Who the hell appointed Elon Musk to be the loudest defender of white men?
From the moment the South Africa native took over what was once called Twitter in 2022, the wealthiest human being on Earth has let neo-Nazi accounts flourish while repeating their insistence that white men are an endangered species as the world grows more diverse and minorities assume positions of power.
In 2023, Musk accused South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa of “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa” because political opponents sang an apartheid-era anti-Boer song during a rally. That same year, Musk posted, “You have said the actual truth,” to a user who claimed Jews supported unchecked migration in order to destroy Western — read, white — civilization.
The mogul ended up apologizing for that babble, calling it the “dumbest post I’ve ever done.” That didn’t stop him from getting dumber ever since.
Last year, X’s Grok feature pushed the white South African genocide claim to users on its own, then insisted the Freudian slip came from an “unauthorized modification” by a “rogue employee” that violated the chatbot’s “core values.” Who that could be, one can’t say for sure. But then Musk opined in September that “relentless propaganda portraying white men as the worst human beings” is what leads some of them to transition into becoming female.
All this garbage was prelude to this month, when Musk twice shared a post that stated nonwhite men “will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites.”
Say this about Musk: He knows trends. And right now, the idea that white men are the most persecuted group out there is the Labubu of American conservativism.
A widely read essay in the online magazine Compact labeled Gen Z white men “the lost generation,” adrift in a world where workplaces shun them in favor of minorities. The piece earned an endorsement by New York Times columnist Ross Douhat, who added that the “simple” way to not make young white men open to racial radicalization is by “just not discriminating against them” — whatever the hell that means.
White men have fretted about their place in a changing America ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1784 that a divine “revolution of the wheel of fortune” was “probable” against white people for their embrace of slavery. Fear of the sunset of white men has fueled lynchings, legal segregation, laws against immigration legal and not, lawsuits against affirmative action and so much more.
Their supposed plight has been a major plank of Trump’s political career since his first term — but it has become an obsession of his second. His administration’s social media accounts have regularly pushed posts lauding the days of Daniel Boone and Manifest Destiny while using the Ma and Pa American artworks of Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade to push its noxious agenda.
At the same time, as part of his deportation campaign, Trump has pushed the concept of forcing people who weren’t born in this country to go back to their birthplaces. But foreigners aren’t the only ones bringing down the white man, according to this regime.
In December, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas released a video encouraging white men — not white women, tellingly — who felt they were victims of workplace discrimination to file a claim with her agency. Vice President JD Vance shared Lucas’ request on social media along with the Compact essay, noting in the post sharing the latter that DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is a “deliberate program of discrimination primarily against white men.”
Trump, for his part, told the New York Times this month that the Civil Rights Act — the 1964 law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to help nonwhite American citizens fight decades of segregation and discrimination — “was a reverse discrimination” where “white people were very badly treated.”
As a nongringo, I’m as amused as I am sad about this industrial-scale pity party thrown by some of the most powerful men, white or otherwise, on the planet.
A poster showing the Trump Gold Card is seen as President Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office on Sept. 19, 2025.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
When Trump and his allies claim to have the interest of white men in mind, they don’t really mean the sons of small-town Appalachia like Vance’s ancestors; they’re talking about white men like them: wealthy guys who want to get wealthier. They preach racial solidarity while gutting funding for SNAP benefits and healthcare, which will disproportionately affect poor people of all ethnicities.
The Pew Research Center found that 51% of white Republicans with no college degree voted for Trump in 2024 — a significant drop from the 63% who did the same in 2016. No wonder the president and his allies are doubling down on painting minorities as usurpers of the white American Dream. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” LBJ said. “Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Personally, I can assure all white men — but especially the blue-collar guys — that the children of Latino immigrants I know don’t plan to treat you all the way some of your grandparents treated our fathers when they migrated to this country in the 1960s and 1970s. Our parents didn’t come for us to turn into chillones — crybabies — seeking revenge for past sins.
Cousins and friends who should have known better spent most of 2024 railing to me against trans athletes, Kamala Harris, unchecked migration from Central and South America, and other Fox News talking points when they weren’t talking Dodgers and Raiders. None of them desired to be white, as wokosos insisted in postelection breakdowns of what happened; these rancho libertarians just wanted the fair shake that the colorblind policies would supposedly offer and thus cast their lot with Trump in a history-making decision.
