Elon Musk just went on his website Twitter/X and seemingly endorsed one of the most disgusting present-day libels on the Jewish people. A tweeter named @breakingbaht announced that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against white that they claim they want people to stop using against them.”

To which Musk responded: “You have said the actual truth.”

I have long admired Musk and thought the assaults against him often preposterous or just a classic element of hating the super-rich guy whose innovations are far more important than the obnoxious things he does. This is something different, though. As Yair Rosenberg points out, the “Jews hate whites” trope is exactly the idea that drove the monster to shoot up the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.

There are two possibilities here, and two possible outcomes.

First, somehow, Musk misunderstood or mistook the tweet and endorsed it because he read it wrong. That is somewhat plausible because, though he is often wildly impulsive, he is not openly self-destructive and has said things like he is “aspirationally Jewish.”

The other is that we take him at his word.

The two possible outcomes are 1) that he makes it clear he didn’t mean it, or 2) that the reliance of the government on Musk for some of its space business and Musk’s reliance on various government subsidies that make his cars relatively affordable must be the subject of severe challenge in Congress with an eye toward cancelling his contracts and revising the tax-break system for electric vehicles.

There is no middle ground here.