loading . . . Elon Muskās Race War Just Took Darker TurnāTime for a Global Response If you were on the verge of becoming the first trillionaire in human history, with the press breathlessly reporting on your every move, that would probably be your focus. Yet in the days before SpaceXās initial public offering vaulted Musk into the 13-digit wealth club, the tech mogulās mind was elsewhereāa white man in Belfast had been viciously stabbed by a Sudanese immigrant, and it provided Musk an opening.
In numerous social media postings, Musk highlighted the crime in starkly racist terms. Several nights of violent anti-immigrant pogroms orchestrated by fascist mobs followed. It was a telling confluence of events: Muskās extraordinary wealth is fueled by investorsā bedazzlement at his techno-utopian schemes. But the Belfast conflagration revealed the other side of his future vision: His belief that the white populations of the world must violently subjugate the nonwhite enemy in what he sees as a multi-continental, Armageddon-like Total War for global racial supremacy.
As the bedlam raged in Belfast after the stabbingāresulting in far-right rioters torching cars, buses, and even the homes of immigrantsāMusk egged it on. Using Xāthe platform he acquired precisely for moments like theseāhe posted locations for groups of rioters to congregate. He elevated vile, overtly fascist and white-supremacist exhortations. When one far-right British politician called for the prosecution of officials who āplaced dangerous third world savages in our communities,ā Musk replied: āThis is the way.ā
These developments graphically illustrate the future that Musk truly envisions. They also demonstrate that Musk will use his stratospheric wealth and influence to incite untold levels of global fascist violence going forward. Which leads to an unavoidable conclusion: At some point, friends of liberal democracy throughout the advanced democraciesāincluding future liberal governmentsāwill simply have to come together in a concerted and deliberate way to constrain Musk and all heās unleashing. Whenever Democrats take back power in the United States, this must be squarely on the agenda.
In a very real sense, the fires in Belfast illuminate the emerging outlines of that coming struggle. Muskās involvement in British politics has tracked with his growing fantasies about global race war. Last fall he compared non-white immigrants in the UK to orcsāthe dangerous, inhuman monsters from _Lord of the Rings_ āand enthusiastically endorsed a tweet claiming: āIf White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered.ā As Musk has watched the anti-immigrant far-right grow in the UK, he has gravitated toward extreme versions of Great Replacement Theory, ones that posit a far-reaching plot to violently eliminate whites or breed them out of existence entirely.
A coming-out moment for Musk came last September, when he spoke via video link to a āUnite the Rightā rallyāa gathering of far-right and anti-immigrant groups organized by Tommy Robinson, a British white nationalist with a long history of thuggery. Musk promoted the event on X. He addressed a crowd of more than 100,000 people, warning of the dangers of multiculturalism and āuncontrolled migration.ā
āWhether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you,ā Musk warned. āYou either fight back, or you die.ā
In the United States, Musk had already been experimenting with a consistent trope in fascist rhetoric: Seizing on a crime committed by an individual member of a minority group and claiming that it shows the innate murderous tendencies of the group as a whole. The real claim here is that these isolated horrific acts ārevealā the whole minority groupās disguised _genocidal_ intent toward white peoplesāand suggest that _this is why_ the group has deviously infiltrated white countries and communities.
Musk zealously adapted this to the UK context. In one case he suggested that āthe gentlefolk of the English shiresāāthat is, the descendants of the imagined, unsullied Anglo Saxon island existence mythologized by white nationalists everywhereāwill be ābrutally murderedā if the ātide of illegal immigration is not turned.ā
With the Belfast stabbing, Musk hit paydirt. After a Sudanese man whoād legally sought asylum brutally mauled a white man, video of the attack rapidly circulated online, amplified by Musk. The perpetrator was swiftly arrested and charged, but that didnāt stop loud demands for ājustice,ā which actually meant collective retribution against all nonwhite and foreign-born residents. Rioters clashed with police and threw bricks. Hooded masked men roamed in large gangs, setting up roadblocks to check cars for immigrants. The Police Federation of Northern Ireland, hardly an overly woke institution, explicitly described the rioters as āfascist.ā
Even as his trillion-dollar payday came together, Musk promoted a pamphlet calling for action against this supposed āinvader attack on our people.ā He amplified far-right politicians demanding retribution against āthird world savages.ā He posted a reminder of his September exhortation that āyou either fight back, or you die.ā
These were violent, fascist ethnic purgesāor pogroms. As an Indian man whoās lived in the UK for 25 years told the BBC: āIt was horrible. It was like a war zone. Everything was burning.ā The man added: āI pay my taxes. I am British.ā Yet heās preparing to leave: Across Belfast, others are finding themselves forced to make similar decisions.
