Trump’s Steady Fall Into Fascism Orchestrated By Vance And Musk
Fascism: I sometimes fear…
“I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.
Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you…
It doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”
In an avalanche of extraordinary moments, the most significant and far reaching may be the least known, when Vice President JD Vance recently met with the leader of a rising, far right party in Germany but refused to meet with the Democratically elected German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
It was a truly scandalous event for Vance, who refuses to admit that trump lost the 2020 election. It is simple to see why trump, Vance and Elon Musk, sometimes referred to as President Musk, have strongly backed the far right Alternative for Germany or AfD party and other authoritarian groups.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” the richest man on the planet posted on his social media platform, X.
Musk’s AfD endorsement came ahead of German elections this month and after Scholz lost in a vote of confidence.
Musk’s incessant shift to the far right was on display when he spoke at an inaugural celebration on Jan. 20 and ended with an arm gesture that looked very much like the notorious Heil Hitler greeting. The gesture has been used regularly by white nationalist groups.
Musk has shown support for other right wing politicians, including Argentine President Javier Milei, whom he met with at a Tesla factory in Texas. Musk spoke in an online appearance with Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged with fomenting a coup to stay in office after he lost the 2022 election. (Sounds familiar) Musk also said on X that he plans to meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Musk has plans to build a Tesla plant in India. Can anyone spell conflict of interest.
The AfD party and trump are mirror images in many ways. The AfD calls for mass deportations of foreign born criminals with multiple citizenship or permanent residency. It decries multiculturalism, especially railing against Muslim influence. The party also supports closer relations with Russia and prohibiting gay rights rainbow flags from flying at public buildings.
In March 2019, AfD party leader Alexander Gauland was interviewed by a Russian newspaper and said the party considered war in Donbas region to be a Ukrainian internal matter and that Germany should not get involved in the internal affairs of Ukraine or Russia.
AfD said that NATO’s anti-Russian stance was overly ideological and against Germany’s interests. AfD members have called for a more independent stance from the United States, an end to military aid to Ukraine and an end to sanctions on Russia supported by NATO and the U.S.
A large number of AfD delegates boycotted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in June 2024 when he spoke to the Bundestag while
AfD also claims that climate change is caused entirely by natural factors and that rising carbon dioxide concentrations have been beneficial by contributed to a “greening” of the planet. The AfD is against “uncontrolled expansion of wind energy.” Just like trump who declared that “Big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.”
Vance and Musk have carried the torch for trump’s bromance with various authoritarian regimes including Russia and Hungary. Perhaps next on Vance’s traveling clown show will be a trip to Austria where the far right also is flexing its muscles led by Herbert Kickl who lost his bid to become what he calls “Volkskanzler” or “Chancellor of the People,” a title once embraced by Adolf Hitler.
Like trump, Kickl has promoted Austrian pride and the “remigration … of people who came to Europe uninvited.” Kickl heads the Freedom Party which was initially led by a former Nazi and SS officer after its founding in 1956. In September the party won a plurality in parliamentary elections but could not win the support of another party to secure a governing majority.
The AfD also has ties to authoritarian parties in Hungary, France, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Sweden, Serbia, Canada and Switzerland. In the U.S. the AfD has connections with Musk and groups associated with the Republican Party, particularly the Young Republicans. A delegation of AfD, led byTino Chrupalla, said his trip to Washington was an opportunity to establish political and economic contacts with the new U.S. leadership.
It was in this climate that last week, that Vance brought his anti-democratic message to the Munich Security Conference. Vance accused European leaders of suppressing free speech, failing to halt illegal migration and running in fear from voters’ true beliefs.
“Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration,” said Vance, reading from the trump and Project 2025 playbooks.
Vance questioned whether European values warranted defense by the U.S. as he described European politics as being infected by media censorship, cancelled elections and political correctness. He said that Russia and China are not the real threat to Europe but that the real danger in Europe is from erosion of its “most fundamental values.” His speech was a rehash of trump’s speaking points.
Vance called trump “a new sheriff in town” and that “Democracy will not survive if the people’s concerns are deemed invalid or even worse not worth being considered.”
It was no surprise that the speech was highly praised on Russian state TV, where a correspondent, Asya Emelyanova, said, “It was very nice to hear Vance’s very strong speech. It was a public caning, I can’t call it anything else.”
