Is Elon Musk a White Supremacist?

Henry Ford was shamed and shunned. When will Musk suffer the same fate?

On June 17, 2015, a young white man walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to attend Bible study. The church, founded in 1817, is historically black. But the young white man was welcomed.

The young man then pulled out a Glock handgun and proceeded to murder nine people, including the pastor.

The young man’s name was Dylann Roof. Subsequent investigation revealed that Roof was a white supremacist whose particular obsession was apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, the former white supremacist colony which became Zimbabwe after the white supremacist government was defeated in a civil war. His Facebook page was decorated with the flags of both white supremacist regimes. He had a website called “The Last Rhodesian.”

As esoteric as that may sound, it wasn’t unusual among white supremacists and neo-Nazis. In those circles, both white supremacist regimes were seen as admirable creations of strong white men destroyed by craven leftist whites and the non-white hordes. And both are cautionary tales: Whites must be proud of their race, band together, and fight to defeat their enemies — which includes pretty much everyone who doesn’t share their skin colour and ideology — or face extinction.

I share all this to explain a series of recent thread of tweets involving Elon Musk.

Please note these tweets are not particularly unusual for Musk. He is a compulsive tweeter and he has often repeated similar themes to his more than 200 million followers.

First:

Those are the standard views of white supremacists.

Then Musk pops up to comment on those views.

It’s not hard to imagine how excited white supremacists are to move from the realm of obscure websites and meetings in the basement to being promoted to hundreds of millions of people by the world’s richest man.

So of course they pick up and amplify Musk, and add their own commentary.

Two points need to be explained about the tweet above.

First, “remigration” is now the preferred term used by white supremacists for the forced deportation of non-whites.

Second, the tweeter, Martin Sellner, is an Austrian leader of the European “identitarian” movement, which is quite explicitly white supremacist. Sellner has extensive ties to neo-Nazis. In 2018 — during the first Trump administration — Sellner was denied entry to the United States because he had ties to Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the man who shot up mosques in New Zealand, murdering 51 people. (Tarrant was a fan of Sellner, he donated 1,500 Euros to the Austrian, and the two had exchanged friendly, mutually admiring emails about their shared cause prior to Tarrant’s rampage.)

So what does Musk think of being applauded by the likes of Martin Sellner?

There’s no need to guess.

So what are we seeing here?

This is Elon Musk explicitly promoting familiar tropes of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, effectively promoting white supremacists and neo-Nazis themselves, endorsing the most cherished racist desire of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and warning white Americans that if they don’t embrace the white supremacist and neo-Nazi view they face a future of “anarchotyranny, expropriation, and race communism.”

And remember, this isn’t particularly unusual for Musk. It’s just a tweet thread I happened to notice today.

How much evidence is needed before we can say that Elon Musk is the world’s most powerful white supremacist and/or neo-Nazi and he is using one of the world’s largest social media platforms to promote white supremacism and/or neo-Naziism?

Once that is established, when will the non-lunatic fringe start to treat Musk as the extremist he is? Most notably, when will financiers and others doing business with Musk stop or themselves face ostracism?

This situation is more extreme than any like it before, as far as I know. But it is not entirely unprecedented.

A century ago, Henry Ford was the lionized founder of the Ford Motor Company, the man who revolutionized manufacturing. Ford let the adulation go to his head and he became convinced he understood every important matter better than anyone and must share his wisdom with all. To do that, he bought a newspaper. He used that newspaper to promote, among other views, vicious anti-Semitism. Ford’s newspaper even reprinted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, as fact.

Ford’s reputation plunged. Even in the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan had a membership in the millions, and polite anti-Semitism was widespread, Ford’s crude, open hate was too much. Mainstream society shunned him until he expressed contrition. Ford remained an anti-Semite the rest of his life but he put a polite veil around his despicable views in public.

Will today’s America do the same?

If it does not, if it is acceptable for a business leader to openly promote fringe, hateful, racist nonsense — to an extent that even the vastly more racist America of the 1920s would not accept — what does that say about today’s America?