— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 28, 2026
THOMAS SOWELL: Slavery has been a universal institution for thousands of years, as far back as you can trace human history. And what we're looking at is as if slavery is something that happened to one race of people in one country, when in fact the spread of it was around the world. In 1776, which is when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, as well as when the United States got started, he said that Western Europe is the only place in the world where there is no slavery. And even the Western Europeans had vast numbers of slaves in the Western hemisphere but not in Western Europe itself. And so if you're going to have reparations for slavery, it's going to be the greatest transfer of wealth back and forth, because the number of Whites, for example, who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary Pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and in the American colonies before that put together. But nobody is going to North Africa to ask for reparations because nobody is going to be fool enough to give it to them.The truth matters.
