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Elon Musk's New Far-Right Nazi Party for America
It’s the opposite of Trump, who was interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement. Musk is far more dangerous.
Jul 13, 2025
There are always worse political figures waiting in the wings.
In Israel, for instance, Benjamin Netanyahu is a relative moderate compared to some members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who believes that letting two million Palestinians die of hunger in Gaza is “justified and moral.” In Russia, ultranationalists to the right of Putin espouse racist and anti-immigrant views, while the country’s Communist Party recently declared that Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin was “a mistake.”
And then there’s Donald Trump, whom scholars consistently rank as the worst president in U.S. history. Even here, in a country of only two main parties and a blanderizing political discourse, worse options abound. Imagine if Trump’s successor actually believed in something other than his own enrichment and self-aggrandizement? What if Trump is simply preparing the ground for an authentically far-right leader to take over, someone even more extreme than Vice President J.D. Vance or Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)?
Elon Musk is prepared to use a lot of his considerable fortune to test that proposition.
What Musk Believes
It’s tempting to believe that Elon Musk decided to create a new political party in a fit of pique because of his personal falling-out with Donald Trump. In public, however, Musk links his decision to the recent passage of Trump’s legislative package and the several trillion dollars that the measure will add to the national debt. After bonding with Trump over eviscerating government, Musk was no doubt appalled to discover that the president, in the end, turned out to a more conventional tax-less-and-spend-more Republican.
Either way, Musk announced last week the creation of his new America Party. The details of the party platform are scant, as you might guess from a party created by tweet. Musk has naturally emphasized “responsible spending,” debt reduction, and deregulation. He has also added pro-gun and pro-crypto planks to his expanding platform along with “free speech” and “pro-natalist” positions.
These preferences might qualify the America Party as a typical libertarian project—if it weren’t for Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, his support of the neo-Nazi party Alternative for Germany, and his fantastical accusations of “genocide” against the South African government for its treatment of white farmers. Not surprisingly, Musk entertains extreme views on race, genetics, and demography. As The Washington Post reports:
He has warned that lower birth rates and immigration are diluting American culture and the cultures of other majority-White and Asian countries. “We should be very cautious about having some sort of global mixing pot,” he said earlier this year. He has called unchecked illegal immigration “civilizational suicide” and “an invasion,” though he himself was working illegally, in violation of his visa, after he deferred his enrollment in a Stanford University graduate program to launch his career in the United States in the 1990s. He also warns that declining birth rates are leading to “population collapse,” and, having fathered over a dozen children, stresses the importance of “smart people” having more kids.
In his latest sign of malign intent, Musk removed controls from the artificial intelligence component of his social media platform. The newly unshackled Grok—named after a verb in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land that means a deep, intuitive understanding—began to rant anti-Semitically. As they say in Silicon Valley: garbage in, garbage out.
You might argue that it doesn’t really matter what Musk says or does, given that his approval rating plummeted to 35 percent during his tenure as DOGE-in-chief. Even his popularity among Republicans has dropped from 78 percent in March to 62 percent after his break with Trump in June.
But Americans are political amnesiacs. The ravages of DOGE, the insults traded with Trump: all of that could disappear down the memory hole once Trump’s economic program starts to hurt the blue-collar constituents that supported his 2024 candidacy. That’s when Musk will likely dust off his earlier criticisms of the “big and beautiful bill” and start promoting his new party in earnest.
Billionaires Gone Wild
Trump, a billionaire who has consistently overstated his assets and his importance, proved that an idiot with a big bank account could buy the presidency. Now along comes Elon Musk with even more money, a bigger ego, and a comparable lack of shame.
Musk’s political trajectory resembles Trump’s in other respects as well. They’re both supreme opportunists who have changed their political views to suit the moment. Musk used to donate to both Democrats and Republicans, considered the prospect of a Trump presidency to be an “embarrassment,” and believed in the importance of addressing climate change. He was always something of a libertarian in his embrace of the free market, but there was little indication in the early 2000s that he would veer off into extremes.
If historian Jill Lepore is right, however, Musk is just returning to his roots. His current views uncannily echo those of his grandfather, J.N. Haldeman, who moved from Canada to apartheid South Africa where his racist views were more the norm. She writes that Haldeman, in the 1930s,
joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.
