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This evening, Ron DeSantis is announcing his presidential campaign by talking to Elon Musk on Twitter. The Florida governor’s attempt to fit into Donald Trump’s shoes is only going to get worse from here.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Four forces bind Trump’s supporters more tightly than ever. The meat paradox There is no evidence strong enough to end the pandemic-origins debate. Local politics was already messy. Then came Nextdoor.

Not Serious People

I am not going to open Twitter this evening to hear Ron DeSantis announce—finally, for real, no joke, this time he means it—his campaign to become the leader of the free world. Neither are you, in all likelihood; Twitter is composed of a tiny fraction of highly engaged social-media users, and most people in America aren’t on the platform. Even fewer use Twitter Spaces, the audio component of Twitter where users can tune in to a live conversation. (I’ve participated in some of them. They’re fun, but a bit cumbersome.)

More to the point, very few of the people Ron DeSantis wants to reach are on Twitter. Most of them won’t hear any of the conversation, unless somehow the Ron and Elon Show is blasted from loudspeakers in Florida’s retirement mecca, The Villages. Yesterday, after Fox News announced tonight’s event, Reuters published an explainer: “What is Twitter Spaces where DeSantis will announce his presidential run?” If you’re unfamiliar enough with Twitter that you need to read the explainer, you’re not likely to join the event.

Regardless of what plays out tonight, or how many people tune in (or don’t) to hear it, I have to wonder: Who came up with the galaxy-brained idea of matching up two of the most socially awkward people in American public life for a spontaneous discussion on Twitter? It’s not even laden with the pomp and suspense of a real announcement: As my colleague David Frum tweeted yesterday, “If you tell Fox News you plan to announce your candidacy on Twitter, isn’t that really … announcing on Fox News?”

In any case, the venue is, to say the least, something of a risk. The last time Musk tried to participate in a Twitter Spaces event, he got exasperated with journalists for asking him questions and quickly left the discussion. (Much like Donald Trump, Musk seemingly cannot internalize that everyone in the world does not actually work for him.) This time, Musk has brought in his friend David Sacks as the moderator. Musk reportedly once tossed Sacks out of a room with a wave of his hand by saying, “David, this meeting is too technical for you.” Sacks denies that this happened, but still, a close Musk adviser like Sacks is unlikely to ask anything too challenging.

DeSantis’s campaign likely saw two reasons for choosing this stunt. First, Trump has not come back to Twitter, despite Musk lifting the former’s president ban from the platform. (Trump vowed not to return, and amazingly, it’s one of the few public promises he’s ever kept.) The Florida governor will get a Trump-free environment, where he can show that he’s cool and hip and down with his fellow kids on the interwebs, unlike the elderly Trump. (Trump, of course, pioneered the abuse of social media for political reasons, but he’s now over on his own platform.)

The second reason is likely more important: DeSantis seems to think he can win the nomination by imitating Trump (sometimes physically), and part of that, apparently, is owning the libs on social media. In that sense, Musk’s weird and cloddish right-wing politics make him a perfect partner for DeSantis; both of them need a public-relations boost after months of missteps. Of course, Musk will still be a billionaire and the CEO of three major companies no matter who likes or hates him. DeSantis, meanwhile, needs money and Republican primary voters, and he has apparently decided that the way to gain Trump’s share of those voters is to troll, and troll hard, while generating free publicity by appearing with the guy who tried to wreck Twitter just to get even with the blue-check media elites.

DeSantis’s moves so far fit into that strategy. The war with Disney, the attack on public education, the phobic reaction to anything regarding race, sexuality, or gender—it’s all performative cruelty aimed at the most socially and politically retrograde voters, which is another way of saying “the GOP-base voters who will decide the primaries.” DeSantis could be a true believer in his own policies, but he’s clearly decided to lean into the idea of being a Trumplike outsider and culture warrior. (As Jill Lawrence pointed out today in The Bulwark, possible candidates such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin are also culture-war partisans, but they seem to understand the risks of scaring off less extreme voters.)

In my view,  the United States will be better off if Donald Trump does not become the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. His continued support of violent insurrectionists forever renders him unfit to participate in our elections; anyone would be better on the ticket than Trump, and that includes DeSantis. But DeSantis has learned from Trump that winning the GOP nomination is not about policy; it’s about playacting. He knows that the primary faithful want rallies and revenge, costumes and chaos.

The presidency is a job for a serious person, but in today’s Republican Party, serious people need not apply. DeSantis seems to understand this, and will appear with Elon Musk in the hope, perhaps, of winning over Twitter power users such as @catturd2 and the various pestilential extremists Musk welcomed back to the platform. Though it might be a good move for DeSantis—who needs to do something to reinflate his shrinking political bubble—his cozying up to Musk is just another moment when Succession’s Logan Roy might look at the 2024 GOP primary candidates as he did at his children, shake his head sadly, and say: “You are not serious people.”

Related:

The non-rise and actual fall of Ron DeSantis Twitter is a far-right social network.

