Let Elon Cook

1,588 words

It’s only been a week since Elon Musk took a stand on the Jewish Question, and yet so much has happened since then it almost feels like ancient history already. While it was a big win for the dissident Right, in the days that followed there were some minor black pills.

The day after Musk’s tweetstorm, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) head honcho Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted his obligatory denunciation: “At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories. #NeverIsNow”

At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories. #NeverIsNow pic.twitter.com/vVlyOeoS5x

— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) November 16, 2023

The next day, Elon Musk announced that the pro-Palestine battle cry “From the river to the sea” is now an offense that will lead to a ban on Twitter/X:

As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide. Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.

As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.

Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension. https://t.co/1fCFo5Lezb

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2023

In a November 20 X Space, Keith Woods stated that he has seen an 85% decrease in engagement recently, suggesting that he is being shadowbanned and that Elon Musk’s “free of speech, not freedom of reach” is being put into action.

Since Elon is proscribing “from the river to the sea,” there’s been speculation that some kind of deal was made between Elon Musk and the ADL. This was somewhat confirmed by Greenblatt in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) in which he said that he had had a meeting with Elon Musk. JTA reports that Greenblatt did not ask for an apology for Musk’s statements, but that Elon apparently threw the ADL a bone nonetheless.

People have been comparing the recent dissident Right revival on Twitter to the energy of the 2016 Great Meme War, but there are also parallels to the YouTube Internet Bloodsports craze of 2018, when the Alt Right crashed the Skeptic Community’s party and cut their civic nationalist arguments to ribbons in a series of high-profile debates: JF Gariépy versus Destiny, Richard Spencer versus Sargon, Greg Johnson versus Styx Hexenhammer, Andrew Anglin versus Sargon and others. Likewise, we see a situation on Twitter where a newly unchained dissident Right has descended on the Zionists, who are wholly unprepared to deal with our talking points.

But in hindsight, the golden age of dissident Right YouTube activity from 2018 to 2020 was like a shooting star in the night. After a few glorious months of free speech, the deplatformings began, with one dissident Rightist after another biting the dust every few weeks for two years until Jared Taylor and Way of the World were finally banned during the George Floyd riots. With Elon banning the phrase “from the river to the sea,” one wonders if the current moment on Twitter is another shooting star and that we will eventually come to remember this era of Twitter as “the good ol’ days.”

You can buy Tito Perdue’s novel Vade Mecum here

Although I would not hit the panic button just yet.

First of all, I see the banning of “from the river to the sea” as similar to banning racial slurs. It’s not free speech in the strictest sense of the word, but White Nationalists can still make all their arguments without using racial slurs. It’s a bummer, though, because using racial slurs can be fun, but ultimately it doesn’t change the game that much. Likewise, banning a slogan such as “from the river to the sea” does not prevent you from selling the product. We can always invent a new slogan.

Second, if you wanna get Machiavellian and talk 4D chess, one could argue that there may be some value in keeping Jonathan Greenblatt around, as any replacement would almost certainly be more likable. Unless they got Tim Wise, I don’t see how the next guy could possibly be worse. The banning of “from the river to the sea” is purely a symbolic victory for the Jews. It doesn’t prevent people from criticizing Israel or pointing out the connection between organized Jewry and anti-whiteness. It does, however, give Jonathan Greenblatt something to show to the Elders of Zions the next time he walks into Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) headquarters. If he walked in empty-handed, ZOG might find a more competent spokesman.

Shadowbanning and deboosting are more worrying, but it’s not the end of the world. In a way, I feel as if the virus has already escaped the lab. Even if they banned every dissident Rightist, the fact is that our talking points are now being taken up by too-big-to-fail personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. At this point, the best the Jews can hope for is to slow us down and delay the inevitable, as the genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

For a moment, let’s try to consider how the game board looks from the Jewish perspective. From the dissident Right’s perspective, there is only one front. We are on one side, fighting for our free speech on Twitter, and on the other side are the Jews trying to stop us. From the Jewish perspective, Twitter is but one front in a vast, multi-front war. Jews are also losing ground on the TikTok front, the college campus front, the street protest front, the celebrity front (Roger Waters, Susan Sarandon), and others.

White Nationalists might not even be the Jews’ main priority at this time. Right-wing white anti-Semitism may be the Jews’ greatest long-term threat, but Left-wing anti-Zionism is probably of far greater short-term concern because that’s who they rely on for their grassroots activism. Election season starts in a few months, and if the Gaza War is still ongoing when the primaries kick in, it may become a litmus test for their base.

Organized Jewry has done much to antagonize the Bernie Bros and the old-school materialist Left. The Zionists conspired to crush Bernie Sanders twice, and British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, hailed by Leftists as the most pro-labor candidate in generations, was brought down by a Zionist mass-slander campaign where he was bombarded with bogus accusations of anti-Semitism on the flimsiest of evidence.

I knew that things were getting real when the Bernie Bro podcast Chapo Trap House recently did an episode on the ADL. Chapo Trap House is the flagship podcast of the Dirtbag Left, which was promoted by segments of the media as a safe alternative to the dissident Right. There are a great many people who claim that they were “going down the Alt Right rabbit hole until Chapo Trap House saved them.” While the Dirtbag Left has always been anti-Zionist, talking about the ADL is dabbling in full-on Jewish Question territory. The people put forward to drain support from the dissident Right are now following the dissident Right’s lead.

The fact that the #BantheADL hashtag blew up immediately prior to the Israel-Gaza War certainly limits the Jews’ options. Organized Jewry had just spent an entire month emphatically denying that they played any role in online censorship; thus if they were seen to be calling for censorship now, it would confirm all the “anti-Semitic conspiracies.” This is probably the reason why they have outsourced the task of organizing advertiser boycotts to the not-explicitly-Jewish organization Media Matters. Media Matters has made some headway in getting some heavy hitters such as Apple, IBM, and Disney to pull advertising from Twitter. Elon Musk has responded by launching a lawsuit against Media Matters, claiming that they doctored their evidence.

I’ve been willing to give Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt in that there are practical considerations as to why creating a truly free speech platform is easier said than done. It may indeed be the case that making Twitter/X a free speech platform is a long-term project. And there are signs of that things are getting better. For one, Twitter/X appears to be easing up on enforcement of ban evasion. For several years Nick Fuentes had to create a new ban evasion account every week, but Elon has allowed Fuentes to keep his current ban evasion account for a several months now and allowed him to accumulate 36,000 followers as of the time of writing.

Compared to Donald Trump, who did not deliver on any of his 2016 promises, Elon Musk, while he has not delivered on “free speech” in the truest sense of the word, has at least delivered some of what he promised. We certainly have more free speech than we had before. A lot of /OurGuys/ are still banned, and some might not ever be allowed back on — but we now have enough of /OurGuys/ on Twitter to influence the conversation.

There’s an expression that has come into fashion recently which is “let them cook,” which is often employed when someone is doing something counter-intuitive but that leads toward a positive goal. It might not make sense in the moment, but you have to trust that they know what they are doing. Thus, you step back and “let them cook.” While there are some reasons for concern, I think we need to let Elon cook. We really don’t have much choice, anyway.