The Useful Poison: Musk, Ford, and the Scourge of Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories
We're watching a familiar story play out. It's past time we learn its lessons.
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The public radicalization of Elon Musk has been incredibly instructive. For those unversed in how wealth both corrupts and exacerbates personal shortcomings, not to mention how it brings out authoritarian tendencies, it is a rolling, daily reminder of something true and unsettling. Not to mention how seeing Musk struggle reminds us that wealth is not a marker of talent or competence.
Some days it takes the form of an awful joke. Something no one could even find funny and might even be confused that it was supposed to be humorous in the first place. Quickly his sycophants - all of them holding a religious belief in Musk as an entity and also desperate for his attention and, hopefully, charity - flood in with their bought blue checks and assure him he’s hilarious. It is the digital representation of the universe of yes men these oligarchs surround themselves with constantly.
But sometimes it hits harder. It hits worse. Like Monday night, where the owner of Twitter and one of the richest men in the world decided it’d be a good idea to post this:
Let’s just look past the fact that this is genuinely a stupid entry point for all of this. Musk’s relationship to the terminally-online Right and reliance on pop culture references for anything even resembling “thoughts” is yet another iteration of his remarkable vapidity. But here, in the exchange, Hungarian billionaire George Soros is, once more, brought into the frame as a handy anti-Semitic boogeyman. For anyone paying attention, this is hardly a surprise as Soros is an easy target considering his political donations and how he has become shorthand for the GOP and Right in targeting Jews as a scapegoat without having to say it explicitly.
Musk is absolutely stewing in Right Wing radicalization. His experience on the platform and apparently out in the world, where he rubs elbows with everyone from Alex Jones to Tucker Carlson, is an active and ceaseless soak in that toxic milieu. Over time, it goes from being eye-rollingly crazy to just an accepted and unquestioned stance. Musk posting this was valuable to the Far Right in that it presented to many of his worshipers a concept they were probably unfamiliar with, but also just kind of vanilla in its content. Lame, even.
But as we’ve discussed, Musk’s position and wealth makes all of this predictable. The powerful gravitate to these things because it legitimizes what they do, their status, and both helps their own agenda while empowering the Right, which is dedicated to protecting their power and ideally their own power in the process. That anti-Semitic tropes are part of the process is as predictable. It has been the case since the very beginning of Conservatism itself.
Something we should examine, though, is how this incident, which we are watching play out in realtime, directly reflects a past moment in American and world history that eventually led to the rise of Fascism and Nazism, the systematic murder of millions of Jews, and a crisis that could very well serve as a precursor to where we are going now.
We should talk about how antisemitism was mainstreamed by another powerful mogul named Henry Ford in the early 20th century and how that debacle parallels this dangerous moment in so, so many ways.
Before we begin though, we must acknowledge that a comparison between Elon Musk and Henry Ford is accurate in terms of wealth, influence, and how parts of the culture viewed them, but in doing so we must also recognize that, as despicable and destructive as Ford was, he at least achieved something. The empire he built was largely constructed on his ideas and work, though his abilities were inflated by imagination and his own egotism. Musk, though, is a perfect modern-day iteration of Ford in that no “mogul” is particularly interested in doing anything now except maximizing earning potentials and appearing to achieve.
The cultural impact, however, is striking.