The Silence of the Lambs
Mushy Mollusk Musk Goes Dark MAGA
I am utterly amazed by the eerie silence of so many influencers, public artists, actors, musicians, authors, and TV personalities, who must be afraid to speak out directly about a possible authoritarian takeover of the United States. A White nationalist Christian dictatorship in the US will have devastating impacts across the world. There is a kind of chill in the air as people instinctively react to the prospect of a Trump/Vance/Heritage/Musk/X/Thiel/Palantir victory and recalibrate what it will mean for their personal future. Definite shades of 1932 Germany.
Many friends in my extended community — through Burning Man, psychedelic networks, and Silicon Valley — have a personal relationship with Elon Musk. They have partied with him, gone to sex parties and huffed Ketamine with him. Some of them have privately expressed shock at Musk’s recent decision to go “all in” on Trump, committing some $45 million a month to the election, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk recently appeared at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally with Trump, jumping up and down while wearing an “Occupy Mars” t-shirt (such a cute reference to Occupy Wall Street, a curtailed social movement that challenged America’s billionaire class), then saying, “As you can see, I am not just MAGA. I’m Dark MAGA.”
I appreciate Scott Galloway’s perspective on this, from Kara Swisher’s podcast:
A lot of people really admire, for a lot of understandable reasons, Musk. To me, the two of them on stage, and how much love and adulation they get, represents something deeper and darker: The aspirational vision of masculinity represented by these guys has turned so coarse, so vile… Between the two of them they have 17 kids by six different women. With Musk, you have a guy who, when he gets to a position of power, accuses his workers of of sex crimes falsely such that they have to leave their home; does not pay contracted legally obligated severance; dead names, says his daughter is dead to him. Yet we have VCs that … make all sorts of excuses for the guy. What I have found is that, generally speaking, it represents this dark peanut butter and chocolate Zeitgeist in our society where we have conflated masculinity with coarseness, with cruelty, and some fucked up vision that as long as you're rich, you can treat women like shit. You can be a shitty dad, a shitty employer. I mean, these guys — it was literally like the parade of poor role models for young men.
Musk was routinely brutalized as a child, by his father — characterized by biographer Walter Isaacson as “an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist” — with whom Musk has claimed he no longer speaks, but this is, apparently (see below), one of his many lies. Musk’s second wife told Isaacson: “He’s retained a childlike, almost stunted side. Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad.” Perhaps that helps to explain the very bizarre ambience of Musk’s bellydance at the Trump rally.
Whatever his character flaws, Musk is responsible for globe-spanning companies like SpaceX and Tesla. Trump, who Musk unconditionally supports, pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, withdrew from a nuclear arms treaty with Iran, and incited the war in Israel. If “elected” again, he intends to gut Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act so oil companies can “drill, baby, drill,” despite accelerated global warming and rapid increase in natural disasters like the two recent hurricanes that caused more than $120 billion in infrastructure damage across Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Trump made a series of fascinating statements at another, more recent rally, as journalist Aaron Rupar documents on Twitter. According to Trump, Kamala Harris “imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons all over the world.” Rupar notes: "Trump’s closing message is a full-blown hate campaign against black and brown people. Historians will look back in astonishment that this terrifying reality wasn’t the subject of wall to wall coverage and commentary in weeks leading up to this election. He’s not hiding anything.”
As the campaign goes on, Trump’s overt Fascism becomes more apparent. He has started calling for the mass deportation of legal immigrants. He also openly states he reserves the right to use the US military against his political opponents: “Trump says Americans who don’t support him are “enemies” and says they may need to be “handled by the military,” notes HarrisHQ.
I recently wrote about how JD Vance blurbed a new book, Unhumans, which argues that Socialists, Leftists, and liberal Democrats are not fully human. The book praises past dictators like Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet who imprisoned, tortured, and killed their political opponents. According to his blurb, Vance thinks this is a good plan for the US. Vance is supported by Peter Thiel, who paid for his Senate campaign and originally worked with Musk on PayPal.
In 2003, Thiel founded Palantir Technologies, data analytics and AI firm, with funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir specializes in software that aggregates and analyzes vast amounts of data for intelligence, defense, and corporate purposes. It has been involved in many controversial applications, such as military operations and surveillance programs for agencies like the CIA and FBI. Thiel supports Israel’s war in Gaza and elsewhere with his "Lavender" AI system, which assists the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in targeted operations. Lavender helps identify targets for military strikes, and has contributed to significant civilian casualties.
At the moment, I am working my way through all of the links on “Elon Musk: King of the Dark Enlightenment,” an excellent, must-read anonymous article on Medium which connects many dots around Musk’s euphoric embrace of Trump-ism. Many feel this to be an extremely dangerous alliance. I would concur.
I am going to dive deeper into this wormhole in my next essays.
Before we go there, let’s warm up a bit with a few recent tidbits, such as this from the Washington Post: “Musk’s new Twitter policies helped spread Russian propaganda, E.U. says.” Joseph Menn writes: “Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has played a major role in allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to reach more people than before the war began, according to a study released this week by the European Commission, the governing body of the European Union.” According to the study:
Over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe. Preliminary analysis suggests that the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts has grown further in the first half of 2023, driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards.