Like his grandfather, Musk escaped from his country of birth, in this case a South Africa just then shrugging off the apartheid system that had drawn J.N. Haldeman there. Eventually in Silicon Valley, Musk found a like-minded community. He palled around with Peter Thiel—and created PayPal together—before eventually falling out over artificial intelligence. Thiel, too, has uber-libertarian beliefs, as do other Silicon Valley disrupters like Marc Andreesen who have shifted rightward. They all have a fondness for the latest avatar of the Technocracy movement, Curtis Yarvin, himself a refugee from saner realms of the political spectrum, who has waxed rhapsodic over replacing a democratically elected president with a CEO-in-chief.
And that, perhaps, is the position that Musk imagines for himself. So what if the Constitution forbids a foreign-born president? As Trump has made clear, the Constitution too is ripe for disruption.
Anticipating Musk’s Next Political Move
Vladimir Putin was once a fairly conventional apparatchik before he donned the costume of a Russian nationalist. Viktor Orban was an ego-driven liberal before he found political opportunity in Hungary as an illiberal autocrat. Elon Musk’s political evolution could be compared to the trajectory of these two opportunists.
Elon Musk has indeed cultivated a relationship with Putin over the last two years—after initially supporting Kyiv following Russia’s 2022 invasion—and has floated pro-Russian peace plans to end the conflict in Ukraine. Musk met with Orban at Mar-a-Lago, along with Trump, and has tweeted support in the Hungarian leader’s direction from time to time. But the illiberalism of Putin and Orban is not really a model for Musk.
Instead, he has gravitated toward something even less palatable: the Alternative fur Deutschland. The AfD, founded in 2013, built its base on anti-immigrant sentiment, attracted extremists with its anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and capitalized on anti-elite anger by railing against heat pumps. Musk has framed his support of the AfD as a defense of “free speech,” a familiar tactic of those who routinely engage in hate speech. In an op-ed in the German Welt am Sonntag newspaper that was calculated to influence the German elections, Musk wrote that only the AfD could save Germany by “ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization.” This was a particularly rich observation from one of the most powerful promoters (and beneficiaries) of globalization.
Musk himself lost his earlier identity as a globalizer to become today’s xenophobe. It’s a new type of “whitewashing” whereby internationalism somehow loses its prefix in the laundering process.
The center, however, is not giving up so easily. Even as a larger portion of the electorate is supporting the AfD, the German establishment is mobilizing against the right-wing party. The country’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution determined in May that the AfD is an extremist organization. More recently, the Social Democratic Party began the process of banning the AfD, which requires that a qualifying group meet two criteria: it must threaten Germany’s democratic order and it must be sufficiently popular to pose such a risk. If, after a lengthy legal process, the party is deemed unconstitutional, it is dissolved.
Obviously, such a process can’t dissolve public support for the party’s positions. Currently the AfD is polling at 23 percent, behind the Christian Democrats (28 percent) but ahead of all other parties. For the time being, these other parties are refusing to collaborate with the AfD at a federal level, though there have been some cases of collaboration at the subnational level. A ban—of a party or of collaboration with that party—may be satisfying, but it doesn’t address the reasons that the party is flourishing.
The Musk Effect
In the first flush of Brexit and Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, Steve Bannon attempted to build a National International out of far-right governments, parties, and movements. He largely failed. Now, Elon Musk has stepped up to the plate, with his media platform and his deep pockets.
As NBC reports:
Musk has posted online in support of right-wing street demonstrations in Brazil and Ireland. He has welcomed a new conservative prime minister in New Zealand and expressed agreement with a nationalist right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He’s met in person several times with the right-wing leaders of Argentina and Italy. His social media app X has complied with censorship requests from right-wing leaders in India and Turkey.
As Bannon discovered, the obstacles are many to creating a far-right network. Simply put, entities devoted to the politics of hate often end up hating each other as well.
Musk faces numerous speed bumps at home as well to the creation of a third party. The administrative hurdles are enormous, which is how the Democrats and Republicans have managed to preserve their duopoly. “I was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” one political analyst told The New York Times. “A lot of them predicted that he’s the kind of person who, when he finds out how hard this is, he’ll give up.”
But Musk, like his Silicon Valley buddies, knows how to apply maximum pressure to weak points in a system in order to make it crack. He has promised to focus on just a few races where he might have the greatest likelihood of winning. It’s the opposite of Trump, who was interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement.
Musk is far more dangerous. He actually has ideas. They’re terrible ideas, to be sure. But they are motivating him to build something more durable and, in the long term, potentially more disruptive.
