A Makeover For 21st Century Fascism
A woman can't be a fascist. Just ask Elon Musk.
Absolving right-wing political parties of their hideous ideas and goals by pointing to diversity within the ranks of said parties is not exactly a new trick.
Elder millennials, with our canes and our compact disc players and whatnot, might remember this little right-wing gotcha from the days before Liz Cheney was an avowed Trump opponent and persona non grata among the American right. Republicans pointed to Cheney – and other women within the Republican caucus – as proof that the party was not, in fact, waging war on the basic rights of women, including, naturally, the right to bodily autonomy.
You claim we are systematically attacking women’s rights yet we have a handful of wealthy, well-connected women funded by far-right interests who offer unwavering support for our agenda. Curious!
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Republicans did the same trick with Michael Steele in the first years of the Obama presidency. With the nation’s first black president ascending to power, Republicans selected Steele – Maryland’s first black state-wide office holder – as the head of the RNC. It was in this prominent yet ultimately inconsequential role where Steele provided cover for state-level Republicans instituting Jim Crow Lite after sweeping to power in the 2010 midterm elections.
You claim we are intentionally and enthusiastically restricting voting access for people of color while hiring algorithmic gerrymandering-witchcraft knowers to dilute black people’s vote, yet the chair of the RNC is black. Curious!
(My Michael Steele story goes like this: As a reporter for a local paper, I covered the 2006 U.S. Senate race between Steele and Ben Cardin, and on Election Day while meandering outside a polling place in northern Prince George’s County, Maryland, I watched as bus after bus of disheveled men – possibly homeless – pulled up. I asked one of the men about the buses, one of which was a marked Steele campaign bus, and he told me they were getting lunch and being paid to vote for Steele. Cardin won with 55 percent of the vote.)
This trick is brimming with the most toxic kind of bad faith imaginable. Right-winger operators are cynically pointing to a member of an historically marginalized group and using them as a human shield against (well-founded) allegations of racism and sexism and homophobia that serve as the fuel for their hateful little policy machine. We are totally exonerated! We did nothing wrong! Our policies are as viable as any in a multiracial democracy because we found a few people outside our white cisgender male mainstream to back us in exchange for power and money and a lifetime of access to those with both.
Folks on the right know this is horseshit. They know their preferred policy outcomes are harmful to marginalized people and they like it, they long for it. But they know well-meaning people would reject this if they were honest about their aims and presented themselves as a party steeped in the power dynamics of white supremacy. There is no good-faith approach to presenting a radical right-wing agenda and expecting buy-in from the public. Only bad faith will do. Only bad faith will sell the unsellable.
Elon Musk, rapidly becoming the world’s most malignant cultural and political force, has demonstrated an ability to wield bad faith in favor of the planet’s worst people and causes. He’s continued with this game in his abominable support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), an explicitly fascist party that has largely embraced the legacy of the Nazi Party after nearly 80 years of German parties rejecting the Nazis’ monstrous agenda. Spending an inordinate amount of time in fascist chat rooms – like a disaffected 14-year-old in 2007 – Musk has fully embraced the Alternative for Germany as the last hope for a nation grappling with migration.
Denny Carter
Musk has not wrapped his arms around AfD in an honest, forthright way. Instead, he has pointed to the party’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, as absolute proof the Alternative for Germany cannot be a nazi-adjacent organization. Why? It’s simple: Weidel, a former analyst for Goldman Sachs who lives in Switzerland, is a woman. Not just a woman, but a gay woman. And she’s married to a lady from Sri Lanka. That, Musk has said in a post I can’t seem to find online, doesn’t sound like a nazi to me. Where's the tightly cropped haircut? The finely tailored military uniforms? Where's the goose stepping and scary screaming from a lectern? Where are the calls for world domination? All I see, Musk says in bone-rattling bad faith, is a gay woman who wants what's best for her country.
In this way, Musk and his allies are weaponizing identity politics against the left. You said you wanted diversity in leadership, they say. You've said for years and years that you're tired of white guys calling the shots. Well, here's a gay woman leading an upstart political party in a mature western democracy. What's not to like?
The faith is so bad it might make your eyes water.
This radioactive bad faith has allowed Musk to throw his full support behind the AfD ahead of Germany’s February elections without coming clean about why he would back such a radical political party: Because he has positioned himself as the moneyman for the international fascist movement, which has swept to power in the United States with the help of Musk’s endless cash flow and the algorithmic mind control machine we call the X platform, formerly known as Twitter. Musk has transformed his platform into a fascism machine that carefully and systematically boosts far-right politicians and their parties while suppressing messaging from pro-democracy forces the world over. This, to me – a humble observer – should be a bigger story. Maybe it should be the only story.
