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white nationalism
Elon Musk's Shiny New Dystopia Is Just White Supremacy in Cyberpunk Dress
The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C. by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from the politics of hatred and racialism.
Mar 08, 2025
The opening weeks of the second Trump administration have produced daily headlines that read—no, this is not hyperbole!—like science fiction. The spectacle of a South African tech billionaire and his cronies staging a 21st-century cybercoup with the acquiescence of an aging lunatic of a president beggars belief. Elon Musk has given vast powers to young, even teenaged plenipotentiaries like Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, 19, who had earlier been employed by Musk’s brain-chip project Neuralink and has now been made a special adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and the Department of Homeland Security. The Trumpian lists of forbidden words and concepts have reminded some observers of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
High Technology and Squalor
Insights into our present crisis, however, are also offered by science fiction novels that, over the decades, imagined artificial intelligence, brain-Internet interfacing, the decline of the state in the face of tech corporations, and the development of largescale digital systems and ways they might be hacked. Such works coalesced into the cyberpunk school of sci-fi writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Heirs to that tradition like novelist William Gibson may now be seen as the reluctant prophets of—yes!—Elon Musk’s invention of a new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE for the second Trump era.
Cyberpunk has especially resonated in South Africa, its themes explored by authors like Lauren Beukes, whose 2008 novel Moxyland is set in a futuristic Cape Town that labors “under a tyrannical and vigilant government and media.” As she explained, “I’m always writing from that perspective of growing up under what was a utopia for me and a repressive violent state that destroyed lives and futures for Black people when the racist government wasn’t actively murdering them.” Cyberpunk themes have also deeply shaped video games like Canadian-South African director Neill Blomkamp’s Off the Grid, in which Mega Corporations are pitted against one another in a contest for dominance.
Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health.
The racist tinge to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ongoing hacking of the government should also bring to mind Blomkamp’s 2009 “first contact” movie, District 9, which highlighted the determination of white nationalists to cannibalize the resources of populations who had been marginalized precisely to make them vulnerable enough to be looted. With its simultaneous depiction of high-tech wonders and social squalor and its foregrounding of corporate rather than state power, District 9 also has significant cyberpunk themes.
On January 31s, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted, leaks from the Treasury Department revealed that high-ranking government employees were mounting resistance to ad hoc DOGE head Elon Musk’s demands that his team of young hackers be given entry to the financial-transaction systems managed by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). That’s the unit that makes virtually all government payments, control of which amounts to control of the government. It soon became clear that DOGE operatives had indeed been given authorization to access BFS platforms. As a result, Elon Musk, the CE0 of three private corporations, has gained the ability to oversee government financial transactions (with no questions asked about how he might use the information obtained to enrich himself or harm competitors).
By mid-February it was clear that one of Musk’s acolytes, 25-year-old Marko Elez, had for some time obtained overwrite privileges at the BFS—power, that is, to override the entire federal budget, if he (and Musk) wished to. Elez briefly felt he had to resign due to past messages on social media boasting of his racism, including his advocacy for “Indian hate.” His cause was nevertheless adopted by Vice President JD Vance (whose wife Usha is, ironically enough, from India). For right-wing movements, whipping up hatred of racialized minorities is crucial to getting into and staying in power, and disciplining Elez would have undermined Vance’s project—in comparison to which his wife’s honor is apparently of little interest to him. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Elez was soon reinstated.
Overwrite Privileges
Musk maintains that he’s reducing government waste by capturing the Treasury Department infrastructure and arbitrarily firing large numbers of government workers. He essentially abolished by fiat the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main government distributor of aid globally, which he bizarrely characterized as a “criminal” organization and the employees of which he called “worms.” He abruptly cut off its field agents in dangerous areas like the Congolese capital Kinshasha from their email access and funds to escape a potentially hazardous situation.
Nor was that agency the only object of his ire. In his view, vast swathes of the government are unnecessary and wasteful. No matter that his own companies have fed from the public trough to the tune of nearly $21 billion dollars since 2008 and his DOGE team has been enormously wasteful and dangerous. For example, they fired hundreds of personnel at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee the country’s nuclear arsenal. When the Gen Z DOGE ninjas finally thought better of it, they couldn’t immediately rehire the experts since they didn’t have their personal emails and had already abruptly closed their government accounts.
