Until I learned the whole story about Musk’s takeover of Tesla, I had no idea how bad and overconfident he was at engineering and business, but once I learned that, a lot of things started to make a lot more sense.
Yeah, my cousin used to work at SpaceX, and it’s sort of an open secret that they need to actively keep Elon away from the engineers. They have entire teams of people dedicated to shoving menial decisions and distractions in front of him, so he doesn’t have time to wander over to the engineers. Like as soon as he steps out of his office door, there are multiple people whose sole job is dedicated to subtlety redirecting him off to other non-critical wings of the building to keep him distracted. Because if he ever talks to the rocket engineers, he’ll try to one-up them by dropping some asinine “we’re going to do it this dumb way instead” decree that requires them to scrap their entire current project and start over from scratch (for the third time this week.)
It has always been there, but until Trump’s first term the Nazis were at least cautious about things. They were afraid to openly and publicly spout their BS, unless they were in large groups. Because they knew that if they held up swastika signs on the street corner, that they’d very quickly get punched in the mouth.
But Trump changed that. Depending on how old you are, you may remember the “he tells it like it is/he’s not afraid to say what’s really on his mind” types of support for Trump during his first term. What a lot of those people were really saying is “he makes me feel empowered to say what’s is on my mind.” And what was on their mind was white supremacy and nazism. When the highest office in the land is tacitly (and sometimes directly) supporting white supremacists, they feel emboldened. And when they feel emboldened, they escalate.
What used to be whispered racist jokes escalated into passive racism. What used to be passive racism escalated into active racism. What used to be active racism escalated into openly hostile racism. And what used to be openly hostile racism escalated into nazism.
And the issue is that Trump/Musk have given Nazis a forum to meet other Nazis. Before, being a Nazi was a fairly lonely hobby. Finding other Nazis carried a lot of risk, because it meant potentially exposing yourself and getting your life ruined. But with Musk buying Xitter, Trump building Truth Social, etc… Yeah, suddenly the Nazis felt empowered to actually start talking to each other. The same way flat earthers used to just be your crazy uncle who smoked too much in his garage. But now that crazy uncle is part of a Flat Earth Society that regularly does large “experiments” to try and prove the earth is flat. By finding a forum to connect with other like-minded individuals, people feel emboldened as their views feel more normalized.