I don't see enough evidence that Musk is a Nazi, but he does seem more fine with Nazis than with people who disagree with him. Twitter is slowly turning into his private propaganda network. It's entirely reasonable to look for something better.
I suggest "Nazi adjacent" to describe people like Elon, who don't hold explicitly white supremacist, racist or anti-semitic beliefs (that we're aware of) but who seem to find camaraderie with such people out of a common disdain for "the wokes."
Depends. Did you spend 40 billion dollars to buy a social media platform you believe to be a "woke hivemind", unban the racists and bigots and force right-wing content into people's feeds just to fuck with them?
Or more generally, are you tolerant of, or even willing to spread, racist and bigoted speech because you have an enemy in common? Because you agree more than you disagree? Are you willing to put up with the spread of right-wing authoritarianism just to see "the woke" suffer? When the nazis show up to your events, do you chase them away and denounce them, or let them be?
I think the "Nazi" epithet just shows a lack of imagination and historical knowledge by those who use it, basically Godwin's Law exemplified. After all, on the American side, the Confederacy predated Nazi Germany by 70 years or so, and with regard to Musk, he comes from South Africa with its own history of Apartheid, so there are much more relevant antecedents, if you want to go there. It feels like "Nazi" has become a just an empty, generic stand-in for "really bad". To be honest, it's difficult for me to take anyone seriously who throws it around like that, regardless of how I feel about the target of the insults. (I'd say the same about "woke" too, by the way.)
> It feels like "Nazi" has become a just an empty, generic stand-in for "really bad".
Well... yes. Language evolves and terms generalize over time as the context in which they're used gains distance from their original meaning. No one is accusing Elon Musk of being a member of the German National Socialist Workers' Party.
> Language evolves and terms generalize over time as the context in which they're used gains distance from their original meaning.
Yes, but I'm old enough to remember being told that we should "never forget" the Holocaust. Perhaps people are already forgetting though. I think it's a mistake, indeed a moral error, to trivialize this word.
> No one is accusing Elon Musk of being a member of the German National Socialist Workers' Party.
The problem is that hyperbole never helps one's case, only makes it worse.
Some people have already forgotten, but many others do remember the holocaust, and are quite alarmed by recent developments. As Mike Godwin said: it's okay to call them Nazis if they do behave like that.
It had become a meaningless word back when Godwin coined his law, but not anymore. There really is a strong push towards some form of fascism, in the US, in Russia, and in many places in Europe. It's important to call it out and to fight it.
Well, fascism is another one of those words thrown about too casually and inaccurately nowadays.
Going back to my original comment, though, my thesis wasn't that people have forgotten the Holocaust but rather the opposite: people seem to have no historical awareness or metaphors except from World War II. This may explain how these terms such as Nazi and fascist become generic and constantly used hyperbolically: without any other intellectual resources to draw from, people are forced to employ this language inaccurately. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
> Well, fascism is another one of those words thrown about too casually and inaccurately nowadays.
Used to. It's unfortunately getting more accurate. Russia is pretty much full-blown fascist right now. Their propaganda ticks all the classic fascist talking points, and Putin is following much of Hitler's playbook. The one thing he lacks is the adoring crowds seeing him as the saviour of the nation. Trump has those. Again, he's doing a lot of the things Hitler did, including an attempt to overthrow the government.
Both rely on a glorification of an imagined past to sell their message. Both expect corporations to follow their government's lead. Both demonize critics and opposition, would really like to punish them (from "lock her up" to poisoning and defenetration), block press access (though to very different degrees), undermine civil rights that they feel is at odds with the traditionalism they use to sell their message, and try to sow division between the people who belong and the people who don't.
They're doing so in very different ways of course, and of course Putin is much further down that road, but the similarities are there.
DeSantis is another example, which his book bans and rewriting education to suit his political message. And see how he treats Disney World for refusing to toe the line and daring to criticise him.
All of these are elements of fascism. That doesn't mean they're ready to start another holocaust (though Putin definitely seems to be, and some Trump supporters seem to be leaning that way too), but they're absolutely warning signs, and we should be wary about the direction they're taking us.
> Russia is pretty much full-blown fascist right now. Their propaganda ticks all the classic fascist talking points, and Putin is following much of Hitler's playbook.
I mean... Putin is literally a former KGB agent, and Russia was a totalitarian regime until 1991. So I would argue that the Soviet Union is much more relevant in this case, as well as the Russian Empire that preceded it. Russian history is already there, we don't need to go borrow history from Germany or Italy.
> DeSantis is another example, which his book bans and rewriting education to suit his political message.
This to me is a trivialization of "fascism". And again, there's already a local history available, because American religious conservatives had long tried to ban books and control education, such as the teaching of evolution, sex education, history, etc.
I'm not praising lack of precision, just noting it, because outside of technical fields language is never precise, and expecting it to be so is a sign of bad faith and pedantry. "Nazi" has generally referred to authoritarianism, racism and anti-semitism and more specifically the neo-Nazi movement for a very long time, and its spike in prominence with the right-wing shift in American politics post Trump isn't entirely coincidental. Context, as always, matters.
I'll damn hyperbole all day long, though, because I think people hide their malice behind it too often and it tends to poison the well.
