Workers blasted DOGE hatchet man Elon Musk Thursday after he reposted a startling message on X declaring that “Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Public sector employees did.”
Lee Saunders, union president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees of the AFL-CIO, fired off a furious response saying: “America’s public service workers — our nurses, teachers, firefighters, librarians — chose making our communities safe, healthy and strong over getting rich. They are not, as the world’s richest man implies, genocidal murderers.”
He added: “Elon Musk and the billionaires in this administration have no idea what real people go through every day. That’s why he’s so willing to take a chainsaw to people’s jobs, Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare.”
It was only the latest of Musk’s disturbing instances of sidling up to Hitler as he appeared to excuse the actions of the architect of the Holocaust that murdered 6 million Jews and others to pick on public employees, whose jobs he has cut by the thousands since Donald Trump took office.
Ironically, he retweeted the Hitler post just days after the Trump administration announced it was withholding some $4 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University for failing to squelch pro-Gaza protests at the expense of Jewish students, indicating the demonstrations were antisemitic.
Some 150 of pro-Palestinian protesters, many of them Jewish, poured into Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan Thursday to support former Columbia Palestinian student Mahmoud Kahil, who was arrested for for organizing a campus demonstration in defense of Gaza.
“Not in our name,” read the red t-shirts worn by the protesters, who shouted “Fight Nazis, not students.” Police arrested some 100 of the protesters. Khalil and other student on Thursday sued Columbia to block congressional access to student records as the university threatened to expel or suspend campus protesters.
Musk, who was born and raised in apartheid South Africa, triggered an early uproar when he notoriously flashed what appeared to be a Nazi salute at an event marking the Inauguration in January.
He later mocked outrage over the gesture with a series of unfunny Nazi “puns” featuring Hitler’s top aides, including: “Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations!” and “Some people will Goebbels anything down!” He also wrote: “Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! “
Musk concluded: “Bet you did nazi that coming,” with a laughing-to-tears emoji.
The head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League ripped Musk’s Nazi “jokes,” noting that the Holocaust was a “singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it.”
Public workers were hardly the only Americans taken aback by Musk’s repost.