(Insert “The Price Is Right” losing horn sound here.)
To see Trumpworld now limit male grievance to just whites threatens to destroy the Trump coalition in a year where they can’t afford to lose much more support.
Leave it to Grok to back me up on this. After Musk endorsed the post claiming nonwhite men will subjugate white men, a user asked the AI chatbot: “@grok is this true”?
This is how Grok replied, edited for length but not the thrust of what it said: “No, this claim aligns with the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory, which lacks evidence. … It is speculative fear, not fact.”
Musk. Trump. Vance. Powerful white men. Why so afraid?
A transgender employee of the National Security Agency is suing the Trump administration and seeking to block enforcement of a presidential executive order and other policies the employee says violate federal civil rights law.
Sarah O’Neill, an NSA data scientist who is transgender, is challenging President Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order that required the federal government, in all operations and printed materials, to recognize only two “immutable” sexes: male and female.
According to the lawsuit filed Monday in a U.S. District Court in Maryland, Trump’s order “declares that it is the policy of the United States government to deny Ms. O’Neill’s very existence.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The order, which reflected Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric, spurred policies that O’Neill is challenging, as well.
Since Trump’s initial executive action, O’Neill asserts the NSA has canceled its policy recognizing her transgender identity and “right to a workplace free of unlawful harassment,” while “prohibiting her from identifying her pronouns as female in written communications” and “barring her from using the women’s restroom at work.”
O’Neill contends those policies and the orders behind them create a hostile work environment and violate Section VII of the Civil Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that Section VII’s prohibition on discrimination based on sex applied to gender identity.
“We agree that homosexuality and transgender status are distinct concepts from sex,” the court’s majority opinion stated. “But, as we’ve seen, discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex; the first cannot happen without the second.”
O’Neill’s lawsuit argued, “The Executive Order rejects the existence of gender identity altogether, let alone the possibility that someone’s gender identity can differ from their sex, which it characterizes as ‘gender ideology.’ ”
In addition to restoring her workplace rights and protections, O’Neill is seeking financial damages.
Trump’s order was among a flurry of executive actions he took hours after taking office. He has continued using executive action aggressively in his second presidency, prompting many legal challenges that are still working their way through the federal judiciary.
The way the story is often told is that Western countries gifted human rights to the world and are the sole guardians of it. It may come as a surprise for some, then, that the international legal framework for prohibiting racial discrimination largely owes its existence to the efforts of states from the Global South.
In 1963, in the midst of the decolonisation wave, a group of nine newly independent African states presented a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) calling for the drafting of an international treaty on the elimination of racial discrimination. As the representative from Senegal observed: “Racial discrimination was still the rule in African colonial territories and in South Africa, and was not unknown in other parts of the world … The time had come to bring all States into that struggle.”
The groundbreaking International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) was unanimously adopted by the UNGA two years later. The convention rejected any doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation as “scientifically false, morally condemnable and socially unjust”.
Today, as we mark 60 years since its adoption, millions of people around the world continue to face racial discrimination – whether in policing, migration policies or exploitative labour conditions.
In Brazil, Amnesty International documented how a deadly police operation in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas this October resulted in the massacre by security forces of more than 100 people, most of them Afro-Brazilians and living in poverty.
In Tunisia, we have seen how authorities have for the past three years used migration policies to carry out racially targeted arrests and detentions and mass expulsions of Black refugees and asylum seekers.
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, Kenyan female domestic workers face racism and exploitation from their employers, enduring gruelling and abusive working conditions.
In the United States, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives aimed at tackling systemic racism have been eliminated across federal agencies. Raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeting migrants and refugees are a horrifying feature of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation and detention agenda, rooted in white supremacist narratives.
Migrants held in detention centres have been subjected to torture and a pattern of deliberate neglect designed to dehumanise and punish.
Elsewhere, Amnesty International has documented how new digital technologies are automating and entrenching racism, while social media offers inadequately moderated forums for racist and xenophobic content. For example, our investigation into the United Kingdom’s Southport racist riots found that X’s design and policy choices created fertile ground for the inflammatory, racist narratives that resulted in the violent targeting of Muslims and migrants.
Even human rights defenders from the Global South face racial discrimination when they have to apply for visas to Global North countries in order to attend meetings where key decisions are made on human rights.
