Musk Endorses German Far-Right
What could go wrong?
The Guardian reports: Outrage as Elon Musk claims ‘only AfD can save Germany’.
Elon Musk has caused outrage in Berlin after appearing to endorse the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland.
Musk, who has been named by Donald Trump to co-lead a commission aimed at reducing the size of the US federal government, wrote on his social media platform X: “Only the AfD can save Germany.”
[…]
In May, the AfD was expelled from a pan-European parliamentary group of populist far-right parties after a string of controversies, including a comment by the senior AfD figure that the Nazi SS were “not all criminals”.
The ID group, which includes France’s far-right National Rally, Italy’s Lega, Austria’s Freedom party, Geert Wilders’ Dutch Freedom party and Vlaams Belang in Belgium, said it “no longer want[ed] to be associated” with such incidents.
So, the AfD is too far-right for many in the European far-right. But not for Musk, it would seem.
This particular boosting of the AfD is part of a broader pattern (as noted by USAT):
Musk had already voiced support for the AfD last year, when he attacked the German government’s handling of illegal migration.
Last month, Musk called for the sacking of Italian judges who had questioned the legality of government measures to prevent irregular immigration.
And this week Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s right-wing Reform UK party and friend of Trump, posted a photo of himself and Reform’s treasurer meeting Musk at Trump’s Florida residence, and said he was in talks with Musk about financial support.
There is, of course, the profound irony that Musk is not from the US, Germany, Italy, or the UK and yet seems more than willing to opine on their internal politics. Granted he does have US citizenship even if he was once but a humble immigrant to the United States who almost certainly over-stayed his student visa to work illegally in the US for a time.*
But, you know, if you are rich and white, it’s all cool.
*I say “almost certainy” beacuse Musk disputes this account, but I also know enough about the way student visas work to state that based on what was reported he entered legally, but if he did not enroll in classes like he was supposed to, but instead started working, his status would have changed. Whatever nether space between his J-1 and HB-1 was a time that he was surely over-staying a visa, which would have made him an “illegal immigrant.” But, rules for thee and not for me, and all that.
Is the South African Nazi that pretends not to be a Nazi endorsing the German Nazis that pretend not to be Nazis really news?
Fuhrer as well as president?
It reminds me of one thing Darth Vader said
Apparently at some point Musk’s father was an anti-apartheid activist and Elon has stated anti-apartheid views. But it sure looks like you can take the boy out of apartheid South Africa, but you can’t take apartheid South Africa out of the boy.
In a better world, a future justice dept, and perhaps trump’s, if the muskrat is to big an irritant, will look deeply in the visa irregularities and move to deport him.
That a SA could be anti-apartheid, but still hold Jim Crow-ish attitudes, shouldn’t be too surprising. Separate and equal, as they said.
He can opine all he wants. The problem is spending millions to interfere. It looked like RW money bought BREXIT, but why stop until the UK is hell for the little people, but heaven for finance.
Also, know who else supports AfD? Taleb Abdulmohsen.
Some years ago, President Xlon struck me as an atypical oligarch, in that he wanted to do something with his wealth other than accumulate a lot of it. Be it build a space launch company or develop an electric car business.
I think I was right in this assessment, only now he’s shifted from something positive to controlling politicians and meddling in politics. It never ends well when oligarchs begin playing with power.
BTW, the wealth of most oligarchs is largely theoretical. That is, it’s made of unrealized gains that can’t be used as money in most cases. Xlon could swap shares of Texla for shares of Xitter (which he didn’t do), but he can’t buy a house or aan aircraft carrier with shares. he needs to sell them for money, pay a capital gains tax, and then buy a fleet or whatever.
So, how much actual money does Xlon have on hand?
No idea, and I doubt even President Xlon knows for sure. But we know he had to borrow from investors to acquire Xitter. he also seemed to easily spend a quarter billion dollars on the felon’s campaign.
It strikes me as reasonable, then, to conclude he does have a few billion in liquid assets he can spend freely. It remains to be seen whether Republiqan DC is, like ancient Rome, a city for sale. It’s certainly doomed to destruction if it should find a buyer.
Some rando from the Internet (who anonymously goes by @Jigajig) calls a retired professor of political science dumb with no specific example and no counterargument.
If that’s not the epitome of our anti-expertise, post-fact age, I don’t know what is.
@Scott F.: You didn’t finish the story – was Jigajig right or not?
@Scott F.: Our new rando learned the truth from FOX or worse. He came over here to enlighten us, and since Dr. Taylor doesn’t see the rando’s truth, he, and the rest of us, must be dumb.
@gVOR10: The rando in question is a multi-time banned individual (and not just by me) who, for some reason, feels the need to keep coming back again, again, and again.
@Steven L. Taylor:
In another thread there’s some discussion on how angry the MAGAts need to be. maybe this rando doesn’t get enough real life anger, and needs to come here for aggravation.
Just so everyone is clear:
This is what Elon Musk and JD Vance are endorsing.
https://bsky.app/profile/auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social/post/3ldti6laric22
This is why I keep insisting we treat Nazis the way we treat pedophiles; Something so horrific that it should be unspeakable.
Blocked, shunned, deplatformed, driven from civil society.
My brother has lived in Germany for 35 years. He tells me that Musk is unpopular there and this “endorsement” could hurt AfD more than help them. AfD also opposed (along with the far-left parties but not the moderate parties) a Tesla plant in Germany in 2022.
@Andy:
On a company visit to Mannheim once, I caught a ride to dinner with a colleague who had been assigned a Tesla as his company car. The contempt this German had for the automotive engineering of the American car was profound and visceral.