Itās instructive that amid the violence, Musk endorsed a call for āReconquista,ā an allusion to Christian military campaigns to retake the Iberian peninsula from Islamic forces. (Modern-day keyboard fascists have long rather pathetically imagined themselves to be akin to Charles Martel, who turned back the Muslims at Tours in 732.) And Musk boosted a call for the removal of millions from the UK.
The turmoil has now subsided, and soon after, thousands demonstrated in Belfast against the pogroms. But nonetheless, Muskās influence on events there must be reckoned with. While what transpired is not all about Muskāpolitical violence in the region has deep roots, and many homegrown demagogues in the UK have demonized immigrants thereāthe riots demonstrated a real-world manifestation of the racial apocalypse Musk wantsāand may increasingly be in a position to summon into being.
By endorsing āReconquista,ā Musk is amplifying one of the clarion calls of the European far right, and increasingly, the American right as well: _Remigration_. This is the idea that saving Western civilization (as Musk imagines it) requires the forced expulsion of huge numbers of immigrants, especially Muslims, and even untold numbers of their descendants. In response to a missive about white people potentially becoming a minority in New Zealand, Musk posted recently: āThe doom of Western Civilization must be averted!ā
In other words, nonwhite immigrants are by definition invaders who threaten āWestern civilizationā wherever they infiltrate, from New Zealand to Belfast to Minneapolis, where Musk called for a military crackdown on pro-immigrant protesters. True, Musk employs high-skilled immigrant tech workers and has defended the need for them. But this does not constitute a general tolerance of immigration or desire to see immigrants integrate at scale within the embattled outposts of Western civilization.
Indeed, in some respects, Muskās vision is a classically fascist one: He appears to believe that race and culture are inseparable. Fascism is a set of interconnected values and yearnings that center the state, the nation, violence, masculinity, and the rebirth of a mythic, heroic past. Itās an ideology of palingenetic ultranationalism: Though the nation is a broadly contested concept, to the fascist, the nation is defined, in an almost transcendent spiritual sense, by culture and race. These are inexorably linked: Only certain races are capable of producing certain cultures.
Thus it is that Musk is also obsessed with white fertilityāhe has done his part to save civilization by siring over a dozen children by multiple women. There is no doubt that this is deeply entangled with his belief that nonwhite immigration threatens the West.
One of the greatest challenges in combating fascism, both in the early-to-mid-twentieth century and today, is getting comfortable, middle-class, politically moderate people to understand that its adherents _actually mean what they are saying_. Muskās favorite politician in BritaināRupert Lowe of the far-right Reform Partyāhas called for the deportation of almost every immigrant in the UK, which Musk, too, has endorsed.
Such large-scale mass expulsions of legal residents are rare. The closest modern analogue is Idi Aminās expulsion of Ugandaās Asian population. The famously insane tyrant forced out 80,000 legal residents in the 1970s. Britain has a foreign-born population of around 13 million. So if we take Muskās calls for remigration at his word, heās envisaging an act of ethnic cleansing over 100 times as large. He apparently hopes to see this in all majority-white countries with large immigrant populations. There is nothing in the modern era that compares.
