The proto-fascism of Elon Musk

Libertarianism turns rancid

Win McNamee/Getty Images

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Jean-Paul Sartre anticipated Elon Musk just after the defeat of Nazi Germany. In his 1946 essay The Anti Semite and Jew, Sartre captured the perky malice, proud ignorance, and worship of brute power that so characterises Musk’s version of a Silicon Valley libertarianism turned sour.

"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies,” Sartre wrote. “They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."

Musk has “the right to play” with the minds of millions because he is the world’s second richest man. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s insight that the rich “are different from you and me” is always worth quoting, and that difference does not only lie in the fact that they “have more money,” as Ernest Hemingway retorted. The rich have always thought that wealth should bring them influence far beyond their businesses. Success in one area – the ability to manufacture and market electric cars in Musk’s case – makes the narcissistic among them believe that they can successfully remold the whole of society.

In the early 20^th century, they bought newspapers – the most effective propaganda tool of the age. In any discussion of Musk, it is worth dragging up the memory of Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-British tycoon, who used the Daily Express to batter the politicians of his day into pandering to his prejudices. Beaverbrook disarmingly told the 1948 Royal Commission on the Press that he ran his papers “purely for propaganda” .

As the left-wing editor Hugh Cudlipp commented on one of Beaverbrook’s madder campaigns to save the British Empire, he “merited no more attention than a bearded nut in Trafalgar Square carrying a placard proclaiming that ‘Judgement is Nigh’; but he owned newspapers”.

The same applies to Musk. If were a poor man, he would just be another troll on Twitter.

But Musk isn’t on Twitter: he owns it. He paid vastly over the odds for the site so he would not be the equivalent of a nut shouting into a void, but a dominant voice able to reach tens of millions.

His pronouncements reveal that Twitter is under the control of a typical figure from the radical right in its pre-fascist stage.

All the classic signs are there. In the past two weeks, Musk has made his love of strongmen clear. On the eve of the Turkish election, Twitter accepted a demand from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to censor the accounts of opposition figures in the run-up to the first round of the Turkish presidential election. When the US writer Matt Yglesias protested, Musk responded in the jeering intimidatory style Jean-Paul Sartre described.

“Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?”

It’s hardly a novel phenomenon for Western corporations to guarantee their access to markets by bending the knee to autocrats. And it was thus no surprise to learn that, since 2017, Musk has held  meetings with Erdoğan to discuss possible collaboration between his Tesla and SpaceX ventures and Turkish firms. From a business perspective, the billionaire’s jeers that journalists should forget about freedom of speech make a brutish sense. But remember that Musk took over Twitter as a “free-speech absolutist.” He argued, with justice, that liberal culture was too keen on silencing and censorship, and promised to put an end to thought policing.

Read his statement again and notice, too, how Musk displays the true arrogance of the powerful. Nowhere in his self-justificatory bombast is there the smallest concern for Turkish Twitter users, whose right to read what they pleased he was arbitrarily restricting. He was the boss. He took the decisions, and they had to suck them up.

The indulgence of Erdoğan was not a one off. A few days ago, Donald Moynihan of the Bulwark website detailed how Musk has not just allowed far-right figures back on to Twitter but applauded and amplified their views to his 140 million followers. He engaged with and appeared to believe a self-confessed white supremacist with the resonant name of Laura Loomer, who said she had proof that Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros (of whom more later) were conspiring to steal elections  Loomer is a self-confessed white supremacist. She celebrated the deaths of migrants, and is an activist so extreme she was not only banned by Facebook, Venmo, PayPal, GoFundMe, and Instagram, but also by Uber and Lyft (How can you be banned by ride-hailing apps, I hear you ask. Well, they blacklisted Loomer for a hate-filled Twitter rant about “never want[ing] to support another Islamic immigrant driver.”)

Musk welcomed Loomer and many more like her back to Twitter on free-speech grounds. But, as Moynihan says, he “didn’t just let them back into the room so they could hang out in their own dark corner; he pulled them into the very centre of the action by regularly interacting with them” and passed their ideas on to a global audience.

You do not need to go too far down this road before you fall in with the George Soros conspiracy crowd. Viktor Orban uses  the Soros conspiracy theory to maintain his autocratic rule in Hungary. Across the world the notion that the progressive Jewish financier has the supernatural power to eradicate the white race by importing Muslim immigrants is the far-right equivalent of the far-left’s belief that the “Israeli lobby” controls the West.