Then there is “The Dangers of An Elon Musk Shadow Presidency Are Now Clear Following a Shockingly Raw Interview By His Father,” a very bracing essay from Musk biographer Seth Abramson, which dredges up Musk’s racist, pro-apartheid, authoritarian roots. It turns out that Musk and his apartheid-loving father remain close. Surveying the current political and media landscape, Abramson writes:
It is only speculation to say that current Vice President Kamala Harris, current vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, and the Democratic Party can overcome the unholy trinity of 500+ MAGA influencers inside the United States amplified by various means—including financially—by the Kremlin, social media platforms run by unscrupulous far-right billionaires whose brotastic “libertarianism” is merely a fig leaf covering an aggressive neo-fascist bent, and a business sector (i) terrified of a future wealth tax, (ii) seduced by promises of Elon Musk slashing regulations left and right as a handpicked Trump “government efficiency czar,” and (iii) the idea that when businesses fail it’s not because of bad management or market factors outside the control of politicians but liberal bugbears like DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], ESG [environmental, social, and governance] and CRT [Critical Race Theory].
The eminently provable truth is that Wall Street always does better under Democratic presidential administrations—but try telling that to a corporate executive who’s really just afraid of queer people and wants his own taxes cut as everyone else’s skyrocket.
… The simple fact is America is in the midst of a hot “information war”… but only one side is fighting. And that fighting side—Trumpworld, MAGA influencers, and the most dangerous foreign autocrats on Earth—has been on the front lines since at least the middle of last decade, plugging away creating a network of disinformation platforms, agents, funding streams, strategies, tactics, and celebrity pantheons that would take Earth Prime denizens (those connected to phenomenological reality) 25 years to unravel if we started right now.
That’s another way of saying that in many respects it’s too late to win the battle the current U.S. presidential cycle represents—and perhaps even the war it’s central to.
It’s not just that one belligerent in Information War I has on its side the richest man on Earth (Musk), the most famous man on Earth (Trump), the two leaders waging the largest unilateral wars on Earth (Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu), a majority of the United States Supreme Court (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh), and most of the most-popular podcasts, radio programs, YouTube channels, Rumble channels, fake-news websites, and cable networks, they also quite simply have an understanding of the shape of digital culture that there’s presently no evidence anyone on the other end of the battlefield possesses.
We are in one salty pickle! More on mushy mollusk Musk next time.
A tough read; thank you for pulling it all together. I'm glad you quoted Seth Abrahamson, who I follow with the free subscription so haven't been as privy to the detail. I just got off of a long call discussing these very issues. I am not a prepper, and can barely keep plants alive. I believe most people don't want to live like this. I think we need to keep working to elect Harris AND build lifeboats, really experiment with new ways of being from a place of inspiration and not just desperation. I am 50 and arguably lived through a heyday of society (from a privileged position, at that) and I ALWAYS felt that society made very little sense. Now it's becoming pretty self-evident that maybe that's because it didn't really make sense. More of the same vision isn't going to work.
There's the Trump side that is looking to control everything in the ways that you've outlined; there's the Davos crowd (for shorthand) that many of these people we've been discussing (Brand, Eisenstein, etc) are fighting against, who are also looking to control society, if more slowly.
My emerging theory is that our desire for control (even in our own lives, where it all starts) has created the conditions whereby we took our eyes off the ball of what the fuck a good life is even about. Gathering, food, good music, laughing. We (community-minded people) want these things to be available to everyone, and to get all of the shit out of the way that prevents all people from enjoying these things: abusive labor, impossible working conditions, unaffordability of good/real food, medicine, clear-cut forests, etc. Globalism has been destroying these things. Wanting cheaper and cheaper stuff — fake shit from Home Goods to make it look like we have a polished style — have made us easy prey for the corporations who have been exploiting our need to feel "as good as" (if not "better than") others, in our clothing, homes, cars, (politics) etc. Waht's the expression? Status anxiety.
The whole idea of Edward Bernays, weaponizing psychology against us and creating a definitionally unsatisfiable hunger for quick consumption to replace slow wholenness (and destroy the knowledge of how to fix anything), and then the utter dependence on fossil fuels to satisfy that itch the way that milk satisfies a baby's hunger.
It's all a complete disaster., but my main point is aligned with an earlier comment on your posts: build from what is good. We need to start building towards a new vision, and I think that vision is not one that can be articulated in a sweeping blueprint for all the world to follow. That's where decentralization comes in, where we create mechanisms for small communties to reclaim their own agency and directionality. The "how" is the thing.
Many excellent points but one glaring error which is refering to Netanyahu as in a "unilateral" war. First, Hamas violated an existing cease fire with a terrorist action that killed what would be for the USA, proportional to our population, a 9-11 with 35,000 casualties. According to the OED, unilateral means: (of an action or decision) performed by or affecting only one person, group, or country involved in a situation, without the agreement of another or the others: unilateral nuclear disarmament. The Israeli's have the agreement (however strained) of the USA and the tacit agreement of other countries like Germany, and the strong , but carefully non public support of Gulf Arab states. The awfulness of Netanyahu has apparently caused you, in recent articles, to skew from a sufficiently complex view of the conflict to a decidely anti-Israeli one.