Elon Musk being accused of racism isn't anything new.
In 2022, a California state agency filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Tesla in which one Black employee claimed to hear racial slurs at least 50 to 100 times a day. And last year, Musk posted a series of racist dog whistles on X. (Some speculated it was part of a bid to woo then-recently-fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson.)
Today, Mother Jones' Video Correspondent Garrison Hayes dropped a new video breaking down the significance—and harm—of Musk's recent posts peddling racist pseudo-science and what he's helping to platform as a result. As my colleague Arianna Coghill wrote of Garrison's latest interview:
Garrison zeroes in on a specific phenomenon: Musk is amplifying users who will incorporate cherry-picked data and misleading graphs into their argument as to why people of European descent are biologically superior, showing how fringe accounts, like user @eyeslasho, experience a drastic jump in followers after Musk shares their tweets. The @eyeslasho account has even thanked Musk for raising “awareness” in a thread last year. (Neither @eyeslasho nor Musk, via X, responded to Garrison’s request for an interview.)
“People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff,” Will Stancil, a lawyer and research fellow at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, told Garrison in a video interview. He added: “This is the most basic statistical error in the book: Correlation does not equal causation.”
Check out Garrison's full video for more of his conversations with experts who call out, as one put it, this "old-school gutter racism" shrouded in "new-school Silicon Valley, data-driven analysis."
—Julianne McShane