Elon Musk is on the warpath against an elite Los Angeles school, the Crossroads School for the Arts & Sciences, which he accuses of “brainwashing” his child, who is now transgender and a self-declared communist.
It’s not the first time Crossroads has been in the spotlight. Eighteen years ago, the school was exposed as a center of wacko far-left indoctrination by Andrew Breitbart in his debut book, Hollywood Interrupted.
Breitbart’s book devoted nearly a whole chapter to Crossroads, an example of what the conservative firebrand considered “warped Hollywood child-rearing.” Even by the standards of the liberal education system, Breitbart found practices that were unusually bizarre, including “crossdressing day” and “ménage à prom,” in which students purchase tickets in groups of three.
Andrew Breitbart speaks during the final day of the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) February 12, 2011, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
This is the school that Elon Musk is now saying brainwashed his son, Xavier Alexander Musk — who is now a transgender “daughter,” going by the name Vivian Jenna Wilson. Breitbart News reported last year that Musk’s son said he no longer wanted “to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
In interviews with journalist Walter Isaacson, who is releasing a biography of the multi-billionaire SpaceX founder, Musk said he supported his son’s decision to transition, but that Wilson then became a “fervent communist,” and broke off all contact with him.
This, according to Isaacson, partly led to Musk’s concerns about the rise of woke ideology, and with the Crossroads school in particular — a chain of events that would ultimately help motivate his takeover of Twitter.
Via the Wall Street Journal:
Musk’s anti-woke sentiments were partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child, Xavier, then 16, to transition. “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” she texted the wife of Elon’s brother. “Don’t tell my dad.” When Musk found out, he was generally sanguine, but then Jenna became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” he says. The rift pained him more than anything in his life since the infant death of his firstborn child Nevada. “I’ve made many overtures,” he says, “but she doesn’t want to spend time with me.”
He blamed it partly on the ideology he felt that Jenna imbibed at Crossroads, the progressive school she attended in Los Angeles. Twitter, he felt, had become infected by a similar mindset that suppressed right-wing and anti-establishment voices.
Little wonder that Musk considers the suppression of conservative perspectives to be a major problem. Had news of the “crossdressing days” and “ménage à proms” uncovered by Breitbart in 2005 reached Musk at the time, he might not have sent his child to Crossroads in the first place.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.