It’s too terrifying a prospect to grok.
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Why Does Trump Really Hate Internationalism? It’s Bad for Billionaires
As he has thrown international rules to the side and tried to strong-arm other countries into concessions, his list of demands has resembled Wall Street’s much more than Wisconsin’s.
Jul 12, 2025
If you take U.S. President Donald Trump’s word, his foreign policy will finally make American workers great again. Where weak-willed attempts to work with other countries hollowed out the American economy, his belligerent nationalism will push the U.S. up and the rest of the world down. The globalists are for them; Donald Trump is for you!
But taking Donald Trump at his word is never a good idea. As he has thrown international rules to the side and tried to strong-arm other countries into concessions, his list of demands has resembled Wall Street’s much more than Wisconsin’s. He has fought Japan’s car safety standards and India’s price cap on coronary stents. He has gotten Canada and India to drop taxes on tech giants. And in perhaps his biggest victory, six major countries recently caved to his escalating threats and hollowed out a global plan to enforce a minimum tax on big corporations.
That Trump has fixed his ire on this international agreement reveals a broader truth: Internationalism is bad for billionaires. The misguided approach of neoliberal globalization opened up a lane for nationalists to claim that they defend the working class. But in reality, Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies would like nothing more than to play governments against each other. Billionaires can take fragmented countries to the bank—only international cooperation can build a united front strong enough to beat them.
Trump’s Revenge on the Global Corporate Minimum Tax
The global corporate minimum tax is a good example of this. (The details are a little complicated, but the super-rich would like to keep it that way, so bear with me as I explain.) In recent decades, major corporations have gotten spectacularly effective at avoiding taxes. Last year, Tesla made a profit of $2.3 billion in the U.S. but paid zero federal income tax. Neither did Merck, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson, despite making $45 billion around the world.
Two global dynamics help them achieve this. First, corporations use sophisticated accounting tricks to make their profits show up in countries where they do little actual business, like Ireland and the Cayman Islands—which just so happen to have very low taxes. Second, when countries attempt to raise taxes, corporations threaten to move elsewhere, creating fears of job losses and economic slowdowns that can convince governments to keep taxes low.
Trump’s global bullying successfully beat back two things he hates: international cooperation and taxing the rich.
In 2021, most of the world’s countries agreed to a tax deal that aimed to counter these dynamics. It was highly imperfect, with too many exceptions and rules skewed against developing countries, but it was still an important step forward. One of its key rules was a global minimum corporate tax of 15%. Suppose a Brazilian company paid just 10% in tax for income earned through its Swiss subsidiary. The deal would allow Brazil to apply a top-up tax and collect the remaining 5% itself. This 15% floor meant corporations could no longer drive a race to the bottom in tax rates, as any tax haven with a rate below 15% would just be leaving money on the table—someone else would tax it anyways.
And because congressional Republicans blocked the U.S. from implementing the deal—instead relying on a weaker U.S. version of the minimum tax—that’s what could have happened to American companies. This was how the agreement was supposed to work: If a country like the U.S. was too silly to make sure its companies paid at least 15% in tax, other countries would.
But Donald Trump hated the idea that countries could work together to make sure the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Eli Lilly would pay a fair share of taxes toward schools, hospitals, and roads. In an attempt to spook other countries out of making the corporate minimum tax work, Trump’s tax bill included a “revenge tax” provision that would have hiked taxes on companies from countries that applied it.
In a moment of deep cowardice, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom folded: they agreed to exempt American companies from the minimum tax in exchange for Congress removing the revenge tax provision. While the exact details are not yet clear, it is certain to give a leg up to American corporations avoiding taxes at home and abroad. It will also create a perverse incentive for foreign companies to relocate their headquarters to the U.S. in order to avoid taxes—or at least to hang that fear over countries that consider raising taxes on them. Trump’s global bullying successfully beat back two things he hates: international cooperation and taxing the rich.
Building the International “We” That Can Beat the Super-Rich
The way big corporations have played countries off each other to avoid taxes echoes a tried-and-tested strategy of advancing the interests of the rich. Corporations threaten to move investment out of countries that raise minimum wages or strengthen environmental standards. When countries reject austerity, financial markets often sell off their currency or demand higher interest rates on government bonds.