In their great book, _Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed_, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff take an exhaustive look at just about everything Musk has said on these and other topics. As they observe, we know Muskās preoccupation with declining birth rates is linked to his embrace of āremigrationā because heās far more preoccupied with declining birth rates in some parts of the world than others. As Slobodian and Tarnoff conclude: āMuskās demographic panic is bound up with his concern for the survival of white civilization.ā
Hereās the idea, put simply: Nonwhite immigration and reproduction threaten āwhite civilization.ā By definition, that threatens the survival of Western civilization (remember, to the fascist, race and culture are inseparable). The only hope for humanityās future is the West, which can only be preserved by halting and reversing declining white birthrates and migration to majority-white nations. In short, saving whitnessāvia remigration and white reproductionāis essential to saving humanity.
What does Musk envision for those who are not privileged inheritors of Western civilization? On the one hand he sometimes gives voice to the hopeāalbeit vaguelyāthat his companiesā breakneck development of AI and robotics will unlock a future of widespread drudgery-free abundance. He has flirted with progressive ideas like universal basic income to spread the fruits of technological advancement.
But itās difficult to take all that seriously in light of Muskās emergent fascist politics. Muskāwhose contributions to combatting global warming are unquestionedāknows what the models show: Under plausible climate scenarios, large additional swaths of the earth will be rendered uninhabitable. That could mean much more human misery and/or dramatically scaled-up mass migrations in the future.
Hereās where Muskās well-known fondness for terms like āempathy geneā and āsuicidal empathyā enters the chat. As Slobodian and Tarnoff document, Muskās pronouncements amount to suggesting that ācivilizationā is committing āsuicideā when western countries allow migration while showing too much āempathy.ā Musk insists this constitutes allowing āthe Rape of Europeā by nonwhite immigrants. He has absurdly claimed that hordes of thousands are invading ālovely townsā of 500 people throughout the UK and āraping the kids.ā The idea of nonwhite predation on Aryan women is, of course, a core historical fascist narrative.
But the real intent behind Muskās indictment of āsuicidal empathyā appears to be future-focused, too. In an interview, Tarnoff points out that Muskās imagined future of humanoid robots and AI can be squared with his hatred of mass migration. āYou reduce your reliance on immigration as a labor source if you automate more labor,ā Tarnoff tells us, noting that in this scenario, AI and robots might then be pressed into service to ārestrict immigration.ā
In this context, we believe itās not an accident that Musk explicitly denigrated ācivilizational suicidal empathyā while his Department of Government Efficiency decimated the budget of USAID, which helped produce hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. That was a test run: If Muskās robot-and-AI utopia fails to produce mass abundance for the global poor, and global warming spurs more suffering and more migrations, saving human ācivilizationā will require dispensing with the empathy gene: It will give us the fortitude to cut loose all that Third World civilizational dead weight.
āMuskās vision of the world is extremely anti-humanitarian,ā Tarnoff tells us. āEmpathy enables human beings to relate to one another across differences. And that is very threatening to Muskās vision.ā In Muskās future, Tarnoff continues, āthe vast majority of humanity is expelled from the productive process.ā In a sense, Tarnoff says, Muskās logic is ultimately āeliminationist.ā
Musk often speaks about his goal to save the ālightā of human āconsciousness.ā Itās a tellingly cold formulation. It doesnāt entail a concern for actual human beings. It just requires preserving the select and their descendantsāperhaps through mind mergers with digitally superintelligent machines, or behind the walls of vast Muskian compounds guarded by humanoid robots, or on faraway planets.
āWhatever happens, we have got the spaceships, and they do not,ā Musk posted recently. As chronicled in _Muskism_ , that alludes to a quote from a nineteenth century colonialist celebrating the machine gunās power to put down colonial subjects. If the global race war doesnāt accomplish Muskās objectives, thereās always interplanetary escapeāor perhaps the extermination of the brutes left behind on land with the spaceshipsā lasers. Those who call themselves inheritors of āWestern civilization,ā then, are making a coded declaration of privilege: We get to be on the spaceships. The savages do not.
