Elon Musk: The Normalizer of Fascism
The world's richest man needs you to believe fascist parties are part of the democratic spectrum
After an explicitly fascist German political party open about its ethnic-cleansing plans became the first far-right party to claim a state-based majority since the Nazi era, the party's leaders thanked the world's richest man for his material and political support, and everyone went about their day.
Everyone kept driving the rich man's cars and using the rich man's social media website. Everyone kept ignoring the rich man's incompatibility with representative democracy.
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The Alternative For Germany (AfD) this weekend came real fucking close to claiming an outright majority in the East German state Saxony-Anhalt, in case you were just living your life and not sweatily tracking the latest developments in the rise of international fascism. The AfD receives support from Elon Musk, the moneyman for international fascism who also happens to operate the nerve center of American politics, along with other billionaires who are so bored by their wealth that they've decided to use their riches to destroy the world.
The AfD, as Bad Faith Times readers might recall, is an important test case in the remaking of fascism, especially the European flavor. The party, quite naturally, is steeped in bad faith. Its backers – including Musk – point to the party's leader, a gay woman married to an immigrant, and say look: She's nothing like a 20th century fascist. Alice Weidel is not dressed in military garb. She's not goose-stepping around Germany barking from lecterns about cleansing the fatherland of the subhuman termites who have washed up on its shores. In no way does Weidel, they say, fit the popular conception of a fascist leader.
This is the perfect mask for 21st century fascism. It also represents a textbook example of how far-right movements weaponize so-called identity politics against their opponents. You libs support women and immigrants and gay folks, yet you don't support the leader of Germany's fascist party. Curious!
And yet, she is. The party she leads is nightmarishly clear about what it wants to do after seizing power, either locally or nationally. The AfD wants to end immigration from developing countries, which happen to be populated by black and brown human beings, many of them hungry of jobless and desperate, fleeing to more stable European countries. The AfD is among the world leaders in mainstreaming the idea of re-migration, or forcing non-German natives to go back to where they come from, even if they've never lived anywhere but Germany. People who are considered culturally incompatible with Germany would be removed from the country under re-migration. I'll leave it to your imagination as to how this mass removal would be achieved.
Read a little bit about re-migration and the words of the fascist rock star from Pink Floyd's The Wall might ring in your head: "Would you like to send our colored cousins home again?"
Denny Carter
Bad faith – claiming to mean what you do not mean – is vital to any successful anti-democracy party of movement. I've spent a lot of time and written a lot of words about why this is the case and whether there's anything a good-faith small-d democrat can do about it. I'm still looking powerfully into a final answer on the matter. In the case of the AfD – the vampire that JD Vance has told mainstream German political parties to allow into their homes – the bad faith is two-fold: Its leaders and supporters claim the party is only filling a space traditionally occupied by mainstream conservative parties that have failed to deliver, and that its stance on immigration is not any different from other right-wing parties in Europe and across the world.
They know these twin claims are not true. In no way do traditional conservative parties in Germany or other parts of Europe support the government-backed kidnapping and removal of anyone it considers "culturally incompatible." This sort of ethnic cleansing rhetoric has always existed in one form or another, but it has been restricted to the sidelines of European politics since, you know, such words and policies tore apart the continent less than a century ago. I listened in total horror the other day as an AfD official shouted down a BBC interviewer, refusing to accept the interviewer's premise that the fascist AfD was somehow different from more normalized right-of-center political parties. It didn't seem to matter that the BBC reporter destroyed her arguments. It never does with fascists, I suppose.
Denny Carter
It was clear after a while that this AfD mouthpiece knew she was lying. She was well aware that her party represented a massive departure from "normal" conservative politics in Germany. That didn't stop her from portraying AfD as an everyday right-wing coalition. Musk, for his part, spent the weekend spreading the bad-faith claim that AfD was just a normie conservative party that wanted the best for the hard-working people of Germany who think all their problems could be solved with a little ethnic cleansing.
The other part of the AfD's bad faith recipe – that forced removal of black and brown families from Germany is quite normal and mainstream – is important because it's meant to whip the political press into submission. This talking point is designed to create an unquestioned narrative that the Real Problem for Germany and other western nations is out-of-control immigration (it's why fascists like Musk make an international story out of every crime committed by an immigrant). This, I think, is how the Trump regime's "crackdown" on immigration has been framed as something within the bounds of small-d democratic discourse and politics. It's not. It shouldn't be, anyway. But now it is thanks to a feckless, compliant media that has no interest in telling its viewers and readers that good and bad things are not, in fact, the same.
So when Musk posts to the X platform formerly known as Twitter that "only AfD can save Germany," the question must be asked: From whom is the AfD saving the country? Who, exactly, is the threat that must be neutralized? You know that answer. So do I. Everyone does. And yet it's hardly ever said explicitly in coverage of the fascist threat funded by the guy who has more money than anyone.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
