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Commemorating Fall of Fascism in Spain, PM Sánchez Warns Against Musk Political Interference
"Forgetting the mistakes of the past is the first step towards repeating them again."
Jan 09, 2025
Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk's decision to wade into the political battles of several European countries did not go unnoticed by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who used a Wednesday event marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as an opportunity to warn against Musk's recent commentary.
Without naming Musk, Sánchez warned that the billionaire Tesla CEO's leadership of an "international reactionary" movement is a threat "that should challenge all of us who believe in democracy."
The Spanish leader spoke days after Musk—an ally and megadonor to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump who he's selected to co-lead the proposed Department of Government Efficiency—commented on an article that stated foreign nationals in Catalonia are disproportionately convicted for sexual assault, writing, "Wow" in response.
"Foreign nationals are neither better nor worse than Spanish citizens in terms of criminality," Sánchez said in response to Musk's commentary, following his remarks at the event Wednesday by rebuking the man he referred to as "the richest man on the planet."
He pointed to Musk's recent perceived interference in Germany's upcoming snap elections, which are scheduled for February. Musk has written an op-ed in support of Alternative for Germany (AfD), an anti-immigration right-wing party that the German domestic intelligence agency has designated a "suspected extremist" group.
"You don't have to be of a particular ideology, left, center, or right, to look with sadness, with great sadness and also with terror, at the dark years of Franco's regime and fear that this regression will be repeated."
One candidate aligned with AfD said last year that Nazi paramilitaries under Adolf Hitler's regime were "not all criminals."
Musk, said the Spanish prime minister on Wednesday, "openly attacks our institutions, stirs up hatred, and openly calls for the support of the heirs of Nazism in Germany's upcoming elections."
"You don't have to be of a particular ideology, left, center, or right, to look with sadness, with great sadness and also with terror, at the dark years of Franco's regime and fear that this regression will be repeated," he said at the commemoration at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. "Forgetting the mistakes of the past is the first step towards repeating them again."
Musk's recent commentary on Spain played on similar narratives to those he's recently pushed in the United Kingdom, attacking Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Labour Party leaders for allegedly not being aggressive enough in prosecuting child sexual exploitation cases involving suspects who were originally from Pakistan.
Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have all spoken out against Musk's recent foray into European politics and accused him of spreading disinformation, with Scholz telling one media outlet, "Don't feed the troll."
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Wednesday called on the European Commission to protect its member states against political interference by Musk.
"Either the European Commission applies with the greatest firmness the laws that we have given ourselves to protect our public space, or it does not do so and then it will have to agree to give back the capacity to do so to the E.U. member states," Barrot told France Inter radio. "We have to wake up."
Members of European Parliament on Wednesday called on the European Commission to investigate whether the social media platform X, which Musk owns, can legally promote Musk's posts on the app under the E.U.'s Digital Services Act. Last year, the tech news site Platformer reported the X algorithm has been reconfigured to amplify Musk's comments.
The pressure from MEPs and recent comments from European leaders came as Musk prepared to host a livestream conversation with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X Thursday.
"I don't understand why people believe that free speech is not affected by the concentration of opinion-making power in the hands of the few," MEP Damian Boeselager of the pan-European Volt party, a candidate for the Bundestag in the German election, told The Guardian. "For me, that has rather illiberal, autocratic tendencies, rather than liberal tendencies, when one voice is so much more powerful than all the others."
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Beware Elon Musk and His Attempts to Steer the World Toward the Neo-Fascist Right
It will not be the first time in history that someone is seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although it may be the first time that so much of it is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.
Jan 07, 2025
Elon Musk repeatedly asserts, without evidence, that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer covered up the abuses of young girls by gangs comprised largely of British Pakistani men, in cases that date back to before 2010 when Starmer was head of Britain’s public prosecutions.
“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for six years,” Musk posted to the top of his account on Friday. “Starmer must go, and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
In fact, Starmer, who heads the Labour government, did not cover up abuses. Instead, he brought the first case against an Asian grooming gang and drafted new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with cases of sexual exploitation of children, including the mandatory reporting of child sex offenses.
But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be President of the United States.
Musk also calls Jess Phillips, the Labour government’s under secretary for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, a “rape genocide apologist” because she pushed back on calls for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester.
In fact, Phillips, who has long campaigned for women’s rights, has called for a local investigation by Oldham authorities rather than the central government. Women’s rights supporters say Musk’s labeling Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” is threatening her safety.
Yesterday, Starmer warned publicly that Musk’s baseless accusations “crossed a line,” adding that “once we lose the anchor that truth matters, in the robust debate that we must have, then we are on a very slippery slope.”
