And for the most part, no one seemed to care.
It was this exchange on Fox News about the forced detention and possible euthanasia of the homeless and mentally ill that got me thinking along these lines. While Brian Kilmeade’s lethal injection comment proved to be outside of the Overton window, the earlier part of the exchange, which has gone largely ignored, had even clearer antecedents in Nazi Germany.
Brian Kilmeade endorses euthanizing homeless people: "Involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 13, 2025 at 7:56 AM
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In the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, we are seeing a number of people on the right testing just how extreme and overt a fascist position can be without prompting mass disapproval. Kilmeade was outside of the pale, but it’s shocking just how much has managed to get through.
While it is possible to make too much of a few brief comments from a couple of Fox talking heads, the comments of the world’s second-richest man in Britain over the weekend had the same disturbing historical precedents and were far more potentially catastrophic.
Elon Musk is trying to violently overthrow the government of the UK and replace it with a far-right racist regime, a fact that will not inform how US elites see him at all
— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) September 14, 2025 at 7:28 AM
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Elon Musk spoke by video to Tommy Robinson's anti-immigrant rally in the UK today. "You're in a fundamental situation here where, whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you," said Musk. "You either fight back or you die."
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 11:20 AM
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Elon, fresh off attempting to incite race riots in England is now trying to incite pogroms against trans people.
— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) September 14, 2025 at 7:10 AM
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These are deeply held and long-standing beliefs for Musk, most tracing back at least one and in some cases two generations, going back to his Hitler-loving maternal grandfather.
Along with credulously accepting every self-serving and delusional claim the man made, the mainstream press’s canonization of Elon Musk depended on willfully disregarding heaps of damning evidence that reporters like Lynette Lopez, Lora Kolodny, Michael Hiltzik, and Ed Niedermeyer were diligently uncovering.
Musk has always had, at the very least, serious fascist leanings, but that put him squarely in the mainstream of the Silicon Valley tech right. Racism and anti-feminism have been steeped into the culture from the very beginning, and yet, though this was reported, the editorial offices of places like the New York Times or NPR still aggressively promoted the tech Messiah narrative, which is one of the reasons we are in our current situation.
In case you’ve forgotten, here’s what Peter Thiel said in a widely disseminated Cato Institute essay from 2009. (Ever since then, Thiel and his apologists have been dancing around what he said about women's suffrage. It's best to ignore the distractions and focus on his actual words.)
Even beyond the fascism, these are bad people—greedy, power-hungry, devoid of empathy, and so convinced of their own worth, intellect, and general superiority as to often suggest messianic delusions. And yet, the press was so enamored of the story it was telling itself of a techno-optimist revolution that it ignored all evidence to the contrary.
They should have been calling out these people in real time. Having failed to do that, they need to start now.
p.s. I was going to talk about Andreessen here, but he probably merits a post of his own.
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