Elon Musk’s critics are more autistic than he ever could be

I’ve managed to keep most of my liberal family relationships and friendships intact, even after going public about voting for Trump. Most of them shrugged and applied the principle our grandparents taught us — blood is thicker than politics.

That is, until Elon Musk. He has proven to be the straw that broke the liberals’ back. Realizing that they’d rendered calling Trump “literally Hitler” ineffective, many normie Democrats and liberal commentators have redirected this energy toward the “Chief Twit.”

First there was the hand gesture at the post-inauguration rally. Since I’ve come out and said, “I don’t think Elon did two Nazi salutes, I think he is autistic,” I’ve lost old friends, shed hundreds of followers on Instagram — not that I care, I just find it interesting that was beyond the pale for them — and had some tough conversations with family members who aren’t sure they can associate with a “Nazi sympathizer.”

I blame a few things for the acceleration of “everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi.” The first being the internet. Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies is an internet adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990 that states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

The second is media abdication of its duty to maintain objectivity as members instead became breathless pushers of emotionally charged opposition to Donald Trump — much of it indicating that he’s a murderous dictator on the rise. Colloquially known as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or TDS, it includes the Hitler comparisons that have damaged the trust between these media figures and their audiences.

The biggest problem with using these terms so much they lose all meaning is that you end up giving cover to actual Nazis. If the same media accusing Elon of being a not-so-secret Nazi is not also drawing attention to adults openly performing Sieg Heils at a Free Palestine protest, for instance, people tune them out. It becomes white noise. Actual Nazis thrive and multiply in these conditions.

Left-wing media has poisoned its audience — and the characters driving this trend should be held accountable. They won’t be. But they should be. Many of my friends and family are in a lot of pain and distress, bordering on hysteria. Their media diet is partially responsible for breaking their brains — it’s infuriating and frustrating to see how incoherent they’ve become. The conversations go something like this:

Me: Do you actually think Elon Musk is a Nazi?

Them: No. But that was a Nazi salute.

The stripping of intent from action has been a tactic that, until recently, has been very successful in the power struggle for “the Culture.” It’s how we ended up with “microaggressions” and “implicit bias.” You might not have meant it this way, but this is how I took it.

It’s also a useful way to soothe your psyche when you’re experiencing cognitive dissonance. Foundationally it must be unsettling. They were all lied to. They were told that Donald Trump is Hitler and January 6 was worse than 9/11 — and this is the end of Democracy.

Then Trump won every swing state. He won the popular vote. The youth voted for him. Minorities broke for him in record numbers. Biden and Obama shook his hand. Every billionaire tech leader scrambled to appear with him on the dais at the inauguration.

How do you regain some sense of control? How do you soothe your ego when reality collides with your worldview? When it turns out most people don’t actually hold the beliefs you thought they did? You have preference falsification on mass levels. It’s like The Truman Show. Instead of taking in new information, it’s much easier to say, “Aha! Elon is the Nazi!”

Now that Elon is sleeping on the floor of the West Wing, with his team of six autists doing a line-by-line audit of government spending, the memo going out is that an unelected shadow government is staging a coup. That is going to be a hard sell after an unelected shadow government just ran this country for four years while hiding the fact that the elected president was barely functioning — and shamed Americans for pointing it out.

Yet here we are again. The media has crafted a storyline in which their audience has to be the freedom fighters. The anti-fascists. The righteous defenders of evil. And when the evil doesn’t exist, they will conjure it out of nowhere.

At root, this is a deeply cynical worldview. Wouldn’t it be better if Elon was not a Nazi?

The media tends to laser-focus on one detail and becomes incapable of reasoning, or applying Occam’s Razor or sensing context. As a result, valid critiques of the Trump administration will get lost or be dismissed as TDS.

In other words, when it comes to discussing politics, Musk’s critics are more autistic than he ever could be.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.