The ascent of a crazed Nazi-saluting ketamine-addled billionaire weirdo to unprecedented and unaccountable power as the president’s right hand – and please do not speculate about what he is doing with that right hand: this is a family blog – has been frightening to watch. The rise of the far right across much of Europe has been scary enough to observe but as the so-called Land of the Free dances with the devil of fascism and aligns itself with actual dictators like Vladimir Putin, it really does feel like a new version of what happened in 1939, as this ad on a London bus stop suggests.
Elon Musk’s descent into the murky world of fascism in some ways defies logic. He has made a gigantic fortune as a great salesman – not, I should add, as an inventor, as mythology suggests – not least by making top-of-the-range environmentally friendly electric cars. Yet the very people who, you would think, would choose to buy a motor car that doesn’t pollute the air and accelerate climate change are not classic Trump supporters and Musk allies. They are more likely to be those of a liberal disposition, who care about the climate crisis and at least don’t want to make it worse. A Trump/Musk government is not of a liberal disposition in any way, shape or form. In other words, are not potential TESLA consumers less likely to buy a car from a far right nut job who has no interest in protecting the environment? His far right fans have no interest in the environment. He has no alternative car market.
If I drove a TESLA – and I am definitely someone who would buy an electric car, if I could afford one – I would be worried. The Musk car has been named a Swasticar, you know,, as in Swastika. How long before an anti-Musk campaigner goes out with a Banksy style stencil kit and spray paint to vandalise TESLA cars? As a responsible blogger, I would not urge anyone to do such a thing because it would represent criminal damage and in my case incitement. But can you see how the more militant in society, those of an anarcho-syndicalist philosophy perhaps, might differ in their viewpoint? If I owned a TESLA and parked it in the street, or indeed anywhere in public view, including a car park, I would live in constant fear of my car being trashed and having a Swastika painted on it. I repeat: don’t do it. It’s not big and it’s not clever, but some people, eh?
Elon Musk is an example of power via money. A man who knows how to utilise the media in order to make himself even more rich, in his case by purchasing a large chunk of it called twitter, now X. What can we, the great unwashed, the lumpen proletariat, do about it?
How about just not buying into it? Don’t buy Musk’s cars, don’t use X. If you have any TESLA stock, divest of it. If you own a TESLA car, then get rid of it, either out of principle or to avoid having to go through your life fearing a bloody great Swastika might appear on it one day?
People like Musk think they can do anything they really please because they have if not all the money in the world than more than enough to enable them to stand aside from the rest of the world and to ignore the rules and the laws that there rest of us have to abide by.
One day Musk and Trump will self-destruct. Dictators usually do because there are no depths they will not plumb. Until then, we play a long and, I would urge, legal game to see them off. Others may not be so circumspect in which case whatever will be will be.
