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I am old enough to remember the days when, if someone said to you “omg have you seen what Elon Musk has just tweeted?”, it was because he had made yet another joke about the number 69, shared a dank meme, or said something rather surprising about Tesla.
These days, the now-owner of then-Twitter has moved on to much weightier, more grandiose topics. No longer satisfied with the mere lolz, the world’s richest and most thinly spread man seems to consider it his moral duty to use the platform to bravely defend a whole array of worthy and persecuted entities: biological women, the west, Donald Trump, England’s race rioters and, despite not being religious himself, Christianity.
“This was extremely disrespectful to Christians,” Musk — who has of late decided that he is “probably a cultural Christian” — said on X in response to an image of the Olympics opening ceremony, amid widespread outrage that the games had gone “FULL BLOWN. SATANIC” and that one of the scenes resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of the Last Supper. (The organisers have since apologised for any likeness, explaining that the idea was not to parody Jesus and his apostles but rather to pay homage to the pagan feast of the Gods of Olympus.) The next day, the thrice-divorced father of at least 12 pronounced gravely that “Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”
The idea that a man whose profile picture on X quite literally shows him wearing a Satanic “Devil’s Champion” costume featuring the pagan idol Baphomet and an upside-down cross might find this offensive to Christianity is a difficult one to take seriously.
Social media is of course hardly known as a bastion of authenticity, subtlety or compassion. Virtue-signalling, confected outrage, baying mobs and pile-ons are the name of the game, rewarded as they are by evermore sophisticated, attention-seeking algorithms. But increasingly, those who are partaking in such behaviour are the very people who complained about it before. Musk bought Twitter in 2022 saying he wanted to make it “warm and welcoming for all” and that it must not become “a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences”. He has a funny way of trying to achieve that.
It was almost inevitable, given the intolerance of differing opinions and the lack of nuance during the culture wars that peaked in 2020-21, that those whose views were deemed beyond the pale by progressives would end up coalescing. But now, it seems that many of those who spoke out against the real issues of illiberalism, cancel culture and echo chambers have turned into an “anti-woke” tribe of their own, beset by the very same issues they were calling out just a few years ago and the same intolerance of others.
Anti-woke outrage merchants must now constantly hunt down fresh outrage to feed their expectant followers. All sorts of social media accounts dedicated to this pursuit — such as “End Wokeness” and the infamous “Libs of TikTok” — have sprung up since 2020, with their continued existence and income stream dependent on finding new liberals to pile on to, make fun of, or even to get “cancelled”. A Home Depot cashier was recently fired for making a Facebook comment about the attempted assassination of Trump, after the Libs of TikTok account posted a video of the woman on X.
And the Olympics have provided further fodder for the lib-bashers. Musk also endorsed US swimmer Riley Gaines’ X post that “men don’t belong in women’s sports” amid a furore last week, stirred up in large part by JK Rowling, over the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s having beaten Italy’s Angela Carini in the women’s welterweight boxing round of 16 in just 46 seconds.
“Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better?” posted Rowling to her 14mn or so followers, leading many to wrongly assume Khelif was trans. “The smirk of a male who’s [sic] knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered.”
One might imagine that a picture of an actual man would probably sum up “our new men’s rights movement better”, given that Khelif was born a girl (though she did fail a gender eligibility test last year, resulting in a ban by the International Boxing Association). But Rowling was not the only one who didn’t let facts get in the way of a good bit of outrage. “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match,” Trump’s running mate JD Vance chimed in.
The inclusion of Khelif in the women’s boxing competition — as well as that of the Taiwanese featherweight boxer Lin Yu-ting — is clearly a complicated and nuanced matter that requires serious thought, with difficult trade-offs to be made between inclusion, fairness and, in the case of boxing, safety. But the treatment of Khelif reeked of bullying. Attacking and misgendering someone to millions of followers is neither a kind nor a constructive way to tackle the issue.
Just over four years ago, Rowling was one of 150 signatories of a letter published in Harper’s magazine that criticised the “intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty”. It is in many ways understandable that those who have themselves been publicly shamed and ostracised — people like Rowling — seek the safety and comfort of an ideological tribe. It is also important they resist the urge.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
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