The billionaire has said that he declared war on wokeness in 2021
X owner Elon Musk has said that he purchased the platform, previously called Twitter, in order to “destroy the woke mind virus.” Musk has blamed much of society’s ills on the “virus” of radical liberalism.
“In 2021, I set out to destroy the woke mind virus and now it has been deleted,” Musk wrote on X on Saturday, after sharing a post he made in 2021 reading “traceroute woke_mind_virus.” A traceroute is a diagnostic command used to troubleshoot Internet Protocol networks.
Asked by a follower if this was “the main reason you bought twitter?” Musk replied “Yes.”
Musk has frequently lashed out against the “woke mind virus,” a catch-all term used by some conservatives to condemn radical liberal philosophies and policies including transgenderism, censorship, and the promotion of diversity in the workplace at the expense of merit.
In an interview with Canadian psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson last July, Musk said that the “woke mind virus” killed his son, referring to his transgender child Xavier. Musk claimed that he was “tricked” by doctors into signing documents authorizing his son to undergo hormone treatment, which permanently sterilized him.
“I lost my son, essentially. They call it deadnaming for a reason,” the billionaire said. “The reason it’s called deadnaming is because your son is dead. My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.”
Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, rebranding the platform as X, firing most of its content moderation staff, and rolling back the majority of its censorship policies. X was the first major social media platform to reinstate US President-elect Donald Trump’s account, which was suspended after his supporters rioted on Capitol Hill in January 2021.
The platform’s overhaul initially made it an outlier, with most of its competitors maintaining their restrictive speech policies. However, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that his platforms – which include Facebook and Instagram – will dial back their moderation policies to “restore free expression” and will no longer work with third-party “fact checkers” to label political content.
Alongside these planned changes, Meta ended its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring programs this week, and according to the New York Times, removed tampons from men’s bathrooms in its offices, where they had been provided “for nonbinary and transgender employees.”
