Elon Musk Celebrated Imminent Trillionaire Status by Stoking Pogroms in Belfast – Truthout
Dozens of people have been burned out of their homes after Musk used X to incite anti-immigrant mobs in Ireland.
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Two years ago, as far right thugs in Britain launched a series of attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers, Elon Musk took to X to gleefully predict that the U.K. was on the verge of civil war, and urged the English to forcefully oppose immigration. Last year, in a speech live-streamed to a huge fascist rally in the center of London, Musk told his audience that “violence was coming” to England and “you either fight back or you die.”
This past week, as Musk prepared for an initial public offering (IPO) of SpaceX that would, on paper, end up making him the world’s first trillionaire, the tycoon openly sided with the masked arsonists terrorizing non-white asylum seekers and refugees in the northern Irish city of Belfast. Musk has posted and reposted statements about “murderous migrants,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer “hating white people,” and how “millions must go,” referring to fascist demands to “remigrate” non-white peoples out of Europe.
It’s impossible to overstate the irresponsibility and dangerousness of Musk’s actions at a moment when Belfast, which was riven by Protestant-Catholic hostility and anticolonial violence for generations, is witnessing a fresh bout of communal rage, this time directed against non-white immigrants. In the last few days, dozens of people, including children, have been burned out of their homes by roving anti-immigrant hoodlums, who were marshalled to sites of “protest” by the U.K.’s preeminent fascist leader, Tommy Robinson. Musk shared the list of these sites, some of which appear to be the addresses of immigrants, with his followers.
By midweek, the violence fueled by a network of white supremacist youth groups had become so fierce that the U.K. government belatedly authorized the police to use water cannons in an effort to regain control of city streets. Musk was anything but contrite. He took to X to proclaim that the “very deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration and open borders” was responsible for the mob violence.
As an individual, Elon Musk’s net worth — post-IPO, an astounding $1.2 trillion — is now more than the annual GDPs of all but 20 countries on earth. On paper, he is now on a par with the Swiss GDP. And as a social media presence, his reach is, arguably, second to none. On X alone, the tycoon — whom the well-known economist and commentator Paul Krugman has recently accused of basically running the world’s largest Ponzi scheme — has roughly a quarter of a billion followers. He is somewhat like a one-man superpower, using his outsized influence to openly support white supremacist mobs burning immigrants out of their homes, and refashioning X as something of a clearing house for white supremacist conspiracy theories and hate speech.
U.K. government figures have, somewhat halfheartedly, condemned Musk’s comments. And Liberal Democrat party leader Ed Davey used a speech in Parliament to urge the Labour government to crack down on X in the wake of Musk’s interventions in British politics. But, to date, none of Starmer’s ministers have stated whether Musk could or should be prosecuted for incitement to violence.
And so, Musk’s assault on the concept of multiracial democracy continues to pick up steam. In this, he is ably backed up by the evermore overtly white nationalist Trump administration.
This past week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used his podium at the annual D-Day commemorations to warn Europe’s leadership against complacency in the face of boatloads of migrant “invaders.” And JD Vance took to X to lambast Europe’s “elites” for letting their civilization die by not standing up to a “mass invasion of migrants.”
The administration has also ratcheted up its white nationalist offensive by launching a raft of additional investigations and lawsuits into universities for supposedly lowering standards by admitting too many Black and Latino students into medical schools. This comes just days after the launch of a truly despicable “Aliens.gov” website, linked to the White House website, that attacks immigrants who have arrived in the six-plus decades since the U.S.’s immigration system was liberalized and ominously warns that “they” do not belong here. Meanwhile, a World Cup is underway that will exclude the attendance of residents of nearly a third of the world’ s countries, due to Trump’s travel bans.
In April of this year, the Washington Post reported that Elon Musk had tweeted on race 850 times over the previous few months. His tirades are, as the article detailed, anything but subtle. The SpaceX CEO warns his followers that “whites are a rapidly dying minority”; that the West is beset by “poisonous propaganda” against straight, white men; that whites face the risk of “genocide” against them; that white job applicants are routinely discriminated against. Each one of these posts reaches millions of readers. Each one further inflames white resentment and anti-immigrant racism not only in the United States but also in other countries all over the world.
Faced with criticism for his words, Musk doubled down. “Only Restore Britain can save Britain,” he wrote, endorsing Britain’s newest far right, nativist political party.
Last year, as Musk used his “Department of Government Efficiency” shock troops to destroy USAID and other foreign assistance programs, thus all but guaranteeing that millions of people in poor countries would die from preventable diseases, Musk averred that too much empathy leads to civilizational death; and that empathy is a “fundamental weakness” of Western societies. This week, Musk’s anti-empathy crusade is on full display in Belfast. Empathy for terrified non-white immigrants, facing masked mobs who want to burn them out of their homes? That’s for the birds.
In fact, faced with criticism for his words, Musk doubled down. “Only Restore Britain can save Britain,” he wrote, endorsing Britain’s newest far right, nativist political party — a political party whose members, endorsing the “remigration” of millions of British residents and citizens, are too extreme even for Nigel Farage’s fascist-tinged Reform Party. It was, even by Musk’s debased standards, a truly repugnant endorsement.
Around the U.K., including in Belfast, over the past few days, anti-racists have organized protests to counter the anti-immigrant mobs and to push back against Musk’s particularly appalling statements. Yet, Musk has a massive structural advantage in this fight. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated last week that his Belfast posts reached tens of millions of people. It takes an awful lot of grassroots campaigning to counter a built-in audience on that scale.
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Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. Abramsky’s latest book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, is available for pre-order now and will be released in January. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.
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