[Original version is behind a paywall.]
Elon Musk [who promised to fire government employees en masse through DOGE, the new Department of Government Efficiency to be created by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump] has taken his animus to another level by cruelly singling out an individual federal employee named Ashley Thomas, who works a relatively obscure job at the US International Development Finance Corporation, to be harassed online.
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Things kicked off when a popular right wing account ridiculed Thomas in a tweet, writing, "I don't think the US Taxpayer should pay for the employment of a 'Director of Climate Diversification (she/her).'"
Musk quoted the post with a dunk of his own, effectively inviting his hundreds of millions of followers to join in on harassing this random government worker.
"So many fake jobs," Musk wrote in the tweet, which now has over 200,000 likes.
Seemingly, the billionaire culture warrior saw the word "diversification" and thought "diversity," "DEI," or some other form of "wokeness" — his favorite punching bags — as did his many followers.
"You aren't getting rid of all the good jobs are you?" replied one of his courtiers. "I just applied for Chief Climate Gender Diversification Administrator."
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Aside from the harassment and the abhorrent massacring of comedy on display here, this is a truly bizarre job to single out.
The work of climate diversification, a subset of economic diversification, does not involve sitting around at the office and inventing pronouns or whatever Musk is imagining, but to develop strategies to reduce the impact of climate change on various sectors of the economy, especially agriculture. If certain food crops end up failing, for example, diversifying what we grow ensures that we don't all literally starve. But Musk and his cronies clearly heard the job and thought it sounded like out-of-control wokeness.
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At any rate, Musk clearly knows what he's doing here by making that tweet. And if he doesn't, he's an idiot.
In the past, Musk disparaged Twitter's former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth by more or less implying that he was pedophile, which his followers capitalized on by sending him death threats. So intense was the onslaught of hate that followed that Yoel felt forced to flee his home.
That, and this latest episode, are a testament to the power of even just one tossed-off post by Musk — who now tweets as if it's his job.