“Long before Elon Musk,” writes Shra Avi-Yonah in The Washington Post, “Henry Ford went to war with Jewish groups:”
An auto tycoon, one of America’s most prominent businessmen, stood accused of enabling antisemitism on a platform he owned, allowing hate speech against Jews to spread to new audiences. The businessman was Henry Ford; the platform was his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.
Just like Ford, you see, auto tycoon and prominent businessman Musk has also been “accused” of “enabling” anti-Semitism.
“Enabling” is a favorite of the contemporary leftist, who makes little distinction between neutral principles of free expression and the morality of the opinions being expressed. Consequently, anyone who believes that bad people should be able to say bad things can be accused of being an “enabler.”
It is true that Musk permits most users, some of them abhorrent, to have their say. You might think this is a dangerous way to conduct business. But a newspaper doesn’t profess to be an open “platform.” Ford bought the local Dearborn Independent explicitly to publish and actively spread conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific racialist ideas about Jews. Ford was not an enabler.
Indeed, Ford wasn’t merely “accused” of hating Jews, as the Post contends in its rickety analogy; he openly declared himself a hater, penning scores of anti-Semitic screeds under his byline. Hitler didn’t call the carmaker his “inspiration” in Mein Kampf because the Dearborn Independent “enabled” rando letter writers to say mean things about Jews. There is a big difference.
Ford
