Elon Musk Is a Threat to International Peace
Reading Time: 6 minutesThe Trump-Musk Interview Demonstrated Why Other Nations Despise Elon, The world’s richest man holds a dangerous amount of influence over countries whose political discourses still center on the platform once known as Twitter., Elon Musk and Donald Trump: T
Among the bits of nonsense that best buds Elon Musk and Donald Trump traded Monday night in their glitch-delayed audio conversation on X, one especially concerning remark from Musk stuck out as a key indicator of his far-right worldview.
‘I think it’s just worth emphasizing to listeners [the] immense importance of whether the United States president is intimidating or not intimidating and how much that matters to global security,’ Musk stated in response to Trump’s comments on the supposedly ‘environmentally friendly’ Keystone XL pipeline. ‘There’s some real tough characters out there. And if they don’t think the American president is tough, they will do what they want to do. And that puts the whole world in danger.’
Predictably, this spurred the former president to gush on with ridiculous claims about how he never would have ‘allowed’ Israel or Ukraine to have been attacked, and then ramble on about how ‘nuclear warming’ is a bigger threat than climate change, ultimately distracting from what Musk just said. But it’s worth taking stock of Musk’s sentiment on its own, and situating it within his behavior on the international stage over the past few weeks.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is certainly not wrong that any U.S. chief executive should be tough and resilient, particularly when facing off against adversaries who may wish to harm everyday Americans. But the kind of ‘tough’ and ‘intimidating’ stance Musk deems suitable in fact has darker, troubling implications for ‘global security’—and those go far outside his endorsement of Trump. There are plenty of good reasons why the European Commission formally expressed its concerns with the Trump-Musk X Space.
One person whom Musk would fancy as ‘tough’ and ‘intimidating,’ and who has forcibly injected himself into fraught international affairs, is … well, Musk himself. As the self-promoting overseer of X, he holds outsize influence over the countries whose political and electoral discourses still—for persistent lack of better alternatives—center on the text-based platform once known to them as Twitter.
One of those very nations, the United Kingdom, saw an ugly breakout of racist riots and immigrant terrorization earlier this month after three girls were horrifically stabbed to death in late July at a summer holiday class in Southport. The ensuing street violence was incited and encouraged by British social media users who falsely posted on X that the killer—in actuality a 17-year-old boy born in Wales—was a Muslim asylum-seeker. They even attempted to frame random, innocent people by sharing their names online, fueling even more hysteria. In the following days, Islamophobes, neo-Nazis, and myriad other bigots attacked mosques, migrant shelters, libraries, and immigrant-owned businesses across England and Northern Ireland, continuing their aggressive rampage until counterprotesters put up spirited resistance and law enforcement cracked down on the disorder.
The prosecution of these hate crimes, which has utilized ‘rapid sentencing’ to quickly arrest violent demonstrators and consign them to (mostly brief) jail sentences, has also kept social media users in its purview. One woman from Chester was arrested for claiming that someone different from the named suspect was responsible for the stabbings; a Facebook user who called for a mob attack on a Leeds hotel that housed migrants was likewise caught by the law, as was an X user who got three years and two months in prison for tweets ‘that called for mass deportation and for people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers,’ according to the Guardian.
The more public figures guilty of similar acts—Tommy Robinson, Douglas Murray, Andrew Tate—have elided such prosecution, however. That list includes Elon Musk, who quote-tweeted a ‘news’ graphic, mocked up by the fascist political party Britain First, falsely alleging that Prime Minister Keir Starmer was planning to build ‘detention centers’ on the Falkland Islands in order to house the rounded-up rioters. Musk later deleted his post without acknowledging his error, which had garnered nearly 1 million views—but that didn’t stop him from further poking his head into the issue.
In response to a right-wing commentator who tweeted the blatant lie that ‘mass migration and open borders’ were responsible for the violence, Musk declared that ‘Civil war is inevitable.’ He didn’t delete that one after the fact, nor did he take down his quote-tweet of the falsehood that ‘gangs of armed & masked Muslim men are rampaging through cities,’ adding only his limp, constant refrain that X’s Community Notes feature is good at countering misinformation. (It demonstrably isn’t.) Meanwhile, his racist memes kept coming and drew outraged responses from media commentators and even Starmer himself, who, alongside London’s Muslim mayor, called for tougher reforms to Britain’s existing digital regulations.