All these instances of systemic racism have their roots in the legacies of European colonial domination and the racist ideologies on which they were built. This era, which spanned nearly four centuries and extended across six continents, saw atrocities that had historical consequences – from the erasure of Indigenous populations to the transatlantic slave trade.
The revival of anti-right movements globally has led to a resurgence of racist and xenophobic rhetoric, a scapegoating of migrants and refugees, and a retrenchment in anti-discrimination measures and protections.
At the same time, Western states have been all too willing to dismantle international law and institutions to legitimise Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and shield Israeli authorities from justice and accountability.
Just as the creation of the ICERD was driven by African states 60 years ago, Global South countries continue to be at the forefront of the fight against racial oppression, injustice and inequality. South Africa notably brought the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and cofounded The Hague Group – a coalition of eight Global South states organising to hold Israel accountable for genocide.
On the reparations front, it is Caribbean and African states, alongside Indigenous peoples, Africans and people of African descent, that are leading the pursuit of justice. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has been intensifying pressure on European governments to reckon with their colonial past, including during a recent visit to the United Kingdom by the CARICOM Reparations Commission.
As the African Union announced 2026-36 the Decade of Reparations last month, African leaders gathered in Algiers for the International Conference on the Crimes of Colonialism, at which they consolidated demands for the codification of colonialism as a crime under international law.
But this is not enough. States still need to confront racism as a structural and systemic issue, and stop pretending slavery and colonialism are a thing of the past with no impact on our present.
Across the world, people are resisting. In Brazil, last month, hundreds of thousands of Afro-Brazilian women led the March of Black Women for Reparations and Wellbeing against racist and gendered historic violence. In the US, people fought back against the wave of federal immigration raids this year, with thousands taking to the streets in Los Angeles to protest and residents of Chicago mobilising to protect migrant communities and businesses against ICE raids.
Governments need to listen to their people and fulfil their obligations under ICERD and national law to protect the marginalised and oppressed against discrimination.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Commentary: Even Grok thinks Elon Musk’s claim that white men are persecuted is bull
Who the hell appointed Elon Musk to be the loudest defender of white men?
From the moment the South Africa native took over what was once called Twitter in 2022, the wealthiest human being on Earth has let neo-Nazi accounts flourish while repeating their insistence that white men are an endangered species as the world grows more diverse and minorities assume positions of power.
In 2023, Musk accused South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa of “openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa” because political opponents sang an apartheid-era anti-Boer song during a rally. That same year, Musk posted, “You have said the actual truth,” to a user who claimed Jews supported unchecked migration in order to destroy Western — read, white — civilization.
The mogul ended up apologizing for that babble, calling it the “dumbest post I’ve ever done.” That didn’t stop him from getting dumber ever since.
Last year, X’s Grok feature pushed the white South African genocide claim to users on its own, then insisted the Freudian slip came from an “unauthorized modification” by a “rogue employee” that violated the chatbot’s “core values.” Who that could be, one can’t say for sure. But then Musk opined in September that “relentless propaganda portraying white men as the worst human beings” is what leads some of them to transition into becoming female.
All this garbage was prelude to this month, when Musk twice shared a post that stated nonwhite men “will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites.”
Say this about Musk: He knows trends. And right now, the idea that white men are the most persecuted group out there is the Labubu of American conservativism.
A widely read essay in the online magazine Compact labeled Gen Z white men “the lost generation,” adrift in a world where workplaces shun them in favor of minorities. The piece earned an endorsement by New York Times columnist Ross Douhat, who added that the “simple” way to not make young white men open to racial radicalization is by “just not discriminating against them” — whatever the hell that means.
White men have fretted about their place in a changing America ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1784 that a divine “revolution of the wheel of fortune” was “probable” against white people for their embrace of slavery. Fear of the sunset of white men has fueled lynchings, legal segregation, laws against immigration legal and not, lawsuits against affirmative action and so much more.
Their supposed plight has been a major plank of Trump’s political career since his first term — but it has become an obsession of his second. His administration’s social media accounts have regularly pushed posts lauding the days of Daniel Boone and Manifest Destiny while using the Ma and Pa American artworks of Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade to push its noxious agenda.
At the same time, as part of his deportation campaign, Trump has pushed the concept of forcing people who weren’t born in this country to go back to their birthplaces. But foreigners aren’t the only ones bringing down the white man, according to this regime.
