Billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk tore into ‘woke’ leftist political and cultural ideology during a sit-down interview with the satirical news site Babylon Bee, while also taking another verbal shot at Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., whom he has traded barbs with for most of the month.
To begin, Musk blasted wokeness for ruining satirical comedy, like news stories posted at “The Onion,” the original satire site, which he ripped for becoming “really politically correct” and for not making fun of “anything on the Left.”
“It used to be much more even-handed, The Onion, and then they just got the woke mind virus to the point where … it used to be very funny and then it was not that funny,” Musk said. “
“You know, SNL, I used to be a huge fan of SNL. … many, many, many, if not, most of the SNL episodes are kind of a moral lecture on why we’re bad human beings, instead of comedy,” he continued.
“So, and again, won’t make fun of anything on the Left, really, like, you know, they’ll beat up on Ted Cruz 17,000 times and you’re like, ‘OK, we get it,'” he continued.
“So it’s, it’s just, there’re just a lot of no-fly zones with a lot of comedy,” the entrepreneur added. “And then you realize, it’s like, wait a second, is the comedy getting at an essential truth or trying — is there a propaganda element?
“Or is it trying to push you in a particular direction? Or getting to an essential truth that is humorous? And when it stops trying to get to an essential truth that is humorous, then, you know, it’s just not that funny,” he continued.
The Bee then asked Musk to explain what he meant by the following tweet:
traceroute woke_mind_virus
— Elon Musk
“Okay, so traceroute is a networking command to — so, if you want to figure out a path to a particular server, or domain, you’d say ‘traceroute,’ or in Windows, ‘TRACERT,’ that would show you the path to a particular source server, either an IP address or domain name, and it would show you basically all the hops that it goes through, and the latency between each hop,” Musk explained.
“So traceroute would be like, where did it come from? Where did the virus come from? What is its origin?” he continued.
“[Wokeness] is a prevalent mind virus, and arguably one of the biggest threats to modern civilization,” Musk added.
Later, Musk was asked why he believes that wokeness is so destructive, responding, “I think we should be aiming for, like, a positive society and that it should be okay to be humorous.”
“Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool,” Musk noted further. “I mean, Chappelle like, what the [bleeped out]. I mean, try to shut down Chappelle? Come on, man, that’s crazy. So, do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate, basically?”
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful,” Musk responded. “It basically gives mean people a reason, it gives them a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”
At another point in the interview, Musk was asked about his ongoing verbal war with Warren.
“She struck first,” Musk said. “Obviously. She called me a freeloader and a grifter who doesn’t pay taxes, basically. And I’m literally paying the most tax that any individual in history has ever paid this year, ever.”