Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk made an oopsie. Musk shared a debunked misattributed quote on his personal social media platform while also inexplicably attacking children with leukemia.
The AP debunked the quote as being misattributed last year when Kentuckian congressperson Thomas Massie also shared it. The selection is not by Voltaire but rather by some neo nazi.
Here is the tweet:
The very same "Voltaire" quote, however, was the subject of a fact-check piece last year from The Associated Press after Republican Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie shared it in a tweet criticizing Dr Anthony Fauci, also attributing the words to the French philosopher.
"Enlightenment-era writer Voltaire did not say this," AP reported. "The quote, which was paraphrased, comes from a 1993 radio broadcast by Kevin Alfred Strom, who has been identified as a neo-Nazi by organizations that monitor hate groups."
The AP continued: "The original quote from Strom, a self-proclaimed American white nationalist and Holocaust denier, has been used previously online and paraphrased in a variety of ways … Despite the quote originating more than a hundred years after Voltaire's death in 1778, it has been repurposed and incorrectly attributed to him dozens of times. In 2019, actor John Cusack tweeted the quote before deleting the post and apologizing."
