Musk Attacks Nyong’o For The Same Reason Hitler Attacked Jewish Art

It is a tactic of genocide.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, CC

Last week, Christopher Nolan confirmed that Lupita Nyong’o is going to play Helen of Troy in Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey. Most people thought, “Helen of Troy was supposed to be incredibly beautiful; Lupita Nyong’o is incredibly beautiful—this seems like a reasonable choice.”

But a handful of people on the right, led by Nazi billionaire Elon Musk, were enraged. Lupita Nyong’o is Black. Racist pseudo-intellectuals like Musk believe that the Greeks were not just white, but transcendental icons of white culture. Casting Nyong’o, therefore, is, supposedly, an insult to whiteness, and a sign of Hollywood’s assault on Western purity and honor.

Many people have pointed out that Musk is a disgusting gutter racist. Some, like the Atlantic’s reliably left-punching befuddled reactionary doofus Thomas Chatterton Williams, have argued that Musk was playing into the identity-obsessed politics of progressives; the problem is not so much racism as the failure to embrace the race-blind talking points which have formed the basis of the massive disenfranchisement of Black voters over the last month (and years.)

Williams is a fool; Musk is a racist. But beyond that, I think it’s important to recognize that this attack on Nyong’o is not (just) ridiculous, trivial bullshit led by an irrelevant clueless wealthy asshole and spun as the left’s fault by elite media platforms for contrarian click and billionaire donations. It is part of an ongoing genocidal agenda—and, indeed, part of an ongoing genocide.

Culture war arguments can seem like silly distractions. But racism exists in culture; it is an ideology built through propaganda and even through aesthetics. Elon Musk is a fool. But he is also a racist mass murderer. His public statements should be read in that context—as deliberate efforts to enable him to slaughter more non-white people in the name of white supremacy.

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Hitler: genocidal culture warrior

It may seem odd or overblown to link art criticism and genocide. One person who saw the connection clearly, though, was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler is obviously best known for his deliberate racist genocide of 6 million Jewish people. For Hitler, though, genocide was not just about eliminating and murdering human beings. It also involved a thoroughgoing effort to remove, destroy, and discredit art which he believed was “degenerate”—especially art by Jewish, Communist, and avant garde artists (groups which Hitler indiscriminately and compulsively conflated.) Under the Nazis, the work of Jewish composers like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were banned. Jewish musicians were barred from performing. Jewish artwork (or art that Hitler claimed was Jewish-influenced) was ridiculed in an infamous “degenerate art” exhibition. Jewish directors and actors were expelled from German cinema.

Hitler’s attack on Jewish art, and on modern art in general, was in part simply a dictator imposing his preferences on his own people—the dictator was a failed artist in a blandly realist style, and he seems to have viewed abstraction and modernist approaches as a personal insult. But the moral panic over decadence was also a part of a broader, deliberately genocidal strategy.

“The idea of the [degenerate art] exhibition was not just to mock modern art, but to encourage the viewers to see it as a symptom of an evil plot against the German people,” as Lucy Burns of the BBC explains. Jewish artists (or those supposedly embracing degenerate Jewish modes of culture) were portrayed as working deliberately to undermine the German spirit of virtue, cleanliness, vigor, and as scheming to dilute and destroy German culture—as epitomized by Hitler’s beloved Wagner. The Jewish culture worker, Hitler said in Mein Kampf, “contaminates art, literature, the theater, makes a mockery of natural feeling, overthrows all concepts of beauty and sublimity, of the noble and the good, and instead drags men down into the sphere of his own base nature.”

For Hitler, a painting that didn’t appeal to him was not just a painting that didn’t appeal to him. It was a deliberate, violent attack on his nation and all that he held dear. Decadent art, Jewish art, was framed as an essentially genocidal assault on Germany, its culture, and its people. The destruction of such art was part of the effort to erase Jews from Germany, but it was also a justification of that effort. The ridicule of Jewish cultural production, and the framing of Jewish visibility in culture as an existential threat, served to dehumanize actual Jewish people and to legitimize their mass murder.

Musk: genocidal culture warrior

Musk (who has on several occasions signaled his admiration of and sympathy for Hitler) has followed the Nazi blueprint in his approach to culture war issues. In attacking Christopher Nolan for casting Nyong’o, he said that the filmmaker was “desecrating Homer.” He also approvingly retweeted a post by rabid right-wing racist Matt Walsh who claimed that people on the left would “literally riot in the street” and would be driven “to murderous violence” if a white woman were cast as “the most beautiful woman in Africa.”

Nyong’o’s casting is, then, framed as a sacrilegious assault on Western culture and as an insult perpetrated by violent, murderous opponents. Musk is not merely engaged in a debate about art; he is (not very subtly) suggesting that Nyong’o’s appearance in the role is a deadly insult to white people, and that it is reasonable to respond to that insult with violence. When Thomas Chatterton Williams claims that Musk’s arguments are equivalent to those of progressives who objected to Scarlett Johansson playing a Japanese woman in Ghost in the Shell, he is eliding the difference between the argument that non-white heroes should get a chance to appear in Hollywood films and the argument that non-white people should be erased and exterminated wholesale.

Williams would probably say that it is unfair to accuse Musk of wishing to commit genocide. That is because Williams seems largely oblivious to the fact that Musk has already committed a genocide.

Musk led the DOGE initiative supposedly tasked with reducing waste and inefficiency in government at the beginning of Trump’s term. Musk—as you’d expect from a Nazi obsessively worried that non-white people outnumber white people—believed that aid to non-white people globally was wasteful and inefficient. So he unilaterally and illegally shuttered USAID and other global aid programs.

As a result, in the last year and a half hundreds of thousands of people—mostly children—have died of malnutrition and preventable disease. The end of aid has also contributed to a dangerous increase in violence across Africa. If aid is not restored, researchers believe preventable deaths because of Musk’s genocide will reach 14 million by 2030.

Musk is not just some asshole complaining about Hollywood casting choices. He is one of the most horrific mass murderers in history. He hates and fears non-white people, and so—like the Nazi leader he admires—he took deliberate steps to kill as many of them as possible.

You don’t have to assume good faith

Hitler called for the erasure of Jewish art from public life, and we all understand that as part and parcel of his efforts to exterminate Jewish people. Similarly, when Musk says that Lupita Nyong’o should not be allowed on movie screens, we should see that as part and parcel of his horrific and ongoing campaign of mass murder of Africans and non-white people across the globe.

Individuals who commit genocide should not get the benefit of good faith; we do not have to pretend that Musk is just expressing a trivial, narrow opinion on art any more than we need to pretend that Mao’s views on art, or Stalin’s, or Hitler’s, were somehow separate from their political programs of terror and genocide. Musk has murdered hundreds of thousands of Black people; when he says he wants to erase Lupita Nyong’o, he is expressing and attempting to advance his program of absolutely literal, horrific genocide.

When commenters like Williams ignore that genocide, they are not (just) expressing their ignorance or cowardice—they are complicit, just as Holocaust deniers are complicit. When we erase the blood on Musk’s hands, we are empowering him to continue to advance his genocidal goals—by stigmatizing and delegitimizing Black people, by targeting Black people for racist abuse and death threats, by making studios and directors nervous about promoting Black actors and Black artists. Musk wants to exterminate Black people. He has exterminated hundreds of thousands of Black people. That is vital background to understand what he means when he says Lupita Nyong’o should not appear on film.