Elon Musk Hires American Nazi to Attack Tesla Takedown

Elon Musk and the rest of Tesla’s department of public relations have turned to a prominent American Nazi to attack the Tesla Takedown movement. Not surprisingly, Tesla’s American Nazi propagandist Chris Rufo uses familiar tools of deception. His focus today is on Tesla Takedown, but it’s all about the bigger picture.

To summarize, if you wade through the waters of Rufo’s 2023 book, he blames a Jewish guy who was forced out of Germany by the Nazis. After immigrating as a refugee, Rufo wants us to believe this same Jewish guy decided to launch a conspiracy to destroy the USA. Rufo then tries to justify another holocaust to stop the conspiracy, which supposedly continues to this day, long after the guy’s death.

This brings us to Rufo’s recent claim that Tesla Takedown is part of the same evil conspiracy to destroy the USA. His overall goal is to demonize anyone protesting against the attempted fascist coup. He wants to paint Tesla Takedown as part of the same Jewish conspiracy outlined in his book. That way, he and the rest of the forces of Dark MAGA can try to justify another holocaust.

Rufo’s 2023 book is called America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. He claims this long dead Jewish guy named Herbert Marcuse created a radical left that intentionally infested American institutions. JD Vance’s own American Nazi guru Curtis Yarvin refers to these institutions as “The Cathedral.”

Rufo claims that the leftist ideologies that Marcuse supposedly created, particularly critical race theory, are a cultural rot in the USA that must be exterminated. He literally claims this is necessary to avoid another holocaust, one that Marcuse’s followers are supposedly attempting to orchestrate.

What he doesn’t tell us is that Herbert Marcuse was a Jewish refugee from Germany who was a member of the Social Democratic Party, the Nazi’s main rival political party. Marcuse was forced out of the country with the rest of the party’s leadership in May 1933, less than four months after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor that January, the Reichstag’s fire that February, and the Enabling Act that March.

Rufo is wrong about Marcuse being part of some conspiracy. Despite what Marcuse wrote in his academic books, which can hardly be understood because of his overly complicated writing style, he was no revolutionary. He gave that up all the way back in 1919, after he had joined the communists in an attempted revolution in Germany.

The attempted revolution was put down by the social democrats, who had just been handed the keys to the Weimar Republic by the ruling class capitalists. After that, Marcuse switched sides and became part of the social democratic status quo.

What Rufo claims is a conspiracy to destroy the USA was just the opposite. Marcuse was a Jewish intellectual, a refugee from Germany. This meant that he had to work for what,  a few years later, became the CIA. He helped them understand unions around the world, specifically their connections to socialist and communist parties, so the CIA could crush them all.^[1]

That’s what he had to do to become a citizen. Otherwise he’d have been deported back to Germany and face certain death in an extermination camp.

Far from being a revolutionary, Marcuse was actually criticized by other Jewish refugees from Germany who believed he was what we’d call a “sell out.” Folks like Erich Fromm criticized both Marcuse and Max Horkheimer (the guy who actually created critical theory, not Marcuse) for just using overly complicated language and the mask of revolution to advance nothing more than their own middle class professional careers.^[2]

Marcuse and others sold out the revolutionaries. They were not revolutionaries themselves. They just wanted to feel better about their own cynical betrayals.

What Rufo does with the book is just a version of what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Social Democratic Party of Germany back in the days of the Weimar Republic. Like their political cousins today, the social democrats kept telling people to be patient, that everyone would eventually be part of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive middle class one day. It’s like a “Fight Oligarchy Tour” that’s not encouraging anyone, nor providing guidance on what to do, to actually fight.

Meanwhile, the crisis in the economy got worse, while so did the threat of mass Nazi violence. To defeat the social democrats, the Nazis proposed a more militant, working class, and nationalistic alternative to encircle them from the left and right at the same time. The Nazi’s said that the Jews controlled the social democrats, who were trying to destroy the nation too.

That’s what Rufo and the broader American Nazi movement are trying to do, even pathetically down to blaming Jewish people for causing all the rot. The Tesla Takedown movement is just the latest target because it poses a threat to Elon Musk’s business venture. So Musk and Tesla hired an American Nazi to attack the movement.

Tesla Takedown isn’t trying to destroy democracy though. In fact, despite the important effort they’re making, they are also trying to preserve the status quo that folks like Erich Fromm thought Marcuse sold out to.

Far from representing the revolution that Chris Rufo describes, the Tesla Takedown movement’s overall law and order liberalism actually shares way more in common with the social democrats of the Weimar days than those who actually wanted to stop fascism.

Social democrats like Marcuse turned their backs on those who attempted to stop the Nazis. The people that Rufo says are part of the now long dead Marcuse’s supposed revolutionary conspiracy today are just more recent generations of sell outs. The supposed conspirators are just trying to advance their middle class professional careers with a similar mask. But that’s enough for Rufo and it makes a great target.

Rufo, Musk, and the rest of the MAGA movement want to exploit this, trying to present themselves as on the side of the working class, as some sort of militant nationalist alternative to today’s status quo. They claim to be stopping a conspiracy in order to justify their goals of another holocaust and an American Third Reich. Like their goose-stepping cousins, they too blame “the Jews.”

At the same time as we must stop these American Nazis, we also don’t need more of Tesla Takedown’s law and order liberalism. The non-profit industrial complex has been failing us for decades. They are today’s sell outs. They are our movement’s colonizers.

That’s how we got in this mess in the first place. Middle class liberals keep telling us that law and order will stop fascism, but it won’t.

Instead, we need to make a democratic revolution against fascism and their capitalist wannabe American Caesars like Elon Musk. In order to pull it off, we need grassroots democratic assemblies in communities across the country.

Far from destroying democracy, our movements must expand it, otherwise these movements like Tesla Takedown and Hands Off will just keep being mostly middle class white people. Everyone else knows that there’s no actual democracy to save.

We need assemblies to be the democratic backbone of our movement, not the non-profit industrial complex. We need similar assemblies in workplaces to grow our capacity for mass strikes. Like Marcuse, though Tesla Takedown talks of “taking to the streets,” they actually fight against this. They want everyone to remain on the sideways or tree-lawns, out of the streets and off of Tesla’s private property. They’ve even got protest marshals to keep us all in line.

To keep obeying law and order, like they want, all while American Nazis claim Jewish people control us to destroy the nation and that only our mass extermination can stop it, is genocidal, suicidal, lunacy. We must be better.

1. Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kircheimer, Secrets Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, edited by Raffaele Laudani, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013). P. 3-8, 577-610. ↑
2. Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, (New York: Lexington Books, 2012). P. XLIX; Raya Dunayevskaya, “In Memoriam” in The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, Edited by Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, 237. ↑