Henry Ford, Elon Musk & The Dearborn Independent of the 21st Century

How the richest man is following in the footsteps of another fascist plutocrat

Cult leaders and dictators have always created alternate realities based on fear, so they can control people with it. They identify an enemy, regardless of whether the scapegoat is guilty of anything, dehumanize it — and drain their victims of labor and resources to “fight” the boogeyman. Historically, authoritarian cults have had to physically isolate people to create an effective alternate reality, while dictators have required the power of the state.

But technology made it so oligarchs can get in on the game.

As an example, the technology of the newspaper — the ability to cheaply print narratives at length and deliver them at scale, was transformational. And like all technologies it was used for good, bad and everything in the middle.

Enter an oligarch with bad ideas who purchased a newspaper in 1918 called The Dearborn Independent. Plutocrat Henry Ford had just lost a Senate race, as a candidate who was described by the New York Times at the time this way:

“Mr. Ford is a highly successful business man, but he has demonstrated conclusively on many occasions not only his lack of acquaintance with basic international and national affairs, but a certain quality of mind which forbids the hope that he will ever be able to overcome that lack of equipment—an altogether too impressionable mind for public office.”

Sound familiar? You may be thinking of Donald Trump, but the description is apt for Elon Musk as well. While his reputation as a genius has been actively curated for decades, any casual listen to the man, or look at his Twitter account reveals something different. He’s objectively not smart. Devious, yes. A con man, yes. But that’s different.

Here he is in a transphobic conversation with incel whisperer Jordan Peterson in which he misgenders and rejects his own daughter, and declares war on the “woke mind virus.” Like Ford, Elon Musk is not a genius, Musk is bigoted moron.

More than thirty years before the Holocaust, while Hitler was serving in the Bavarian Army, Ford blamed Jews for instigating World War I, saying "I know who caused the war: German-Jewish bankers.”

In 1919, a few months after Ford purchased it, The Dearborn Independent published The Bolshevik Menace to Russia by a Russian imperialist propagandist. Ford’s paper was being influenced by a Russian emigré named Boris Brasol who had worked for the Tsars, but been assigned to the United States, and provided intelligence to the US military.

Brasol was a fervent anti-Bolshevik, and a virulent antisemite who also blamed the Jews for the communist takeover of Russia, and a fierce advocate for returning the Russian monarchy to power.

Based on influence by Brasol, in 1920, Ford’s newspaper, with a circulation of 75,000 at the time, started a 149-story, multi-year focus on the antisemitic hoax Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a plagiarized hodgepodge of fictional and antisemitic writing to create a fake document “proving” a cabal of Jews are plotting to enslave the “goyim” and take over the world. It has contributed to millions of deaths.

The Protocols were first introduced in imperialist Russia in 1903, almost certainly by Okhrana — the Tsars’ secret police, as a scapegoat to blame Jews for the problems of the Russian monarchy’s own failing state.

Brasol, as an agent of the Tsars, and enemy of “Jewish Bolsheviks” spread the Protocols to America through Ford’s purchased newspaper. To spread the lie even further, Ford pressured his dealerships, which were selling the wildly popular Model-T at the time, to sell his publications. This way, he reached 900,000 copies at its peak in 1925, the second largest circulation in the United States.

Ford’s newspaper and a book cover that sold millions — note hammer and sickle on tablets carried by the antisemitic caricature

Ford walked back his articles, but never gave up his beliefs in a Jewish conspiracy, and promoted “America First” causes and promoters like antisemites Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin before and during WWII.

Charles Lindbergh, 1940

In Mein Kampf, written while Hitler was in prison for a failed insurrection, Hitler praised Henry Ford as “a singular great man.”

The year before the Nazis invaded Poland, in 1938, Henry Ford was awarded “The Order of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle” by the Nazi German government, an “honor” created the year before by Adolf Hitler.

Fast forward a century from Ford publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion through his Model-T dealerships, to Elon Musk and his hostile takeover of Twitter.

The parallels are stunning, and an important lesson. These kinds of evil men, corrupt and gullible, but somehow able to collect an inordinate amount of power nevertheless, have come and gone through history.

Both Musk and Ford are psychopaths at their core with a deep hate in their hearts, who chose to use the power they gained through the labor of others to persecute and dehumanize those they considered less than them. They chose to work against the government that allowed them to seek and gain their power — to not just bite the hand that fed them but to try and cut it off.

The recent behavior of Elon Musk, to take funding from Saudi and a parade of malicious actors and purchase “the town square” only to turn it into the 21st century version of The Dearborn Independent must be seen as an even more dangerous abuse of his power, it must be seen as a crime.

The same racist lie going from an anti-Black anonymous account to the House GOP, to Elon Musk

What Musk is doing is not just repulsive and dangerous, it’s foreign election interference on a massive scale. Musk bought Twitter with the full intention of turning it into a radicalization engine. The second person he allowed back on the platform after he bought it was misogynist cult leader Andrew Tate who was recently arrested for child rape and child-trafficking charges on top of his previous rape and trafficking accusations.

Musk allowed literal Nazis like Andrew Anglin, Chuck Johnson and Nick Fuentes back on his website. He allowed Mike Flynn and QAnon back on. And he has allowed false, divisive disinformation to not just flourish but to be favored by his algorithm, with the blatant goal of radicalizing people against their own government — and against each other.

There Is Nothing “Neo” About These Nazis

Elon Musks ideology is complicated, but fundamentally he’s a born fascist, a messianic narcissist like Donald Trump, ready to fight a war against his own country to save himself and gain even more power. He’s already sunk $44 billion into this, not counting his money donations, and his backers and co-conspirators expect results.

Elon Musk’s Twitter Deal Is Nothing Short of an Act of War

Those backers include accelerationist oligarch and Musk’s fellow apartheid veteran and PayPay Mafia member Peter Thiel, who controls JD Vance. Thiel recently said that if the election is “close” that means that the Democrats “cheated.” This is intentionally setting up a dangerous, potentially violent situation after the election. Musk posted this clip with his full agreement.

They are counting on the Supreme Court. They are counting on cheating.

The ending of Ford’s life was fitting, if too late. On seeing the actual human result of the propaganda that he helped popularize, of the evil that he himself really represented, he had a stroke and died the following year.

Ford did eventually reckon with the lethal hatred he had helped whip up, according to Josephine Gomon, who oversaw female personnel at a Ford plant. She was among a group of executives who joined Ford in May 1946 for a screening of Death Stations, a government-produced film documenting the liberation of Hitler’s concentration camps. For an hour, horrifying images flashed across the screen: a crematorium at the Majdanek camp, torture chambers, a warehouse filled with the confiscated belongings of murdered Jews. When the film ended and the lights rose, Ford’s colleagues found him clinging to consciousness. He had had a major stroke. Ford died the following year at the age of 83.

They never went away. They must be defeated.

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