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris called for Congress to enact more gun-safety legislation on the first anniversary of the mass shooting in Uvalde. Tina Turner, the rock-and-roll pioneer and pop icon, died at the age of 83 after a long illness. Montana banned people dressed in drag from reading books to children at public schools and libraries, becoming the first state to do so.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Hawaii's feral chickens are out of control, Tove Danovich writes.

More From The Atlantic

The problem with how the census classifies white people The silence that mass shootings leave behind There is no constitutional end run around the debt ceiling.

Culture Break

Read. Chain-Gang All-Stars, a new novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s set in a world where imprisoned people duel to the death as entertainment for others.

Watch. Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (streaming on Netflix), a perplexing new documentary that offers glimpses of the tabloid star but fails to reckon with the forces that ruined her.

P.S.

Though some readers may know that I spent more than 25 years teaching at the Naval War College (and many years before that teaching at Dartmouth and Georgetown), they may not know that I also have taught for 18 years in Harvard’s continuing-education division, the Harvard Extension School. I have now retired from Extension, and last night I was honored to receive the school’s highest award, the Harvard Extension School Medal, for my teaching and service. Harvard’s program is (of course!) the oldest in America: Founded as the Lowell Institute in 1835 (Oliver Wendell Holmes, who named this very magazine, was a lecturer then), it became known as “Extension” in the early 20th century. I was proud to be part of the mission to deliver quality education to anyone who wanted it, including the nontraditional students who would come to class after a full day at work—just as I had.

My time at Extension, however, also taught me that Americans often overlook or underestimate the value of such programs. I am an advocate for residential, four-year college programs—that is, for the students likely to benefit from them. Not everyone can or should go to a full-time program; some students would rather work, others need to pick up a course on a topic only as part of their professional development, and others might be lifelong learners who are coming back to school merely out of interest in a particular subject. Continuing-education programs at America’s universities help provide this learning at a fraction of the cost of a full-time degree, and often with the same instructors and on the very same campuses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When Elon Musk tweeted that the Jewish financier George Soros “hates humanity” and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization,” he drew international condemnation. Musk’s outburst was “not just distressing,” but “dangerous,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, said on Twitter. “It will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.” Later that day, Israel’s foreign ministry tweeted, “The phrase ‘The Jews’ spiked today on the list of topics trending on Twitter following a tweet with antisemitic overtones by none other than the owner and CEO of the social network, Elon Musk.”

But soon after, that statement was deleted and disavowed by Israel’s foreign minister, who promised, “There will be no tweets like this again.” The next day, Amichai Chikli, the country’s minister of diaspora affairs, went further. A hard-right politician who first entered Israel’s parliament in 2021, Chikli broke with his own party when it joined the country’s recent anti–Benjamin Netanyahu government, and was later rewarded with a parliamentary seat in Netanyahu’s Likud party. Last Thursday on Twitter, he publicly praised Musk as an entrepreneur and “role model,” and declared that “criticism of Soros - who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!” Chikli subsequently doubled down on this position, citing an op-ed written by Alan Dershowitz that states, “No sin­gle per­son has done more to dam­age Is­rael’s stand­ing in the world, es­pe­cially among so-called pro­gres­sives, than George Soros.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Elon Musk among the anti-semites]

I’ve reported critically on the activities of Soros’s foundation, and I certainly don’t think scrutiny of him is bigoted. But having covered anti-Semitism for more than a decade, I also found Musk’s remarks about Soros to be demonstrably anti-Semitic, and was confused by how some people, like Chikli, seemed willing to excuse such rhetoric out of distaste for Soros’s politics. So I spoke with Chikli yesterday in an attempt to understand his perspective. Our conversation below has been edited for clarity, but there was not much to be found, in part because even after we spoke it was unclear to me whether Chikli had read Musk’s tweets in the first place.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Yair Rosenberg: Let’s start with the tweet that kicked off the whole controversy. Last week, Musk goes on Twitter and writes, “Soros reminds me of Magneto.” What did you think of this comparison when you saw it?

Amichai Chikli: First of all, I hadn’t seen it at the beginning. I just saw the waves of reaction. I listened to what was being said in the media. I saw Soros becoming the victim. I saw Elon Musk becoming the vicious anti-Semite. And it sounded ridiculous to me.

Rosenberg: So you didn’t see the specific thing that he wrote.

Chikli: I was responding to the trend and not directly to the tweet. Obviously, before I wrote something, I learned about the tweet. But I was responding to the trend. What added to my motivation to respond was that a lower-level foreign ministry employee, who is not the minister, was saying that [Israel is] standing up to protect Soros.

Rosenberg: So I assume you saw Musk’s second tweet, where he explained what he meant in the first one. He wrote that Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” What did you think of that?

Chikli: But I wasn’t responding to his tweets. I was reacting to the reaction to the tweets, and in particular the reaction of nonelected officials in the foreign ministry, who spoke in the name of the state of Israel, and joined the trend that portrayed Elon Musk as an anti-Semite.

