ADL condemns Musk's Nazi "jokes" after salute controversy
axios.com
axios.com
When the OG Nazis came to power, Germany was in terrible shape. They had lost a catastrophic war and were still being ground under the victors' boot heels, at least in the citizenry's own estimation. Never mind 12% inflation, it went as high as 12 digits in the years leading up to 1933. It's hard to blame them for latching onto someone promising to "Make Germany Great Again," and it's not surprising that they didn't feel an incentive to quibble over the details.
In the past election, US voters treated the price of eggs as an emergency of similar scope. That's about all that was going on. Eggs. Eggs were too expensive. They're even more expensive now, of course, but try telling Fox News addicts that. Can you imagine what things would be like in America -- the quality of the leaders we'd be electing -- if we were facing what Germany faced in the 1930s?
I think that it's partly the manifestation of a cultural trauma response to Obama's election, and mostly white, mostly rural Americans feeling alienated and misdirecting their anger at the effects of globalism and their loss of demographic and cultural hegemony. That aspect of it, at least, was well documented as far back as 2016. Now we've got Musk and the whole neo-reactionary dark enlightenment set cranking it up to 11, because they see a path to power.
A lot of the crisis is manufactured. Remember we live in a post-truth age - many people construct their subjective realities from platforms which have been feeding them conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda for years. They believe Biden created COVID with the CCP. They believe hordes of rapists and killers have been swarming over the southern border. They believe the purpose of DEI and "wokeness" is white male genocide. They have been convinced that America is in the same position that Germans believed they were in was prior to the Nazis, having soaked up so many neo-nazi memes and so much agitprop specifically to make it seem reasonable when the "Nazis" do take over.
Musk is showing Trump his willingness to play the kayfabe game. It is a rational move on his part, sadly, because his businesses are so critically-dependent on a good working relationship with Federal power.
He probably isn't really a Nazi. That would imply that he considers himself to be part of something larger than himself. As Vonnegut said, though, we should be careful about what we pretend to be, because that's what we tend to become.
Bottom line, if he were actually interested in Nazism as an ethos, I don't think he would publicize it. Not at this stage, anyway. If you could actually ask Fr. Occam what he thinks about Musk, he'd probably say, "He just gets off on shit-stirring, that's all."
In that respect, he has found a kindred spirit in Trump, and he rationally sees an alliance as the only way to keep his business interests healthy over the next several years.
Steve Bannon's dictum still holds sway, even if the man himself is on the outs with Trump: "The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Say what you will about Musk, he's really good at that.
There's a clip of Elon's dad saying that his caretaker had read the book to him, translating along the way, and so he'd known the name. It also coincides with an in-law's name, so he took that coincidence as a sign. But Errol really did say that the name came from the book.
He's been promoting Nazist ideas for a year.
And he took part in the AfD's big meeting (you know, the closest thing to a modern Nazi Party in Germany) downplaying what the Nazis did.
If he acts like a Nazi then we need to call him a Nazi and stop coming up with weird excuses for him.
It is true that Musk himself is checking more and more of them every day, though.