With the predictability off darkness falling, Musk said of George Soros on 16 May, “He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”

For me, the most telling indication of the direction of travel of Musk and an entire right-wing culture came after 6 May when Mauricio Garcia opened fire in the Allen Premium Outlets mall in Dallas, Texas, and killed eight people.

Investigators at the Bellingcat open-source intelligence site showed that, unsurprisingly, Garcia gave every appearance of being a neo-Nazi – a suspicion the local police confirmed.  Bellingcat (the name comes from the medieval fable of the mice who put a bell round a cat’s neck to warn of its approach) and the New York Times found what appeared to be his account on Odnoklassniki, a social media site for Russian speakers. The account praised Hitler. Meanwhile, Garcia carried evidence of his sympathies on his dead body, which was adorned with tattoos of swastikas and other Nazi symbols. For good measure, after the police shot him, they found Garcia had a patch on his chest that read “RWDS,” an acronym for the phrase “Right Wing Death Squad.” In other words, the investigating officers were not short of clues.

Musk would not have it. He impugned Bellingcat’s integrity saying it was running a “psyop”. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he continued to deny the link between the extreme right and mass murder. The story was “bullshit,” he said on 17 May, more than a week after the event. The murderer wasn’t necessarily a white supremacist, he continued to maintain, and Bellingcat was still, somehow, pulling a con.

Musk had no evidence beyond his nutty prejudices. But then he did not need evidence. As Sartre understood, all Musk needs is the means to satisfy his “delight in acting in bad faith” – and Twitter gives him that.

His misinformation serves a dual purpose. Musk is not only rejecting prima facie evidence of far-right terrorism but serving the interests of Vladimir Putin. Bellingcat is hated by the far left and far right. It exposed Assad’s war crimes with cluster munitions and chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war, and helped show how Russian-backed forces were responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The pro-Putin faction wants to smear Bellingcat’s meticulous accounts of crimes by Russia and its allies as lies. It is this faction Musk was boosting when he talked of Bellingcat running “psyops”, His attack on one of Russia’s leading critics complements his desire to appease Putin by allowing him to keep the Ukrainian territory he has illegally occupied.

Musk’s libertarianism is morphing from an ideology that insisted you should not censor people because they are far right, to an ideology that denies the existence of the far right. Where once men like Musk mocked leftwingers who said, in effect, that “everything I don’t like is fascist” now Musk says that actual fascists, white supremacists and authoritarian nationalists aren’t fascists, white supremacists and authoritarian nationalists.  To those who are “obliged to use words responsibly” the performance is absurd. But as Musk knows better than anyone, responsibility on the radical right is for losers.

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Looking at Musk, Donald Trump and the wider US right, makes me believe that we need to revise our language. Instead of talking about “fascism” we should think instead about the histories of proto-fascist or pre-fascist movements. Let us not fall into liberal hysteria. America is not about to become a fascist society, whoever wins the next election. Donald Trump did not establish death camps when he was president and will not do so if he becomes president again.

Rather the US is closer to Europe in the late 19^th century when the forerunners of what was to become fascism established themselves. Karl Lueger was the Donald Trump of Austro-Hungarian politics. He served as mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, and used antisemitism to secure the support of the “left-behind” working and lower middle-class by telling them that Jews were "specialists in vile profits", determined to secure the "expropriation of the indigenous population". (As you can see, the Soros conspiracy theory has deep roots.) Lueger didn’t order the killing of Jews, anymore than Trump ordered the killing of Muslims, but his racist conspiracies inspired the young Adolf Hitler, who spoke of his admiration for Lueger in Mein Kampf. (Lueger also denounced the Austrian liberal press in true Trumpian fashion.)

The Dreyfus affair from 1894 to 1906 saw Catholic and conservative France embrace the lie that a Jewish army officer was a German spy, with the same grim enthusiasm that Elon Musk embraces far-right and Putinist propaganda today. A large portion of French conservatism went off on a flight into reactionary politics that was to end with the Vichy collaboration with the Nazi invaders.

Pre-fascism can best be understood as a breaking down of the border posts that separate mainstream conservatism from the far right. Anti-democratic ideas are no longer taboo. Conspiracy theories, conservatives once dismissed as mad, become respectable.

The case of Elon Musk shows that a large section of American conservatism is in the pre-fascist stage. It refuses to accept the results of legitimate elections. It prefers pandering to the dictator in the Kremlin to defending democracy in Ukraine – or, indeed, defending it in the United States. Rather than distancing itself from extremist movements and murderers, it denies their very existence.

If America were just another country, Musk and the millions who listen to him would matter less. But it remains the essential democracy, and if it falls, so does the rest of the West.