As though intent on causing serial catastrophes for the United States, Trump and his crew then began firing employees of the Federal Aviation Agency without whom air traffic controllers say they cannot do their work. They appear to have done keyword searches for “probationary” employees of the agency whom they let go en masse, unaware that the term has a technical meaning in government. A newly promoted FAA employee with a high level of irreplaceable technical knowledge would still be “probationary” for one month.
And here’s the reality of our governmental moment in the second age of Donald Trump: Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After all, every $100 million of funding for NIH-supported research (often at universities) generates some 76 patents. In turn, such breakthroughs can generate as much as $600 million in continuing research and development funds. Cuts to overhead at universities hosting NIH research threaten to bankrupt the country’s network of unparalleled research universities, setting the U.S. farther behind in a race to innovate in which China has already taken the lead. The DOGE cowboys may tell themselves that private industry will take up the slack, but (bluntly put) that’s a libertarian fairy tale.
Cyber Capital
The tech-bro oligarchy’s rise to power is intimately connected with profound changes in America’s political economy. This country has always had a capitalist system, but it has taken radically different forms over time. Each of those forms has had a strong racial dimension. Today, cyber capital seems in the process of becoming dominant, driven by the internet and large language models (misnamed “artificial intelligence”). The digital economy now represents 12% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than industry, and from 2017 to 2021 it grew seven times as fast as the rest of the economy. It is also giving a fillip to American trade. In 2022, government data indicated that “while U.S. real GDP grew by 1.9%, the U.S. digital economy real value added grew by 6.3% driven primarily by growth in software and telecommunication services.”
This development was foreseen by cyberpunk authors like Gibson whose 1984 novel Neuromancer is soon to be an Apple TV serial. His hacker hero, Henry Dorsett Case, takes on the fabulously wealthy Tessier-Ashpool SA, a clan-corporation with its own space station fighting the attempt of an artificial intelligence entity, Wintermute, to become autonomous. An amoral gun-for-hire and adrenaline junkie, Case gradually discovers that he’s actually working for that AI entity, which could be seen as a symbol for oppressed, non-autonomous workers or minorities, and is coerced into helping it. (The Cyberpunk genre often depicts a dystopian world in which the dispossessed, ranging from Haitians to immigrant Mongolians, form defiant subcultures never quite penetrated by white corporate digital power.)
The Ultimate in White Privilege
It has been argued that digital capitalism is intricately interlinked with whiteness as an ideology, serving to perpetuate a racial hierarchy that evolved over the past four centuries. Such a historical interconnection between whiteness and technology functioned as both a tool and a rationale for European colonial expansion. The technology-driven ability to ransack the rest of the world for its wealth turbocharged Europe and North America in the early modern and modern periods. In some instances, as was true with slavery in the United States, Black workers were simply kidnapped and made to work for no pay. The total value of the enslaved in this country on the eve of the Civil War has been estimated at as much as $3.7 billion, among the country’s biggest capital assets at the time.
Elsewhere, instead of outright slavery, an external system of oppressive colonialism was established to extract value from the colonial world for the metropole. South Africa was a classic example of how a white settler-colonial capitalist class from the Netherlands profited from the utter exploitation of Black labor. Consider it no accident that Elon Musk came from South Africa or that such a system, even after it was ended, gave birth to the “PayPal Mafia” of “libertarian billionaires” that has now taken over the U.S government (though they sold PayPal to Ebay in 2002 and no longer own shares in that company).
Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination.
Elon Musk grew up with the ultimate in white privilege, for which he is clearly nostalgic. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, for instance, his Johannesburg-based father Errol “worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories;” held political office in South Africa while it was still an apartheid state; and opposed the very principle of one person, one vote. Black South Africans were excluded from the university Errol Musk attended, had their movements restricted by pass laws, could not shop in white establishments, and had no right to vote.
In 1971, when Elon was born in Pretoria, Black South Africans earned, on average, about a sixth of what the average white worker did. And keep in mind that his father Errol wasn’t even the most hardline supporter of the old regime in his family. He viewed his in-laws, the family of Elon’s mother Maye, as far worse. And indeed, Joshua Haldeman, Elon’s maternal grandfather, a Canadian Nazi, moved to South Africa in 1950 because he liked its apartheid racial segregation and ruling white nationalism. No wonder that, today, his grandson Elon is a supporter of Germany’s neo-Nazi party the AfD.
