Even by a Strict Definition, Elon Musk Is a Fascist
He is weaponizing Tolkien to promote violence by ‘hard men’ against Asian immigrants
Until very recently, it was standard to dismiss as alarmists those who would invoke “fascism” to describe the right’s transformation in the era of Trump. But even for the most committed of us—I’m someone who does use the f-word—endless media obliviousness and obfuscation can get in your head: Are things really as bad as I’m suggesting? Is liberal democracy really in this much danger? The modern illiberal right is bad, sure, but is this really fascism?
And then you listen to a few sentences out of Elon Musk’s mouth and all doubts are dispelled.
In the past, he affirmed the notion that Jews push “hatred against whites.” At the time, he claimed that he was against racism in any form—a transparent effort to cover up his supremacist ideas. Since then he has dropped all pretense. Earlier this year, he greeted a right-wing audience with a gesture many interpreted as a Nazi salute. He also endorsed the German far-right AfD party as the nation’s “only hope” and cautioned against losing “German culture” to a “multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” And then, just a few weeks ago, the world’s richest man went even further and agreed with an explicitly eugenicist post.
In the U.K., he has regularly promoted Tommy Robinson, a far-right activist with a long history of criminal convictions for assault, fraud, stalking, and harassment. In September, speaking at a rally organized by Robinson, Musk inveighed against the government, immigration, and multiculturalism—ominously concluding, “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. That’s the truth, I think.”
But it was a recent Lord of the Rings-themed post on X, the social media platform he owns, that has most vividly telegraphed his extremism.
Hobbits and Hard Men
Late October, the billionaire and all-purpose reactionary superfunder shared a post by Robinson with the following commentary:
When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realize the horrors that take place far away.
They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.
What happened to the nice man who was brutally murdered while walking his dog will happen to all of England if the tide of illegal immigration is not turned.
It is time for the English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival or they shall surely all die.
Lest anyone mistake Musk’s meaning, he made it even more explicit on a subsequent appearance earlier this month on the Joe Rogan Experience:
These lovely small towns in England, Scotland, and Ireland, they’ve been living their lives quietly. They’re like hobbits. ... One day, 1,000 people show up out of nowhere in your village of 500 and start raping the kids. ... This has now happened, God knows how many times in Britain.
He was presumably referring to the long-running grooming scandal in which British authorities, allegedly overtaken by wokeness, ignored the pleas of the sexually exploited victims because the perpetrators were Asian men.
The scandal is undoubtedly a blot on the British system, as Steve Davies has explained, but Musk has extracted an overtly self-serving, fascist narrative from it. There is nothing dressed-up or disguised about it. Taking one appalling case, ridiculously exaggerating it, and using it to define entire races as dangerous is a classic trope of racist authoritarians. Even the misreading of national myth and literature is on brand—fascism has always expressed itself in this way.
What Is Fascism?
In calling someone’s views “fascist,” it’s useful to define our terms. Unlike, say, socialists, modern fascists don’t tend to embrace the label, although they do often wink and nod at it with “jokes” or coded language.
If you see ideology in dimensional terms—as in a left vs. right spectrum—then fascism can be understood as the most right-wing point. Or, in a two-dimensional model, it’s at the top of the authoritarian right quadrant. But this is perhaps too simple. Fascism isn’t just very extreme conservatism, although there is some overlap there. Nor is it just particularly bad authoritarianism—as Yale political theorist Kevin Elliot convincingly shows.
On the other hand, attempting to provide a formal definition is tricky. Ideologies have considerable internal variation; they are families of things, not one specific thing. However, within that family, they will generally share certain features. Possibly the most famous attempt to formulate a list for fascism is Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism,” which outlines 14 principles. Eco’s framework has been used to diagnose the Trump movement as fascist, but perhaps this goes too far towards complexity.
My own view follows political theorist Michael Freeden in defining ideologies by a small set of “core concepts.” These are simultaneously the central values to which the belief system appeals, the tools it uses to understand the world, and the recurring themes in the work of its adherents. For example, equality is a core concept for socialism—there are many variants of socialism, but all will make appeals to some sort of substantive equality (or will stridently critique inequality). Likewise, individuality, freedom, toleration, rationality, progress, and the public good make up liberalism’s conceptual core.
