Not if Elon Musk is considered one.
Not if Elon Musk is considered one.
E lon Musk is a fascist, don’t you know?
He, we’re told, did a Nazi salute at a rally at Trump’s inauguration, and Teslas are “swasticars” or “Nazi mobiles.”
The New Yorker’s gloss on his work with DOGE is: “Techno-Fascism Comes to America.” The absurd but widely cited Yale professor Timothy Snyder opines, “Musk wants the United States to collapse. His sort of oligarch sees local fascists as a tool to destroy the functioning democratic state everywhere.” The Bulwark says Musk occupies a “Nazi-adjacent space,” and Robert Reich has deemed him a “neo-fascist.”
Bored yet?
It doesn’t matter how childish and clichéd Nazi comparisons are, progressives and the most deranged anti-Trumpers can’t give them up. Barack Obama once joked that Rahm Emanuel losing his middle finger would render him mute: Likewise, the Left and Trump’s fiercest antagonists would find their moral vocabulary drastically impoverished if they couldn’t call people on the right Nazis.
You’d almost think when they use an online thesaurus and type in the word “bad,” two of the synonyms that come up are “Nazi” and “fascist.”
I remember covering an anti–Iraq War march before the 2004 Republican convention in New York City, and Nazi iconography was all over it — George W. Bush and Condi Rice (now the nice Republicans) were supposedly Nazis for invading Iraq.
It’s true that the Nazis invaded countries, too, but it was never to try to set up a democracy where none had existed before.
It doesn’t matter if a Nazi comparison doesn’t remotely compute — it’s the pleasure of the sound of the word and the maliciousness of the charge that make the smear so irresistibly pleasurable for those who make it.
Musk is a techno-libertarian, who has absorbed elements of Trumpian populism — he’s an immigration hawk, an opponent of the Ukraine war, a fierce critic of legacy media, and an anti-elitist.
None of this remotely scans with Hitlerism.
Libertarianism is antithetical to Nazism — one fears the state, the other glorifies it.
Anti-interventionism is antithetical to Nazism — one seeks to avoid military conflict, the other welcomes it.
Small-D democratic populism is antithetical to Nazism — one considers popular consent paramount, the other imposes totalitarian rule.
Nazism isn’t a point on the American political spectrum such that, if you are a few clicks to the right of the old Republican consensus, you’ve entered Brownshirt territory.
It is profoundly anti-American to believe that our country is heavily influenced by and sometimes actually led by neo-Nazis, always on the verge of committing the worst crimes known to humanity.
It’s not just that many of these people need to read a book — they need to get acquainted with the country where they live.
Needless to say, Nazism is not, and never was, normal. It was born of the wrenching destruction of World War I and represented a fundamental break with the norms of Western civilization. It was irrational, bloodthirsty, and obsessed with racial purity and warfare.
If Hitler merely sought to reduce the workforce of the Ministry of the Interior by 15 percent, he wouldn’t have been the most notorious figure in modern history.
Elon Musk wants to balance the budget; Hitler wanted to murder mentally ill people.
Elon Musk seeks to root out fraud from the federal government; Hitler sought to eliminate the supposed malign, pervasive influence of the Jews.
Elon Musk believes that we need to enforce the border and welcome talented foreigners into the United States in abundance; Hitler believed he had to conquer Europe and “cleanse” the East of Untermenschen.
Elon Musk makes trolling posts on X; Hitler made a “prophecy” that if war came, it would bring “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
And so on.
It’s tiresome, of course, to point this out, and the sheer overuse of the Nazi charge means that it has lost much, if not all, of its sting. Still, as long as the other side remains so attached to this smear, we shouldn’t lose our outrage at the poisonous idiocy of it.