Musk’s Global Reach
Musk’s lies about the left-wing British government and his support for far-right groups are parts of an emerging pattern. Musk is also:
- Boosting the far-right party in Germany with neo-Nazi ties, known as Alternative for Germany (AfD), before elections early next month. Musk signaled his support for AfD in mid-December, writing in a post on X that “only the AfD can save Germany.” He also penned an op-ed in a German newspaper recently, describing the party as the “last spark of hope” for the country. Musk is planning an online “discussion” on X with the AfD’s leader and candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, amplifying the party’s neo-Nazi ideology.
- Attacking the Italian judiciary for curbing Italian Prime Giorgia Meloni’s hardline anti-asylum immigration policies. Musk has met regularly with Meloni, who has called him a friend, and appeared at a youth event for Meloni’s party.
- Urging support for Britain’s far-right MP Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform U.K. Party. Musk says he might donate upward of 100 million pounds ($127 million) to Farage’s group.
- Demanding Britain “free Tommy Robinson,” the far-right founder of the English Defence League—an Islamophobic nationalist group—and anti-immigrant agitator who, Musk charges, is in jail for “telling the truth.” In fact, Robinson is in jail because he was found to have defamed a teenage Syrian refugee and then defied a British court order by repeating the false claims. (Robinson has been previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud, and traveling on a false passport to the United States, where he has sought to establish ties with right-wing groups.)
- Allowing on X inflammatory lies of a kind that incited anti-immigrant riots in Britain last July, following the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport. After Britain arrested more than 30 people, Musk condemned the government for what he called an attack on free speech.
- Calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau an “insufferable tool” over comments Trudeau made in support of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, and predicted he “won’t be in power for much longer.” (Yesterday, Trudeau announced he will resign.)
Where Musk Is Getting This Power
As the richest person in the world, politicians everywhere now recognize his capacity to pour money into their parties and political campaigns, as he did by investing a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected.
He also owns X, formerly Twitter, which (as of December 2024) has 619 million monthly active users. He has manipulated X’s algorithm to boost his own posts, which now reach 210 million.
But Musk’s real power these days comes from his proximity to and presumed influence over Donald Trump, soon to be President of the United States.
Musk has hardly left Trump’s side since the election, meaning that Musks’s opinions (amplified by his social media platform) cannot be ignored by politicians around the world who are trying to decipher Trump’s opinions.
One prominent member of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party is asking that Germany determine “whether [Musk’s] repeated disrespect, defamation, and interference in the election campaign were also expressed in the name of the new U.S. government.”
This combination—the richest person in the world, owner and manipulator of the biggest political messaging platform in the world, with direct influence over Trump—puts Musk in the position of being able to move other nations toward the neo-fascist right.
Why Musk Is Doing This
Not for money. As it is, he has far more than any human can utilize.
Partly, it’s ideological. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” which puts him at odds with Europe’s and Canada’s aggressive responses to hate speech online. (Britain, Musk says, “is turning into a police state.”)
But the roots of Musk’s neo-fascism probably go deeper.
I am no psychoanalyst, but I imagine that as an immigrant from South Africa, Musk is especially triggered by poor people of color moving into white nations. His father smuggled raw emeralds and had them cut in Johannesburg.
Part of his shift to the radical right also comes from Musk’s transgender child. As Musk told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson, “I lost my son, essentially,” claiming she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” (Musk’s daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, now 20, toldNBC News that Musk was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine.)
On X, Musk continuously criticizes transgender rights, including medical treatments for trans-identifying minors, and the use of pronouns if they are different from what would be used at birth. He has promoted anti-trans content and called for arresting people who provide trans care to minors. Last July, Musk said he was pulling his businesses out of California to protest a new state law that bars schools from requiring that trans kids be outed to their parents. After Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in 2022, he rolled back the app’s protections for trans people, including a ban on using birth names (known as “deadnames” for transgender people).
Perhaps the major reason for Musk’s recent effort to push other nations to the neo-fascist right is his newfound thirst for right-wing global politics. After effectively (at least in Musk’s mind) winning the presidency for Trump by spending more than $250 million and unleashing a maelstrom of pro-Trump and anti-Harris lies over X, he now seeks even more of an authoritarian rush.
It will not be the first time in history that someone is seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although it may be the first time that so much of it is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.
What Should Be Done About Musk?
For the time being, particularly under Trump, there is little that we in America can do to constrain Musk except by boycotting Tesla and X.
Canada and Britain and other European nations, meanwhile, should, at the very least:
- Enact laws and regulations to prohibit non-citizens (like Musk) from financing activities that could affect their elections.
