Why Elon Musk Won’t Stop Talking About a ‘Woke Mind Virus’
The question to Elon Musk was a long time coming: What is the “woke mind virus," anyway? For months and months, the world’s richest man has been talking about the “woke mind virus"—let’s call it WMV for short. He describes it as a threat to “modern civilization" and says those concerns motivated his decision more than a year ago to buy the social-media platform now known as X.
When it comes to how he defines that threat, however, he has been vague in public—painting a picture of something akin to hysterical groupthink by liberals against merit-based achievement and free speech, a catchall for what he expresses disagreement with. Musk has lately expounded more on what worries him, including earlier this month, when he was asked directly what he means by WMV and continued to attack Disney—which he calls “deeply infected"—after the company cut ad spending on X.
“The woke mind virus consists of creating very, very divisive identity politics…[that] amplifies racism; amplifies, frankly, sexism; and all of the -isms while claiming to do the opposite," Musk said at an event in Italy. “It actually divides people and makes them hate each other and hate themselves." A few weeks earlier, during an appearance on a podcast, Musk summed it up simply as “communism rebranded." Understanding what Musk means when he talks about WMV takes on greater importance as his stated concerns increasingly hang over any number of his actions—from how he manages X and positions the platform against the likes of Disney, to how his views might affect policies and customers at the other companies he runs.
In apparent expansion of his anti-WMV views, Musk is now taking aim at a management effort known as diversity, equity and inclusion, or, DEI. “DEI must
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