Elon Musk's Original Fanbase and His Alt-Right Shift

A little while back in this here blog I wrote about how weird and ostensibly embarrassing it must be for ostensibly left-wing figures like Bill Maher, Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais and J.K. Rowling to have increasingly vast right-wing followings who could care less what they think about most issues as long as they’re ostentatiously anti-“woke” and/or transphobic. 

There’s a self-perpetuating element to these free thinkers’ aggressive rightward shift. Someone on the left will criticize them for saying or doing something transphobic, problematic or offensive. Rather than engage in self-reflection, the defensive and thin-skinned celebrity sees the criticism as a symptom of the poisonous hypocrisy of a far left infected with the dreaded Woke Mind Virus. 

That certainly seemed to be the dynamic at play with Elon Musk’s aggressive courting of the Alt-Right as the smug face and impossibly annoying voice of Twitter. 

Musk’s appeal was once apolitical or even leftist. He is, after all, synonymous with electric cars that are environmentally friendly, or at least less destructive than the kind that run on fossil fuels. 

But the much-reviled South African’s vague environmental  bona fides haven’t mattered to the left as much as his contempt for unions and the fact that he pretty much spent 44 billion dollars for Twitter so that The Babylon Bee can make the same abysmal joke over and over again and be free to disseminate its lazy, transphobic hate on the biggest social media site in the world without consequences. Also, he seems deeply invested in the Twitter user Catturd2 receiving the deference he has earned through years of heroic shit-posting. 

Musk clearly felt that so many people on the left were being mean to him that he had no choice but to conclude that the Republican Party of Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ron DeSantis is the party of kindness, reason and restraint and consequently something he should be a part of. 

I’ve never liked Musk, let alone been a fan of his but in the beginning at least it felt like his cult was relatively harmless, even positive. It felt like nerds saw him as one of them, a brilliant scientist and inventor intent on saving the planet and beginning a new world in outer space. 

Musk cultivated an image as a real-life Tony Stark who did REAL SCIENCE but also crashed the superficial world of the pretty people and had a sex life they could live through vicariously with famous models, actresses and singers. 

Then Musk got VERY political in the biggest forum for spouting off ignorant political opinions in the history of the universe: Twitter. 

Musk bought Twitter precisely so that his new Alt-Right friends and allies could continue to spout off ignorant political opinions on a site that was like Truth Social but a little less partisan and a little more respectable. 

So while all of Musk’s cool MAGA buddies are free to tweet about Trump’s many god-like qualities on Twitter, Trump himself insists that Twitter is lame, and smells weird, and that he once saw Musk picking his nose so he’s going to aggressively reject Musk’s attempts to get him to sit at his table during lunch and keep hanging out at the Truth Social table. 

Musk went from being the electric car and private NASA science guy to being the Free Speech Knight who slayed Twitter’s evil thought police in order to help good triumph over its eternal enemy, wokeness. 

This makes me wonder what Musk’s initial fanbase of nerds who thought it was super cool that a geek like them was rich and powerful and super famous and able, willing and eager to change the world with his actions make of his shift into being your oblivious, racist aunt if she were worth one hundred and seventy-seven billion dollars. 

Do Musk’s initial fans feel betrayed? Do they feel like he joined the wrong team? Are they disgusted that a man who once represented science fandom in its purest form is now leveraging all of that power and money to hurt the LGTBQ community and help Alt-Right personalities expand their empires and reach? 

I’d like to think that Musk lost many, if not most, of his fans with his descent into Alt-Right shit-posting and empty provocation but I get the sense that Musk’s early fans were primed to follow him down a very deep, very unfortunate rabbit hole after being inundated with years upon years of anti-feminist, anti-woke, MRA rhetoric online.  

I fear that Musk’s fans share his paranoid sense that straight white men are being unfairly persecuted by that nefarious woke mob and that while he is being unfairly targeted by the extreme, radical Communist left the other side is waiting to welcome them with open arms precisely for being straight, white and male. 

My sincere hope is that Musk’s original fans see him accurately, as someone who may or may not be savvy when it comes to electric cars and space travel but who is aggressive in his wrongness when it comes to just about everything else, particularly politics. 

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