Last week, the world’s richest man and biggest troll, Elon Musk, came under heavy fire for writing, “You have said the actual truth,” in response to a post on X that declared that Jewish people “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” Shortly thereafter, a number of major advertisers, including Apple, IBM, and Disney, reportedly pulled their ads from the platform, and the White House called Musk’s comments an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate.” But what does Florida governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis think of the situation? The answer may surprise you, but only if you were unaware that awful people tend to stick together.
Asked about Musk’s remarks on Sunday, DeSantis told Jake Tapper, “I did not see the comment,” before suggesting that the richest person in the world is being treated unfairly. “I know that Elon has had a target on his back ever since he purchased Twitter, because I think he’s taking it in a direction that a lot of people who are used to controlling the narrative don’t like,” DeSantis said. “So I was a big supporter of him purchasing Twitter. I think that they’re obviously still working some stuff out, but I did not see those comments.” Yet once he was shown the tweet, the 2024 hopeful still went to bat for his antisemitism-promoting buddy, calling the X post simply “blogging.” Later, Tapper noted, “You have been very out front when you see antisemitism on the left,” and asked, “Is antisemitism on the right something that concerns you as well?” While DeSantis said that antisemitism is “wrong no matter what,” he claimed that on the left, antisemitism comes from major institutions, like universities, and that on the right, it’s relegated to “fringe voices.”
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Musk, of course, is not exactly a “fringe voice.” When Tapper reminded DeSantis that the X owner “is a pretty powerful guy, and he’s out there endorsing some pretty hideous antisemitic conspiracy theories” that the governor had failed to condemn, DeSantis kind of, barely offered the inkling of a teeny, tiny, blink-and-you miss-it conditional slap on the wrist. “I know Elon Musk,” DeSantis said. “I have never seen him do anything. 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.”
DeSantis officially announced his presidential bid on X, back when it was known as Twitter, in May, during a Twitter Space with Musk; Musk said last year he’d support DeSantis’s candidacy for office.
On Sunday, Musk took to X to declare that stories suggesting he is antisemitic are “bogus” and that “nothing could be further from the truth.”
Bess Levin
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