Elon Musk Is Leading a Far Right Anti-Empathy Revolution
On Tuesday, Trump addressed a joint session of Congress, bloviating for a record-breaking hour and 40 minutes. The speech was filled with the kind of lies, vitriol, and self-adulation we have come to expect from the current president. Notably, Trump affirmed, during his speech, that Elon Musk is in charge of the infamous Department of Government Efficiency. “I have created the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, perhaps you’ve heard of it, which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight,” Trump said. Trump’s administration has repeatedly stated that DOGE is not, in fact, headed by Musk, as legal challenges around the entity have mounted. Since Trump’s speech, multiple legal filings have cited Trump’s affirmation of what has long been clear to the public: when it comes to the looting of the federal government, Elon Musk is in control.
Trump’s speech was predictably ugly and overlong, and included few surprises. “Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is gone,” Trump rambled.
Some Democrats present responded to Trump’s rhetoric by holding up small signs bearing messages that included, “Musk Steals,” “Save Medicaid,” and “Protect Veterans.” Many observers have compared the signs to ping pong paddles. Personally, I thought they looked more like auction paddles, but whether one associates the signs with table tennis or an elite shopping exercise, the imagery was not favorable. The signs were roundly mocked on social media, as some declared the effort was “giving bingo.”
Representative Al Green disrupted Trump’s speech, rising to his feet, raising his cane, and declaring that Trump had no mandate to cut Medicaid. Green was ultimately removed from the chamber by the Sergeant at Arms, while Republicans cheered and Democrats clutched their paddles. Congressional Democrats offered us a valuable lesson that night: This is what failure, ineptitude, and an unwillingness to protect others look like. Meek expressions of disapproval — from flimsy signs to an inconsistent attempt at rebellious(?) color coordination — made most Democrats in attendance appear unserious, and the contrast between their sad efforts, and Green’s loud, defiant gesture, only served to emphasize their weakness, as did their abandonment of their colleague.
Some Democrats have gone beyond abandonment, with ten Democratic House members joining Republicans in a vote to sanction Green.
It’s worth noting that representatives Jasmine Crockett and Maxwell Frost walked out during Trump’s speech. Each removed their jackets as they left, revealing messages on their t-shirts that read “RESIST” and “No kings live here,” respectively. A small cohort of Democrats followed them as they made their exit. Bernie Sanders also walked out during the speech.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Patty Murray opted not to attend the address.
“The Empathy Exploit”
While congressional Democrats fail to mount any meaningful opposition to Trump’s agenda in Washington D.C., Elon Musk is bragging publicly about the “revolution” he is leading. In a recent, three hour-long conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk opined, “DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy. It’s the first threat to the bureaucracy. Normally, the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they’re not, that the revolution might actually succeed.”
Revolution was a recurring theme in Musk’s remarks during the interview. When Rogan claimed that Trump was restrained by “neocon” appointees during his first administration, but faced no such obstruction during his second term, Musk noted, “This is a revolutionary cabinet. Maybe the most revolutionary since the first revolution.”
The sprawling conversation included a flurry of misinformation, as Musk sought to beat back criticism around the havoc DOGE has caused nationally and internationally. Rogan affirmed each round of Musk’s nonsense with statements like, “It’s so fascinating that people can’t see this.”
While Musk acknowledged “mistakes” such as DOGE’s discontinuation of ebola prevention efforts, he also attempted to cast doubt on the validity of the work DOGE had disrupted. “It could be the kind of thing where you sort of fund Ebola prevention, but it turns out that actually you’re funding a lab that develops new Ebola,” Musk said. Musk offered no evidence to back this claim, or his assertion that “DEI” had forced “a bunch of really good, talented old white guys” out of the Federal Aviation Administration, creating an air traffic controller shortage.
Musk regularly amplifies, repeats, or simply invents hoaxes. The richest man in the world lies with abandon, secure in the knowledge that fact-checking efforts will not reach or impact his target audience. The mediasphere is incredibly fractured, and selective exposure means that many people will only encounter media that affirms, rather than corrects, their worldview. However, even people who are exposed to and believe corrections are not immune to the influence of misinformation. Studies have shown that even after being exposed to the truth, misinformation continues to shape people’s perspectives.
Musk is seeking to affirm what feels true to people who want to believe in the Trump administration. Some will cling to those stories, even in the face of correction. But even if they feel forced to abandon a particular lie, there will always be more to choose from. The end game of this approach is to make facts irrelevant, since new “facts” can always be generated to support the right-wing position. Musk has turned his social media platform into a misinformation machine, offering a constant flow of fascist myths and fantasies to justify the actions of right-wingers and oligarchs.
Meanwhile, DOGE has initiated cuts at the Social Security Administration that former SSA chief Martin O’Malley has warned could lead to a “system collapse and an interruption of benefits.”