Peter Thiel, Musk’s comrade-in-arms among the tech-bro oligarchs, is from a German family that moved to the South African town of Swakopmund, which had a substantial German population—many of them unreformed Nazis who idolized Hitler. In the 1980s, at Stanford University, Thiel allegedly proclaimed that “apartheid works.” He now serves as the chief ventriloquist for Vice President JD Vance, hence Vance’s recent attacks on any European attempts to curb racist speech.
District 9
What a resegregated world would look like was imagined as science fiction allegory in Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9. In it, an alien spaceship, perhaps disabled, parks over Johannesburg in 1981. Its passengers descend and live in a ramshackle slum, District 9. After a while, the government decides to exile them to a settlement outside the city, hiring Multinational United, a private corporation, for the purpose. It begins evicting the aliens, smeared as “prawns,” brutalizing them and even performing experiments on them of the kind once used by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The smarmy white Afrikaner Wikus van de Merwe starts as the corporation’s point man in executing that forcible relocation but becomes infected with alien DNA and begins transforming into one of them. Hoping to reverse that phenomenon, he aids an alien who adopts the human moniker Christopher Johnson. Johnson attempts to return to the mother ship and pilot it to the home world, having discovered to his horror that his people are being experimented on. The film is prescient in highlighting how contemporary capitalist states increasingly view immigration as a problem rather than an asset, how xenophobia drives violence and displacement, and how the role of private corporations in policing citizenship is on the rise.
The South African mafia and their fellow travelers are conducting a counterrevolution. Developments like the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the United States and the 1994 end of apartheid rule in South Africa both represented an international wave of reaction against racist politics. Such reforms made it distinctly harder for politicians and businessmen to gain and keep power by stigmatizing people of color and representing them as a “terrorist” threat to whites. The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C. by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from such a politics of hatred and racialism.
It should be underlined that birthplace isn’t destiny. Many South African whites, Beukes and Blomkamp among them, are committed to democracy and determined to make their multiracial country work. Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination. Sadly, we have yet to see any of the libertarian racists now in charge of the U.S. government grow a conscience as Blomkamp’s Wikus did.
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Be Terrified Trump Is Using the Same Bonaparte Quote as This Right-Wing Mass Murderer
This declaration by Trump was no passing joke or meme. He wants us all to see it. To hear it. To know that he means it. He’s shoving it in our faces. Pounding it out on the keyboard. Declaring it to the world. Quoting Anders Breivik.
Feb 17, 2025
The 32-year-old Norwegian considered himself a deep thinker and a big fan of the rightwing and Russian propaganda which argued western civilization was rotting from within because of multiculturalism, empowered women, racial/religious minorities, and liberalism. Putting pen to paper, he wrote:
“When I first started blogging I was concerned with how we could ‘fix the system.’ I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the system cannot be fixed, and perhaps shouldn’t be fixed. Not only does it have too many enemies, it also has too many internal contradictions.
“If we define the ‘system’ as mass immigration from alien cultures, globalism, multiculturalism and suppression of free speech in the name of ‘tolerance,’ then this is going to collapse. It’s inevitable.
“The goal of Western survivalists — and that’s what we are — should not be to ‘fix the system,’ but to be mentally and physically prepared for its collapse, and to develop coherent answers to what went wrong and prepare to implement the necessary remedies when the time comes.
“We need to seize the window of opportunity, and in order to do so, we need to define clearly what we want to achieve.”
After writing over 1500 pages describing how it’s the essential duty of every white man in the world to marginalize or even kill as many non-white non-Christians as possible, Anders Breivik set off a bomb in Oslo’s Government Quarter, killing eight people.
He then drove to Utøya, an island in Tyrifjorden where the Norwegian Social Democratic party’s youth organization, the Workers’ Youth League (AUF), held their summer camp. There he used a semiautomatic rifle to kill another sixty-nine people, most in their teens or early twenties. He shot and wounded another 41 mostly young people, leaving many with life-changing injuries.
The epigraph to the paragraphs cited above was the polestar of Breivik’s philosophy, one he’d learned from studying the writings and lives of his heroes: Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte. He opened the chapter with it at the top of the page, apart from all the other text:
“He who saves his country, violates no law.”
The phrase was most recently quoted three weeks ago — on January 24, 2024 — by El Salvador’s notoriously violent and lawbreaking President Nayib Bukele, who also tweeted: “He who saves his country violates no law.”
Napoleon overthrew the Directory in 1799, naming himself as First Consul, and then declared himself Emperor in 1804 with those same words: “Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi.”
