Henry Ford, Elon Musk and the 21st Century Dearborn Independent

Cult leaders and dictators have always alternative realities based on fear so they can control people. They identify an enemy, regardless of whether the scapegoat is guilty of anything, dehumanize him — and drain their victims of labor and resources to “fight” the bogeyman. Historically, authoritarian cults needed to physically isolate people to create an effective alternate reality, while dictators needed the power of the state.

But thanks to technology, oligarchs can also get involved.

For example, the technology of the newspaper — the ability to print stories in full length cheaply and deliver them at scale — was transformational. And like all technologies, it was used for good, bad, and everything in between.

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Enter an oligarch with bad ideas who bought a newspaper called The Dearborn Independent. Plutocrat Henry Ford had just lost a Senate race, as the New York Times described it at the time as a candidate in this way:

“Mr. Ford is a very successful business man, but he has demonstrated convincingly on many occasions that he is not only unfamiliar with elementary international and national affairs, but has a certain frame of mind which forbids the hope that he will ever be able to overcome that lack of equipment—a mind far too impressionable for public office.”

Sound familiar? You might be thinking of Donald Trump, but the description also applies to Elon Musk. While his reputation as a genius has been actively curated for decades, any casual listen to the man or glance at his Twitter account reveals something different. He is not, objectively speaking, smart. Sly, yes. A con artist, yes. But that’s different.

Here he is in a transphobic conversation with incel whisperer Jordan Peterson in which he misgenders and rejects his own daughter, and declares war on the “woke mind virus”. Like Ford, Elon Musk is no genius, Musk is an intolerant idiot.

More than thirty years before the Holocaust, when Hitler was serving in the Bavarian army, Jews blamed for provoking World War I, saying, “I know who caused the war: German-Jewish bankers.”

In 1919, a few months after Ford bought it, The Dearborn Independent published The Bolshevik Threat to Russia by a Russian imperialist propagandist. Ford’s paper was be influenced by a Russian emigrant named Boris Brazil who had worked for the Tsars but was sent to the United States and provided intelligence to the American army.

Brasol was a fervent anti-Bolshevik and a virulent anti-Semite who also blamed the Jews for the communist takeover of Russia. He was also a fervent advocate of restoring the Russian monarchy to power.

Under Brasol’s influence, Ford’s newspaper, which at the time had a circulation of 75,000, began a 149-part, multi-year focus on the anti-Semitic hoax in 1920 Protocols of the Elders of Zionwhich is a plagiarized hodgepodge of fictional and anti-Semitic texts to create a false document that “proves” that a cabal of Jews plans to subjugate the “goyim” and take over the world. It has contributed to millions of deaths.

The Protocols were first introduced in Imperial Russia in 1903, almost certainly by Okhrana — the secret police of the Tsars, as a scapegoat to blame the Jews for the problems of the failed state of the Russian monarchy.

Brasol, as an agent of the Tsars and an enemy of “Jewish Bolsheviks” distributed the Protocols to America through Ford’s purchased newspaper. To further spread the lie, Ford pressured his dealers, who were then selling the wildly popular Model T, to sell his publications. In this way, he reached a circulation of 900,000 copies at its peak in 1925, the second largest in the United States.

Ford distanced himself from his articles, but never gave up his belief in a Jewish conspiracy and promoted “America First”businessmen and promoters such as anti-Semites Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin before and during World War II.

In Mein Kampf, written while Hitler was in prison for a failed uprisingHitler acclaimed Henry Ford as “an exceptionally great man.”

The year before the Nazis invaded Poland, in 1938, Henry Ford wrote was awarded “The Order of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle” by the Nazi German government, an “honor” that had been established the year before by Adolf Hitler.

Fast forward a century, from Ford publishing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion through its Model T dealerships, to Elon Musk and his hostile takeover of Twitter.

The parallels are astonishing and an important lesson. These types of evil men, corrupt and gullible, yet somehow able to amass an inordinate amount of power, have come and gone throughout history.

Both Musk and Ford are psychopaths at their core with a deep hatred in their hearts, who chose to use the power they gained through the labor of others to persecute and dehumanize those they saw as less than them. They chose to work against the government that allowed them to seek and gain their power — to not only bite the hand that fed them, but to try to cut it off.

The recent behavior of Elon Musk, who took money from Saudi Arabia and a host of malicious actors and bought “the town square” and then turned it into the 21st century version of The Dearborn Independent must be seen as an even more dangerous abuse of his power, it must be seen as a crime.

What Musk is doing is not only disgusting and dangerous, it is foreign election interference on a grand scale. Musk bought Twitter with the full intention of turning it into a radicalization machine. The second person he allowed back onto the platform after buying it was woman-hating cult leader Andrew Tate who was recently arrested for child rape and child trafficking, on top of his previous charges of rape and human trafficking.

Musk allowed literal Nazis like Andrew Anglin, Chuck Johnson, and Nick Fuentes back onto his website. He allowed Mike Flynn and QAnon back on. And he has allowed false, divisive disinformation to not only flourish, but to be favored by his algorithm, with the blatant goal of radicalizing people against their own government — and each other.

There’s nothing ‘neo’ about these Nazis

Elon Musk ideology is complicatedbut at his core he is a born fascist, a messianic narcissist like Donald Trump, ready to wage war on his own country to save himself and gain even more power. He has already poured $44 billion into this, not counting his monetary donations, and his backers and accomplices expect results.

These proponents include accelerationist oligarch and Musk’s fellow apartheid veteran and PayPay Mafia member Peter Thiel, who controls jd vanceThiel recently said that if the election is “close,” it means the Democrats “cheated.” This is deliberately creating a dangerous, potentially violent situation after the election. Musk posted this clip with his full approval.

They’re counting on the Supreme Court. They’re counting on deceit.

The end of Ford’s life was fitting, though too late. When he saw the real human result of the propaganda he helped popularize, of the evil he himself truly represented, he had a stroke and died the following year.

Ford eventually did overcome the deadly hatred he had helped to foment, according to Josephine Gomon, who oversaw female workers at a Ford plant. She was among a group of executives who came to Ford in May 1946 for a screening of Death stationsa government-produced film documenting the liberation of Hitler’s concentration camps. For an hour, horrific images flashed across the screen: a crematorium at Majdanek camp, torture chambers, a warehouse filled with the confiscated belongings of murdered Jews. When the film ended and the lights came up, Ford’s colleagues found him still conscious. He had suffered a massive stroke. Ford died the following year at the age of 83.

They never left. They must be defeated.

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