This site publishes what people said, not what we think it proves about them. That is a deliberate constraint, it costs us the most satisfying sentences available, and it is the reason the rest of the site can be trusted.
This page explains the rule and then does something more useful: it lists the specific occasions on which we have applied it, including the ones where applying it worked against us.
The rule
A quotation is a fact. It can be checked, dated, sourced and archived. Either the words were said or they were not.
A characterisation is an interpretation. It may be a reasonable one, it may be one most people would share, but it remains our conclusion about someone rather than a fact about the world — and a reader who disagrees with it has no way to check it.
| What a case would say | What this site says |
|---|---|
| He endorsed the Great Replacement conspiracy theory | He replied “You have said the actual truth” to a post about Jewish communities pushing hatred against white people, on 15 November 2023 |
| He backed a neo-Nazi party | He told an AfD rally “I think you really are the best hope for Germany”, and Germany’s domestic intelligence service classified the party as a proven far-right extremist entity three months later |
| Tesla is a racist company | A federal judge wrote that a jury award was justified by “the endemic racism at the Tesla factory and Tesla’s repeated failure to rectify it” |
In each pair, the right-hand version is longer, less punchy, and far harder to dismiss. That is the whole argument.
Where we have applied it
We declined a verdict headline
“Was Errol Musk racist?”
We were asked to publish under that title. We did not, and said so on the page. Instead we reproduced what he told CNN in November 2025 — that Black South Africans were not oppressed under apartheid because “we gave them work, we fed them” — and set the claim against the documented mechanisms of apartheid.
The quotation is stronger than the adjective, and it is not actionable.
See: Errol Musk on the Record
We refused to characterise a gesture
The January 2025 inauguration
We record that a gesture was made, that it was widely compared in international reporting to a Nazi salute, that Musk rejected that comparison, that the ADL also rejected it, and that many people — including Jewish commentators and elected officials — disagreed with the ADL.
We do not say what it was. It is a fraction of a second of movement, contested in good faith on both sides, and unlike a sentence it cannot be quoted. Everything else here rests on words that can be dated and sourced.
See: Elon Musk and the ADL
We attribute labels rather than applying them
The reinstatements page
Where individuals are described as neo-Nazi, white nationalist or antisemitic, those are the characterisations of CNN, NBC News, The Hill, Engadget and The Independent, attributed to them by name. They are not this site’s own.
This is not evasion. It is the difference between reporting that a description exists and asserting it ourselves, and only one of those is a fact.
See: The Reinstatements
We separate a political position from a factual claim
The DEI pages
“DEI is racism” is a definitional and moral claim resting on contested premises. People disagree about it in good faith and no dataset settles it. We take no position.
“Diversity hiring has made aircraft less safe” is a claim about the world involving identifiable working people. It can be checked, and we checked it.
Treating the first as evidence of bad character would be the single easiest way to discredit everything else here.
See: “DEI Must DIE” and the aviation page
We refuse to convert sequence into cause
Three separate occasions
The Afrikaner refugee executive order followed years of his posts and was issued by an administration in which he held a role — but no document establishes he sought or directed it, and the page says so.
The SpaceX case was dismissed weeks into that administration — the dates are given, the inference is not drawn.
Tesla stripped DEI language from its 10-K weeks after his posts, while defending race discrimination cases — both facts are shown, no causal claim is made.
Where we believe a connection is documented, we show the document. Where we cannot, we say we cannot.
Where applying the rule cost us
We debunked a claim that suited us
The allegation that Musk’s grandparents belonged to the Nazi party circulated widely in January 2025. There is no direct evidence for it. Our page says so plainly, and also records that no conclusive evidence establishes Joshua Haldeman emigrated because he supported apartheid, as distinct from defending it in print once there.
See: Joshua Haldeman
We rejected a conspiracy theory about our own subject
After the January 2025 midair collision, claims circulated that Musk’s year-old post about a crash ending DEI policy was “suspicious” or predictive. It is not. A person who repeatedly predicts disaster will eventually be followed by one. Documenting what someone said carries an obligation to reject fabrications about them.
See: the aviation page
We led with an outcome that favoured the subject
The Department of Justice dismissed its case against SpaceX with prejudice. No finding, no penalty. That appears in the opening box of the page, not buried below the allegations — which is where it usually appears elsewhere.
See: The SpaceX hiring case
We published both halves of a court record
South African courts found Julius Malema’s singing of “Dubul’ ibhunu” was protected expression, up to the Constitutional Court. They also found him guilty of hate speech in August 2025 over different remarks. Reporting only the first makes Musk look baseless; reporting only the second makes him look vindicated. Both are on the page.
See: Elon Musk and “Kill the Boer”
We gave the other side its strongest genuine grievance
While setting out why the South African “white genocide” claim is unsupported, we recorded AfriForum’s own finding of convictions in only 66 of 1,402 farm attack and murder incidents between 2019 and 2022. That is a real failure of policing and saying so is what earns the right to reject the genocide framing two paragraphs earlier.
We declared an interest against ourselves
X Corp sued a British research organisation in California over research critical of it. This site is published in Britain and is critical of X Corp. That interest is declared in the opening box of the page, along with what we did about it.
See: X Corp v CCDH
Where we broke the rule
One departure, disclosed on the page
Our page on the July 2025 Grok outputs describes rather than reproduces the most extreme material. A congressional letter documents the chatbot producing rape fantasies and detailed instructions for sexual violence against named individuals.
Reproducing that would republish material targeting identifiable people and would prove nothing an accurate description does not. So we described it, linked the primary source, and said on the page that we were departing from our own rule and why.
A rule that is never bent is a slogan. A rule bent silently is a fraud. The only defensible option is to bend it visibly and explain.
What we do with unresolved conflicts
Where sources disagree and we cannot resolve it, we record both rather than choosing quietly. Current examples across the site include: the chair of the UK grooming gangs inquiry; the size of the certified class in Vaughn v Tesla; Elon Musk’s city of birth; and whether the threatened defamation claim against the ADL was ever filed.
Each is flagged in the “Outstanding on this page” section of the article concerned. Those sections exist so that our weaknesses are published by us rather than discovered by someone else.