Elon Musk Brings Onboard 'How to Fight Anti-Semitism' Author Bari Weiss to Twitter 2.0
Another Encouraging Sign the World's Richest Man Will Take Hatred Seriously
This post is the tenth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous 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
An Open Letter to Elon Musk Thanking Him for the Correct Decision Shutting Down Neo-Nazi Kanye West
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
Obsessing Over 'the Left' Sabotages the Fight Against Antisemitism
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.
Five posts ago, I expressed my hope that the new owner of Twitter would take the fight against antisemitism on his platform seriously. His banning of Kanye West was a particularly good sign that there were serious limits to his supposed free speech absolutism
Now Business Insider is reporting another encouraging sign for the Jewish people and their allies:
On Friday, a more unexpected sighting came in the form of Weiss, the conservative newsletter writer who was previously a New York Times opinion columnist. Weiss was in the San Francisco office that evening, speaking and "laughing with" Musk, two employees said.
By Saturday, Musk said Weiss would take part in releasing what he's dubbed "the Twitter files," so far consisting mainly of correspondence between Twitter employees and executives discussing their decision in 2020 to block access to a New York Post article detailing material on Hunter Biden's stolen laptop. Now, Weiss has been given access to Twitter's employee systems, added to its Slack, and given a company laptop, two people familiar with her presence said.
The level of access to Twitter systems given to Weiss is typically given only to employees, one of the people familiar said, though it doesn't seem she is actually working at the company. Matt Taibbi, the other newsletter writer through whom Musk has released the Twitter files, didn't seem to receive this degree of access, the person added.
Weiss having Musk’s ear is a wonderful development. While I don’t agree with all the causes and ideas Weiss has embraced in recent years - I am very unimpressed by this “twitter files” expose of the Hunter Biden laptop fake story - I continue to deeply appreciate her work on antisemitism and own a copy of her book.
It’s very much in Musk’s interest at this point to be able to show in as much detail as possible that under his tenure Twitter isn’t turning into an even more despicable racist, antisemitic sewer than it’s known to have become:
On Sunday, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) said it found that between 2019 and 2020, over two million tweets about Jews and Israel were antisemitic, with one being posted every twenty seconds in 2020…
In 2019, 6.9% of all Twitter conversations about Jews — 849,253 — were antisemitic. In 2020, 10.7% — 1, 531, 912 —percent were. That same year, an antisemitic tweet about Israel was posted every 5 seconds, totaling over 6 million, or 14% of all tweets about the Jewish State.
“Social media has become the largest medium for antisemitic narratives, which can radicalize individuals and lead to violence,” said the study, which examined primarily lexical differences between antisemitic and non antisemitic tweets.
Come on Elon, clearing out antisemitism and racism on the world’s most popular micro-blogging website can’t be much harder than bringing humanity to Mars, right?
