Musk slams media, critics for Nazi comparisons: 'Character assassination'

[Kid Berwyn]

70. Pressure reveals Character

The Guardian writer puts two of today's billionaire NAZIs pol-watchers into context:

How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa

Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler

by Chris McGreal
The Guardian, January 26, 2025

Excerpt...

They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.

David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.

Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.

Snip...

The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.

Snip...

The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.

Continues...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa

Mission

Connecting the global grassroots with the tools of genocide prevention.

About

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention was founded to fill a gap in the global prevention protocols. We noticed during several trips to northern Iraq in 2016 and 2017 that very little of the work that goes on at high levels of governments, in international organizations, and among large civil society groups ever reaches people facing genocide and mass atrocity, although they are the people for whom all this work is supposed to be done.

We built the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention to be responsive and flexible, transparent and judicious, nonpartisan and vocal. We believe that peoples in crisis need immediate action and direct support, even when the international community has its head in the sand.

We have heard from many survivors that the worst thing about living through genocide was the sense that the rest of the world did not care and had forgotten about them.

The Lemkin Institute wants to change this dynamic by putting threatened peoples at the center of our concerns.

We use a transparent system for analyzing crises within a genocide prevention framework and we have created materials so that this system can also be used by others.

The Lemkin Institute has grown from the Iraq Project for Genocide Prevention and Accountability, which was launched in 2017 to address the need for long-term capacity building in genocide prevention in Iraq. In the wake of ISIS genocides, we saw an enormous grassroots interest in ending the cycle of violence and promoting a lasting peace. We are now bringing that work to the global grassroots.

Source: https://www.lemkininstitute.com/about-us

Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat gave me an Rx I'd like to share:

The Anti Fascism Toolkit

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s0JbXhND7-1iqABNcUNL031NQLxkLfr-USkCKGZTidI/mobilebasic

An excerpt:

Introduction

Generations of Americans before us have faced and fought oppression, confronting forces determined to harm their lives and endanger their livelihoods while still forging ahead toward the unrealized promise of liberty and justice for all. Now, it is our turn to pick up the baton and show up – marching, striking, voting and protecting each other – for our freedoms, our families, and our futures. We have won fights against exploitation by a wealthy, White few before, and by joining together, we will again.

As we enter an era of increased authoritarianism in this country, it will be critical to stay true to our values. The siren song of the right is intended to entice many to abandon their principles, and their fellow Americans, capitulating in order to protect themselves or in a misguided attempt to attract conflicted voters. To fall into this trap is to lend credence and credibility to the MAGA Agenda. Americans consistently favor progressive policies – from our freedom to decide if and when to start a family, to our freedom to join together in union, to our freedom to shine bright as our true selves - and we must continue to promote them.

Over the next few years, MAGA leaders will launch attack after attack, perpetrate outrage after outrage, commit injustice after injustice with the goal of keeping us disoriented, demoralized, and demobilized. Rather than exhausting ourselves reacting to each new indignity, we must expose the throughline between attacks and remain consistent and determined. We do that by telling a single, clear story about who we are, what our opposition intends, why they scapegoat, and how we build power to defeat them.

We are people of all races, genders, and backgrounds who value our freedoms. They are a handful of billionaires and scammers trying to take away our freedoms and permanently rig the rules so that wealthy White men control all who do not look, live, or love like them. But joining together – Black, White, and brown, Native and newcomer, transgender and not – the many can and will defeat the money and finally make this a country where liberty and justice are for all, no exceptions.

They live. The NAZIs are everything the opposite of what they call “woke.” And many if these oligarchs and kleptocrats spend their money to turn America into the Turd Reich.