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Current Affairs: The Most Powerful Man in America is a Nazi Sympathizer
Current Affairs - The Most Powerful Man in America is a Nazi Sympathizer
Elon Musk is just the latest billionaire to exert tremendous influence over U.S. politics. When he says he supports Neo-Nazis, take him at his word.
Stephen Prager
filed 30 December 2024
If there was any doubt about the power and influence of Elon Musk as we head into Trump’s second term, it was decisively erased this past week. The world’s richest man singlehandedly hijacked the negotiations for the spending bill that Congress passed last week in order to narrowly avoid a government shutdown. He used his wealth and his vast digital influence as a bludgeon against an entire political party and did so successfully. He threatened to use his immense wealth to fund primary challengers against anyone who voted to pass a bipartisan funding bill that wasn’t to his liking. In doing so, Musk successfully coerced them into removing a heap of important medical-related funding and other provisions.
The version of the bill endorsed by Musk excised more than $190 million worth of funding for childhood cancer research, as well funding for research into premature labor, treatments for sickle cell anemia, and early detection of breast and cervical cancers. It also eliminated provisions allowing for low-income kids who receive funds through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to access complex care across state lines. Beyond that, Sam Stein of the Bulwark reports: “The initial compromise bill included language to ensure that providers of internet service to rural areas weren’t ripping off customers, to protect consumers from hidden hotel fees, to secure semiconductor supply chains, to restrict U.S. outbound investment in China, even to prohibit deepfake pornography. All those were all gone in the successor bill.”
With a few tweets, many of which contained outright false information about what was in the bipartisan bill, Musk was able to bend America’s lawmakers to his will. By spending more than $250 million to help Donald Trump win the 2024 election, he had already managed to purchase for himself an advisory role in the incoming administration as a leader of the newly christened “Department of Government Efficiency” (aka DOGE). By virtue of Musk’s unprecedented ability and willingness to spend money to influence the political landscape, he is now arguably more powerful than any single person in government, potentially including the incoming president himself.
With this in mind, we should probably talk about the fact that the most powerful man in the world is also an overt Nazi sympathizer. On Dec. 20, Musk posted that “Only the AfD can save Germany,” referencing the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party that has been inching upwards in the polls in recent months. The press, especially in America, tends to default to the less-loaded term “far-right” to refer to AfD. But this does more work to hide their explicit Nazi ideology than AfD does themselves. Even other European far-right parties, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally—find them too extreme to associate with. This May, RN formally split from its alliance with AfD in the European Parliament after the German party’s leader, Maximilian Krah, stated that a member of the German SS, the paramilitary group that carried out the Holocaust, was “not automatically a criminal.”
This was not some one-off, ill-advised comment but characteristic of AfD as a party. In 2020, the party’s parliamentary spokesman, Christian Lueth, was fired from his post after telling a blogger that migrants coming to the country “could still be shot later on … or gassed.” This was too embarrassing even for AfD to abide, though they’d merely suspended him months earlier when he stated plainly that he was a “fascist.”
/snip
Elon Musk is just the latest billionaire to exert tremendous influence over U.S. politics. When he says he supports Neo-Nazis, take him at his word.
Stephen Prager
filed 30 December 2024
If there was any doubt about the power and influence of Elon Musk as we head into Trump’s second term, it was decisively erased this past week. The world’s richest man singlehandedly hijacked the negotiations for the spending bill that Congress passed last week in order to narrowly avoid a government shutdown. He used his wealth and his vast digital influence as a bludgeon against an entire political party and did so successfully. He threatened to use his immense wealth to fund primary challengers against anyone who voted to pass a bipartisan funding bill that wasn’t to his liking. In doing so, Musk successfully coerced them into removing a heap of important medical-related funding and other provisions.
The version of the bill endorsed by Musk excised more than $190 million worth of funding for childhood cancer research, as well funding for research into premature labor, treatments for sickle cell anemia, and early detection of breast and cervical cancers. It also eliminated provisions allowing for low-income kids who receive funds through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to access complex care across state lines. Beyond that, Sam Stein of the Bulwark reports: “The initial compromise bill included language to ensure that providers of internet service to rural areas weren’t ripping off customers, to protect consumers from hidden hotel fees, to secure semiconductor supply chains, to restrict U.S. outbound investment in China, even to prohibit deepfake pornography. All those were all gone in the successor bill.”
With a few tweets, many of which contained outright false information about what was in the bipartisan bill, Musk was able to bend America’s lawmakers to his will. By spending more than $250 million to help Donald Trump win the 2024 election, he had already managed to purchase for himself an advisory role in the incoming administration as a leader of the newly christened “Department of Government Efficiency” (aka DOGE). By virtue of Musk’s unprecedented ability and willingness to spend money to influence the political landscape, he is now arguably more powerful than any single person in government, potentially including the incoming president himself.
With this in mind, we should probably talk about the fact that the most powerful man in the world is also an overt Nazi sympathizer. On Dec. 20, Musk posted that “Only the AfD can save Germany,” referencing the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party that has been inching upwards in the polls in recent months. The press, especially in America, tends to default to the less-loaded term “far-right” to refer to AfD. But this does more work to hide their explicit Nazi ideology than AfD does themselves. Even other European far-right parties, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally—find them too extreme to associate with. This May, RN formally split from its alliance with AfD in the European Parliament after the German party’s leader, Maximilian Krah, stated that a member of the German SS, the paramilitary group that carried out the Holocaust, was “not automatically a criminal.”
This was not some one-off, ill-advised comment but characteristic of AfD as a party. In 2020, the party’s parliamentary spokesman, Christian Lueth, was fired from his post after telling a blogger that migrants coming to the country “could still be shot later on … or gassed.” This was too embarrassing even for AfD to abide, though they’d merely suspended him months earlier when he stated plainly that he was a “fascist.”
/snip
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