Rosenberg: Okay. So let me read what you said. You wrote, “As Israel’s minister who’s entrusted on combating anti-Semitism, I would like to clarify that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and a role model. Criticism of Soros - who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!” So you made a case there, and I suspect you could make a longer case here, that George Soros is anti-Israel.

Chikli: One hundred percent. This is one of the most hostile individuals, who funds dozens of organizations that are all into delegitimizing the state of Israel. It’s not just because of his opinion. It’s very systematic.

Rosenberg: But here is my question. This whole thing happens because of Musk’s tweets. And he didn’t say he didn’t like Soros because of his positions. He said that Soros wants to end civilization because he hates humanity. Aren’t these two very different things? If Musk had just said, “I don’t like Soros, because he doesn’t like Israel,” do you think anyone would have called him anti-Semitic? Didn’t that only happen because Musk accused a rich Jew of wanting to ruin the world, which is what anti-Semites have said about Jews for centuries, whether it’s “Zionists” or the Rothschilds or whoever?

Chikli: But if you’d like to have a serious interview, you must understand, and I will say it, I think it’s the third time. I wasn’t—

Rosenberg: —responding to the tweet, you were responding to the reaction. But it’s confusing to me that you would respond to say Elon Musk is not an anti-Semite when you don’t know what he said.

Chikli: I stand behind my words. I don’t think that he’s an anti-Semite. You can also say that George Soros is doing huge damage, not just to the state of Israel, by promoting the deal with Iran, which I think is damaging for humanity.

Soros speaks highly about the “open society” while his foundation has zero transparency about where the money goes. It’s not just anti-Israel, I think it’s anti–freedom of speech. I think he is the No. 1 promoter of what we call today “woke soft tyranny.” And his ideology is a threat to freedom of speech and the core values of the Western civilization. This is far more than the state of Israel.

Rosenberg: Let me try to put this in a different way because maybe I’m not being as clear as I want to be in my question. Here’s an analogy. As you know, many Israelis today think Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to destroy Israel. Many others think former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and the opposition are trying to tear the country apart. But if someone in America says something anti-Semitic about Netanyahu or Lapid, it’s still anti-Semitic, regardless of the target and whether one agrees with them, right? That’s a separate question.

You can have the lowest opinion of Soros, but that still doesn’t give anyone license to say anti-Semitic things about him. So you might not like George Soros at all, but Musk didn’t say Soros is bad on Israel, or he’s bad on freedom of speech. He said Soros hates humanity and wants to destroy civilization.

Chikli: I think we are now on the fourth time, you insist—

Rosenberg: I will print every time that you say this, don’t worry!

Chikli: [Laughs.] You think I was looking with a microscope at every single letter in Musk’s tweets. Again I will say, I was responding first to the trend, and second to the response of unelected officials who took authority from nowhere to speak with the name of the state of Israel on a very serious issue, to protect a man who is super hostile to the state of Israel, and who is maybe the No. 1 promoter of woke anti-Semitism that seeks to delegitimize and demonize the state of Israel.

[Matt Welch: Why the right loves to hate George Soros]

One last thing about the accusation of Elon Musk allowing anti-Semitism to spread on Twitter. The organization that reported this is called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. And guess what? When you go and check them out, there are a few interesting things about them. One is that they are funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations. And second, in their methodology, when they are looking for anti-Semitic tweets, they look for the following: Jesus, Hitler, and George Soros. This is also one of the points that I wanted to dispute—suggesting criticism of Soros is anti-Semitism; that is ridiculous.

Rosenberg: Of course. But the question isn’t whether it’s inherently anti-Semitic to criticize Soros. He’s one of the richest and most influential people in the world; obviously, you have to be allowed to criticize him. The issue is that sometimes anti-Semites criticize Soros because he’s Jewish and rich, and it’s not about his positions; it’s about who he is, right? You should be familiar with this problem because the same thing happens to Israel. It’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, but some people criticize Israel because they’re anti-Semites and therefore say anti-Semitic things. Isn’t that what’s happening here?

Chikli: I want to give you the professional answer to why I wasn’t putting the focus on those people who, as you said now, might refer to Musk’s quote from an anti-Semitic perspective. Why was it not my focus at all? In the United States, when we researched the trends in the media, the vast majority of anti-Semitism is new anti-Semitism: the anti-Semitism that delegitimizes, demonizes, and sets double standards against the state of Israel.

It’s true that anti-Semitism coming from the far right is often louder and more violent. But that’s a small part of the phenomenon that we see today. It’s not less disturbing, but it’s not the new, main trend. And I was responding to the big picture. I wasn’t interested in how did everyone feel about the following tweet of Elon Musk, dada dada dada. That’s not what I was responding to, as I said—I think this is now time No. 4.

Rosenberg: Five.

Last week before Congress, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, laid out how the US government should regulate artificial intelligence companies like his. Besides calling for a new agency to oversee AI and license the development of large-scale models, Altman advocated safety standards and auditing requirements for the…

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