Elon Musk: The Normalizer of Fascism

Thanos Angelopoulos on Twitter / X

Please do not call Elon Musk a fascist. He is not a fascist. He has simply endorsed a post arguing that universal suffrage causes "universal suffering", that the population must be divided into "makers" and "takers", and that "takers" should lose the right to vote. He replied "I… pic.twitter.com/DNThZrexFL— Thanos Angelopoulos (@Th_Angelopoulos) July 4, 2026

‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley

As Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their peers have grown richer and more influential, Gil Durán argues they have all but abandoned democracy – and found the perfect government to enable them

Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia

The world's richest man has joined a growing chorus of right-wing voices attacking Wikipedia as part of an intensifying campaign against free and open access information.

Elon Musk’s Race War Just Took Darker Turn—Time for a Global Response

The violent fascist riots in Belfast reveal the future that the trillionaire really wants. We need an international movement to constrain him.

America’s new oligarchy

Under Trump an ultra-wealthy clique has infiltrated government, raising concerns about democratic integrity

The sanewashing of Elon Musk - Lawyers, Guns & Money

As Jamelle Bouie points out, Elon Musk spends a great deal of time on the social media site he owns both personally pushing and amplifying themes directly derived from prominent works of violent white supremacy, attracting very little attention from the mainstream press: Over the past month in particular, he has adopted the imagery of […]

Neoliberal Fascism as the Endpoint of Casino Capitalism

This article explores neoliberal fascism as a distinctive political formation within the current historical moment. In doing so, it first analyzes neoliberalism as a project that has since the 1970s destroyed all the commanding institutions of democracy while consolidating power in the hands of a financial elite. In addition, it analyzes neoliberalism as a movement, that produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism creates the conditions for right wing extremists to mobilize the anger of white disenfranchised working class populations by both appealing to the economic injustices they experience while simultaneously blaming and directing their frustrations towards non-white minority groups such as immigrants, blacks, and Muslims. It is precisely this merging of the social, political, and economic hardships produced by neoliberal capitalism and its appropriation of the discourse of white supremacy to divert attention from its worst excesses and failures that a neoliberal fascism is produced. Â More specifically, I argue that in the face of 40 years of neoliberalism with its production of massive inequality, a frontal attack on the welfare state, and the erosion of civic institutions and culture, there has been a resurgence of fascist discourses and a populist fascist political movement. Neoliberal fascism represents the conjoining of the most extreme elements of casino capitalism with the discourses of racial cleansing, and white nationalism. The article concludes by examining how atomization, fear, and anxiety have become the breeding grounds of fascism and what it means to revive education as a central tenet of politics so as to address the task of not simply resisting oppressive economic structures, but also what it means to engage in the massive challenge of changing individual and collective consciousness as a precondition for collective struggle and the building of new social movements. Author Biography Henry Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy

Fascism Depends On The Presumption Of Good Faith

The media's sanewashing of the Trump regime is fueled by this presumption

It’s Not Just Elon Musk — These Billionaires Are Also Neurodivergent

Some billionaires say their conditions helped them succeed in business.

Muskism Is the Specter Stalking Our Present

Elon Musk sells us sovereignty through technology in an age of crisis. Muskism resembles past futurisms, but with an important difference: this time, the question of who owns the machines is paramount.

Fascism | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

The Authoritarian Stack

How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next

The Authoritarian Stack

How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next

Donald Trump: A Critical Theory-Perspective on Authoritarian Capitalism

This paper analyses economic power, state power and ideological power in the age of Donald Trump with the help of critical theory. It applies the critical theory approaches of thinkers such as Franz Neumann, Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Fromm. It analyses changes of US capitalism that have together with political anxiety and demagoguery brought about the rise of Donald Trump. This article draws attention to the importance of state theory for understanding Trump and the changes of politics that his rule may bring about. It is in this context important to see the complexity of the state, including the dynamic relationship between the state and the economy, the state and citizens, intra-state relations, inter-state relations, semiotic representations of and by the state, and ideology. Trumpism and its potential impacts are theorised along these dimensions. The ideology of Trump (Trumpology) has played an important role not just in his business and brand strategies, but also in his political rise. The (pseudo-)critical mainstream media have helped making Trump and Trumpology by providing platforms for populist spectacles that sell as news and attract audiences. By Trump making news in the media, the media make Trump. An empirical analysis of Trump’s rhetoric and the elimination discourses in his NBC show The Apprentice underpins the analysis of Trumpology. The combination of Trump’s actual power and Trump as spectacle, showman and brand makes his government’s concrete policies fairly unpredictable. An important question that arises is what social scientists’ role should be in the conjuncture that the world is experiencing.See also the related blog post "How The Frankfurt School Helps Us To Understand Donald Trump’s Twitter Populism"http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/christian-fuchs1/how-the-frankfurt-school-_b_14156190.html?utm_hp_ref=uk-donald-trumpThe German translation of this shorter piece was published in Der Falter 5/2017: 21-23.