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 month. 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 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 Congress 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 as 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 original bipartisan bill, Musk managed 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 an advisory role for himself 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 the party's 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 one that is 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 Lueth months earlier when he stated plainly that he was a “fascist.”

Many sitting AfD figures express open admiration for Hitler—or, at least, as open as one can be in a country where disseminating Nazi propaganda is a crime. Siegbert Droese, the party’s leader in Leipzig, posted a photo of himself at the “Wolf’s Lair,” Hitler’s Eastern Front headquarters in Poland, with his hand over his heart. Droese later campaigned across the country in a Mercedes with “AH 18 18”—a commonly used alphanumeric signal of support for Hitler—on the license plate. He remains an AfD member in the Bundestag. 

One of the most influential members of the party, Björn Höcke, who recently led the party to its first-ever state election victory in Thuringia, once lamented that “Hitler is portrayed as absolute evil,” and questioned why “Lebensraum”—the word the Nazis used to describe their territorial expansion—is a dirty word in German politics. He crusaded against a memorial to victims of the Holocaust as a “monument of shame,” while calling for a “180-degree turnaround in the politics of [Holocaust] remembrance". He has twice been convicted for knowingly using the slogan “Everything for Germany!," which—he surely knew, having been a history teacher—was widely used by SA stormtroopers and even engraved on their daggers.

It’s not merely that party members seek to whitewash and lionize the worst criminal and genocidaire in German history. They use his regime as a model for politics and policy. In a similar fashion to how the Nazis sought a full purge of Jews and Judaism from German society by portraying them as a dangerous external scourge that needed to be eradicated to preserve the Reich, AfD portrays Muslims as an existential threat to Germany. Amid the Syrian refugee crisis, which led to many asylum seekers settling in Germany, Höcke described a “refugee invasion” and excused violent backlash among followers because, he said, Germans were faced with “the death of their race” through "Africanization, orientalization and Islamization.” AfD’s first manifesto in 2016 declared that “Islam is not a part of Germany,” and the party called for a ban on mosques, the Muslim call to prayer, and religious garments such as burkas and niqabs in public. (AfD also called for banning hijabs in public in 2017.) 

In January 2024, the German investigative outlet Correctiv reported on a secret conference in Potsdam in which high-ranking AfD members met with avowed neo-Nazis to discuss what they called a “masterplan” of “remigration”—forced deportation—for immigrants and citizens of non-German ethnic backgrounds. The plot was laid out by Martin Sellner, an Austrian leader of the ethnonationalist “Identitarian Movement,” who has been convicted for vandalizing a synagogue with swastika stickers and who received money from the racist mass-shooter who killed Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019. Correctiv described  the essence of the meeting as follows:

The scenarios sketched out in this hotel room in Potsdam all essentially boil down to one thing: people in Germany should be forcibly extradited if they have the wrong skin colour, the wrong parents, or aren’t sufficiently “assimilated” into German culture according to the standards of people like Sellner. 

AfD intended for this agenda to be secret. But last month—as the party’s influence has reached its apex after a strong electoral showing—Bavaria’s AfD decided it didn’t need to hide its intentions any longer: It adopted an official platform of “comprehensive remigration in the millions over the next 10 years,” calling for creating means “to more easily revoke German citizenship that has already been granted.” 

In Germany, a country most familiar with the horrors that can follow the mass denaturalization and deportations of unwanted minorities, it’s well-understood exactly what ideological strain AfD represents. When we look back at Germany’s persecution of Jews, knowing where it would all lead, it is so easy to see each step in the process for what it was: Dehumanizing propaganda led Germans to believe they were being victimized by a Jewish conspiracy that would destroy their nation and their race if it wasn’t stopped in its tracks. This was used to justify their marginalization, the stripping of their citizenship, deportation, and eventually their mass murder. When anti-Semitic propaganda is wielded today, most of us (though certainly not all) are able to recognize and reject it. However, when Muslims are described in similar ways nearly a century later—painted as vicious, inhuman invaders who will destroy us if we don’t destroy them first—many struggle to see it for what it is. (Anti-Palestinian racism, for instance, has been totally normalized by our political leaders and media.)

That said, AfD members have been so overt with their eliminationist beliefs that it is widely understood in Germany what they stand for. Lars Klingbeil, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, has repeatedly referred to them as a “Nazi” party, saying that “Anyone who consciously gets involved there and says: 'I want to take responsibility' is of course a right-wing extremist, a Nazi.” Major newspapers like Der Spiegel describe them as descendants of Nazi ideology who harbor “ethnic racism and nationalism” across their ranks. Germany’s Commissioner on Anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, has said he’s “worried that a party like that would achieve such approval.” Jens-Christian Wagner, a historian and director of the memorial to the former Buchenwald concentration camp, has described Höcke and AfD as “trying to make National Socialist [Nazi] language acceptable again.” When news of AfD’s Wannsee Conference revival meeting emerged in January, tens of thousands of Germans took to the streets—signs read, “Nazis, no thank you” and “It feels like 1933, AfD ban now!” Even former party members have seen the writing on the wall, such as Höcke-opponent Siegfried Gentele, a fellow representative in the Thuringian state parliament who left amid the party’s rightward drift: In a 2019 Spiegel interview, he described the AfD’s current state with two words: “Heil Hitler!”

