It would have been easier to simply not post Holocaust denialism in the first place.

Junk History

Elon Musk seems to have had second thoughts about platforming far-right nonsense on his own account.

The flailing executive deleted a quote-tweet in which he called a Tucker Carlson podcast featuring a Nazi apologist "very interesting" and "worth watching" after near-universal backlash.

In the original Carlson post, which is still live, the ex-Fox pundit interviews purported historian Darryl Cooper, an apparent Holocaust denier who says, among other things, that then-UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the "chief villain" of World War II.

As with other forms of Holocaust denial, Cooper's points were less pro-Adolf Hitler and instead tended more on the side of erasure, as evidenced by his claim that "millions of people ended up dead" in Nazi concentration camps — without naming either the Jewish victims of those atrocities or their genocidal perpetrators.

Quote-tweeted on the heels of his promotion of an overtly sexist take about women's brains and leadership, Musk's since-deleted insistence that the junk historian's takes are "interesting" was met with revulsion.

As one Lithuanian noted, the post would likely be considered illegal in the Eastern European country because rather than finding "Holocaust denial 'very interesting', we find it a massive threat to our safety."

"That finding comes from horrific real life experience," the user continued, "not from the whisperings of ketamine fairies."

In Denial

As Mother Jones' DC bureau chief David Corn noted, the Holocaust denial evidenced in Carlson's interview with Cooper goes way back, too.

"Imagine someone saying drag performers at the Olympics was worse than Hitler's conquest of Paris. Well, you don't have to," he wrote, screenshotting another Cooper post. "And Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk enthusiastically amplify this guy." 

Writer Alheli Picazo also pointed out the alleged historian's antisemitism in prior posts on the Musk-owned platform, including one that seems to suggest that Jewish people are making too big a deal out of the Holocaust as compared to other groups who've been subjected to genocide.

In about as close as he ever comes to admitting a mistake, Musk later posted a screenshot of an X Community Note debunking the historian. Rather than providing an apology or explanation, however, he simply plugged the social network's context tool.

Given the frequency and increasing severity of Musk's opinionated gaffes, it is notable that he made the fairly rare choice of deleting his promotion of the Carlson interview with a Holocaust denier.

Unless someone leaks any internal conversations or communications from X's lawyers about it, though, we'll probably never know exactly why he did.

More on bad Musk takes: Hypocrite Elon Musk Attacks Voting by Mail, But Records Show He's Done It Himself


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