What is a Nazi in 2025? If you ask progressive activists and many in the media (but I repeat myself), Elon Musk is the Dr. Goebbels of Silicon Valley.
When the pro-MAGA tycoon extended his right arm waving to the crowd at a Trump inauguration event, mainstream media went berserk speculating about whether or not he had given a “Heil Hitler” salute. Never mind that images of politicians like Emmanuel Macron and Tim Walz making the same gesture are easy to find on the Internet. If Musk does it, he must be sending a fascist signal to his followers, right?
In Germany, Musk’s support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party makes him Nazi-adjacent. Even though AfD is now the second-biggest party in Germany, it remains a total pariah among the German establishment, which regards them as “far right.”
Anybody can read AfD’s platform in English, on the Internet. Musk has called it “common sense,” and that’s how it reads to me. But I actually read the thing. People who depend on the liberal media will have no idea what AfD really believes. The ‘Nazis 2.0’ narrative is incorrect and malicious, but it plays into deep historical stereotypes people have about Germans, so few people question it.
For far too long, merely being accused of Nazi sympathies has been enough to discredit and exile someone from the community of respectable people.
The French writer Renaud Camus—author of the ‘Great Replacement’ concept—is a left-wing gay atheist. But his questioning mass migration and framing it as an elite plot to displace the French people brought upon him the immense stigma of being some kind of Nazi.
Camus has pointed out that it is impossible to deny that European civilization is being radically changed by mass migration policies supported by generations of elites, on both the Left and the Right. He writes:
It is perfectly fine to acknowledge it as a reality if one celebrates it. If, on the other hand, you do not like the Great Replacement, then it does not exist, you are the one inventing it and you are a fascist, a racist and a propagator of conspiracy theories. If you like it, it exists, and it is an opportunity for France, an opportunity for Flanders, a blessing for Belgium, a lifeline for Europe; and you are a benefactor of humanity.
What Camus has called “the Second Career of Adolf Hitler” is how effectively leftists and others can condemn anyone who opposes them as modern-day Nazis to humiliate and discredit them without having to deal with their arguments.
This tactic has been immensely successful in marginalizing the non-tame Right. On a recent flight, I sat next to a pro-Trump American, the child of a couple who fled the Soviet bloc for America. His father prospered and, in the 1990s, sent his son to study at one of the most elite U.S. preparatory schools.
As a student, he was shocked to hear teachers and fellow students openly praising Communism. When he stood to tell them what Communism actually is, and how his family had suffered, he was denounced as a “fascist.” In a single day, he had become a Hitlerite outcast, simply for challenging their narrative about Communism. This experience taught him a hard lesson in how effective Hitler could be in his ‘second career.’
In Hungary, we are quite used to this. Ordinary people in Western Europe, Britain, and North America, if they know anything at all about Hungary, it’s that it is an authoritarian hellhole ruled with an iron fist by Viktor Orbán. They know this because that’s what their media have told them. Should they visit the actual existing Hungary, they would understand how they have been lied to.
Two British expatriate friends who live in Budapest both told me that when they tell friends back in the UK that they are more free to speak their minds in Orban’s Hungary than in Starmer’s Britain, nobody believes them. But it’s true! I often wonder if the media and elites in other countries keep up the lies about Hungary to prevent their own populations from realizing the benefits of reduced mass migration and demanding similar policies.
When Donald Trump first took office in 2017, the media filled with dark predictions of the descending dark night of fascism. Noted academics warned grimly that this is just how Hitler got started. Even though it was perfectly obvious that whatever Trump was, he was no Nazi, it did not matter. The Left, which controls academia and the media, stuck to its vile story. Indeed, as A.H. himself wrote, in Mein Kampf, people can be brought to believe a “big lie” if you tell it often enough, and with enough confidence.
They believe it … until they don’t. The United States is now undergoing de-Nazification, in the sense that ‘second-career Hitler’ is facing unemployment. His work is increasingly ineffective. The liberal sports broadcaster Stephen A. Smith, a black Democrat who voted for Kamala Harris, explained it last week on Bill Maher’s HBO program:
Smith observed that even though Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, he still won the popular vote, because to most Americans, “he’s closer to normal” than what the Left offers.
What voter out there can look at the Democratic Party at this moment in time and say, ‘There’s a voice for us, somebody that speaks for us, that goes up to Capitol Hill and fights the fights we want them to be fighting, on our behalf? …They didn’t do that, and that’s why their behinds are home, and that man is back in the White House.
Unlike 2017, when the Left successfully trashed Trump and his team as crypto-Nazis, this year, they are exhausted. Nobody listens to them anymore. For one, Trump has already been president, and whatever his failures, only fools, journalists, and professors still claim he was a fascist. Plus, four years of Joe Biden’s rule brought disaster after disaster, especially on mass migration. Voters assessed the cost of believing the Big Lie about Trump and American fascism and decided not to be intimidated by it anymore.
Will European voters reach the same conclusion about their own right-wing politicians who are routinely denounced as ‘Hitler helpers’? One can only hope. The reason that so many European politicians and media figures are eager to demonize Elon Musk and censor his X platform is that Musk refuses to live by the Big Lie. And on X, Europeans can hear from these pariah politicians and make up their own minds.
A Czech businessman told me in Prague last fall that Trump offers hope to European conservatives like him. He said that the fact that Trump refuses to be bullied by the media and establishment opinion shows people like him that it is possible to resist the liberal ideology that is slowly killing Europe. It is certainly true that Europe should be vigilant against the return of Nazism, but it is also true that the ruling class has become so fanatical that it prevents Europe from embracing sensible policies that protect their liberal democracies from grave threats.
