Why do we tolerate Elon Musk’s racist commentary?
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
By JAMELLE BOUIE
“The Turner Diaries” is a work of white supremacist agitprop. It purports to be the diary of a neo-Nazi militant, Earl Turner, who is working to overthrow the United States government — or as the book calls it, “the System” — through a group called “the Organization.” Turner castigates “the System” for promoting integration, encouraging nonwhite immigration and placing Jewish people, Black Americans and other minorities in positions of authority over whites.
Among other atrocities, the novel describes nuclear attacks on predominantly Black cities, a Holocaust of Jewish Americans, the total ethnic cleansing of California, the subjugation of women and the “Day of the Rope” — a mass public lynching of white people deemed “race traitors” for their relationships with nonwhites. The book’s epilogue describes a future after the “Great Revolution” in which the former United States is now an all-white, utopian garrison state led by the Organization, which went on to export its revolution and exterminate nonwhites worldwide.
The white power movement in the United States, notes historian Augusta Dell’Omo in “Saving Apartheid: White Internationalism at the End of the Cold War,” “looked to white southern Africa for inspiration as it planned for the coming ‘race war.’” This apocalyptic fantasy of racial conflict in places such as Zimbabwe and South Africa shaped “The Turner Diaries.” And in turn the novel, first serialized in the pages of a white nationalist periodical in 1975 and then published as a stand-alone volume in 1978, became a touchstone for the American and global far right.
“The Order,” a white supremacist terrorist group responsible for three killings, including the murder of Denver talk-radio host Alan Berg, took its name from the book. And Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, carried passages from the book on his person and once sold the book at gun shows.
The ideas, images and language of “The Turner Diaries” have long since entered the gestalt of far-right ideology. The book hovers there even when it isn’t mentioned. In his manifesto, for example, Dylann Roof — who murdered nine people at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina — frames himself as a martyr and calls on white Americans to fight a race war against Black people.
Today, you don’t have to look far or dig deep to see the ambient influence of “The Turner Diaries” on the far right. You need just to spend a little time in the online world of the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk (although to be clear there is no direct evidence that Musk has read the book).
The Musk of the mainstream media is an enthusiastic, if awkward, technologist, industrialist and would-be government reformer, as seen in his now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency. But Musk spends much of his time on X, his social media website, where he amplifies far-right accounts and shares his own white nationalist, anti-immigrant politics for all the world to see.
Over the past month in particular, he has adopted the imagery of a recent film, “Citizen Vigilante,” in which actor Armie Hammer spends the run time playing a Charles Bronson-esque character who targets alleged criminals, framed mostly as Arab and African migrants. Musk uses that imagery to state his views about what must be done to save Western civilization.
“Yes,” replied Musk to an image of a gun-toting Hammer clad in black with the caption, “First the traitors then the invaders.” He also shared a post from a different user who explained that the point of “Citizen Vigilante,” in which the Hammer character “spends the first half of the movie murdering white people not migrants,” is that you must “always hang a traitor before you hang an enemy.” Musk repeated this several times, including in a post that simply said, “Traitors before invaders.”
Last week, Musk again posted that we must “Deal with traitors before invaders” and then said a few days later that “Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor.”
“Remigration” is the call, from far-right European political parties, to forcibly remove nonwhite citizens to their supposed countries of origin, regardless of whether they are immigrants or native-born. It is essentially a form of ethnic cleansing, and it is envisioned as a response to the supposed “Great Replacement” of white Europeans with nonwhites, an idea originating from a different work of far-right fiction, “The Camp of the Saints,” published in 1973.
As Musk sees it, opponents of remigration are traitors to “the West.” And as “traitors” their proper fate, according to the logic of his posts, is to be killed as punishment for their role in the demographic transformation of majority-white nations and, presumably, as a warning to those who might pollute the national bloodstream by welcoming nonwhites into their lives and into the country.
Musk’s preoccupation with demographic “traitors” flows directly from his obsession with population collapse, which he frames in terms of shrinking European and white American birth rates. “White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of the global population,” Musk wrote in September 2025. “Low birth rate,” he later said, “is the number one threat to the West followed closely by migration. There will be no West if this continues.”
One might even see his destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development — responsible, so far, for an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide — as consistent with his concern with falling white birth rates relative to those in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, where USAID was active. After all, one way to secure a future for Western children, in this zero-sum view of the world, would be to starve African ones.