When Jack Dorsey sold Twitter to Musk, he sold democracy to the highest bidder. Far from “extending the light of consciousness” – as Dorsey claimed Musk would do with control over the digital town square – Musk’s seedy algorithmic manipulations and his total control over political and cultural discourse has and will continue to make the world a far darker, more frightening, less free place. Shoutout to Jack.
Denny Carter
Just as he bought the White House for Trump in the 2024 election, Musk is using his perch atop the world’s most important social media site to boost the AfD. He recently hosted a virtual townhall with Weidel in which they erroneously agreed that Adolf Hitler – the foremost enemy of communism in the 20th century – was in fact a communist. It’s unclear whether Musk and Weidel said this as a basic misunderstanding of nazi ideology or because they are fully invested in the long-term right-wing project of whitewashing 20th century history and making Hitler a leftist figure. Either way, I would suggest they read a book.
That Musk offered such a prominent public platform for a party that has been long rejected by mainstream German parties – even the most conservative ones – is a stunning turn for the world’s richest man. It’s one thing to back the Republican Party. At least one can pretend it is a mainstream party in line with the values of a representative democracy since it’s still one of only two major parties in the United States and yes, it used to be less hostile to democratic values, doing shit like recognizing election results that don't go in its favor. To have full throated support for the AfD and its leaders is something entirely different. Musk’s radicalization might not be complete, but it’s close. There’s not much further to go after getting behind Weidel and the Alternative for Germany.
Musk and other Silicon Valley fascists who support AfD in the coming weeks and months can’t hide from the party’s odious plans should they come to power (this appears unlikely, though Musk’s billions and his fascism machine can go a long way in making the politically unlikely a reality). Just last week, Weidel, announcing plans for the “remigration” of German immigrants – sending our colored cousins back home, as Pink Floyd might’ve said – was cheered on by throngs of rabid fascist supporters who used a phrase forbidden in Germany for generations: “Alice für Deutschland” – a play on the nazi-era slogan “Alles für Deutschland,” or “everything for Germany.”
The phrase, “Everything for Germany,” can be found engraved in such places as the daggers of Nazi soldiers.
What you won’t hear from Musk as he points to Weidel’s sexual preferences as proof that she is not a fascist is that many of AfD’s most prominent members are proudly pro-nazi. The party’s leaders have called for an end to Holocaust remembrance and the elimination of all public acknowledgments of history’s greatest crime. They have advocated for the re-education of German students, who they say should be “proud” of the genocidal German cause in World War II. A judge once ruled Germans could label Björn Höcke, a prominent AfD leader, as a fascist without fear of legal reprisal because calling Höcke a fascist is a “value judgment based on facts.” The record on AfD officials is clear.
Denny Carter
AfD’s call for “remigration” is in line with the anti-immigration ideas of other European fascist parties that have made disturbing headway in an era defined by social media eating away at the edges of western democracy. Remigration is a polite-sounding way of saying all unauthorized migrants should be forcibly shipped out of the country. It gets worse: Remigration, as AfD officials have described it, includes the immediate expulsion of “non-assimilated” Germans, meaning German citizens who do not abide by the AfD’s definition of who qualifies as German. Maybe you dress wrong or pray wrong or speak the wrong language. Maybe you support the wrong party. If so, you gotta go, according to the AfD. Alexander Gauland, an AfD politician, has said a socialist party politician and lifelong German citizen whose parents were born in Turkey should be “disposed of.”
Another way of thinking about remigration – a policy that Musk presumably supports considering his public backing of Weidel – is genocide. Critics of the international fascist movement need to be clear with the language we use to describe the goals of these anti-democracy forces. These are not people who want to adjust national immigration policies or “toughen” existing immigration rules and regulations; they want to make their homelands a racially pure utopia free from the multiculturalism that was once widely accepted by elected leaders across the western world.
We’ve seen this hideous desire idea creep into American life with the sudden and almost universal opposition to diversity efforts as a concession to the far right. The idea that these anti-DEI policy tweaks will satiate the fascist beast is farcical. It will never be satisfied, it will never have enough capitulation. I’m afraid Americans – corporate titans and congressional Democrats particularly – are going to have to learn this the hard way. So it goes.
My hope, however naive, is that the media coverage of Musk’s support for the AfD – a party so extreme it has alienated France’s leading fascist Marine Le Pen – will reject the bad-faith strategy of using Weidel’s gender and sexuality as a way of obscuring the party’s horrifying agenda. People need to know how dangerous Musk has become. There is a viable argument that he has become an immediate threat to the stability of civilization. Why governments are not addressing the Musk threat is baffling, and why Democrats are not sounding the goddamn alarms on a shadow president giving a makeover to a neo-nazi European party is, at best, distressing.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
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