Understood this way, it all looks like some supercharged Muskian version of the āreactionary modernismā that John Ganz frequently discusses. Technology will be used to fortify and harden global hierarchies and protect those chosen to carry humanity forward from the disposable hordes. Hypermilitarized borders and violent pogroms will grow even more necessary as human labor is replaced and climate-fueled global suffering produces more desperate migrations. Perhaps the robotsāwho have no empathy geneāwill carry it all out.
We donāt mean to oversell Muskās influence. Heās not unstoppable. He often fails, is thwarted, or just doesnāt follow through. Heās also clearly not the only, or even primary, reason for the global reemergence of fascism. But he wields immense power.
Political theorist Stephen Lukes famously divided power into three dimensions: decision-making power (should we do A or B), agenda-setting power (is it a choice between A and B, or B and C), and ideological power (how do people perceive and understand A, B, and C).
People who question Muskās influence note that his decision-making power is limited, as his DOGE fiasco revealed. But Musk has tremendous agenda-setting power. His white-nationalized Twitterānow Xāis somewhat diminished by backlash but still helps shape how many journalists in developed countries interpret the world while enabling him to launder fascism for the mainstream. His deep embeddedness within the machinery of Western governments through immensely lucrative contracts in everything from space travel to national security means he has incredible power to derail the projects of modern states.
What about ideological power? It is bad, very bad, that a fascist controls an information conduit that still shapes a fair amount of how many politicians and the press understand global events. Ideology is not just how we label ourselves, or what policies we endorse. Itās also how we see the world. Because of Musk, more and more people have in their heads a fascist conception of the nationāthat of an inexorable fusion of race and culture, under unrelenting racial siege.
Ultimately, Musk is playing a crucial role in the global fascist resurgence. He represents at once one of its loudest megaphones, the organizing space for its paramilitary wings, a fifth column of sorts inside the apparatus of many states, and the movementās bank.
Itās hard to know what dealing with this should look like. Obviously it includes moving to break the power of the oligarchs in a broader sense. This must start with higher taxes on billionairesāand trillionaires. It requires stringent limits on the ability of people like Musk to singlehandedly spend immense sums on our elections, such as the extraordinary $290 million he plowed into the 2024 contest. It should go without saying that breaking the power of the tech oligarchyāDemocratic proposals along these lines would rupture tech monopolies, curb market dominance, and empower laborāis also essential, as is far-reaching AI regulation.
Another big question is whether liberal democratic governments should remain on Muskās disinformation platform. āX is now the mechanism through which white nationalist groups have organized violent riots three years in a row,ā Ian Dunt, a prominent UK commentator, tells us. āThereās no good reason for the British government to remain on X. Its continued presence keeps journalists on the site, allowing Musk to mainstream far-right rhetoric.ā A future Democratic administration will have to weigh similar dangers.
Then thereās what a future Democratic Congress can do. The Musk problem will have to be on its agenda in a serious and meaningful way. Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, points out a core problem here: His many government contracts, and his access to privileged information, pose a ānational security threat,ā even as Space X itself is in many ways a ānational security asset.ā We need to know _a lot_ more about what Muskās contracts actually translate into in terms of his personal influence inside the government.
āCongress has to do rigorous oversight of Muskās government contracts as well as his entire financial empire,ā Finkelstein tells us.
Other ideas abound. Brian Beutler has urged the next Democratic administration to closely scrutinize the murky circumstances of Muskās own immigration to the United States. Beyond such things, weāll need a coordinated effort across liberal democracies. Appropriately, the targeting of Apartheid in Muskās native South Africa provides a model. We need an international consensus that recognizes the threat Musk poses and works against it with boycotts, with the withdrawal of support and funding, and with whatever creative tools are available. Politicians and publics alike need to think internationally.
The worldās richest man is participating in a trans-national terror campaign. Ultimately, whatās really needed in response is a new mindset: We are now fighting a global battle against resurgent fascism. The fight is across nations and at every level of society. The response must be international as well. Any path to a free international order, unthreatened by fascism, must run in part through breaking Muskās power. https://newrepublic.com/article/211936/elon-musk-race-war-belfast