For much of the last week, Elon Musk’s mighty Twitter feed—sorry, his X feed—featured as its pinned tweet a video that purports to lay bare a vast conspiracy among Democrats to “flood” the country with “illegals” to lock in a “permanent voting majority.” Many people have picked apart the video’s numerous lies. It is a strikingly crafted piece of “great replacement theory” propaganda, and it illustrates the growing sophistication of far-right information spaces.
Musk’s heavy promotion of this video, however, also does something else: It blows apart the elaborate self-defense he offered in an interview with Don Lemon that went viral earlier this week. Musk offered numerous claims to justify his widely criticized trafficking in great replacement conspiracies—but his own X feed shows that these claims are nonsense.
In that interview, which triggered a public feud between the two men, Lemon confronted Musk over his embrace of great replacement theory. That prompted Musk to insist: “I don’t subscribe to that.” He continued: “I’m simply saying that there’s an incentive here” and noted that “illegal immigrants” have a strong bias toward Democrats, incentivizing the party’s lawmakers “to increase Democratic voters.”
Musk also said undocumented immigrants gravitate toward Democratic cities and states, inflating numbers counted in the U.S. census, boosting the party’s number of House members and Electoral College voters. Musk insisted: “You don’t need a conspiracy when you have basic incentives.”
Musk is playing a sleazy game. He’s drawing a largely artificial distinction between saying Democrats are conspiring to let in “illegals” and saying they merely have an incentive to do so.
But even if you accept this bogus distinction, the video Musk is actively endorsing—his pinned tweet said, “This is actually happening!”—absolutely does allege a vast conspiracy. It describes an “open borders plan to entrench single party rule,” in which congressional Democrats and the White House deliberately allow in “millions” and “keep them in the country at all costs,” all for the purpose of ensuring “their loyalty to the political party that imported them.”
The conspiracy also involves localities that use “sanctuary” policies to draw migrants to blue states, inflating those census numbers. And it implicates untold numbers of elections officials who deliberately overlook voter fraud, presumably to allow “illegals” to vote.
Here’s the reality, Elon. Yes, President Biden stopped Trump’s policy of forcing asylum-seekers to await hearings in Mexico—because it produced horrific humanitarian outcomes. Biden has been somewhat more tolerant of migrant kids than Trump was, and has deprioritized removals of migrants who are not serious criminals and have longtime ties to communities here—but the administration has in fact deported immense numbers of people.
What’s more, if many asylum-seekers are released into the United States, it’s because they must be given a hearing by law, and Congress doesn’t appropriate anything close to the resources for detaining them all in the court-backlogged interim. Trump failed to get that requirement changed or weakened with full control in Washington. This is why Trump also released huge numbers of migrants into the U.S. Why did Trump do this dastardly, conspiratorial thing? Because all presidents do it. They have no choice.
Biden also recently sought expanded funding to detain and process migrants quickly, including faster removal—a strange way of executing the conspiracy alleged in Musk’s favorite new video. Republicans killed that funding because Trump wanted to wield border chaos against Biden. Heck, that Trump-GOP inaction is closer to a political conspiracy involving immigration than anything Democrats have done.
Finally, while Democrats do support more generous immigration policies on humanitarian and pragmatic grounds—they’ve driven the economic boom and would mitigate long-term demographic problems—they don’t have a political “incentive” to let in “illegals.” Voter fraud by “illegals” is made up. And even if some migrants might eventually become citizens after many, many years—if at all—why do Musk and company assume they’d ultimately vote Democratic?
They shouldn’t. As Jon Favreau notes, “Demographics have not been destiny for Democrats.” Denizens of the red-pilled set sometimes treat that idea as given: They regularly insist their populist ideology appeals to nonwhite working people (including Latinos) alienated by liberal elites. So why aren’t Musk and his pals eager for populist Republicans to compete for migrant turned citizen voters?
In his interview with Lemon, Musk rehashed the idea that migration is being engineered to rig congressional representation and the Electoral College. If anything, the malapportioned Senate and Electoral College inflate the power of red state and rural white voters—something Musk sort of concedes. That aside, the Constitution is what requires the counting of “all persons,” and anyway, if noncitizens were removed from the census, it would also shave House seats in GOP states like Texas and Florida. Indeed, recent noncitizen population growth has overwhelmingly been in red states, as the Cato Institute shows.
All those ideas from Musk are great replacement tropes. When Musk piously denies believing that theory, he likely means only that he doesn’t embrace the specific idea that Jewish elites are engineering mass migration to extinguish the white race (he did endorse that notion in a tweet and then apologized).
But there are different versions of great replacement theory. Many Republicans offer a veiled one, in which immigrants are being imported to replace native-born voters, not white people—supposedly only making a political point, not a racial one. Yet even purveyors of this softer version know exactly what they’re insinuating.
And Musk’s feed pushes it relentlessly. He regularly promotes the notion of a migrant invasion and frequently elevates the idea that migrants should be conflated as a class with violent criminals. That video he’s promoting depicts enormous, swarthy, teeming, invading hordes—and we all know exactly what that’s supposed to convey.
Musk can deny embracing “great replacement theory” all he wants. But it’s a scam. In addition to pushing it himself, he’s used X to create a far-right information safe space where an extraordinary outpouring of “great replacement” and “white genocide” propaganda is absolutely flourishing. The evidence for this is right at the top of his X feed. Last we checked, it had 134,000 retweets and counting.
