Elon vs. the ADL: A Rubicon Moment?

Reflections on a Turning Point, and on HOW WE WIN

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The recent #BantheADL Twitter hashtag campaign has succeeded in forcing a conversation that nobody wanted. Nobody outside of “internet racists”, anyway. By responding positively to it, Elon Musk has stepped over a line and now needs to make a decision. What you’re about to read is going to look like a blackpill but in typical Imperium style, there will be a big, fat whitepill at the end.

I wrote an article last year entitled Greenblatt and the Limits of Soft Power that set out the stakes of what has now come. It’s worth reading, but the gist of it is as follows:

The ADL is not the final boss, but simply the mouthpiece of a coordinated oligarchy. It is soft power, and soft power always ultimately depends upon hard power. The ADL is part of a vast racketeering operation, and its role is as messenger. It’s not Don Corleone; it’s the guy the Don sends to tell Musk what’s expected if he doesn’t want to see his business burned to the ground. The final boss, the Don, is the Deep State. Musk is a threat to it because he is a little imperium in imperio, a little node of decision in an otherwise mostly uniform structure that’s disciplined by soft power, because hard power will undermine its mythology. The regime made a mistake letting him capture an important piece of that structure.

So it’s clear that Elon vs. the ADL is much more than Elon vs. the ADL—it’s Elon vs. the entire permanent government apparatus. Whereas Elon, with his net worth of $250 billion, would seem to dwarf the ADL, with its net assets of $81 million,¹ the reality is that Elon picking a fight with it would be like Joe of Joe’s hardware picking a fight with the Don’s messenger. Elon is the small fry here, although if he were to sue the ADL, the legal system would treat the ADL as the small fry. “He’s bullying us!” they would cry. “Abuse of discovery!”—and then the lawsuit gets thrown out of court.

It would be nice to see the lawsuit go through. Musk would of course lose any defamation lawsuit, even in a fair trial. Defamation turns on intent, and Musk clearly knew that inviting Andrew Anglin back on the site would increase antisemitism on Twitter, which the ADL has pointed out has happened. But that’s not the point. The point is that in Musk vs. the ADL, the plaintiff would be a tech billionaire given access to endless incriminating evidence of full-blown anti-whiteness and literal racketeering. There is no way the regime will let that go forward.

So Musk is between a rock and a hard place. If he bans the ADL from Twitter, they will get him banned from the app stores, kicked off Cloudflare’s DDoS mitigation service, and left without hosting that will meet his needs. If he does nothing, his free-speech talk is all hot air since he himself is not free to do what he wants on his own platform. If he sues the ADL, as he has every moral right to do, the Deep State will ruin him, just as they made him, and maybe kill him.

Musk now has a decision to make—he needs to shit or get off the pot. On the one side, he has his billions of dollars to comfort him at night; on the other, he has a chance for true immortality, the chance to make his mark on history in a way that no one else has in almost a century. Which will he choose? What kind of stuff is he made of?

We have no right to hope that he will do the right thing. What if he doesn’t? This would only seem to be a blackpill. If the world’s wealthiest man doesn’t have the power to #BantheADL, who does?

It would be dangerous to speculate realistically in public as to who does, but perhaps that’s the wrong question. It’s enough that people like Trump and Musk continue to follow in their footsteps—this capture of key institutions by disaffected elites is important for destabilizing the regime. It raises the cost of anti-whiteness, just as street activism is doing, just as a revolt in the academy is doing, just like many in the folkish and nationalist scene are doing. It’s death by a thousand cuts. At some point the cost will be so high, the regime so unstable, that someone will be in a position to push it over. Nobody can say who, nor does it matter—when it happens, it will look like a gentle breeze did it, when really it was decades of thankless work by thousands of men, most of them anonymous.

We’re still haunted by the mid-century mythology of spontaneous change, by the belief that we will simply talk our way into power by trumpeting the nationalist message publicly and forcefully enough. In reality, change will come because the “diversity tax” got so high—and was made so high by the efforts of both street activists and the Elon Musks of the world—that the regime simply couldn’t afford to enforce its will anymore. Whether Musk crosses the Rubicon or not, that day is coming.

1. In 2021. https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2023-01/ADL%20-%202021%20Form%20990%20PD%20Copy_0.pdf