The Rich Man Is Projecting
A different way to think about Elon Musk's casual use of dehumanizing language
Sometimes I'll come across an agonizing story of an African mother or father walking for days and days so their children might be fed, only to find the nearest aid facility had been shuttered by the world's richest man, who smirks and laughs and hollers with unbridled joy over his evisceration of food and medical aid for some of the most vulnerable people alive today.
Sometimes I'll read about a child in a war-torn African nation having to ration their medication and suffer accordingly. Sometimes I'll find these soul-splitting stories without any mention of the man who triggered the aid cuts that led to the reported suffering. And I'll get upset, and I'll add to my brain-box of dark fantasies of justice and veanhance, and I'll move on with my day. The kids need dinner. The dog needs walked. The laundry needs folded. The dentist is calling. The game is on.
Denny Carter
It's later, after these stories of far-off human degradation settle within me, that I wonder how that aid-destroying man – the world's richest man – could do what he did with the bad faith-fueled government destruction machine known as DOGE. How could he so blithely close the funding spigot for so many people who depended on that spigot for the very basics of life: For food, for medication, for clothing and maybe even housing, all the things Jesus Christ would ensure they have while his most boisterous followers cheer for the rich man who tore the money spigot from the wall and now says he has no regrets about any of it.
How could a man be so intellectually incurious as to end life-saving funding that flowed from the richest nation in human history? How could the rich man – or anyone – take these actions and not be soul-sick?
Denny Carter
Then I remember the way the rich man, whose satellites and cars and trucks and rockets represent a mass societal infection, thinks of human beings differently than I do. With precisely zero consequences, with the tacit endorsement of every major corporation and media outlet in the world, the rich man has used and happily endorsed dehumanizing language again and again on the social media site he owns and operates – the platform he bought to maybe, for the first time, experience love, not from real people but from anonymous accounts and sweaty, sexless fanboys.
The rich man has compared migrants coming to European countries and the UK and the US to bugs and animals, to non-humans, and he has said if the white folks in these countries – he never says "white" explicitly but his meaning is clear – don't fight back they will be annihilated by the inhuman droves flooding their shores and taking their money and jobs and women and children.
This linguistic dehumanization is not limited to black and brown people from developing nations though. While his DOGE hackers dismantled the U.S. government in what can only be called a coup, the rich man said anyone who receivers federal benefits belong to the "parasite class." It was a comment that drew condemnation even from the grifting jellyfish we know as Republican congressmen.
For the rich man, your grandmother is a parasite leaching off the American government when she cashes her Social Security check. Your cousin who receives disability payments from the feds is a parasite too. The same goes for the kid whose cupboards and refrigerator are empty, but who goes to school and gets a free breakfast and a free lunch and maybe even a free dinner to bring home thanks to elected Democrats.
These, for the rich man, are all unthinking, writhing parasites latching on to the riches of the American empire and presumably the rich man himself and sucking them dry, one modest payment at a time, one sandwich at a time. These aren't people, but creatures sinking their tiny fangs into the riches they did not earn through passive investment, the way money is meant to be earned. In this way they are not meant to live. It fits nicely with the rich man's Hobbesian worldview and his pledge to deliver dystopia.
What is a parasite beyond something that would not live if it did not attach itself to a resource-rich host? What is a parasite beyond slowly but steadily sucking dry that host, so slowly it's barely perceptible? And what is the rich man but a parasite with every one of his lengthy, glistening fangs sunk deep into the United States government, which has funded his stupid cars and stupid rocket ships for years and years, and which does not label him as something less than human because his companies receive oceans full of taxpayer money to make the shit he sells to his fans.
The rich man is projecting. When he calls others parasites and vermin and other words meant to strip them of their humanity, he understands on some level that he is talking not about some hated poor black or brown person, but about himself. He knows somewhere within him – somewhere deep and dark and unexplored – that he's the one who has a deeply and undeniably parasitic relationship with American society, and the world more generally.
It's his parasitic tendencies that have made him an historically important figure, something more than his casually-fashy Silicon Valley counterparts. The rich man sucks the world dry every hour of every day while poisoning minds with the fascist slop he elevates on his propaganda platform. And until those in power recognize the fabulously wealthy man taking the country's wealth and converting it into his own, he will remain latched on, teeth sunk as deep as they'll go, devouring the money and resources that can and should be used to improve society somewhat.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