Emperors like Napoleon and dictators like Bukele don’t bother with trivial details like obeying the law. They rule by decree. Write it down, put your signature on it, and boom, it’s now the law of the land.
That was also Breivik’s hope for the Scandinavian countries: throw off the yoke of the “globalist” EU and embrace a racist strongman to lead the continent into an era of whites-only paradise. Replace “the system” of democracy with a white supremacist Christo-fascist oligarchy.
Which is why it’s so troubling that Trump tweeted the same Napoleonic phrase that Breivik made famous. The phrase every white supremacist has memorized, along with the fourteen words and the number 88 as code for “Heil Hitler.”
It would be a mistake at this point to think that when Trump quotes people like Breivik he’s just trolling us: People are now dying all over the world because a half-billion dollars’ worth of USAID food is rotting in storage; millions have lost access to AIDS drugs that were keeping them alive; children in cancer drug trials have been cut off from lifesaving medication; and federal workers who thought Civil Service would protect them are now on the verge of homelessness.
He means it. And for three weeks he’s been acting on his words, largely with impunity.
So long as he’s “saving the country,” he argues, he’s “violating no law.” It’s why he’s defying court orders right now to eject Musk’s teenage hackers from the Treasury Department or restart NIH and USAID funding.
And, truth be told, six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have already ratified the White House’s new American dictator doctrine with the Trump v US decision last July, saying that if the president breaks the law while executing “official acts,” he’s immune from criminal prosecution for the crime.
He just gets away with it. As long as he’s saving the country, he violates no law. Don’t even bother going after him, the Republicans on the Supreme Court said; it simply won’t succeed.
It’s probably why Trump is now talking about running for a third term — perhaps even pulling a Putin and running for VP with a figurehead for president — because, like most dictators throughout history, he knows that the minute he’s no longer in power he’ll be facing prison.
This declaration by Trump was no passing joke or meme. He posted it both on Truth Social and on Xitter.
He wants us all to see it.
To hear it.
To know that he means it.
He’s shoving it in our faces. Pounding it out on the keyboard. Declaring it to the world. Quoting Anders Breivik.
And perhaps not just on his own behalf. Kyle Clark, a reporter for 9News Denver, believes it’s a shout-out to the armed insurrectionists Trump recently pardoned:
“As a journalist who covers extremism at the local level, I think it’s a mistake to view Trump’s Napoleonic statement as solely about presidential power.
“Consider if it’s interpreted as a wink and a nod for any extremist to act outside the law to ‘save’ the country as they see fit.”
Time to start killing liberals? Harassing queer people? Burning down the homes of undocumented immigrants?
After all, the rightwing gangs in Russia and Hungary enthusiastically do all these things with the tacit approval of Putin and Orbán.
And now Trump is doubling down; yesterday he retweeted a rightwinger’s message that he could defy the courts if he chose to because he is “saving the country.”
And his fellow billionaire, Elon Musk, is burning through our federal government like a California wildfire.
TS Eliot was wrong: sometimes the world does end with a bang rather than a whimper…
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7 Rules for Narrative Discipline in the Time of Trump
We need to focus on helping people to see that the current administration is not on their side, to see the damage being done, and to see that there are alternative policies that actually would meet their needs.
Jan 31, 2025
The next period in U.S. politics will be won on the battlefield of narratives. The recent presidential election was lost on that battlefield.
As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is always pointing out, the American people support progressive positions on many issues: Medicare for all, funding education, taxing the rich, gun control. And yet those were not issues in the recent election. Winning elections will involve creating and disseminating narratives that speak to those who don’t always already vote for Democrats.
Our country is roughly divided into three groups. First are those who have fully bought into the MAGA narrative, often for reasons having to do with white nationalism and a politics of resentment. As white cultural hegemony is declining and people feel a loss of a sense of themselves as the center of our national identity, few in this population are likely to be moved by anything our side does.
We are living in a time of an epistemological crisis, where it is very difficult to keep a clear sense of what is actually going on in our world.
Then there is the third of the population who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris. That is a wide-ranging group made up of people who truly believe in the neoliberal agenda of the mainstream corporate wing of the Democratic Party, people who believe in “the system” and wanted to save it from fascism, and those in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and on the left who voted pragmatically against U.S. President Donald Trump. That third votes reliably and always for Democrats.
