If there is blood in the wake of November’s US elections (and how, after January 6 2021, can you rule that out if Donald Trump refuses to lose?) there will be at least a spot or two on the hands of an immigrant.
No, not a Haitian in Springfield, Ohio, or one of the Afghans my wife and I are helping settle in Hagerstown, Maryland. A SA man-child.
Elon Musk, 53, has no boundaries. On the positive side, that may be why he has been compared to the fictional genius Tony Stark, aka Ironman, of the Marvel franchise. But it also accounts for his frequent fits of infantilism.
His mother, Maye, felt she had to apologise to Taylor Swift recently. “My son can be a bit of a creep”, she wrote on the lavatory wall for neo-Nazis Twitter has become since that son burnt $44bn — the GDP of thriving Mauritius — to buy and rename it X.
In a laddish response to Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, the richest man in the world had offered to get her with child so that she would no longer be one of those childless cat ladies Trump’s running mate, senator JD Vance, believes is leading America down the road to perdition. Snigger, snigger.
A bit of frat bro humour is unlikely to get anyone physically harmed, of course. Unless, that is, Swift’s squeeze, Kansas City Chiefs’ bruiser Travis Kelce, wants to take it outside. But a lot of what Musk says and promotes to the 196-million who follow him on X, and the millions more who are fed his digital graffiti algorithmically whether they like or not, ranges from the sick to the sinister.
Even before Trump out-Goebbels-ed himself in the September 10 debate with Harris, raving that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbours’ pets, Musk was amplifying the repulsive lie on his X account.
Tucker Carlson, the hard-right conspiracy spinner too crazed even for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network, had a pseudo-historian on his YouTube show recently who claimed Winston Churchill was the villain of World War 2, and that Hitler had never meant to exterminate Jews it was just that Allied bombing made it hard to feed them. “Very interesting,” tweeted Musk. “Worth watching.”
In response to a deranged tweet arguing that since Jews favoured opening America’s borders to “hordes of minorities” who hated them, they had only themselves to blame for rising anti-Semitism, Musk commented: “You have said the actual truth”.
These are dangerous times. A couple of crazies have had Trump in the crosshairs of their AR-15s in recent weeks, and those are just the ones we know about. Predictably, Musk took to X to wonder why Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, weren’t also dodging bullets. Since this could be read as prompting someone to even the score, it caught the eye of the FBI.
Henry Adams, descendant of two American presidents, wrote in his 1907 autobiography: “Politics [has] always been the systematic organisation of hatreds...” That hasn’t rung as true since the eve of the Civil War in 1860. Musk is enthusiastically helping stoke the hatred — more specifically the white male hatred — Trump hopes will return him to power for his revenge tour.
A constant theme of the tweets Musk posts or highlights approvingly is that whites are victims of racism. In SA, he warns, a president Julius Malema would kill them all.
Why would a tech titan whose fortune is built on the transition to an electric economy put his dollars and name behind someone who says windmills cause cancer and batteries are triggering shark attacks, and whose energy policy is drill, baby, drill? How are across-the-board tariffs going to help Musk sell more Teslas or lower production costs?
Perhaps he really does dream of landing a job as Trump’s government efficiency tsar. How long, one wonders, before he’s fired? Writing in the Financial Times at the weekend Simon Kuper suggested Musk’s apartheid era roots were showing, and not just his but those of his PayPal co-founders, David Sacks and Peter Thiel.
I’m not sure I buy that entirely. Sacks, though born in Cape Town, came to the US as a child. Thiel spent his formative years in Namibia and SA, but is of German stock.
Yes, all three are aggressively anti-woke and fundamentalist in their loathing for anything that smacks of affirmative action for mortals they consider lesser than themselves, and they despise mainstream media as wholeheartedly as the National Party ever hated the Rand Daily Mail. But they could have caught that anywhere, including Silicon Valley,
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.
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