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Elon Musk booed onstage at Dave Chappelle comedy show
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The White House has branded Elon Musk’s comments on Dr Anthony Fauci “incredibly dangerous”.
The Tesla CEO provocatively joked about changing his pronouns to “'Prosecute/Fauci”, echoing the sentiments of a right-wing campaign to charge him for his involvement in setting the US’s Covid policies.
He sparked criticism online by sharing a series of posts about Joe Biden's chief medical advisor and immunologist Dr Fauci and hinting at support for Covid-19 conspiracy theories while offending transgender and nonbinary people.
Musk also shared a meme from the Lord of the Rings of Fauci telling Biden “Just one more lockdown, my king..." in an implied criticism of the measures taken against Coronavirus despite them first being implemented under Donald Trump.
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White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre has now condemned the comments by saying: "These are incredibly dangerous, these personal attacks that we are seeing.
"They are disgusting and they are divorced from reality," she added on Monday (December 12).
Dr Fauci told reporter Max Kozlov of the science magazine Nature that he was not bothered by Mr Musk’s attack.
“I don’t pay attention to that, Max, and I don’t even feel I need to respond,” Dr Fauci told Kozlov. “A lot of that stuff is just a cesspool of misinformation, and I don’t waste a minute worrying about it.”
It comes after Jimmy Kimmel offered the most brutal response to Musk on Twitter on social media after he joked about his pronouns.
Replying to the post, Kimmel simply wrote: “Your pronouns are ass and hole.”
Astronaut Scott Kelly also hit out at the use of pronouns by writing: “Elon, please don’t mock and promote hate toward already marginalized and at-risk-of-violence members of the #LGBTQ+ community.
Musk has come in for criticism following the commentsGetty images
“They are real people with real feelings. Furthermore, Dr Fauci is a dedicated public servant whose sole motivation was saving lives.”
Musk replied by writing: “I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
“As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.”
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