Elon Musk once claimed that his social media platform would have to be politically neutral to deserve the public’s trust. Now he is openly supporting a right-wing German party with neo-Nazi ties.
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Last month’s election proved to Elon Musk that he can buy himself a president who will do his bidding. Last week’s budget fight not only showed that he is happy to wield his newfound access to power to influence policy (perhaps to further his personal interests), but also that he may already have more pull in the GOP than Donald Trump himself.
We also learned that Musk will use his favorite tools, X and misinformation, to advance his personal agenda.
And, finally, it became quite clear that he keeps talking/posting about things he apparently has a limited grasp of, e.g., the impact of a government shutdown on people who are not billionaires.
To be fair, we knew many of these things already. Musk routinely spreads false information that one of his hangers-on posts on his social media website, and he often wades into controversies he simply does not seem to understand.
Case in point are his forays into European politics, where he clearly hopes to undermine center-left governments while boosting the most far-right parties he can find.
In the summer, misinformation spread on X, including by some of his minions and amplified by Musk himself, poured gasoline on riots taking place in the UK at that time.
Now, the billionaire has his sights set on Germany, which will hold snap elections in February after the center-left government coalition collapsed, i.e., it is another opportunity for him to boost a party aligned with his views.
In this case, that’s the far-right “Alternative for Germany” (AfD).
Twice already, he has posted that only the “AfD can save Germany.”
That might have been a popular sentiment in the 1930s. Now, however, after 80 years of everybody trying to keep the Nazis from rising again in Germany, it seems a bit out of touch… unless you like Nazis, of course.
Which the AfD clearly does.
If you follow German politics (and, based on his tweets, it seems unlikely that Musk does), you will know that hardly a week goes by without the AfD stirring up some controversy or one party official or another saying some stuff that would make Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels proud.
All of this, together with the AfD’s platform, has led a German court to conclude that the party “pursues goals that run against the human dignity of certain groups and against democracy.”
As a suspected extremist party, the AfD can be kept under surveillance as potential enemies of the state and the Constitution. In other words, the party is more Proud Boys than anything else.
There are two reasons why Musk would support them.
The first is that he agrees with the AfD’s far-right, anti-immigrant positions. The second is that he seems intent on becoming a global player beyond the borders of the US… no matter what it takes.
It’s probably a bit of both.
More than anything, his advocacy on behalf of the most extreme German party (he has also called for the country’s chancellor to resign, and amplified unverified information and right-wing propaganda in the wake of a terrorist attack in Germany this weekend) shows that his mix of ignorance, unlimited resources, the world’s largest bullhorn, and zero accountability is a serious threat to stability in Western democracies.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