Finally, there is the third who didn’t vote for president in the recent election, or who might have voted for either party, but who are not entrenched in their support. Many of them are against “the system” and don’t like either major party. Some see both parties as catering to the rich, to the global capitalist elite, or to the military-industrial complex. Many don’t vote because the whole election conversation doesn’t speak to them in ways they find compelling. That is the population that needs to be focused on if we are to defeat the right at the ballot box.
And winning them requires that we have narratives that speak to their interests and concerns. We need to engage with media in ways that don’t just flatter our own sense of righteousness, but rather that engage people in that moveable third.
Our opponents are very effective at using narrative and social media. Look at the TikTok war. Trump started it as a piece of anti-China rhetoric. Democrats and Republicans worked dutifully to come up with bipartisan legislation to ban the popular app. Then as the new administration was about to come into power the president said he would save TikTok. Users of the app got a menacing message saying it would go dark in the U.S. Then they got one saying that Trump had saved it. Now millions of people in the anti-system third of the electorate have Trump to thank for something tangible in their lives.
Similarly, I expect that as soon as the immigration raids continue, they will get a lot of publicity. People who care about immigrants will be horrified and heartbroken by that news. People on the other side will see the raids as a victory. And forgotten will be that immigration raids happened regularly under the Biden administration as a routine part of mainstream policy. But that won’t matter. The new administration will be seen as doing something bold to rid our country of people who have been vilified by the right and ignored by the liberal mainstream.
Immigration is one issue where progressives are deeply out of step with the mainstream. It is probably one of the biggest narrative failures of the recent election. Rather than reminding people that immigrants contribute positively to the country, that U.S. foreign policy and the climate crisis make people’s home countries unlivable, or even, on the anti-immigrant side, that former President Joe Biden had cracked down on immigration in his last year in office, Democrats rolled over and allowed the scapegoating narrative to take over.
And in mainstream and social media it was worse. The vicious and slanderous story told against legal immigrants who helped revitalize Springfield, Ohio was repeated over and over in the mainstream liberal media and on the comedy shows. In mocking its slander, liberals spread its vicious images and associations further. Some on our side tried but did not have any breakthrough narratives about the positive impact that Haitian immigrants have had on their community, and our country as a whole.
Even when we spread our outrage at the absurd statements of the current administration, we can inadvertently feed their power. The president’s absurd statements are compelling. We love to hate them. And that is why they exist. They feed the sense that the president can say and do whatever he wants and is unconstrained by any social structure, history, norms, or common sense. That image of him as transgressive actually enhances his power. And, the more we are outraged, the more those opposed to us take joy in the fact that someone has “owned the libs.” While absurd statements are candy for the outrage centers of our brains, they are distractions from the things that actually shift the balance of power and resources and impact people’s lives in this country.
We are living in a time of an epistemological crisis, where it is very difficult to keep a clear sense of what is actually going on in our world. Our shared sense of reality and ethics has been brutally undermined by the current tech-oligopoly dominated social media hellscape. When we focus on the absurdities and illusions rather than on real things that impact people’s lives, we are feeding the trolls.
The first few days of the administration being in power saw much attention to the president’s executive orders. I was surprised that in my feed there was very little on the overturning of Biden’s lowering of prescription drug benefits. I wanted to see devastating memes about the price of prescription drugs.
A Republican plan is circulating that would pay for the president’s tax cuts by cutting Medicare for 600,000 people. I want memes, satire, and news about that. We need to focus on helping people to see that the current administration is not on their side, to see the damage being done, and to see that there are alternative policies that actually would meet their needs and build livable communities.
If we are strategic and disciplined in how we communicate, we can help shift the common-sense notions people have of what is going on in our world and we can create counternarratives that help make the world make sense for our perspectives. We need to be smart about how we communicate on social media and in legacy media.
Here are Seven Rules for Narrative Discipline in the Time of Trump:
- Don’t respond to the absurd things that people in power say;
- Don’t give any more attention to the president as a person and personality than is necessary to make a point;
- Amplify and spread news of the terrible things the administration does: policies that are changed, rules that are violated, money that is spent. Focus on ones that impact people’s everyday lives;
- Amplify and spread news of our victories in the courts, on the streets, and in our communities;
- Remember that the future belongs to those who speak to those who didn’t vote for Democrats, but who might;
- Create and spread counternarratives that shine a positive light on the things you support; and
- Above all, don’t feed the trolls.
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