Musk attacked Social Security during his interview with Rogan, calling the program “the biggest ponzi scheme of all time.” He also made baseless claims that “entitlement fraud” is attracting immigrants from around the world to the United States. “If you end the illegal alien fraud, you turn off the magnet,” Musk claimed — framing DOGE’s gutting of federal programs and congressional attacks on Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as efforts to stem the flow of immigration.
In addition to conjuring a completely false motive for immigration, and erasing the catastrophic conditions that actually lead people to migrate (conditions that the United States has often played a role in creating), Musk is also attempting to use anti-immigrant sentiment to prop up his lawless slash-and-burn attacks on federal programs.
Musk is trying to further weaponize xenophobia and contempt to gain popular support for cuts that are throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of work (including tens of thousands of veterans), imperiling family-owned farms, jeopardizing climate catastrophe warning systems, depriving foreign aid recipients of care (including malnourished infants and HIV patients), and creating conditions that could disrupt the distribution of Social Security benefits, among other harms. In the hopes of spurring privatization, including massive contracts that would replace human bureaucracy with AI systems (an industry he is angling to dominate), Musk is invoking anti-immigrant bigotry.
Now, I want to return for a moment to Musk’s comments about bureaucracy. Musk talks about bureaucracy as being more powerful than government officials. He claims that bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast, and that DOGE has been the exception to this rule. He is seeking to gut the machinery of government, which he believes has previously restrained people like Trump, and replace it with algorithmic governance. Even as AI technology flounders in the corporate world, Musk clearly believes he is poised to use this technology to overtake the US government and replace human bureaucracy with a monarchistic apparatus. With algorithmic governance, there would be no resistance, no shame, no compassion, and no fear of prosecution to interrupt the execution of oligarchical whims.
This is Musk’s vision, and it’s why he is battling with Open AI to dominate a troubled industry. He wants the United States to be powered by Starlink and xAI. If the richest man in the world owns all of the machinery of the US government, he can fulfill anti-democratic tech blogger Curvis Yarvin’s dream of a state “CEO” — which Yarvin describes as a kind of monarchy.
Given Musk’s current level of power over the federal apparatus, that dream is clearly in the process of being realized.
The removal of human agency and emotion from governance is consistent with Musk’s views on empathy, which he recently shared with Rogan. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. Musk qualified his remarks slightly, noting that he is not wholly opposed to empathy, but nonetheless believes that empathy is destroying Western civilization. “I believe in empathy, I think you should care about people. But you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole, and not commit civilizational suicide,” he said. After repeating multiple falsehoods about immigrants, Musk claimed it was empathy that had allowed immigrants to become a threat to the United States. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit — they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response,” Musk said.
Compassion and Collective Survival
Musk views empathy as a “bug” that threatens his political agenda. This framing is instructive. Musk is seeking to weaponize animus, in order to justify his destructive, self-serving actions, and that means he needs our resentments to outweigh our regard for other people, and ourselves. This means that to effectively oppose him, we have to focus on our connectedness and our shared regard for the people being harmed by DOGE, Musk, and Trump. Rather than simply recounting and denouncing each new outrage, we must keep this administration’s victims front and center in our narratives. We must uplift the stories of people whose lives are being lost, endangered or undone. Who is being harmed? Who is being threatened? What outcomes do those people deserve? This, we must emphasize, is what we are fighting for. We must constantly reiterate that we are acting in solidarity with, and in defense of, targeted and harmed communities. We must build narratives around our shared humanity, rather than grounding our politics in contempt.
While it’s true that some people are contemptible, and some enemies must be fought, our guiding narrative must be based in compassion, what we love, and what we’re fighting for.
For progressives and leftists who are frustrated with one another, and who may be deeply disappointed with the choices some community members have made, this will also mean moving away from a tendency to center critique and disqualification. We will not build strong movements around our resentments. We must move in spite of them.
This is a time to invest deeply in mutual aid and community defense. Lately, I’ve noticed a shift among some progressives — away from prioritizing the protection of vulnerable people and toward a singular focus on protests aimed at stopping DOGE. Protest is necessary, but scattered demonstrations alone will not build the solidarity needed to survive the months and years ahead. To counter the forces of alienation and animosity that seek to divide us, we must build a culture of care. By creating as much safety and justice as we can, wherever we are, we will forge bonds that will sustain us in moments of collective resistance and refusal.
As Democrats have shown, status quo politics are no match for Musk’s agenda. The techno-fascist revolution will not be beaten back with ping-pong paddle signage. We must live in opposition to it, which means being deeply invested in one another. Rather than being ruled by our resentments, we must be empowered by our collective concern for each other. The techno-fascist worldview would leave us isolated from one another, indifferent to reality, and unconcerned with the suffering of others. To defeat it, we must build our own revolution — one rooted in solidarity, not disposability. In Let This Radicalize You, Mariame Kaba and I wrote about a revolution of reciprocal care — a movement where refusing to abandon one another is fundamental to our politics.
This is how we will survive together. This is how we will build the capacity to win: by insisting on the value of each other’s lives, no matter how much men like Musk seek to degrade us.