In his latest racist outburst, multihyphenate billionaire Elon Musk joined other conservative pundits in accusing Haitian migrants of being “cannibals,” arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to move to the US.
The news comes after political unrest in the island nation came to a head this week. On Monday, Haiti’s prime minister Ariel Henry agreed to resign if other Caribbean nations were to form a transitional government on behalf of the country. The statement angered Haitians, triggering mass protests, with tires being burned in the streets.
Meanwhile, Musk took to his social media platform X to further unverified and sensationalist claims of cannibalism arising out of the conflict, as NBC reports.
Case in point, today, the mercurial CEO tweeted a link to a video that claimed to show evidence of cannibalism in Haiti in response to the report.
The video was promptly taken down by X, Axios reports, which stated that the video had violated its rules.
In other words, even Musk’s own social media company isn’t willing to support his increasingly racist anti-immigration posts.
Ever since Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, hate speech has flourished on the platform. The billionaire has spread his own share of misinformation as well, from bogus COVID-19 data to false information about the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Musk has also made plenty of his own racist remarks on his platform. In January, he argued that Black students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have lower IQs and therefore shouldn’t become pilots — ridiculous claims that were met with horror by civil rights groups.
Most recently, the billionaire took aim at the people of Haiti, playing into debunked tropes.
Over the weekend, Musk tweeted “cannibal gangs…” in response to a clip by right-wing commentator Matt Walsh about unrest in Haiti.
“Civilization is fragile,” he wrote in response to another since-deleted video, which claimed to show footage of a “cannibal gang eating body parts.”
This week, Musk joined right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong, who argued on X earlier this week that there were “cannibal gangs in Haiti who abduct and eat people.”
“If wanting to screen immigrants for potential homicidal tendencies and cannibalism makes me ‘right wing,’ then I would gladly accept such a label!” an incensed Musk wrote in a reply to a separate post in which Cheong complained about the NBC report. “Failure to do so would put innocent Americans in [sic] mortal risk,” he added, failing to provide any evidence for his outlandish claims.
As experts have since pointed out, the posts were likely the result of gang propaganda campaigns designed to stoke fear, as NBC reports. While it’s still possible that the odd gang leaders are indeed capable of such ghoulish acts, generalizing these claims is not only misleading — a State Department spokesperson told the broadcaster that it had received no credible reports of cannibalism — but even clearly playing into racist tropes that date back to colonial times.
There’s also the issue of basic human decency. Through no fault of its residents, Haiti is in crisis; instead of wondering how the country he immigrated to could help, Musk is punching down at the most extreme examples of social dysfunction he can find online.
“It is very disturbing that Elon Musk would repeat these absurdities that do, indeed, have a long history,” Yale University professor of French and African diaspora studies Marlene Daut told NBC.
In short, it’s yet another troubling sign of Musk’s descent into extreme right-wing circles, while using his considerable following and social media network to further conspiracy theories and racist disinformation.
“A whole population is getting blamed for what some psycho gang members are doing,” Washington-based lawyer and moderator of the subreddit r/Haiti, told NBC. “It is racist. It is dehumanizing.”
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