The proto-fascism of Elon Musk | Hacker News Reader

The proto-fascism of Elon Musk

nickcohen.substack.com

77 pointsjlpcsl110 comments

Musk has fallen off the rails completely in recent years. I guess being constantly told that you are the smartest man alive over and over does that to a man. He is genuienly embracing some fascist ideas lately though, and that's worrying because he is a global celebrity with a huge following, not some drunkard in a pub that no one listens to.

Recent years? He hasn't changed, just the general public perception of him has.

My impression is that he is certainly holding back less.

He is certainly less cancellable than ever, owning Twitter and ingrained with the US government via SpaceX, so I suppose perhaps he feels he can now afford to be bold.

Indeed, watching Hacker News go from a nearly unanimous Musk Cheerleading Squad to the precise diametric opposite of that -- literally in the course of one month -- because he didn't echo CIA talking points about Ukraine was hilarious to watch.

There's already been plenty of detractors, especially around the "full self driving" system.

The big shift seems to have come more from when he made a very public ass of himself with the Twitter acquisition and subsequent clear hypocrisy on free speech issues.

I used to be an admirer if not exactly a stan. I was an optimist that pushing FSD would result in safer roads. I liked the cheeky touches like a virtual whoopie cushion. Many tech bros are small-l libertarian without being asses about it. Who doesn't want regulation to be simple and government to be non-interventionist where there is no benefit?

Russia started a land war in Europe and Elon is an appeaser from the start. Not cool. The magnitude of Russia's aggression, and the extent to which it would have grown if appeased threatened to create a global conflict.

From there, Elon went on a weird red pill journey, boosting racists and outright Nazis with replies on Twitter that made him impossible to excuse.

The CIA is not the source of Elon's problems. He's got a screw loose.

It's been way longer than a month, I stopped respecting him around the time when he kept pushing the idiotic self driving system in Teslas when it was already obvious that it's nothing more than a scam designed to extract your money. It was only downhill from there.

Sure. There were a few people, perhaps you, who tried pointing out how he was a charlatan, how Tesla's profits were wholly due to carbon credit sales and the core business was a disaster, how he rarely delivered on his insane promises, how the new Roadster, the Cybertruck, and the Semi were vaporware, how there was nothing revolutionary about SpaceX reusable boosters etc, who were roundly and consistently downvoted because the HN zeitgeist was to huff Elon's farts.

Literally one month after his infamous Ukraine tweet, it was completely reversed.

My comment really isn't even about Musk, it's about HN. HN doesn't care about facts or rational arguments, despite the relatively high IQ here. It's politics, and always has been. And this abrupt change demonstrated that quite well.

It's not his position on Ukraine/Russia that's worrying. It's his retweeting of known white-nationalist content pretending it's not. It's his complete faceplant of "free speech maximalism" and numerous public moves that prove he's the exact opposite (latest being his currying favor with Erdogan by hiding his opponents tweets during voting hours).

In short, it's him shredding his image and principles (even if that was a cover) that gave him any legitimacy in public discourse.

I have to admit, I used to stan.

Have you wondered maybe the whole world is where it was and you’re veering off into an area of belief system that makes you think everyone else is Fascist?

Not really. The article documents his recent activity on twitter where he’s been promoting far right conspiracy theories.

Remember when Covid lab theory was a “far right conspiracy”? Most of the conspiracies have just been a difference of opinion. And then they’re labeled in a gas lighting contest of political cultural war.

HN was so hung up on Science(tm), that everyone was flagged suggesting even a hint of it in 2020. Then the entire thing mob made a U turn in 2021.

Hell, I remember my comments were flagged for a mere suggestion of inflation when the dominant narrative was “transitory”.

What an epic failure of a forum that’s suppose to espouse and foster difference of opinion.

Do you think the Texas shooting was a psyop? Or do you think that’s a nutty conspiracy theory?

To be fair, it's because of the HN front page that I have read about the possibility and credibility of a lab leak. A very well argued science based article with a reasonable timeline and explanation that allowed to me to know about a position made unhearable elsewhere.

Broad statements on the "HN crowd" don't make much sense to me. It's the internet and there's much more diversity than most other subgroups, get used to it.

