Elon Musk informed his 120 million Twitter followers on Sunday that Dr. Anthony Fauci must be criminally prosecuted, echoing speaking factors from the far-right conspiracy theorists he has more and more aligned himself with on the platform.
“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” tweeted the brand new Twitter proprietor, whose message additionally mocked pronoun utilization.
The assault got here as Fauci, the nation’s prime immunologist, prepares to step down from his function overseeing the nation’s COVID-19 response. Fauci is the director of the Nationwide Institute of Allergy and Infectious Illnesses and has served 5 many years in public well being.
Musk supplied no clarification for his message, but it surely adopted a previous tweet wherein he shared a meme mocking previous coronavirus lockdowns. His tweet received support from far-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R). Till it was reactivated underneath Musk, Greene’s private account had been completely suspended from Twitter for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. She has additionally advocated towards transgender acceptance and equality.
Fauci has confronted intense backlash together with dying threats for advocating for COVID-19 vaccines and social mandates, together with masks utilization, that aimed to forestall the virus from spreading. Greater than 1 million individuals have died from the virus within the U.S. since early 2020.
Musk has more and more aligned himself with right-wing commentators like these advocating towards Fauci. After buying Twitter, he eliminated an organization coverage towards spreading COVID-19 misinformation and granted “amnesty” to customers whose accounts had been frozen, together with for posting hate speech and inciting violence. These accounts included neo-Nazis and former President Donald Trump, who was banned from the platform for utilizing it to incite the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Musk’s assault on Fauci additionally comes amid weeks of turmoil at Twitter that adopted his takeover, together with a mass worker exodus, slowing advert income, a surge of faux “verified” accounts, and one research discovering an increase in racial slurs on the positioning.
After founding members of Twitter’s Belief and Security Council resigned earlier this month, Musk hit again by accusing them of criminally refusing to take motion on youngster exploitation. This got here in response to a right-wing conspiracy theorist saying the previous staff “all belong in jail.” Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey instantly responded, calling the allegations false.
Musk on Saturday additionally baselessly accused Twitter’s former security head, Yoel Roth, of supporting on-line youngster sexualization.
Musk accused Roth, who resigned final month, of advocating for kids having the ability to use grownup web sites, like Grindr, in a Ph.D. thesis. In response to a snippet of the thesis shared by Musk, Roth argued that younger adults will proceed to make use of the hookup web site, regardless of it seemingly not being secure or age-appropriate for them, and so extra safeguards must be added for them.
Roth didn’t instantly reply to JHB’s request for remark.
Musk’s assault on Roth is harking back to a 2018 incident wherein the billionaire was sued after baselessly calling a British cave explorer, who was concerned within the rescue of Thai kids trapped in a cave, a “pedo man.” Musk argued in courtroom that his remark, an obvious response to the explorer claiming that Musk was solely providing to assist the rescue as a “PR stunt,” wasn’t meant to be taken actually.
Musk reportedly paid a non-public investigator $50,000 to seek for compromising data on the explorer.
The lawsuit towards Musk was in the end tossed.