An Open Letter to Elon Musk Thanking Him for the Correct Decision Shutting Down Neo-Nazi Kanye West
Yay! Now I Don't Have to Quit My Addiction to Micro-Blogging Because of Ye!
This post is the fifth in an ongoing series on antisemitic culture. See the first four installments here:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth.
The JFK Conspiracy Theory Which Makes the Most Sense & Why It Matters Today
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
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Dear Mr. Musk, our new Tweeter-In-Chief,
I’d like to sincerely thank you for making the morally correct choice in banning antisemitic conspiracist - and now, it’s fair to say, neo-Nazi, given the depth of his pro-Hitler sentiments - Kanye West.
I’ll admit I was very worried about how you’d choose to respond to all this. When I saw your initial tweets in response to West, I suspected that you might take your free speech rhetoric too far. I feared you would tolerate West hijacking the platform you just paid billions to acquire, in the name of free speech. And, honestly, while I’m generally sympathetic to your innovative business ventures and Mars colonization plans, in attempting to analyze and understand you, I find you ultimately entirely unpredictable. Some of your moves and sentiments seem on point, while others are head-scratching or eye-roll-inducing. I’ve worked with men of genius-level intelligence and dynamic creativity over the last decade, and, I’ve got to say, you guys can be absolute morons sometimes, too. Nobody’s brilliant about everything all the time.
However, instead of embracing a dogmatic free speech absolutism, you rightly banned West’s account as he began to achieve a new escalation in his efforts to mainstream the ideas, figures, and symbols of genocidal neo-Nazi racism. You correctly explained why, something I have been trying to lay out to so many others: non-violent neo-Nazis and media activist antisemites directly inspire the violent criminal racists. The more evil antisemitic lies and neo-Nazi conspiracy theories are pumped into our culture, the more direct violence will be inflicted against Jews, black people, and other minority groups. It’s that simple.
Yes, we need broad freedom of speech protections, and we should tolerate a huge range of opinions, faiths, cultures, and ideological perspectives. But a line has to be drawn against ideologies and falsehoods which call for and inspire people to kill. And now you’ve correctly drawn it on your platform.
I urge you to regard this as a strong first step in setting the tone for clearing out hate on Twitter, starting with antisemitism. As a Zionist media activist for over a decade now, I’ve grown accustomed to a metaphor you’re likely now seeing at a massive scale in the Twitter data: our Jewish friends and family are the canaries in the coal mine. The hatred against the Jewish people is a unique phenomenon in history and culture. While it has parallels to racism and other forms of bigotry, the special Jewish intellectual, cultural, and religious contributions to humanity intertwine in the hatred in a way unlike other forms of prejudice. People don’t just hate the Jews because of who they are, but because of what the Jewish people have done historically in bringing the idea of their moral, rational God to the world. People hate the Jews because they hate the God of Israel, the God of the desert, the God of all suffering, struggling people, both today and throughout history.
Mr. Musk, I urge you to please now apply your considerable genius and wealth in tackling this deep historical problem of global antisemitism. Here is the ADL’s Global 100 map showing antisemitism rates by country. I hit the highlights in this previous article in the series here. According to the data assembled by the ADL, there are approximately 1,090,000,000 adults around the world who “harbor antisemitic attitudes.” That’s 26% of the adult population.
That means that there are a whole lot of people out there who want to hear what West and his new group of supporters have to say. Mr. Musk, it’s going to be one hell of a challenge figuring out this problem. After you really start to get into it, perhaps you’ll long for the simplicity of space ships, electric cars, satellite internet, and other more “boring” companies…
Sincere appreciations,
David Swindle
P.S. Thank you for Starlink! We’re really enjoying it out in our desert hideaway, and are very impressed by the high speed and reliability!