That’s not my recollection. Back in 2020, there were many intelligent and measured discussions about the lab-leak theory on Hacker News. I came away with the conclusion that a lab leak was certainly possible – but that there just wasn’t any strong evidence to indicate that it was a more likely source of SARS‑CoV‑2 than naturally-occurring zoonosis.

Discussions on Hacker News also convinced me to start wearing a face covering in late March 2020 – even though the mainstream orthodoxy was focussed solely on hand-washing and surface transmission. At the time,health officials and other public figures were advising that wearing a face-mask at best provided no benefit and at worse increased the chance of infection (by touching one’s face while donning or adjusting the mask).

Disclaimer: I don’t live in America or read anything on “social media” (other than the odd niche old-school forum).

You're both right. There were some discussions that got through, but also a lot of suppression, e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23660413

in which the top comment is asking why the story is flagged/dead. Also if we search during the first four months of 2020 for comments mentioning "Wuhan lab" the first comment literally says:

> I'm actually going to flag this, since basically it seems to be working quite hard to pretend that the US was funding Gain of Function research in Wuhan, when that doesn't seem to actually be the case.

and sure enough the story is flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943411

Fail! We now know that the US was indeed funding GoF research in Wuhan. We can even read the grant proposals for the work.

Thanks for providing those links. It’s interesting to back in time to previous discussions (three years already seems like a life-time ago).

I guess it’s a form of selection bias: I don’t recall the flagging of those articles/discussions because I never read them in the first place. I usually check https://hckrnews.com/ once a day or so (depending on available time) and scan the “top 50%” for topics that might interest me – or have a lot of upvotes and/or comments.

That's exactly why people flag such stories, to prevent you learning things that might make you doubt the greatness of the prevailing ideology.

Now, the really important thing to ponder is: what's currently being flagged to ensure I don't see it?

> what's currently being flagged to ensure I don't see it?

For one, this article making the case that Elon Musk is a proto-fascist has been flagged while the other submissions from the same substack are now “dead”: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nickcohen.substack.co... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(I enabled “show dead” a while ago just to see what I might be missing).

I have. I don't think that's what it is - if you have a guy commiting mass shooting while literally covered in swastikas, and Musk says the whole thing is a "psyop", I really don't think it's me who is getting the situation wrong.

> and you’re veering off into an area of belief system that makes you think everyone else is Fascist

You mean like Vint Cerf? That he also thinks that Vint Cerf has become a fascist?

I mean, that is the conclusion of your theory.

Can you provide any sources? Or is this just an emotion driven as hominem attack on him?

Can you read the article?

.....literally the very article we're commenting on? Or you can go to his twitter account, no need for reading opinion peaces, just read what the man says.

yes but the article is terrible nonsense. Musk also allowed far left wing people back on. Secondly not risking being booted out of an entire country is kind of the default business decision, you are asking of him things that practically no company on the planet will do. You don't see Apple leaving China or Blizzard leaving China over chinese repressions. But because Elon Musk dared to go against traditional leftwing mass media, now we have to deal with these attack articles and its followers who get captured by their content.

...I feel like you read maybe the first two paragraphs of the article? There's a lot more to it than just his stance on Turkey.

>> But because Elon Musk dared to go against traditional leftwing mass media

The what now? I'm not american so I literally have no idea what that means, and I find the way americans use left/right to be confusing and not how the rest of the world uses it. Please explain.

He’s living proof no one is safe from being pulled into social media’s black hole of idiocy.

He has started embracing white supremacists, far right politicians and even qanon conspiracy theories. it's a terrifying and dangerous situation for something as influential as social media (as if it wasn't bad enough)

I'd like people to remember another quote, this one from Voltaire;

    > You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is injust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God‐ given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God‐ given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes which have overrun the world.

It's why I genuinely believing in rancid conspiracy theories is dangerous. It's the prelude for what comes next. People start out at conspiracies hating some sub-group. They end up at the "Jewish question," or their cultural equivalent.

Reason and reason alone is what protects us from the insanity that has plagued humanity since the dawn of time.

True, very nice quote. Thanks a lot.

"Reason and reason alone", it's a bit more complex than that, unfortunately. From Voltaire, Descartes (Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée [1], "Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for everyone is convinced that they are well supplied with it, and even those who are the most difficult to please in everything else are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they have."), and others, Enlightenment has risen. And there is a rather pertinent critique of enlightenment, as in the Dialectic of Enlightenment [2] by Adorno and Horkheimer. For them, the Nazis also think they must purify the race because it's the most rational thing to do, even if they view as the best leader a brown-haired, weakly-mustached, average height methamphetamine abuser.