That’s an understandable impulse—especially since Elon Musk has restored the accounts of scurrilous wrongdoers who’d previously broken Twitter rules, while other social media giants, like Facebook and Instagram, are ill-advisedly relaxing their content-moderation standards.
However, Musk and his hateful cronies do have one point: There are legitimate concerns around the ways the U.K. regulates free speech, especially when it comes to journalism and protests of any ideology. (Ask the climate activists who were sentenced to even longer jail terms for hosting a nonviolent rally on a roadway.) The line between a social media post that fuels actual violence and one that’s abhorrent but does not call for or lead to explicit action is a tricky one, and there are excellent reasons why U.S. policies around hate speech require a high bar for punitive action. (Ask all the British politicians who’ve been investigated and disciplined because their compassion for Palestinians was disingenuously conflated with antisemitism.)
Still, if Starmer and British pundits are vocally concerned about the impacts Musk is having on their side of the pond, there’s very good reason for them to be. They’ve pinpointed correctly that Musk, in his perch as far-right tech megatitan and now social media network owner, has much too large an influence over world affairs—to the severe detriment of the very law and order and ‘global security’ Musk believes to be so imperative.
There are, unfortunately, many other countries that now have to pay attention to Musk’s deranged online rants due to his widespread stranglehold over essential tech infrastructure—and his inescapable ties to the U.S. government. Last year, a bombshell report from the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow detailed the troubling extent to which Biden administration officials have to pamper Musk in light of SpaceX’s multiple federal contracts—including, most urgently, for Starlink satellite internet services needed by Ukrainian soldiers fending off Russian aggressors. His erratic statements on the Russia-Ukraine War have never granted confidence that he will continue to support this infrastructure for the Eastern European country, or even for the civilians suffering in Gaza, in light of his buddy-buddy relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Musk is also doing his damndest to ensure the racist, antisemitic ‘Great Replacement Theory’ sticks internationally. Late last year, he made a fearmongering visit to the U.S. southern border, helping to stoke the rampant anti-immigrant sentiment that has led federal and regional governments in both America and Mexico to install policies that have kept migrants and asylum-seekers—including children—in inhumane conditions, wasting public resources on ineffective cruelty.
Even Musk’s cast-off remarks regarding countries he’s not so entwined with are likely to promote harm. He was just one of many far-right bullies to baselessly refer to Algerian Olympic competitor (and gold medalist) Imane Khelif as a transgender man trying to infiltrate women’s boxing, leading Khelif to file a legal complaint in Paris that called Musk out specifically. Two months ago, he claimed that the policies of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party ‘don’t sound extremist’—even though members of that party have repeatedly deployed literal Nazi rhetoric and have even been accused of carrying out espionage reconnaissance for governments hostile to Germany. In 2022, Musk also cheered on the minority of Canadian truckers who laid siege to Ottawa in opposition to their government’s COVID-vaccination mandates, even as those striking truckers were alleged to have beaten and otherwise harmed Ottawans.
Just earlier this year, Musk went on a tweeting crusade against a Brazilian Supreme Court justice after the judiciary had ordered the government to block several X accounts for spreading electoral misinformation, which had culminated in an attempted coup from supporters of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Again, legitimate concerns over Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ actions led to something much darker and more alarming, with Musk piggybacking on conspiracist Michael Shellenberger to claim ‘De Moraes interfered with the Brazil election’ that ousted Bolsonaro—even though Shellenberger was exposed in Brazil for blatantly lying about Moraes’ moves and was forced to apologize for it. (Musk has continued to carry water for the democracy-undermining Bolsonaro family.)
It’s not hard to see where all this is going. Elon Musk thinks a ‘tough’ and ‘intimidating’ figurehead on the international stage must run interference for far-right disruptors in other countries and cite outright, unapologetic lies as justification. If he’s causing this much trouble now, imagine how much more of a threat he could pose to ‘global security’ as a close lackey to Donald Trump, should the former president win in November.
Ref: slate
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