After being met with backlash over his endorsement of a Nazi party, Elon Musk has attempted to feign ignorance. On Friday, he responded to criticism from Democratic lawmakers with the absurd protestation that “The AfD policies are identical to those of the US Democratic Party when Obama took office! I don’t think there is a single difference.” Obama certainly adopted a draconian border policy that shouldn’t be overlooked—particularly in his first term, when critics dubbed him the “deporter-in-chief.” But Musk is obviously being willfully obtuse when he compares him to AfD. Whatever his faults, Obama did not mass deport American citizens, ban certain ethnic or religious groups from entry, downplay the Holocaust, or talk about “Lebensraum.” 

Musk also penned an op-ed this week in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag (translated fully in English here) endorsing and defending AfD, which led the editor of the paper's opinion section to hand in her resignation immediately afterward. Musk argues that “The portrayal of the AfD as far-right is clearly false.” However, he doesn’t even acknowledge the mountain of evidence to the contrary. His sole argument is this: “Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Give me a break!”

It should go without saying, but being personally progressive on gay rights or marrying an immigrant has no bearing on whether your party’s policies are fascist. (In fact, it’s quite common for far-right parties to pose as gay rights champions to pit supporters against Muslim immigrants.) But AfD isn’t even progressive on gay rights—they’re quite openly reactionary on that subject, too. In its policy platform, the party states that its “political family ideal is that of the family of a mother, a father and children”—to that end, in 2019, the party filed a motion in court to revoke same-sex marriage rights. Musk couldn’t refute the portrayal of AfD as a fascist party because doing so is impossible. They are a fascist party, and anyone remotely aware of what their officials publicly stand for would conclude as much.

Inconveniently for Musk, on the same day that he professed his support for the AfD, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, a self-identified AfD supporter and “anti-Islam activis[t]” from Saudi Arabia, allegedly plowed a truck into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing five people and wounding more than 200 others. The suspect identified himself as an “ex-Muslim” who had renounced the faith, vowing to fight it—his account’s biography even claims that through its asylum policies, “Germany wants to islamize Europe.” The language Al Abdulmohsen had used, describing AfD as a force “to protect Germany,” was nearly identical to that used by Musk, and his account included praise of Musk himself. But since then, Musk has only doubled down on his support for AfD, even despite the bevy of evidence pointing to its Nazi ambitions. When Senator Chris Murphy pointed out that AfD stands for “lots of hateful things,” Musk responded, “What a retard.”

As the suspected attacker’s AfD support became clear, largely by reviewing his posts on X from over the years, Musk spread the ridiculous claim that he had merely been pretending to be an Islamophobic fan of AfD and Musk as part of “Taqqiye, an Islamic doctrine that permits lying and deception to advance Islamic objectives.” X then deleted the alleged attacker’s account before restoring it. The posts are now accessible again, but you can no longer search his history to easily find his praise of Musk and the AfD or his rants against Islam. 

Despite the suspected attacker standing for all the same things the party stands for, Musk stated his agreement with a post saying that “Only the AfD would have prevented the attack.” AfD, meanwhile, has managed to use Al Abdulmohsen's crime to continue demonizing Muslims. At a rally on Monday in Magdeburg , the co-chairwoman of AfD, Alice Weidel, jumped onto Musk’s conspiracy theory that the attacker was a “closet jihadist” who was “full of hatred against everything that makes us human—against us as people, against us as Germans, against us as Christians.” AfD supporters chanted “Deport, deport, deport!” As supporters of AfD mobilized across the country in the following days, Germany’s Anti-Racism Commissioner, Reem Alabali-Radovan, has said that “counselling centres in Magdeburg and the surrounding area have reported an increasingly hostile atmosphere and violent attacks against migrants and Muslims.”

During the government shutdown negotiations, Musk used his influence over social media to spread completely made-up information to shape the narrative about the budget deal. He is using even more aggressive measures to shape the public narrative about the AfD and mislead the public about what it represents. As Musk came under fire, soon-to-be Vice President J.D. Vance felt compelled to jump in and defend the AfD on his behalf. In response to a post calling Musk’s support for AfD “dangerous,” Vance sarcastically quipped, “It’s so dangerous for people to control their borders. So so dangerous. The dangerous level is off the charts.” 

