Toby Buckle and Greg Sargent write:

If you were on the verge of becoming the first trillionaire in human history, with the press breathlessly reporting on your every move, that would probably be your focus. Yet in the days before SpaceX’s initial public offering vaulted Musk into the 13-digit wealth club, the tech mogul’s mind was elsewhere—a white man in Belfast had been viciously stabbed by a Sudanese immigrant, and it provided Musk an opening.

In numerous social media postings, Musk highlighted the crime in starkly racist terms. Several nights of violent anti-immigrant pogroms orchestrated by fascist mobs followed. It was a telling confluence of events: Musk’s extraordinary wealth is fueled by investors’ bedazzlement at his techno-utopian schemes. But the Belfast conflagration revealed the other side of his future vision: his belief that the white populations of the world must violently subjugate the nonwhite enemy in what he sees as a multicontinental, Armageddon-like Total War for global racial supremacy.

As the bedlam raged in Belfast after the stabbing—resulting in far-right rioters torching cars, buses, and even the homes of immigrants—Musk egged it on. Using X—the platform he acquired precisely for moments like these—he posted locations for groups of rioters to congregate. He elevated vile, overtly fascist and white-supremacist exhortations. When one far-right British politician called for the prosecution of officials who “placed dangerous third world savages in our communities,” Musk replied: “This is the way.”

These developments graphically illustrate the future that Musk truly envisions. They also demonstrate that Musk will use his stratospheric wealth and influence to incite untold levels of global fascist violence going forward. Which leads to an unavoidable conclusion: At some point, friends of liberal democracy throughout the advanced democracies—including future liberal governments—will simply have to come together in a concerted and deliberate way to constrain Musk and all he’s unleashing. Whenever Democrats take back power in the United States, this must be squarely on the agenda.

In a very real sense, the fires in Belfast illuminate the emerging outlines of that coming struggle. Musk’s involvement in British politics has tracked with his growing fantasies about global race war. Last fall, he compared nonwhite immigrants in the U.K. to orcs—the dangerous, inhuman monsters from Lord of the Rings—and enthusiastically endorsed a tweet claiming: “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered.” As Musk has watched the anti-immigrant far right grow in the U.K., he has gravitated toward extreme versions of “great replacement theory,” ones that posit a far-reaching plot to violently eliminate whites or breed them out of existence entirely.

A coming-out moment for Musk came last September, when he spoke via video link to a “Unite the Kingdom” rally—a gathering of far-right and anti-immigrant groups organized by Tommy Robinson, a British white nationalist with a long history of thuggery. Musk promoted the event on X. He addressed a crowd of more than 100,000 people, warning of the dangers of multiculturalism and “uncontrolled migration.”

“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you,” Musk warned. “You either fight back, or you die.”

In the United States, Musk had already been experimenting with a consistent trope in fascist rhetoric: seizing on a crime committed by an individual member of a minority group and claiming that it shows the innate murderous tendencies of the group as a whole. The real claim here is that these isolated horrific acts “reveal” the whole minority group’s disguised genocidal intent toward white peoples—and suggest that this is why the group has deviously infiltrated white countries and communities.

Musk zealously adapted this to the U.K. context. In one case he suggested that “the gentlefolk of the English shires”—that is, the descendants of the imagined, unsullied Anglo-Saxon island existence mythologized by white nationalists everywhere—will be “brutally murdered” if the “tide of illegal immigration is not turned.”

With the Belfast stabbing, Musk hit paydirt. After a Sudanese man who’d legally sought asylum brutally mauled a white man, video of the attack rapidly circulated online, amplified by Musk. The perpetrator was swiftly arrested and charged, but that didn’t stop loud demands for “justice,” which actually meant collective retribution against all nonwhite and foreign-born residents. Rioters clashed with police and threw bricks. Hooded masked men roamed in large gangs, setting up roadblocks to check cars for immigrants. The Police Federation of Northern Ireland, hardly an overly woke institution, explicitly described the rioters as “fascist.”

Even as his trillion-dollar payday came together, Musk promoted a pamphlet calling for action against this supposed “invader attack on our people.” He amplified far-right politicians demanding retribution against “third world savages.” He posted a reminder of his September exhortation that “you either fight back, or you die.”

These were violent, fascist ethnic purges—or pogroms. As an Indian man who’s lived in the U.K. for 25 years told the BBC: “It was horrible. It was like a war zone. Everything was burning.” The man added: “I pay my taxes. I am British.” Yet he’s preparing to leave: Across Belfast, others are finding themselves forced to make similar decisions.

It’s instructive that amid the violence, Musk endorsed a call for “Reconquista,” an allusion to Christian military campaigns to retake the Iberian peninsula from Islamic forces. (Modern-day keyboard fascists have long rather pathetically imagined themselves to be akin to Charles Martel, who turned back the Muslims at Tours in 732.) And Musk boosted a call for the removal of millions from the U.K.

The turmoil has now subsided, and soon after, thousands demonstrated in Belfast against the pogroms. But nonetheless, Musk’s influence on events there must be reckoned with. While what transpired is not all about Musk—political violence in the region has deep roots, and many homegrown demagogues in the U.K. have demonized immigrants there—the riots demonstrated a real-world manifestation of the racial apocalypse Musk wants and may increasingly be in a position to summon into being. [Continue reading…]