@Fortune:
Actually, I was wrong. Let me fix that.
I should have written “Two randos from the Internet named Jigajig and Fortune…”
@Scott F.:
4+ yesrs ago, many felt Tesla to be an overrated fad with shockingly shoddy builds, a la gaps between panels etc. Perhaps those issues have been fixed as I’m hearing these complaints much less in the past few years. But that’s all anecdote.
More anecdote: as someone who “lives in” (visits) Berlin four months of the year, what I’m hearing is that AfD is not having a good week, between the President Musk endorsement and Christkindlesmarkt terrorist endorsement. Neither of these individuals is beloved by the Ossi or Wessi.
Unfortunately, Scholz has plenty of time to underwhelm and AfD plenty of time to recover before the next election.
@Chip Daniels: we can’t do that because it gives, “reasonable conservatives” sad feelings and we can’t have that.
@Chip Daniels:
To a certain extent, they are. Nazis in our culture are treated for the most part as the real-life equivalent of comic-book supervillains, even by people who share many of their beliefs. Very few people openly admit to supporting Nazis, but accusing others of being Nazis has come to be thought of as a mindless slur, so that a lot of people tune out such accusations as nothing more than overheated rhetoric, even when it’s being applied to a German political party that isn’t merely analogous to Nazis, but has historical roots in the original ones.
In many ways, our culture’s attitude toward pedophiles is similar. On the surface they’re heavily deplored, yet at the same time there’s a great deal of sexualization of minors in our culture, and large dens of powerful people engaging in these crimes, from the Catholic Church to Epstein’s island.
I think a repeat of my comment on Fridays Forum is relevant:
So, Musk endorses the AfD.
And “considering” funding for Reform in the UK
Trump calls for Europe to go 5% GDP defence spending.
Dear me.
Has no-one in the Trump camp ever heard the saying:
“Do not call up what you cannot put down”?
A Europe dominated by the far-right, with a military budget greater the the US, defence technology capabilities rather ahead of China (and making Russia look like a rounding error) and (presumably) a central military directorate and command authority.
What could possibly go wrong?
@Kylopod:
The fact that Nazis are literally comic book villains is precisely why we need to dust off the history books and refresh people’s minds as to what *actual* Nazis *actually* did, and will do again.
Those guys marching at Trump Rallies? AfD, Elon Musk and JD Vance?
They want to kill children. No, this isn’t hyperbole, they literally are happy to see women and children, little babies and toddlers, tortured and murdered.
There are way too many people for whim this sounds hysterical and overreacting, but that’ the point, that the public cartoon image of them has served to make it all abstract and unreal, no more real than Lex Luthor.
The counter assertion tends to be along the lines of “Oh, but they don’t consciously think that..” which was also true for 99% of the members of the Nazi party. Only a tiny fraction of the German population ever actually harmed a Jew. It was the rest who turned their heads and closed their blinds and went about their business.
And in the end it didn’t matter what they thought or didn’t.
They are telling us, loudly and clearly, that there are certain groups of people who they consider subhuman and unworthy of rights or dignity. We need to take them at their word.
@Kylopod: The right is currently busy turning pedophile into a meaningless slur. I’ve been seeing it used as a slur by various right wingers across social media and more. It’s a lot like how they used liberal back in the 2000s. Anyone who disagrees with them is automatically a liberal/pedophile.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Reminds me of the hoary and ancient joke about the hunter who kept running into the bear during his failed efforts to bag same…with horrible and unnatural results.
They’re not really here for the hunting, are they?
@Matt:
Yes and no. Equating homosexuality with pedophilia goes back a long way. If there’s anything new about it today, it’s the extent to which the GOP has foregrounded the tactic and weaponized it in a very targeted and calculated way. There’s also a highly Orwellian quality to it, as the people screaming loudest about protecting children and women from sex predators are some of the biggest apologists for actual sexual predators, including (but not limited to) the man they just elected president.
Here is how AM radio is covering this story”
“WCBM”
Excerpt:
My emphasis on the paragraph I bolded.
@Kylopod:
I thought President Xlon was a reproductive abuser.
@charontwo:
I wonder if Musk is just a dimwit, or merely pretending to be.
AfD is so toxic even the French Rassemblement National (Le Pen’s party), won’t associate with them
They are genuinely scary fuckers.
But MAGA discourse, that Musk seems to have bought into, is such that any “anti-establishment” party on the right is cool.
Leading to massive mix-ups; which, it must be said, the US left and “liberal” segments are also prone to.
Millei, for instance, is not a “right-populist”, on any reasonable metric; Meloni is NOT like Orban.
Even Reform much as I dislike them, are not much like RN.
Let alone AfD.
Insistent mapping of domestically derived mental-models of politics onto other countries often leads to misunderstanding.
@JohnSF:
There’s a saying in Murka:
Just looking at average BMI for Americans will show we adhere to this saying. (Mine’s 36.9)
@JohnSF: “But MAGA discourse, that Musk seems to have bought into, is such that any “anti-establishment” party on the right is cool.”
I think that you are assuming that Musk’s goal is not right-wing revolution. It’s not a matter of ‘cool’. Musk wants to overthrow the existing liberal order.
@Andy: For me, this is more about what it says about Musk than it does about whether it will be of any help to the AfD.
And given Musk’s influence in US domestic politics these days, it is more grist for the fascism discussion mill, yes?
Oops… another thing:
From Mediaite: Looks like Elon has a paid subscription to a racist South African acct called “Boer” (one of only two paid subscriptions he has.
So, a guy that grew up in apartheid South Africa and believes that management by intimidation is (still) a racist.
Who would have ever thought such a thing could happen?