Following Freeden and others working in that tradition, I characterize fascism via the following core concepts: the state, the nation (understood in terms of both race and culture), masculinity, violence, and (the restoration of) a mythic past. These core concepts are the goals of fascism, and combine to create its narratives—for example: that “your” country is being both endangered and contaminated by the nonwhite, the racially inferior, and the sexually deviant; that effeminate elites and intellectuals are allowing this to happen; and that to survive you must surrender control to men of violence—sorry, “hard men.”
Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “In order to preserve a certain culture, the type of manhood that creates such a culture must be preserved. ... He who would live must fight.” Naturally, for Hitler, only the Aryan could fill this role of culture warrior, and “should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth.” If you switch out “Aryan” for “native rural Englander” (sorry, “hobbit”), how different is that from what Musk is saying?
Race, Masculinity, and Violence
In Musk’s analogy, immigrants are cast as orcs—vile, non-human monsters. Or as ravaging creatures possessing some human characteristics, but lacking others. This, too, is a very frequent trope of fascist and proto-fascist regimes. In the authoritarian racial terror states that arose in the postbellum American south, Black people were regularly referred to as demons or beasts, or as possessing an “animal nature.” The Nazis described Jews as vermin—rats, lice, cockroaches.
The purpose of this rhetoric is to remove the demonized group from those we consider worthy of moral consideration—we do not cry about killing a cockroach. It also primes us to view members of those groups as a dangerous and unnatural threat to “our” community.
Often this imagined threat is sexual. Fascism is always machismo and obsessed with the need for violent masculinity. Protecting “their” women provides such a purpose. After the Civil War, many white southerners developed an obsessive “rape complex.” Black men simply could not be trusted around white women, it was imagined. This justified the violent repression of the latter and the exclusion of the former from much of the public sphere.
Interwar Germany had its own version of this. Following World War I, the country was occupied by French troops, some of whom were Black Africans. The nascent fascists cast themselves as protectors of German women, and they were able to get a good amount of international sympathy by “milk[ing] this stereotype of the sexual threat posed by Blacks,” writes NYU’s François Haas. In 1920, the British writer E. D. Morel visited Germany and charged the French with “thrusting barbarians—barbarians belonging to a race inspired by Nature ... with tremendous sexual instincts—into the heart of Europe.”
Musk is appealing to the same values (the nation, masculinity, violence) and giving us the same vision. Needless to say, everything he says is a lie.
In almost all developed countries, first generation immigrants commit less crime than the native-born. Far from being overrun by pedophiles, the areas that have had the most inward migration in the U.K. have seen decline in crime. And while we’re at it: British people are not living like hobbits in small rural idyls, unaware of the world and untouched by the centuries. A whopping 3% of our population lives in smaller rural settlements not near a major town or city. Ignoring all of this and focusing on one anomalous scandal is also on brand: A key fascist principle, from Mussolini to Musk, is: “Tell a lie enough and it becomes the truth.”
Fascists simply do not care about what is true. In a deep and fundamental way, it just doesn’t matter to them. You can see that even in how Musk set up his analogy. What he posted is not even the plot of The Lord of The Rings! It is the hobbits who ultimately save Gondor, not the other way around.
Mangled Myth
Tolkien avoided direct metaphors, so it’s hard to draw political implications from his work, but giving over the state to ruthless men of violence out of fear seems pretty far from anything he would endorse. He certainly despised the Nazis of his day. Interestingly, he was aware that his fictional races could be related to real world racism. It’s been argued that, while his initial portrayal of dwarfs was influenced by anti-Jewish tropes, he attempted to correct against that in The Lord of the Rings (published post-WWII). Gimli was a heroic figure who loved the beauty of nature, not gold for its own sake. And he was presented sympathetically when experiencing discrimination.