AfD And Vance
After the conference, Vance met with a kindred spirit, Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD party, whose members have historically leaned into anti-Semitism. Höcke, 51, is the leader of the AfD’s far right, Der Flügel faction, which the German government’s declared a suspected right-wing extremist organization. He also is chair of AfD Thuringia, also classified as a right-wing extremist organization.
Höcke led the AfD to its first-ever first place finish in a state election at the 2024 Thuringian state election. It was the first time a far-right party placed first in an election since the Nazi era.
All of Germany’s mainstream parties have refused to enter into any sort of coalition government with the AfD, even though it is polling in second place in this month’s federal elections.
Trump and Vance have similar ideals to AfD, led by the AfD’s coziness with Russia. Last year, the German Parliament heard evidence of ties between AfD politicians and Russia. The AfD wants to end German military aid to Ukraine and to restart the Nord Stream pipelines which Russia through which Germany is supplied with natural gas.
In a January 2023 video debate, Höcke said “Today, Russia — whether the mainstream media want to hear it or not — is a country which not only provokes negative associations but is also a country that hopes it could possibly be a pioneer for a world of free and sovereign states without hegemonic influence.”
His views were thinly veiled anti-Semitism. In 2017, Höcke complained that Germans were “the only people in the world who’ve planted a monument of shame at the heart of their capital.” He was referring to the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust and said the country needed “nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance.”
In 2018, the AfD party leader at the time, Alexander Gauland, dismissed “Hitler and the Nazis” as “just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”
In 2014, Höcke called for the cancellation of section 86 of the German Criminal Code (which prohibits the spread of propaganda by unconstitutional organizations) and section 130 of the German Criminal Code (which criminalizes incitement to hatred towards other groups). Such changes to the criminal code would have legalized Holocaust denial, which is illegal in Germany.
The AfD supports a ban on kosher slaughter within the country, as well as the “import and sale of kosher meat.” It also supports a prohibition of circumcision for non-medical reasons for those under the age of majority, saying that the practice constituted “serious violations of fundamental rights.”
A 2019 study found that just 2 percent of Germans agreed that “the Holocaust is propaganda crafted by the Allied Powers.” But 15 percent of AfD supporters agreed with the statement.
In 2017, 10 AfD Bundestag members participated in a closed Facebook group named “the Patriots” that included anti-Semitic, racist, pro-Nazi and conspiratorial posts. One meme showed Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s face edited on a pizza box labelled “The Oven-fresh.” The meme gained particular media attention.
In November 2021, Höcke’s parliamentary immunity was cancelled because he allegedly ended a speech in May with the Nazi phrase Alles für Deutschland or “Everything for Germany.” The phrase was used by the Hitler regime and is illegal under insignia legislation. The law outlaws use of symbols of “unconstitutional organization” and terrorism. It has primarily been used to suppress fascist, Nazi, communist, Islamic extremist and Russian militarist symbols. Höcke was charged in September 2023 and convicted in May 2024. He was fined €13,000.
The display of pro-Nazi symbolism was not unlike the moment at trump’s inauguration celebration when musk spoke and then apparently gave a salute very similar to the Heil Hitler salute of the Nazis.
In March 2021, the Thuringian AfD was classified by the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a confirmed extremist object of observation. The head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, had also described Höcke as a right-wing extremist. In June 2023, Höcke was indicted.
Höcke has said “the big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil” and that Germans have been denied the right to national pride and expression due to their country’s history.
Höcke has used the term “Lebensraum,” a term that was used by Nazis to refer to territorial expansion and he has questioned why this phrase is denounced by the German public. He has also used the term “Tat-Elite,” a word SS officers used to refer to themselves. He called former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s officials a “Tat-Elite.”
Höcke has said “the big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil” and that Germans have been denied the right to national pride and expression due to their country’s history. He has questioned the amount of time that German schools spend teaching students about Nazis and called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a “monument of shame” and wants a “180-degree change in memory policy.”
Political scientists have said that Höcke’s opinions are close to the National Democratic Party of Germany, a far-right, neo-Nazi and ultranationalist political party. It has been referred to as “the most significant neo-Nazi party to emerge after 1945.”
Höcke opposes Germany’s asylum policy and has said that if Europe keeps on taking in immigrants, the African “reproductive behavior” will not change.] In 2017, Höcke stated
“Dear young African men,” he said in 2017. “For you there is no future and no home in Germany and in Europe!”
He also is against mainstreaming students with disabilities and wants them to go to separate schools. He also is against school sexual education, which he regards as “early sexualization of the students,” and wants to “stop the dissolution of the natural polarity of the two sexes.”