Musk threatens Europe as much as Trump
The continent isn't taking the global far right threat seriously enough
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Imagine that a terrorist attack happened in Europe. People were killed. After looking into the perpetrator’s social feeds, the media found that he had expressed admiration for a close advisor to the man about to be the president of the United States, an advisor so powerful that a lot of people were calling him the “shadow president”. That advisor spent a lot of time openly promoting extremist propaganda - exactly the same type of propaganda that the terror suspect had embraced and which seemed to have shaped his decision to murder innocents. In the aftermath of the attack, the advisor doubled down on his support for the same extremist cause, and the media barely seemed to notice the trail of tweets leading from the murdered bodies to the halls of American power.
That might sound like the beginning of a particularly unbelievable spy novel. But it’s actually exactly what happened last week. The terror suspect is Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, an “anti-Islam” activist and far right proponent of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory who drove a vehicle into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany. The advisor, of course, is Elon Musk.
Musk has been promoting far right causes and figures on Twitter for a long time now, even before he owned the platform. A brief resumé might include his pushing of the great replacement theory, amplification of propaganda from far-right groups, posting of racist images, anti-semitic posting, and endorsements of QAnon. He’s also re-engineered Twitter as a whole to boost these voices. Nor does Musk restrict himself to matters at home - he’s waded in to support far-right figures and oppose mainstream ones in contexts as diverse as Scotland, Belgium, Italy and Germany.
If Musk was just some very rich shitposter who also happened to own Twitter, this would be bad enough. But his closeness to Trump means that his alignment with the global far right takes on far more significance. And while much media coverage of the Trump/Musk bromance has focused on the opportunities that it presents Musk for corruption, it seems far more significant that Musk has now become Trump’s main conduit to a network of extremist actors who seek to destabilize democracy and the rule of law across Europe - and whose supporters sometimes commit acts of violence and terror.
One reason that this matters is that Musk is much more ideological than Trump. Trump is skilled at using social media to communicate, but he’s ultimately a creature of cable news - his politics is the politics of Fox News, not QAnon and Catturd. Musk, on the other hand, has been through a very public and thorough radicalization by the platform that he now owns. He posts hundreds of times a day and seems obsessed with promoting far right causes around the world.
No-one doubts that Trump sees groups like Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) or France’s Marine Le Pen as “his people”. But he doesn’t really do that much about it in practice. Musk, on the other hand, seems eager and motivated to wade in. He is younger, savvier, and is playing a longer game, one which is also tied up with the future of his many companies.
And, paradoxically, he also has some tools of influence which even the president lacks.
His ownership of X is a start, particularly now he’s turned it into a platform which explicitly boosts the far right. But he’s also much, much richer than Trump, and as a private citizen has a far freer hand. It’s hard to imagine Trump making a large cash donation to the AfD, if only because there would be little in it for him. But for someone as rich, ideological, and opportunistic as Musk, the logic is clearer. It would not only help out ideological fellow-travellers whose cause he spends many of his waking hours promoting, but it might also give him political allies in a major global market - no small consideration for someone with global business interests to attend to.
It’s even easy to imagine a scenario in which Musk and Trump work in tandem. Europe’s mainstream political parties might soon find themselves assailed by Trump’s tariffs from the outside and newly energized and funded far-right challengers from the inside. The two men seem to share the goal of destabilizing Europe’s political and economic order, and by working together they could try to discredit mainstream parties and push the continent to the right.
Musk can easily throw around amounts of money which could transform the politics of smaller European countries, where the spending on entire general elections can be equivalent to just a few U.S. legislative primary elections. Countries across the continent are rushing to shore up their political financing laws in anticipation of the onslaught, but in a world of globalized communications - one in which Musk himself owns one of the primary means of political communication - the laws could perhaps be circumvented. Either way, little can be done to stop Musk using his own posts and brand to push far right politics.
One of the challenges for Europe is to recognize the scale of the threat. This is another way in which the continent has not prepared itself for Trump’s second term, seeming to expect - at worst - just a repeat of the first. In Trump’s first term, neither he or his political movement really got serious about launching a domestic challenge to Europe’s mainstream parties, even though Trump made lots of gestures in that direction.
In particular, the departure of Steve Bannon from the White House in August 2017 took a lot of momentum away from the international ambitions of the MAGA movement. It’s very likely that Trump and Musk will fall out as well, as I’ve written before. But the difference is that Musk’s mindset and ambitions seem much more global than Bannon’s were, indicating that he’s not going to take his sights off Europe even if he parts ways with Trump.
And while Trump will eventually leave office and pass from the political scene, Musk is only 53. That means that he is not only more dangerous for Europe than Trump is in many ways - he’s also going to be around for much longer. For the sake of Europe’s values, and the victims in Magdeburg, it’s time to start taking the far right challenge more seriously - in all of its global dimensions.