In December, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas released a video encouraging white men — not white women, tellingly — who felt they were victims of workplace discrimination to file a claim with her agency. Vice President JD Vance shared Lucas’ request on social media along with the Compact essay, noting in the post sharing the latter that DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is a “deliberate program of discrimination primarily against white men.”
Trump, for his part, told the New York Times this month that the Civil Rights Act — the 1964 law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to help nonwhite American citizens fight decades of segregation and discrimination — “was a reverse discrimination” where “white people were very badly treated.”
As a nongringo, I’m as amused as I am sad about this industrial-scale pity party thrown by some of the most powerful men, white or otherwise, on the planet.
A poster showing the Trump Gold Card is seen as President Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office on Sept. 19, 2025.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
When Trump and his allies claim to have the interest of white men in mind, they don’t really mean the sons of small-town Appalachia like Vance’s ancestors; they’re talking about white men like them: wealthy guys who want to get wealthier. They preach racial solidarity while gutting funding for SNAP benefits and healthcare, which will disproportionately affect poor people of all ethnicities.
The Pew Research Center found that 51% of white Republicans with no college degree voted for Trump in 2024 — a significant drop from the 63% who did the same in 2016. No wonder the president and his allies are doubling down on painting minorities as usurpers of the white American Dream. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” LBJ said. “Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Personally, I can assure all white men — but especially the blue-collar guys — that the children of Latino immigrants I know don’t plan to treat you all the way some of your grandparents treated our fathers when they migrated to this country in the 1960s and 1970s. Our parents didn’t come for us to turn into chillones — crybabies — seeking revenge for past sins.
In fact, many Latino men sadly did join their white counterparts in the grievance Olympics, as their drift toward Trump in the 2024 election proved.
Cousins and friends who should have known better spent most of 2024 railing to me against trans athletes, Kamala Harris, unchecked migration from Central and South America, and other Fox News talking points when they weren’t talking Dodgers and Raiders. None of them desired to be white, as wokosos insisted in postelection breakdowns of what happened; these rancho libertarians just wanted the fair shake that the colorblind policies would supposedly offer and thus cast their lot with Trump in a history-making decision.
(Insert “The Price Is Right” losing horn sound here.)
To see Trumpworld now limit male grievance to just whites threatens to destroy the Trump coalition in a year where they can’t afford to lose much more support.
Leave it to Grok to back me up on this. After Musk endorsed the post claiming nonwhite men will subjugate white men, a user asked the AI chatbot: “@grok is this true”?
This is how Grok replied, edited for length but not the thrust of what it said: “No, this claim aligns with the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory, which lacks evidence. … It is speculative fear, not fact.”
Musk. Trump. Vance. Powerful white men. Why so afraid?
Source link
NSA employee sues Trump administration over order on transgender rights and two ‘immutable’ genders
A transgender employee of the National Security Agency is suing the Trump administration and seeking to block enforcement of a presidential executive order and other policies the employee says violate federal civil rights law.
Sarah O’Neill, an NSA data scientist who is transgender, is challenging President Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order that required the federal government, in all operations and printed materials, to recognize only two “immutable” sexes: male and female.
According to the lawsuit filed Monday in a U.S. District Court in Maryland, Trump’s order “declares that it is the policy of the United States government to deny Ms. O’Neill’s very existence.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The order, which reflected Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric, spurred policies that O’Neill is challenging, as well.
Since Trump’s initial executive action, O’Neill asserts the NSA has canceled its policy recognizing her transgender identity and “right to a workplace free of unlawful harassment,” while “prohibiting her from identifying her pronouns as female in written communications” and “barring her from using the women’s restroom at work.”
O’Neill contends those policies and the orders behind them create a hostile work environment and violate Section VII of the Civil Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that Section VII’s prohibition on discrimination based on sex applied to gender identity.
“We agree that homosexuality and transgender status are distinct concepts from sex,” the court’s majority opinion stated. “But, as we’ve seen, discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex; the first cannot happen without the second.”
O’Neill’s lawsuit argued, “The Executive Order rejects the existence of gender identity altogether, let alone the possibility that someone’s gender identity can differ from their sex, which it characterizes as ‘gender ideology.’ ”
In addition to restoring her workplace rights and protections, O’Neill is seeking financial damages.