- Maintain, if not strengthen, laws and rules against hate speech, and ensure that they are applied to social media companies, such as Musk’s X.
- Refuse to contract with Musk’s Space X and its Starlink satellite division, or with Musk’s other corporations (Tesla and the Boring Company).
- Disengage from any joint ventures or technology transfers involving Musk, including xAI, his artificial intelligence company.
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Musk Slammed for Spreading Disinformation as He Seeks to Boost Far Right in Europe
Musk wants countries including Germany "to be weakened and plunge into chaos," said one critic.
Jan 06, 2025
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday was the latest European leader to lambast Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and top adviser to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, for his meddling in political battles in Europe after he exerted enormous influence over the U.S. elections.
In a foreign policy speech in Paris, Macron expressed disbelief that Musk, who owns the social media platform X and has used it to boost far-right ideologies in the U.S., would now "support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany."
Displaying an apparent "sense of having the world as his stage," as Jackson James of the German Marshall Fund toldThe Hill, Musk wrote in an op-ed at the German magazine Welt am Sonntag last week that "as someone who has invested significantly in Germany's industrial and technological landscape, I believe I have earned the right to speak candidly about its political direction."
According to Musk, that direction should move toward Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party that last year included a candidate who asserted the Nazi paramilitaries were "not all criminals."
The party is virulently ant-immigration and has been designated by the German domestic intelligence service as a "suspected extremist" organization. Authorities also warned last month that other states could attempt to influence the country's snap elections in February through disinformation, cyberattacks, and other means.
As German voters prepare to go to the polls, AfD has about 20% support in recent opinion polls, compared to an alliance between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), whose support stands at 31%. All the country's political parties have said they would not form a coalition with AfD.
In his op-ed Musk invoked the sexual orientation of AfD co-chair Alice Weidel, suggesting the party isn't on the far right.
"The description of AfD as far-right is made obviously false simply by noting that Alice Weidel, the party leader has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka!" wrote Musk. "Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please."
Lars Klingbeil, leader of German Chancellor Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party, compared Musk to Russian President Vladimir Putin, tellingFunke media group that "both want to influence our elections and are deliberately supporting the AfD, the enemies of democracy."
"They want Germany to be weakened and plunge into chaos," Klingbeil said.
Musk's commentary on Germany's upcoming elections has tended toward vulgar, with the SpaceX CEO responding to accusations of meddling by calling Scholz "Chancellor Oaf Schitz or whatever his name is."
When a researcher in Finland said on Sunday that Musk is "rapidly becoming the largest spreader of disinformation in human history," the top adviser to the incoming president of the United States replied: "F U retard."
In the United Kingdom—where Musk has significant business interests, as he does in Germany—the entrepreneur last week boosted the far-right Reform Party, adding days later that the organization's leader, Member of Parliament Nigel Farage, "doesn't have what it takes."
Musk met with Farage and Reform treasurer Nick Candy last month at Trump's Florida estate, and Candy told The Financial Times recently that Musk could be a billionaire donor to the party through his electric vehicle company, Tesla, which provides grid batteries in the U.K.
As he's promoted Reform—which opposes "uncontrolled immigration" and would impose drastic cuts to "wasteful government spending"—Musk has taken aim at the center-left Labour Party.
On Sunday Musk took to his social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, to ask whether the U.S. should "liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government."
Musk attacked Jess Phillips, parliamentary undersecretary of state for safeguarding, as a "rape genocide apologist" for denying requests for the Home Office to open an inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the town of Oldham.
Phillips should "be in prison," Musk said—a comment that Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the Labour Party said amounted to the "poison of the far right" and led to serious threats against Phillips.
Musk accused Starmer of being "complicit in the rape of Britain" by allegedly failing to confront a child sexual abuse scandal more than a decade ago in northern England. Starmer defended his record as the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, as well as Phillips'.
“And those attacking Jess Phillips, whom I'm proud to call a colleague and a friend, on protecting victims—Jess Phillips has done 1,000 times more than they've even dreamt about when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse throughout her entire career," said Starmer on Monday. "And when I was chief prosecutor for five years, I tackled that head-on, because I could see what was happening, and that's why I reopened cases that have been closed and supposedly finished."
The prime minister added that "those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they're not interested in victims. They're interested in themselves."
Ed Davey, leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats Party, said Monday that "people have had enough of Elon Musk interfering with our country's democracy when he clearly knows nothing about Britain."
"It's time to summon the U.S. ambassador to ask why an incoming U.S. official is suggesting the U.K. government should be overthrown," said Davey. "This dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric is further proof that the U.K. can't rely on the Trump administration."
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