(CNN) — Elon Musk recently sat for a wide-ranging interview with The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, who challenged him over his support for Europe’s far right, his anti-Muslim rhetoric and his cuts to humanitarian aid during his stint in the Trump administration.
Afterwards, on his own social media network that he routinely uses to amplify his personal views, Musk lashed out against his interviewer. “She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple,” he wrote.
By Musk’s assessment, society is full of “traitors.” As he declared over the weekend, “anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor.” So is “anyone who doesn’t love America.” He has also leveled the charge at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, to name a few. CNN has reached out to Musk for comment.
“Traitor” — which derives via Old French from the Latin “trādēre,” meaning to hand over — was first recorded in English in the early 13th century to describe a person who violated another’s trust or a duty entrusted to them. By the end of the century, it also encompassed betrayals of one’s sovereign or government. Being a traitor is a mark of infamy that carries down through history, attached to the likes of Marcus Junius Brutus, who conspired to assassinate Julius Caesar; Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver; Benedict Arnold, who deceived George Washington and the Continental Army; and Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian military officer who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.
In the legal sense, a “traitor” is someone found guilty of the crime of treason, which also derives from the Latin “trādēre” and seems to have entered English around the same time as “traitor.”
Article III of the US Constitution stipulates that “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” This narrow definition was a deliberate attempt by the Founding Fathers to shape political culture, said Thomas Main, author of “The Rise of Illiberalism” and a professor at Baruch College.
In “Federalist No. 43,” James Madison warned against “new-fangled and artificial treasons” invented by political factions to use against one another whenever power changes hands. “[T]he convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime,” he wrote.
“It’s because he doesn’t want newfangled definitions of treason to be used as weapons in everyday debate between political factions,” Main said. “The result of that is a political culture that is intolerant, which is not consistent with liberal democracy.”
Despite the founders’ efforts, the words “traitor,” and its relative “treason,” have been invoked throughout US history in more expansive ways. What sort of betrayals might spark such accusations? Often, the allegiances in question seemed to be drawn along lines of race.
The mid-20th century saw the rise of the phrase “race traitor,” applied by segregationists and the Ku Klux Klan to white people who aligned themselves with the Civil Rights Movement. Catherine Fosl, a historian and author of the biography “Subversive Southerner” of white civil rights activist Anne Braden, said that when Braden and her husband bought a house on behalf of a Black family in 1954, the phrase appeared frequently in the hate mail they received.
“It’s often paired with charges of socialism, communism, outsider,” she said in an interview. “It connotes ‘They’re not like us. They’re not part of us, and they want to undermine our way of life.’”
Fosl, who has also taught South African history, said the word “traitor” was similarly applied to dissenters against apartheid in Musk’s native country, South Africa. The government there charged Nelson Mandela and more than 150 other anti-apartheid activists with treason in a multi-year mass trial that ended in acquittal in 1961.
By the ’90s, the idea of the “race traitor” was so ingrained in US political discourse that it was reclaimed by some activists on the left. In 1993, the steelworker-turned-scholar Noel Ignatiev and the cab driver-turned-educator John Garvey began publishing the journal “Race Traitor” — eagerly embracing the once-derogatory label. “It wasn’t exactly an everyday phrase,” Garvey said, “But it was just below the surface of what people thought when so-called whites made common cause with especially Black folks.”
Garvey said the journal, which published quarterly from 1993 to 2005, was premised on the idea of abolishing whiteness as a social category that situates white people above other racial groups. Under the motto “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” he said that he and his co-editor Ignatiev hoped to inspire a mass movement of “race traitors” that would eventually transform the country.
Garvey and Ignatiev’s vision didn’t exactly come to pass. And political shifts that were set in motion decades earlier would eventually lay the foundation for the right’s use of “traitor” today. With the rise of modern conservatism in the ’70s and ’80s, Main said influential figures on the right began to approach politics as war. The right-wing FrontPage magazine, edited by former leftist-turned-conservative activist David Horowitz, frequently referred to everyday Democrats and liberals as “traitors,” as Main noted in a 2020 analysis. Ann Coulter’s 2003 book “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism” similarly promoted the idea that liberal political views amounted to crimes against the US.
“If you then say, ‘Well, all politics is war,’ that means everybody who doesn’t agree with me politically is a traitor,” Main said.
This is the framing that Musk — and much of the US political right — seems to have adopted today. President Donald Trump deploys the epithet “traitor” at anyone he perceives to be as disloyal, as he did with former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene when she broke with him over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. MAGA influencers, including New Jersey political strategist Mike Crispi, accused Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett of betraying Republicans for voting to uphold states’ post-election grace periods for mail-in ballots. “Amy Coney Barrett is quite literally a traitor to our country,” he wrote on X. “Up until a few years ago, elections were ALWAYS finalized on Election NIGHT. We all know why the Democrats changed this process. So why did Barrett just vote to uphold it?”
The decades-old “race traitor” has seen a resurgence, too. After Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by federal agents while demonstrating against the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, the white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes called them “race traitors.” Fuentes has also referred to Vice President JD Vance as a “race traitor” for marrying a woman of Indian heritage.
When Musk calls someone a “traitor,” he seems to regard the word as the utmost insult. His contempt for so-called “traitors” is so great that in recent weeks, he’s repeatedly posted or reposted versions of the far-right meme “first the traitors, then the invaders.” The slogan refers to the idea among anti-immigrant extremists that before targeting immigrants themselves, they need to attack people who support immigration; Musk reposted a user who applied the message to the new Uwe Boll movie, “Citizen Vigilante,” to explain why the protagonist, played by Armie Hammer, “spends the first half of the movie murdering white people not migrants.”
In white supremacist circles, the idea goes back to a key plot point in the 1978 racist novel “The Turner Diaries,” which depicts a group of white people who hunt down and execute “race traitors,” before going on to wipe all non-white people from the face of the earth. The book — with its treatment of racial integration as equivalent to the death-penalty federal crime of treason — has inspired numerous acts of racist violence through the years since its publication.
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