Elon Musk Is Obsessed With Something He Does Not Understand
There is no particular mystery to unravel around the political views of Elon Musk, the billionaire technology and social media executive. He is an enthusiastic purveyor of far-right conspiracy theories, using his platform on
X to spread a worldview that is as extreme as it is untethered from reality.
Musk is especially preoccupied with the racial makeup of the country and the alleged deficiency of nonwhites in important positions. He blames the recent problems at the aircraft company Boeing, for example, on its efforts to diversify its work force, despite widely publicized accounts of a dangerous culture of cost-cutting at the company.
“Experts and critics say that Boeing’s woes have been years in the making,” CNN reported in January, “some pointing to the result of a shift in corporate culture that started at the top and put profits ahead of the safety and engineering prowess for which it was once praised, placing not only its future, but the passengers on its planes, at grave risk.”
But Musk, a shareholder in various companies — including his own, Tesla, which is being sued for allegedly allowing racist abuse of some of its Black employees — says diversity is Boeing’s problem.
“It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” Musk wrote in January, deliberately misspelling the acronym D.E.I., diversity, equity and inclusion.
Musk’s current obsession, as Greg Sargent observed in The New Republic, is the “great replacement,” a far-right conspiracy theory that liberal elites in the United States are deliberately opening the southern border to nonwhite immigration from Mexico, South and Central America in order to replace the nation’s white majority and secure permanent control of its political institutions.
On X, Musk recently responded to a video that purports to expose a “Democrat open borders plan to entrench single-party rule.” “This is actually happening!” Musk wrote. The video has well over 50 million views.
Musk is far from the first person to push the “great replacement” theory.
The “great replacement” was part of Tucker Carlson’s message to viewers during his time on Fox News. It is touted by a number of anti-immigrant, white nationalist and white supremacist groups. It was featured prominently at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” And it has inspired at least four separate mass shootings, including the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (11 killed), the 2019 Christchurch shootings in New Zealand (51 killed), the El Paso shooting the same year in Texas (23 killed) and the 2022 supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York (10 killed).
It should go without saying that the “great replacement” is idiotic. There is no “open border.” There is no effort to “replace” the white population of the U.S. And the underlying assumption that, until recently, the U.S. was a racially and culturally homogenous nation is nonsense.
As Musk and his like-minded paranoiacs see it, nonwhite voters would necessarily be Democrats. With each new “illegal,” the Democratic Party gets a new vote. But there is nothing about immigration status or melanin content that demands liberal politics. And in fact, there is growing evidence of a rightward drift among nonwhite voters, particularly those of Hispanic origin. If nonwhite voters are up for grabs — if their partisan identities are more contingent than fixed — then Republicans can simply compete for their allegiance the way they would for members of any other group.
To compete for voters is to believe in one of the fundamental truths of democracy: that there is no such thing as a permanent majority. Majorities in a democratic country are variable and fluid for the simple reason that individuals themselves are. They contradict themselves. They contain multitudes. They have different and competing values and interests that fall in and out of salience depending on the context. Your opponent may have assembled a majority to beat you, but you can — in the next election — assemble a different majority to win for yourself. The only constant is that nothing is settled or set in place.
To believe that the “great replacement” is true is to reject the dynamism of democratic society. It is to believe, instead, in a zero-sum world of immutable identities and the hierarchies that necessarily follow. There is no hope for persuasion — no hope for politics, even — if people can be only one thing.
It is no surprise, then, that the rise of “great replacement” theory has happened in tandem with the Republican Party’s turn toward authoritarianism in the personage of Donald Trump. If there is no persuasion, then the only thing left is domination and the imperative, then, to dominate others before they can dominate you.
The fallacies of the far right’s ‘great replacement’ theory.