Musk Derangement Syndrome

Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense points out one of many deranged articles about Elon Musk, this one at the New York Times (image of the NYT headline below). Nellie’s comments:

Pretty bad that baby Elon Musk didn’t solve apartheid: The Times has a new profile of Musk, who grew up in apartheid South Africa until he was 17, then emigrated to Canada so he wouldn’t have to serve in the military.

No matter, the Times’ effort is to smear him literally because he happened to be born into a country with a reprehensible government. Here’s what the reporter wrote: “Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid government propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn’t experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege.”

The word the Times was searching for to describe information flow in apartheid-era South Africa the exact opposite of “unchecked speech. It’s censorship. Newspapers blacked out their own columns in protest of government censorship. So determined are these writers to smear Musk and jam history into our modern language, they are literally rewriting apartheid as a problem of misinformation and too much free speech.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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