CNN’s Jake Tapper made false claims over the weekend about remarks that X owner Elon Musk made on the social media platform last week.
Tapper made the remarks during a Sunday interview with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis while pushing the Republican presidential candidate to condemn Musk for the remarks.
Tapper claimed that Musk “openly endorsed” an “antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews are conspiring to replace white Americans with minority immigrants.”
When DeSantis said that he had not seen the comments but he knew that Musk had been a target of the political Left ever since he bought Twitter, Tapper responded by showing DeSantis only a portion of Musk’s comments on the matter.
The controversy started when Musk responded to the following post on X:
Okay. Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s**t now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is.
“You have said the actual truth,” Musk responded.
Tapper claimed that Musk later went on to say he was “talking about the ADL and other Jewish groups are pushing replacements of whites.”
Jake Tapper tries to bait Ron DeSantis into condemning Elon Musk by deceptively misleading the presidential candidate about what Elon Musk posted on X. pic.twitter.com/pSVvVV7uMq
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 19, 2023
DeSantis responded by refusing to condemn Musk, telling Tapper that he would not do so because, “I have no idea what the context is.”
“I know Elon Musk. I have never seen him do anything [like that],” he said. “I think he’s a guy that believes in America. I have never seen him indulge in any of that. So it’s surprising, if that’s true, but I have not seen it. So I don’t want to sit there and pass judgment on the fly.”
Such a pathetic hack move by @jaketapper going after @elonmusk here and then trying to loop @RonDeSantis into it.
Masterclass answer by RD, as usual.
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) November 19, 2023
Nowhere in the post that Musk was responding to was there an explicit anti-Semitic conspiracy theory involving “pushing replacements of white.”
Tapper did not read Musk’s several follow-up posts, including where he said, “The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop.”
The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel.
This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.
It is not right and needs to stop.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2023
“You (sic) right that this does not extend to all Jewish communities, but it is also not just limited to ADL,” Musk later added. “And, at the risk of being repetitive, I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind. I’m sick of it. Stop now.”
And, at the risk of being repetitive, I am deeply offended by ADL’s messaging and any other groups who push de facto anti-white racism or anti-Asian racism or racism of any kind.
I’m sick of it. Stop now.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2023
Ben Shapiro, founding editor-in-chief and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” defended Musk on his show last week over the controversy, saying that Musk “made a rather large Twitter boo boo” because he was not specific enough with what he was talking about in his initial post.
“So it is true, obviously, that certain Jewish organizations have bought into and promoted things like diversity, equity, and inclusion, which are gross distortions of the American dream,” Shapiro said. “Nobody hates DEI more than I do. There are certain Jewish groups that are liberal in orientation, who have supported that sort of stuff. Many of those groups have also pushed for open borders. It is also true that some of those organizations are now realizing post-October 7, that actually open immigration for people who hate Jews on an intersectional basis was pretty stupid. The problem with the original tweet is that it labels Jewish communities en masse. So my community, for example, pretty Jewish, has always opposed DEI and open borders. In fact, most Orthodox communities do.”
Shapiro then went on to read Musk’s follow-up tweets, something that Tapper did not do, where Musk was more specific about what he was talking about.
“That’s a much more specific point and it’s certainly true,” Shapiro said. “There are a lot of liberal Jewish organizations that supported a lot of the same policies that have now imported a lot of people who really hate Jews and Westerners into the West. And a lot of the very same people who are pushing DEI intersectional politics are now realizing the wages of that. That’s true. The original tweet was wildly overbroad, but a huge number of people in the media decided now was the time to link Musk and the alt-right, and the so called ‘Jewish question’ and support the notion that Musk is some sort of crypto Nazi.”
“Now it’s not a coincidence again, that a lot of the people doing just that are happily calling for Israel to ceasefire in its war with Hamas,” he continued. “See, very often anti semitism becomes a political football, when you can hang the label on Donald Trump or Elon Musk and you’re on the Left, you do it. However, when you’re forced to denounce pro-Hamas protesters shouting, ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,’ suddenly they get a little shy. Thus the same media leaping on both Trump and Musk has been downplaying the open Jew hatred and massive pro Hamas protests around the world, instead propagating lies about Israel’s supposed human rights violations.”
“Instead, they’re focusing in on their political enemies like Trump and Musk and deeming them the Acolytes of Hitler,” he concluded in the clip, which Musk shared on X. “Meanwhile, the actual Hitler acolytes who were out there waving Mein Kampf, they’re like, ‘Those people are oppressed and brown’. It might have more bite to hit Trump and Musk for supposed anti semitism if these people actually spent some actual time talking about the people who actually like Hitler on planet Earth, who are right now holding some 240 Jews and others hostage in Gaza and killed 1,200 people and have subjected the Gaza Strip to complete hellish tyranny for the last 20 years. But a lot of these same people are totally silent.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2023