The “second career of Adolf Hitler” is leading to the demise of Europe. Fear of Hitler, and of being accused of being fascist, has left Europeans paralyzed in the face of mortal threats to their civilizational existence. When people are more afraid of Elon Musk waving to his supporters in a certain way than they are of mass migration, Islamization, economic stagnation, and cultural decline, then they have drunk an ideological poison that, mark my words, is going to kill them.
Elon Musk and the “Second Career” of Adolf Hitler
Photo: ANGELA WEISS / AFP
What is a Nazi in 2025? If you ask progressive activists and many in the media (but I repeat myself), Elon Musk is the Dr. Goebbels of Silicon Valley.
When the pro-MAGA tycoon extended his right arm waving to the crowd at a Trump inauguration event, mainstream media went berserk speculating about whether or not he had given a “Heil Hitler” salute. Never mind that images of politicians like Emmanuel Macron and Tim Walz making the same gesture are easy to find on the Internet. If Musk does it, he must be sending a fascist signal to his followers, right?
In Germany, Musk’s support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party makes him Nazi-adjacent. Even though AfD is now the second-biggest party in Germany, it remains a total pariah among the German establishment, which regards them as “far right.”
Anybody can read AfD’s platform in English, on the Internet. Musk has called it “common sense,” and that’s how it reads to me. But I actually read the thing. People who depend on the liberal media will have no idea what AfD really believes. The ‘Nazis 2.0’ narrative is incorrect and malicious, but it plays into deep historical stereotypes people have about Germans, so few people question it.
For far too long, merely being accused of Nazi sympathies has been enough to discredit and exile someone from the community of respectable people.
The French writer Renaud Camus—author of the ‘Great Replacement’ concept—is a left-wing gay atheist. But his questioning mass migration and framing it as an elite plot to displace the French people brought upon him the immense stigma of being some kind of Nazi.
Camus has pointed out that it is impossible to deny that European civilization is being radically changed by mass migration policies supported by generations of elites, on both the Left and the Right. He writes:
What Camus has called “the Second Career of Adolf Hitler” is how effectively leftists and others can condemn anyone who opposes them as modern-day Nazis to humiliate and discredit them without having to deal with their arguments.
This tactic has been immensely successful in marginalizing the non-tame Right. On a recent flight, I sat next to a pro-Trump American, the child of a couple who fled the Soviet bloc for America. His father prospered and, in the 1990s, sent his son to study at one of the most elite U.S. preparatory schools.
As a student, he was shocked to hear teachers and fellow students openly praising Communism. When he stood to tell them what Communism actually is, and how his family had suffered, he was denounced as a “fascist.” In a single day, he had become a Hitlerite outcast, simply for challenging their narrative about Communism. This experience taught him a hard lesson in how effective Hitler could be in his ‘second career.’
In Hungary, we are quite used to this. Ordinary people in Western Europe, Britain, and North America, if they know anything at all about Hungary, it’s that it is an authoritarian hellhole ruled with an iron fist by Viktor Orbán. They know this because that’s what their media have told them. Should they visit the actual existing Hungary, they would understand how they have been lied to.
Two British expatriate friends who live in Budapest both told me that when they tell friends back in the UK that they are more free to speak their minds in Orban’s Hungary than in Starmer’s Britain, nobody believes them. But it’s true! I often wonder if the media and elites in other countries keep up the lies about Hungary to prevent their own populations from realizing the benefits of reduced mass migration and demanding similar policies.
When Donald Trump first took office in 2017, the media filled with dark predictions of the descending dark night of fascism. Noted academics warned grimly that this is just how Hitler got started. Even though it was perfectly obvious that whatever Trump was, he was no Nazi, it did not matter. The Left, which controls academia and the media, stuck to its vile story. Indeed, as A.H. himself wrote, in Mein Kampf, people can be brought to believe a “big lie” if you tell it often enough, and with enough confidence.
They believe it … until they don’t. The United States is now undergoing de-Nazification, in the sense that ‘second-career Hitler’ is facing unemployment. His work is increasingly ineffective. The liberal sports broadcaster Stephen A. Smith, a black Democrat who voted for Kamala Harris, explained it last week on Bill Maher’s HBO program:
Smith observed that even though Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, he still won the popular vote, because to most Americans, “he’s closer to normal” than what the Left offers.
Unlike 2017, when the Left successfully trashed Trump and his team as crypto-Nazis, this year, they are exhausted. Nobody listens to them anymore. For one, Trump has already been president, and whatever his failures, only fools, journalists, and professors still claim he was a fascist. Plus, four years of Joe Biden’s rule brought disaster after disaster, especially on mass migration. Voters assessed the cost of believing the Big Lie about Trump and American fascism and decided not to be intimidated by it anymore.
Will European voters reach the same conclusion about their own right-wing politicians who are routinely denounced as ‘Hitler helpers’? One can only hope. The reason that so many European politicians and media figures are eager to demonize Elon Musk and censor his X platform is that Musk refuses to live by the Big Lie. And on X, Europeans can hear from these pariah politicians and make up their own minds.
A Czech businessman told me in Prague last fall that Trump offers hope to European conservatives like him. He said that the fact that Trump refuses to be bullied by the media and establishment opinion shows people like him that it is possible to resist the liberal ideology that is slowly killing Europe. It is certainly true that Europe should be vigilant against the return of Nazism, but it is also true that the ruling class has become so fanatical that it prevents Europe from embracing sensible policies that protect their liberal democracies from grave threats.
The “second career of Adolf Hitler” is leading to the demise of Europe. Fear of Hitler, and of being accused of being fascist, has left Europeans paralyzed in the face of mortal threats to their civilizational existence. When people are more afraid of Elon Musk waving to his supporters in a certain way than they are of mass migration, Islamization, economic stagnation, and cultural decline, then they have drunk an ideological poison that, mark my words, is going to kill them.
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