Musk himself seems to have more in common with Tolkien’s villains than his heroes. One could easily write an extended “Elon as Saruman” piece: An egotistical industrialist, impressed with his own intellect, who sides with a rising darkness out of desire for power, and whose encroachments on free societies initially succeed because their political leaders are being badly advised.
As I read him, Tolkien’s writing is shot through with a fear of power that is antithetical to the fascist desire for a strongman. The view that only violence can save us is expressed by unsympathetic characters like Denethor. The “one ring” itself can be read as a metaphor for centralized control of the state: a tool of evil that can only be used by evil, one that must be destroyed if men are to remain free.
However silly, Musk’s tortured repurposing of Tolkien’s classic is very classically fascist. It’s not conclusive in itself, but if we’re defining an ideology by its core concepts, it certainly helps to complete the profile. Because fascism wants to bring the “nation” back to a mythic past, the story its adherents tell usually comes packaged in a confused reading of classical history, national myths, and key works of literature that have a quasi-“timeless” feel to them.
Mid-20th-century fascism was obsessed with classical civilizations, attempting to emulate them in various confused and incoherent ways. The Nazis loved Tacitus’s Germania—it became something of a Bible for them, with its depictions of a pure, warrior-like people on the Rhine. It didn’t matter that it was almost 2,000 years old, or that the author had never visited (then) Germania, or that he was just making stuff up, or that the point of the book wasn’t really about Germans but to contrast them with, as he saw it, an increasingly decadent Rome. Nor did it matter that there’s no direct way to connect the Germania of his day with the Germany of the Nazis. Tacitus praised the Germanic warrior spirit and claimed that Germans did not intermarry with other peoples, and that was good enough for the Nazis. They could pull those bits out and put them into their story.
Similarly, the modern far right loves classical phrases and symbols. A Greek or Roman statue as an avatar online is not proof-positive of reactionary tendencies, but it is increasingly a bad sign. They are interested in literature and history to appropriate symbols, to give an elevated air to their narrative, not for their own sake.
As a result, fascism has a fantastical, often unintentionally comedic, air to it. Musk’s post seems silly—for instance, once you recall that “hard” is a euphemism for “erect” it becomes difficult to take it seriously. Yet this is a man with a demonstrated power to destabilize nations. People living entirely in their own reality can justify terrible things—especially if, in their reality, other races are demons and violence is necessary.
It also makes the resurgent creed much easier to dismiss. Presumably, men like Musk are just being over the top. Surely they don’t really mean it.
Fascism, the Real Thing
Musk isn’t the first to make the “immigrants as orcs” analogy. It’s been a standard meme of his crowd for some time. And that makes sense: The Lord of the Rings is in no way an inherently fascist work, but it’s a very natural one for fascists to turn to for metaphors. Despite being relatively recent, it has a timeless feel, speaks to heroism, and has a set of culturally recognizable symbols that the far right can pillage.
And the underlying narrative Musk was expressing is, without question, a fascist one: The idea of white Europe being overrun; the invented, racialized fears of rape; the flat-out lies; the necessity of violent masculinity; the demand we hand power over to thugs; and the appeal to a national mythic past. This is a “paint by numbers” expression of the ideology’s core concepts.
Yes, it’s fascism. To see it, you only have to listen to what men like Musk are telling us they believe.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Don't be so quick to disparage masculinity. Authoritarianism comes in many genders, and masculinity comes in many flavors. You need to spend more time with the KKK -- Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka.
Are you really intent on defending Nurse Ratched from McMurphy -- backed by a shrieking mob whose "courageous" battle-cry is, "Me, too"?
Liberals shouldn't need to choose between brutal bullies and self-righteous scolds. Where is Al Franken now that we need him?
Robert Paxton (historian of Vichy, France and professor emeritus at Princeton) defined the phenomenon thusly:
"A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation
with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of
unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist
miltants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,
abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without
ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
He added,
"Classical themes: fears of decadence and decline, assertion of national and cultural
identity, threat by unassimilable foreigners to national identity and good social order, need for greater authority to deal with these problems."
And he summarized:
"Hard measures by a frightened middle class-that, indeed, is one good general
definition of fascism."
That seems entirely correct in the context of your own analysis.