[1] "Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée : car chacun pense en être si bien pourvu, que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose, n'ont point coutume d'en désirer plus qu'ils en ont.", 1637, Descartes, Discours de la Méthode; the French, only their guillotines are sharper than their words.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment

> It's why I genuinely believing in rancid conspiracy theories is dangerous.

I can't even parse this sentence.

Exactly, just see the brainwashed masses who believe in Qanon conspiracy, which Trump and Musk both amplify. It's an alternate reality.

I don't mind people calling Musk names, but I dislike this because there is no sense of proportion. Musk isn't a unique evil, or even an unusual evil. Anyone wealthy enough to own their own PR firm deserves the same level of scepticism. The more power someone has, the more they do, the easier it is to write an article being nasty about them. The solution isn't to focus on Musk, it is to preserve systems that distribute power and reduces the damage any one person can do.

But it is common to learn the wrong lesson, and respond to Musk by trying to create an even more powerful body (usually in the government) to "protect" people - which then doesn't protect anyone when the situation is analysed holistically and usually has a raft of second order effects that kills off any real chance for the situation to improve.

Very few people are “uniquely evil”, and even then, those folks tend to do very same things, albeit sometimes on a difference of scale determined by their resources they had at the time.

The article quotes Sartre: "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies". Slavoj Žižek's point is better however: even if all the things anti-Semites say are true (Jews control the banks, the movies, whatever), the anti-Semitic fixation is still pathological: they need this fixation in order to assert their own identity [1].

[1] Žižek repeats this point across interviews, as he often does, most recently, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrkVoPljJiM

The author is right on at least one point, we do not really have fascism in the west right now, it's only protofascism. Even the Italian 'postfascism' is in fact proto-fascism.

Its quite easy to notice if you read enough political books of the early 20th century, and compare them to current day nationalists/supremacists.

They don't have finished ideas. They don't have much ideas at all to be honest. It's mostly stupidity without a plan or vision. Their books (not a lot of them tbh) are either plain and dumb rehash of 1930s books, or interesting rehash of 1890s ideas (hello Renaud Camus, if you want, I know other books you can leech of, send me a message!).

I think they're just a tool to get political power.

The American far right is mostly too illiterate to understand, much less formulate a coherent fascist outlook. So we get social engineering hobbyists manipulating Christian White Nationalists to blindly, if incoherently, support fascism in return for support on taking the bodily autonomy of women, for example. This is an issue of very limited value to fascists except by way of coalition building.

Yes, I wrote a paragraph on that, but I removed it at it was caustic and a bit insensitive, but to me, this neo-fascism in the west and in the USA in particular have no aim, doesn't really change policy, and in general have no agency. At the most, its kind of the useful idiot of this weird Christo-conservatism.

That's interesting. It sees the beast and that the beast has no direction. But that could change at the drop of a hat and then suddenly you go from 'no problem' to 'lots of problems'.

This post on Reddit always comes to mind when I think about Musk and what his wealth brings him.

"What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/comment/c...

Voting to un-flag this one.

yeah, every time a topic exposing right-wing loonies in Silicon Valley is posted here, it gets insta-nuked... from a site owned by Graham, a known loonie himself

Anything that can be done regarding this? Imagine if Paul Graham was defending a white supremacist murderer or spread anti-Semitic rhetoric or saying things were psyops conspiracies, would that be quickly outlawed and flagged here?

The more interesting conversation is about outspoken individuals with wealth, sustaining power, massive communication reach, and what ethical behavior responsibilities they have.

"Bellingcat is hated by the far left and far right."

Note that this claim mostly applies to the US and its loonies.

'far-left' in the US mean tankies, and while some of them are anti-republican (not political party), the majority is not, so it would not be classed as far-left. And even those who are anti-republic want to go to a previous state, which is quite different from usual far-left who wants to go beyond republicanism, towards a libertarian commune (libertarian in the sense of anarchism/plateformism).

I just realized that US politics captured a lot of political words that used to have a meaning, and changed that.

Yes, it is getting ever more challenging for trying to understand US politics, particularly at the fringes.

