There Is Nothing “Neo” About These Nazis

They never went away

As soon as Elon Musk announced he wanted to take over Twitter, his goal was clear: to radicalize Americans by using the platform for psychological operations to create undue influence that Musk could weaponize for his own purposes, including those of his allies — like Putin.

The Neo-Nazi 4chan Troll with $250B and 101M Twitter Followers

That’s why Musk bought Twitter just in time to instruct people to vote Republican, which may have swung the House and given them a 2 year window to attack democracy from inside. Musk has 120 million followers. There is no way to know what effect it had.

But he didn’t stop with blatantly interfering with elections. He’s letting all the Nazis back on Twitter, including Nazi terrorist Andrew Anglin.

But the overt signaling to actual Nazism, including whoever programmed Kanye West to spew Nazi propaganda about the greatness of Hitler, has been breathtaking. Even in racist forums like 4chan/8chan, there has almost always some veneer of irony around the bigotry and some attempt at plausible deniability. That’s largely gone now.

Even after Kanye West proclaimed his love for Hitler and allowed Nazis Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones to tweet from his account, Musk welcomed him back. It was only after he tweeted a swastika that Musk was forced to shut down his account.

Of course, that is deeply hypocritical given that Musk has been signaling “Heil Hitler” to his followers.

This goes beyond trolling. This is not funny. It’s intentionally injecting Hitler into the conversation which the Nazis he allows on his platform are ecstatic about.

So why would he do this? It’s impossible to know exactly when this damage happened. Certainly he is far more vividly out of control and destructive than he was even in the recent past. But Hitler?

An interesting datapoint is the shared background of Elon Musk and his mentor Peter Thiel who created the PayPal Mafia after failing in their first attempt to destroy the American economy seen here:

Both Peter Thiel and Elon Musk grew up in Apartheid, South Africa and went to whites-only schools full of anti-Black propaganda.

The governing party enforcing Apartheid while they were growing up was the National Party.

https://www.newframe.com/a-history-of-south-african-nazis/

The colonization of South Africa by the Dutch and British was inherently racist and brutal for hundreds of years. But during Hitler’s rise, this also created a perfect breeding ground for pro-Nazi movements, including the “OB” which “supported Hitler’s regime by any means necessary.”

The genocidal suppression of Black South Africans came as soon as the white people did. But the modern concept of “Apartheid” started with the Nationalist Party in 1948 which stayed in power until Apartheid was disbanded in 1994.

Importantly many of the people who formed the National Party may have been actual Nazis themselves, or at a minimum people who supported them. The Vatican, which did deals with Hitler through WWII, also helped many in the Nazi regime escape, especially to South America and South Africa.

Elon Musk’s South African father was, according to Elon, a vicious, cruel and domineering tyrant — “he will plan evil.”

Peter Thiel’s family history is similarly dark, although it’s a bit harder to figure out details before 1954 or so.

This article asks a great question. Why doesn’t Peter Thiel denounce Nazism?

At a certain point, we have to stop calling this a neo-Nazi movement. These are Nazis, plain and simple.

We used to know what to do with Nazis. We’d better start remembering.