Is Elon Musk our Julius Streicher?
X today is a crowdsourced Der Stürmer.
First off, I am not one to jump on the Hitler/Trump analogy bandwagon. I lean more to the clownish Mussolini comparison.
In 2015 in the Times of Israel, I wrote an article called The Digital Beer Hall. It made the historical comparison between the fetid politics of Munich’s beer halls and Fox News today. The article was expanded and translated into German and put into a book about the rise of fascism. It was favorably reviewed by a leading German newspaper.
That was then. Now in 2024, we have Elon Musk playing Julius Streicher and X in the role of Der Stürmer. X, in its new, anything goes, free speech for all incarnation, has just promoted a fake Atlantic article claiming Trump is a reborn Führer. Since Musk has promoted the made-up headline, I think it is fair game to look into history and see what others have helped fascists rise to power, start a global war, and cause a once great nation to collapse and be dismembered.
Historical figure number one would be Julius Streicher, who published Der Stürmer. The newspaper was a relentless authoritarian source of “news” for Nazis and those Germans that shared their views and goals. The paper was the central element in the rise of antisemitic attitudes and ultimately the extermination of Germany’s Jews.
Streicher was a Nazi to the core. He was a Gauleiter (regional leader) and member in the Reichstag. His main role, however, was to inflame on a weekly basis using lurid stories about the evil that the Jews were doing to Germany. Goebbels set the strategy. Streicher executed it for, as Hitler put it, “the man on the street.”
Today’s comparison would be Trump and Musk.
Nothing has really changed. Der Stürmer combed local news for stories of Jewish crimes, financial or personal. All social interactions with Aryans were demonized and lurid sexual stories were made up about Jewish lust for pure German women. Today’s mirror would of course be the Trump Musk hysteria about trans people and their attempts to corrupt their youthful neighbors, as well as immigrants who commit crimes, including those of a sexual nature. In Der Stürmer, free reign was given to tales of financial exploitation and behind the scenes manipulation (see Trump favorite Majorie Taylor Green’s Jewish space lasers and weather control theories posted on X).
Germany in the 1920s and 30s did not use memes. The idea of appropriating images to convey messages had not yet been invented. Instead, they used cartoons. Der Stürmer had a weekly cartoon depicting Jews as brutes with long noses and horrid facial hair. They were usually bent over doing some revolting action against an innocent German. There was no restraint and the with ever growing circulation… they even had many subscribers in the United States. There was no call for any restraint.
As the Nazis became more powerful and eventually took over the government, Streicher became even bolder and loudly called for genocidal action against all Jews, worldwide.
It is clear to me, as I have written before, that X today is a crowdsourced Der Stürmer -- the retweets of the most outrageous conspiracy theories, the relentless calls for violence that Musk finds amusing and promotes with fake innocuity like “this is interesting.” His promotion of big lies about election integrity and his willingness to carry whatever inane water Trump is peddling puts him squarely in the Streicher school of sycophants.
No one can be sure what motivates Musk to do such a disservice to America. No one knows (except it turns out, probably Putin) why he would undermine our already-torn social fabric. Yet, he does, minute by minute, tweet by tweet, repost by repost. He destroys reality and creates an alternative universe of distortions and lies.
Perhaps like Streicher and Hitler, he and Trump will succeed. Perhaps the hapless immigrants have Reichstag written on their backs and Musk will do to America what his mentors did to Germany.
However, there was an end to the Julius Streicher story. It went like this: he was found guilty of being an accessory to mass murder in the Nuremberg Trials and hanged in 1946.
I long ago rejected Musk’s attempt to turn X into the cesspool of hate that it is.