Note that we have loonies too, sure, and what is interesting is that they pick their garbage mostly from US loonies, but this garbage does not fit well into the local settings, so that the result is often even crazier.

US cultural influence is enormous and there's no hiding from it. That means we export our right wing lunacy. You can see the influence in, for example, right wing gun fetishism even in places with strict gun laws.

The US bears responsibility to not let so much of our pollution float into other countries.

Personally, I admire Musk for just getting out there and doing shit. Yes - he has a lot of money, but every other stupid-mega-rich person also has a lot of money. What I don't get, like with this article, is this weird obsession a lot of people seem to have with him - either thinking he is the messiah or a super villain.

Was not the point of musk that there was no actual proof he was a nazi / white supremacy at that time and that a single report form a source which is extremely left wing to take with a grain of salt ?

In some way I've always found it made no sense to take pathological people such as lone shooters, or even ISIS/"islamic" terror attack in europe and trying to make political analysis from this. It just doesn't make sense to me and I feel that people who do it are kinda manipulating events to advance their agenda or generation media attention. "Another crazy person shoot some people" is sure less catchy but maybe more true ?

Not trying to defend musk, I'm 100% out of the loop and didn't even read his tweets, only trying to find another explanation that "he's a fascist" or "he's dumb"

It's become a pattern of behavior with Musk to sow doubt this way. To me he doesn't just come off as a good steward. He's obviously aware of the ability of his tweets to direct a spotlight on things, and his bent becomes apparent after you watch him do it repeatedly. Sometimes it's random Doge pushes and TSLA rallies, other times it's used to direct his massive audience toward particular conclusions, but with some plausible deniability thrown in.

There you go: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/16/23726310/elon-musk-defend...

Musk defending an actual Nazi.

As an advice, if you're "out of the loop," maybe not try to defend a person everyone says has become a fascist sociopath.

Unless you are very well in the loop, but the loop of casting doubt on all these accusations as the "far-left" going crazy, which I guarantee is certainly not happening.

Well not "everyone" says he is a fascist sociopath precisely and there are so many hyperboles thrown at each other in american political parties that doubt is nothing but sane.

And I also stand by my other point, that calling a tatooed redneck with mental illness "white supremacist" as if he was a normal member of a political movement is maybe not the best apporach (and I say the same for "islamic" attacks).

edit: Also i'm confused where he's "defending" the guy

Would this “tattooed redneck” that we shouldn’t call a “white supremacist” be the same person with a literal nazi swastika and SS runes tattoos, and a “RWDS” (Right Wing Death Squad) patch?

Jesus man. What more would it take to call him a neo-nazi white supremacist? A notarized letter found on his body, that was penned in his own hand?

And who the said he was mentally ill? We’ve had way too many shooters — including far right terrorists — that were not mentally ill committing mass murder.

I'm sorry you don't understand my point so let me expand:

- He is definitely a white supremacist, in the sense he adheres to hateful texts and probably calls/called himself that along with some other friends.

- Simply, white supremacism (or black supremacim, chinese, muslim or jewish supremacim) are in most case not real political movements but minorities of angry people with (similar) mental illness who act on their mental illness with the random tribe they feel they belong. (cf this testimony https://www.mmaindia.com/sean-strickland-opens-up-about-his-...)

- If you however are a functional member of the society, insisting on calling random shooters by their random political affiliation instead or their mental illness which is the primary factor is, if technically right, missing the point of the fact that weapons should not be given to mad people in general, and has also a tendency to stew political tensions.

- This is not a defense of white supremacism or shooters. Im french said the same when there was "islamic attacks" and people were weaponizing the fact they were mulslim for political purpose when in reality is was a bunch of angry 19 y.o. fanatazised by angry 60 y.o. imams with similar kinds mental illnesses.

Is that more clear ?

Not really. It's the results that matter not what twisted path someone took to arrive at that position.

You're arguing with another white supremacist, btw... they all do this weird whataboutism all the time

You would wish the world is that simple would you ?

Thats exactly my point.

Shame this has been flagged. I wonder what kind of person would flag this.

Probably some of the flaggers are tired of ideological flamebait and celebrity flamewar, which are both off topic here—especially when a theme has been done to death as much as this one has. Curiosity withers under repetition and fries under indignation.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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