Summary

Elon Musk rejected accusations of Nazi sympathies in a Fox News interview, calling it “outrageous” and blaming media propaganda.

Critics point to his straight-arm salute at Trump’s rally, endorsement of a German far-right party, and reinstating white supremacist accounts on X.

His cuts to federal agencies under DOGE have sparked protests and vandalism, including nicknaming Teslas “swasticars.”

Musk claims he’s targeted for character assassination and receives daily death threats. He and Lara Trump compared the attacks to those against Donald Trump, accusing mainstream media of spreading lies.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      10 hours ago

      Calling the press propaganda was.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lying_press

      “Lying press” (German: Lügenpresse, lit. ‘press of lies’ [ˈlyːɡn̩ˌpʁɛsə] ⓘ) is a pejorative and disparaging political epithet used largely for the printed press and the mass media at large.

      The Nazis adopted the term for their propaganda against the Jewish, communist, and later the foreign press. In 1922 Adolf Hitler used the accusation of the “lying press” for the Marxist press.[citation needed] In the Mein Kampf chapter on war propaganda, he described what he saw as the extraordinary effect of enemy propaganda in the First World War. He criticized German propaganda as ineffective and called for ‘better’ propaganda, which, allegedly like that of the English, French or Americans, was to be oriented towards psychological effectiveness.[6] Accusations of “lying” against domestic journalism can be found in his speeches, for example against the “social democratic press”, Jewish liberals, etc.

      Hermann Göring used the expression on 23 March 1933 in his speech during the debate on the Enabling Act of 1933 in the Reichstag.[8] In the same speech he denied attacks on Jewish shops and desecrations of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries.

      In December 1937, Manfred Pechau summarized parts of his dissertation (“National Socialism and German Language”, Greifswald 1935) in the National Socialist monthly and listed synonyms for what he called “Jewish-Marxist lying press”, including “Jewish journals”.[9] The party’s official educational and speaker information material, published in 1938 by the Reich Propaganda Management of the NSDAP, includes comments on the anti-Semitic November pogroms in 1938 by foreign media as reactions of the “propaganda and lying press” which allegedly represented a new field of slander against the Reich.[10]

      In several speeches by Joseph Goebbels from the first half of 1939, “Lügenpresse” is used to characterize the media abroad, especially in the future World War II opponents, the United States, France, and Great Britain.[11] At this point in time, the German domestic press had been “synchronized” (controlled) and a critical domestic press that the National Socialists referred to as the “Lügenpresse” no longer existed. The Nazi propaganda reacted to the false report of Max Schmeling’s death with an attack on the “foreign lying press”.[12] There were also variations in this terminology; the Völkischer Beobachter, for example, referred to the “emigrant and international lying press” to deny reports about the poor health of the imprisoned Carl von Ossietzky, [13] and in 1932, it rejected criticism of Rosenberg using the formula “Marxist lying press”.[14]

      In 1942, Baldur von Schirach described the French journalist Geneviève Tabouis, who published reports on the expansion plans of National Socialism, as “the embodiment of this nifty lying press that was available to anyone who knew how to pay”; in the same context he claimed that “90 percent of all Paris newspapers” were under “Jewish influence” and that the newspaper editorial offices were staffed by “over 70 percent” Jews.[15]

      The expression was also used in speeches at carnival events that were used to bolster the party.[16]

      After the National Socialist Condor Legion bombed the city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and this led to appalled reactions in the world, General Franco’s propaganda accused the “Jewish lying press” of disinformation, claiming that this was a press maneuver by the Bolsheviks; this happened in harmony with the Nazi propaganda.[17][18]

      In 1948, Walter Hagemann analyzed how the Nazi press used the accusation of the “lying press” against the foreign press. He observed that readers should be made aware of how vigilant and reliable German journalism and politics are on this point. The rejection of the Allied “horror reports” as products of the “Jewish journal” was part of this Nazi strategy.[19]