While The Guardian is the most openly aggressive against Elon Musk, the AP is more dangerous in some ways because its framing gets treated as neutral fact and spreads everywhere. 

On June 19, Elon posted one clear sentence:

“The reason they call me a Nazi is to encourage people to murder me.”

Just today, it was reported that Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna accused Elon Musk of sentencing 4.5 million children around the world to death by cutting USAID funding.

This is the kind of extreme, reckless lie that gets normalized when media outlets like the Associated Press repeatedly frame Elon as a dangerous global actor.

The AP may not shout the accusations itself, but it helps sow the seeds for the kind of hatred and lies that people like Ro Khanna then feel comfortable peddling in public.

While the Guardian in the UK has been the loudest, the Associated Press has been the most effective at spreading dangerous framing of Elon. 

In 2025, the AP published a report that accused Elon of “elevating far-right figures on three continents.” The piece presented his interactions with various political leaders and voices as evidence of him boosting extremism around the world. Because the AP is a wire service, that language didn’t stay in one place. It was picked up and republished by newspapers, local news sites, and broadcasters across the entire world.

This is how the narrative spreads without appearing extreme. When the AP frames Elon as systematically lifting up dangerous people, so it gives other outlets permission to go further. It turns political disagreements and platform decisions into so-called evidence of a global threat.

Defenders will say the AP is simply reporting on Elon’s political activity and holding a powerful person to account. That defense is easily dismantled. 

The AP piece purposely refrained from treating Elon’s support for certain elected leaders or his criticism of open borders and DEI as normal political positions held by millions of people. Instead it grouped them under the label of elevating “far-right figures.” This is the same tactic we’ve seen elsewhere. Legacy media takes real actions and statements, strips away context, and places them inside the most toxic category possible.

The damage comes from the reach. When a wire service runs this framing, it becomes background noise in newsrooms everywhere. Local reporters and editors treat it as established fact. Over time, the public gets trained to see Elon not as a businessman or free speech platform owner, but as someone who is actively making the world dangerous.

This fits the exact pattern Elon described. You do not need to scream “Nazi” in every headline to contribute to the environment he warned about. You can do it quietly by repeatedly linking someone to extremism through selective framing and wide distribution. The result is the same: the target starts to look like someone who deserves extreme opposition. This is how Charlie Kirk was killed. 

The AP may not seem as openly aggressive as The Guardian, but its role is just as useful to the overall effort if not more. The AP lends an appearance of neutrality while pushing the same core story that Elon and his platform represent a serious threat that must be confronted.

You can see how this works. One outlet pushes the strongest language. Another spreads a milder version of the same framing to a much wider audience. Together they build the permission structure that makes hostility toward Elon feel reasonable to violent people.

That is how the tactic operates in practice.