Trump’s order was among a flurry of executive actions he took hours after taking office. He has continued using executive action aggressively in his second presidency, prompting many legal challenges that are still working their way through the federal judiciary.
Barrow writes for the Associated Press.
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Sixty years ago, the world tried to stop racial discrimination and failed | Human Rights
The way the story is often told is that Western countries gifted human rights to the world and are the sole guardians of it. It may come as a surprise for some, then, that the international legal framework for prohibiting racial discrimination largely owes its existence to the efforts of states from the Global South.
In 1963, in the midst of the decolonisation wave, a group of nine newly independent African states presented a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) calling for the drafting of an international treaty on the elimination of racial discrimination. As the representative from Senegal observed: “Racial discrimination was still the rule in African colonial territories and in South Africa, and was not unknown in other parts of the world … The time had come to bring all States into that struggle.”
The groundbreaking International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) was unanimously adopted by the UNGA two years later. The convention rejected any doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation as “scientifically false, morally condemnable and socially unjust”.
Today, as we mark 60 years since its adoption, millions of people around the world continue to face racial discrimination – whether in policing, migration policies or exploitative labour conditions.
In Brazil, Amnesty International documented how a deadly police operation in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas this October resulted in the massacre by security forces of more than 100 people, most of them Afro-Brazilians and living in poverty.
In Tunisia, we have seen how authorities have for the past three years used migration policies to carry out racially targeted arrests and detentions and mass expulsions of Black refugees and asylum seekers.
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, Kenyan female domestic workers face racism and exploitation from their employers, enduring gruelling and abusive working conditions.
In the United States, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives aimed at tackling systemic racism have been eliminated across federal agencies. Raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeting migrants and refugees are a horrifying feature of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation and detention agenda, rooted in white supremacist narratives.
Migrants held in detention centres have been subjected to torture and a pattern of deliberate neglect designed to dehumanise and punish.
Elsewhere, Amnesty International has documented how new digital technologies are automating and entrenching racism, while social media offers inadequately moderated forums for racist and xenophobic content. For example, our investigation into the United Kingdom’s Southport racist riots found that X’s design and policy choices created fertile ground for the inflammatory, racist narratives that resulted in the violent targeting of Muslims and migrants.
Even human rights defenders from the Global South face racial discrimination when they have to apply for visas to Global North countries in order to attend meetings where key decisions are made on human rights.
All these instances of systemic racism have their roots in the legacies of European colonial domination and the racist ideologies on which they were built. This era, which spanned nearly four centuries and extended across six continents, saw atrocities that had historical consequences – from the erasure of Indigenous populations to the transatlantic slave trade.
The revival of anti-right movements globally has led to a resurgence of racist and xenophobic rhetoric, a scapegoating of migrants and refugees, and a retrenchment in anti-discrimination measures and protections.
At the same time, Western states have been all too willing to dismantle international law and institutions to legitimise Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and shield Israeli authorities from justice and accountability.
Just as the creation of the ICERD was driven by African states 60 years ago, Global South countries continue to be at the forefront of the fight against racial oppression, injustice and inequality. South Africa notably brought the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and cofounded The Hague Group – a coalition of eight Global South states organising to hold Israel accountable for genocide.
On the reparations front, it is Caribbean and African states, alongside Indigenous peoples, Africans and people of African descent, that are leading the pursuit of justice. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has been intensifying pressure on European governments to reckon with their colonial past, including during a recent visit to the United Kingdom by the CARICOM Reparations Commission.
As the African Union announced 2026-36 the Decade of Reparations last month, African leaders gathered in Algiers for the International Conference on the Crimes of Colonialism, at which they consolidated demands for the codification of colonialism as a crime under international law.
But this is not enough. States still need to confront racism as a structural and systemic issue, and stop pretending slavery and colonialism are a thing of the past with no impact on our present.
Across the world, people are resisting. In Brazil, last month, hundreds of thousands of Afro-Brazilian women led the March of Black Women for Reparations and Wellbeing against racist and gendered historic violence. In the US, people fought back against the wave of federal immigration raids this year, with thousands taking to the streets in Los Angeles to protest and residents of Chicago mobilising to protect migrant communities and businesses against ICE raids.
Governments need to listen to their people and fulfil their obligations under ICERD and national law to protect the marginalised and oppressed against discrimination.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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