Elon Musk: the latest folk devil

Smearing the entrepreneur as a ‘Nazi’ is both infantile and historically illiterate.

Ours is a world replete with folk devils. The ferocity of online discourse can only be comprehended if we accept that the hatred we see from activists is often entirely manufactured. In order to ‘hate’ a total stranger such as J. K. Rowling, Jordan Peterson, and now, most commonly, Elon Musk, one must first concoct a version of that person to despise. This often involves attributing to them views they do not hold, usually ones that are considered to be far beyond the scope of the Overton Window. Brand someone a witch and you can burn them in good conscience. Nowadays, the smear of ‘Nazi’ will work just as well.

The moral panic over Elon Musk is grimly fascinating to observe. Grown adults have been vandalising Tesla cars, setting fire to charging stations, and even throwing Molotov cocktails at showrooms. Much like the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, we have seen ideologically-aligned commentators endorsing the criminality. Rick Wilson, co-founder of the political action group The Lincoln Project, has been booted off X for posting an article entitled ‘Kill Tesla, save the country’ along with an image of a burning cybertruck. Many have genuinely convinced themselves that vandalising other people’s property is justified if it was produced by a company owned by a man whose political views differ from their own.

It goes without saying that Musk is not a supporter of National Socialism. When he made an ill-advised hand gesture at Trump’s inauguration celebration, many of his opponents were determined to interpret it as a ‘sieg heil’. Very few sincerely believed this, of course, which is why the video clip they shared was doctored to exclude Musk’s comment ‘my heart goes out to you’ (which explains what he was attempting to signify by throwing his hand away from his chest). To assume that he had chosen this moment, on live television, to reveal his evil machinations to millions of people stretches credulity to the very limit.

And now we have the vandalism of cars in the name of social justice, and activists who are convinced of Musk’ supervillainy on the basis of intuition alone. Consider this footage from a protest in Portland, Oregon, in which a woman who believes that Musk is a fascist is asked directly to justify her view that he deserves to be arrested.

By the end of the discussion, we are still none the wiser. Her rationale appears to be that those who disagree with her ought to be smeared and silenced, an approach which is identical to every authoritarian in history.

We are seemingly facing a violent social contagion of men and women who now cannot criticise another’s politics without lurching reflexively for the ‘fascist’ label…

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