The Trump administration is currently plotting what they describe as the biggest mass deportation effort in American history. Their own officials have assured us that it will involve rounding people up and putting them in internment camps and stripping the citizenship of people born in America. And now, the person with more money and influence than anybody in right-wing politics is not only singing the praises of an overtly fascist party overseas but inducing others in his coalition to do so as well. To put it lightly, this is not good. 

Now, some things could have been done to stop Elon Musk from obtaining this death grip over the GOP in the first place. His power comes from his immense wealth. And unlike most other democracies, America allows its wealthiest people to spend as much as they care to on political campaigning. Democrats have talked for a long time about the importance of removing corporate donors from the political process, but despite opportunities, they’ve failed to pass any legislation that would have curbed their influence, likely because that would have turned off their faucet of corporate money as well. 

But there’s certainly no shortage throughout history of reactionary businessmen who use their extreme wealth to bend the nation’s destiny toward their wills. (If you want more on that, see Alex Skopic’s articles in recent print editions of Current Affairs about the 1934 “Business Plot” by oligarchs to overthrow FDR and the many consumer products with Nazi ties.)

It’s hard to miss the parallels between Musk and Henry Ford. Like Musk, who has threatened Tesla and SpaceX employees who attempt to unionize and called for the gutting of federal labor protections, Ford was a ruthlessly authoritarian business owner in his own right—hiring company spies and his own private army of police to surveil and brutalize his own work force when they attempted to organize for control over their own working conditions. That authoritarianism extended out to Ford’s entire political worldview. He used his vast wealth to purchase his hometown newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which he turned into an organ of vicious anti-Jewish propaganda. An earlier admirer of Hitler, Ford helped to give his regime legitimacy across the Atlantic and would be honored by the Nazis in 1938, ironically for his “humanitarian ideals.”

 In the very recent past, we've also, seen Peter Thiel shell out big bucks to fund “neo-reactionaries” to run for Congress. (One of them is about to become vice president.)

But Musk is perhaps the most successful yet. he has essentially bought himself a shadow presidency—and the obvious reason seems to be that his pockets run deepest, allowing him to not only dump heaps of money onto Republican candidates but also on a social media platform that allows him to control political discourse. 

 In the last few days, the Musk saga has taken a seemingly bizarre turn when he began to vociferously defend America’s H-1B visa program, which allows international workers with highly specialized knowledge, usually in technology, to legally work in the United States. Musk described this program as the only way to preserve the nation as a “meritocracy.” Musk also defended comments by his DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy, who argued that CEOs preferred to hire foreign guest workers because “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity,” by having too many “sleepovers” spending too much time “chillin’” and “hanging out at the mall.” Musk’s defense of H-1B is described as the first shot of a civil war with the more overtly nativist side of the MAGA movement, which is now realizing he may not be as committed to the white race as they once thought. It’s also at odds with Musk’s endorsement of AfD, whose official position as of 2017 was that “supply of skilled workers must primarily be covered by the full development of domestic labour resources.”

If anything, the fact that this is the one form of immigration Musk is willing to champion is clarifying. Unlike American citizens, who are (sometimes) able to demand a basic level of dignity within their workplaces, H-1B immigrants, whose employment in high-expertise fields is the basis for their legal status, risk being deported if they run afoul of their bosses' demands. They have the status of quasi-indentured servants and are able to be paid much lower wages than American citizens or green card holders for the same work. In the process of defending H-1B, Musk has railed against some of his MAGA critics as “racists,” and he certainly is not wrong about that. But we should not mistake this for evidence that Musk, fresh off his online support for neo-Nazis, has suddenly developed a principled opposition to racism. Musk is a capitalist, and as such, he relies on the accumulation of wealth to give him power and influence. He is thus an opportunist. He will take any position if it serves his goal of continued wealth accumulation. And he has already shown a willingness to cater to the most racist elements of the right in order to ascend the ranks of the Republican Party to the point that he is one of its most powerful members.

Due to his obvious power (and historic litigiousness against media companies that write critical things about him), there seems to be a skittishness in the press about calling Elon Musk a Nazi. Even as he has full-throatedly embraced an unambiguous Nazi party in AfD, the press still tends to use the anodyne euphemism “far-right” to describe them and, by extension, Musk. The two exceptions have been outwardly progressive outlets—Mother Jones and Truthout, who were both willing to state plainly that Musk had endorsed a neo-Nazi party. (Mother Jones, too, later softened its headline, changing “Neo-Nazi” to “Far-Right,” though it does still say that “many of its leaders are not shy about expressing Nazi sympathies.”) With the Trump administration pledging a legal crusade against critical media outlets, it seems as if many have retreated from the harsh criticisms they once issued of the man. (See, recently, ABC backing down in a ridiculous defamation lawsuit and paying Trump $15 million after George Stephanopoulos said Trump had been convicted of rape when he’d actually been convicted of “sexual abuse.”) The press needs to speak plainly about the threats we are facing, and that means calling fascism “fascism” when it’s right in front of our faces.