Rather than falling into this trap, some countries are demonstrating the unity needed to advance a more equitable economy. Last week, Spain, Brazil, and South Africa launched an alliance for wealth taxes on high-net-worth individuals, while eight countries took steps toward taxing first-class plane tickets and private jets. A major United Nations conference led to an initiative that could coordinate developing countries as they borrow funds, rather than leaving them isolated against their lenders.
These efforts model an internationalism different from the form of globalization that dominated the past few decades. Neoliberal globalization advanced a web of agreements that coordinated countries to place a ceiling on taxes and labor standards, not to raise the floor. Developing countries were markets to be opened, not publics to work alongside.
Corporate globalization needed to end—but the problem was that it was corporate, not that it was global. Nationalists promised to reverse this globalization and take back the spoils unjustly taken by others. But Trump has been far more successful int expanding American corporations’ ability to pillage than enabling everyday Americans to prosper. A balkanized world ensures no one is ever powerful or coordinated enough to subordinate the interest of the super-rich to the interests of the public. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can beat the super-rich, but only if that “we” is big enough to include those beyond our borders.
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Sanders Says Billionaire Effort to Crush Mamdani Rooted in Fears of Nationwide Progressive Wave
"They are worried that his campaign is an example of what can happen all over the country."
Jul 11, 2025
Independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday reaffirmed his support for Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, a fellow democratic socialist facing fierce opposition from deep-pocketed establishment figures who fear the broad nationwide appeal of his people-over-profit agenda.
Faced with the growing possibility that Mamdani would win the June 24 primary, Wall Street bankers, corporate executives, real estate developers, mega-landlords, and others rushed to dump money into disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo's campaign coffers. Now that Mamdani is the Democratic nominee, they're pouring tens of millions of dollars into an anti-Mamdani war chest, despite not even agreeing on which candidate to back in November's mayoral election.
In a Thursday interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour—who noted that Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy tour "has been drawing record crowds"—the Vermont senator said that policies like "giving massive tax breaks to billionaires and cutting healthcare and education and nutrition from working-class families [are] not popular."
While acknowledging that "mainstream Democrats" have been unable to galvanize opposition to Republicans' pro-billionaire, anti-working class agenda, Amanpour pressed Sanders about what he would tell New Yorkers who say that Mamdani "has never run anything, and he says, free buses, and... is he antisemitic or not?'"
Watch Sanders' response:
"First of all, understand, he's going to have the entire establishment, the oligarchy, the billionaires coming down on his head, not only because he's demanding that the wealthy and large corporations in New York City start paying their fair share of taxes, they are worried that his campaign is an example of what can happen all over the country when you bring people together to demand the government that works for all of us and not just a few," the senator said. "So, they really want to crush this guy."
"You have billionaires saying quite openly, 'We are going to spend as much as it takes to defeat this guy.' You have Democratic leadership not refusing to jump on board a campaign where this guy is the Democratic nominee," Sanders added. "So, most importantly, I'm going to do everything I can to see that Zohran becomes the next mayor of New York."
Some Democrats have done more than refuse to support their own party's nominee. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) falsely claimed last month that Mamdani had made references to "global jihad" and speciously argued that "globalize the intifada"—a call for Palestinian liberation and battling injustice—is a call to "kill all the Jews."
Freshman Congresswoman Laura Gillen (D-N.Y.) also falsely accused Mamdani of "a deeply disturbing pattern of unacceptable antisemitic comments."
Congressional progressives including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), André Carson (D-Ind.), and Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.)—the four practicing Muslims in the House of Representatives—last month condemned what they called the "vile, anti-Muslim, and racist smears from our colleagues on both sides of the aisle."
Despite the attacks against him, Mamdani is leading Cuomo—who is now running as an Independent—by 10 points in a Slingshot Strategies poll of more than 1,000 registered voters published earlier this week. Mamdani also leads Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa by 21 points and scandal-ridden incumbent Mayor Eric Adams by 24 points.
Observers note that establishment Democrats' reservations about backing Mamdani seem to be fading amid the strength of his campaign. As Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) hold out on endorsing their own party's nominee, critics argue it's time to follow other lawmakers like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jerrold Nadler, Adriano Espaillat, and Nydia Velázquez—all New York Democrats—and endorse Mamdani.
"Mamdani won a record-setting primary victory, and unions, grassroots Democratic groups, and savvy elected officials are rushing to back him," The Nation's national affairs correspondent, John Nichols, wrote Friday. "Now it's the establishment's turn."
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