Musk and the Master Race

What MAGA Identity Politics Won

It’s time again for your Freakshow guide to direct your attention to a dark place and identify the goblin-like creatures before you. Perhaps you’ve heard of Darren Beattie, the white nationalist eugenicist appointed to be the U.S. State Department’s Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. He is not alone. Let’s have a look around at the men influencing and inhabiting the inner sanctums of Washington, performing Hitler salutes, publicly scorning “low IQ trash” and advocating eugenics.

They’re not the German Nazis Brad Pitt carves with swastikas in Inglourious Basterds nor your Grampa’s generation’s racists. KKK leader David Duke is last-century. Even Richard Spencer, with his gang of khaki-clad dudes hiding their white faces behind gaiter masks, chanting “You will not replace us”— so 2016.

Forget the hoods, forget the masks – for now, anyway. The 2025 white nationalists who have achieved control of the U.S. government thanks to the skills of a reality TV marketing genius and a convicted felon are a different breed, a style. These futuristic fascists class up their racism with conspicuous displays of erudition. They’ll let the “redneck males” that some of them claim to think of as perfect Americans do the sucker-punching on the streets. They most certainly think they’re smarter than you and me.

Thanks to the white identity politics Trump has deployed for ten years and his MAGA voters that white supremacists mostly scorn, they are pouring out of the woodwork like termites. With King Donald in control, they are extremely networked-in. JD Vance, Musk, and red-pilled radicalized former Democrat megadonor Marc Andreesen are just a few of the powerful who follow, amplify, and interact with them online and, often enough, IRL.

Through the Trump administration, for all these freaks, dreams of Total White Man domination suddenly seem achievable. They have so long half-joked about a white master race in an Imperial America ruling over hordes of lower beings, and now it seems possible the lower orders could be dispatched to mine rare earth minerals in the new provinces of Greenland and Canada.

They don’t have much use for women, but many are obsessed with having mo, betta babies. Not like the God squad. They’ll be happy to discard sub-optimal embryos. They want future humans genetically selected for superiority, preferably by IVF. Their spawning avatar is Musk, champion breeder “pronatalist” with 13 super-race babies (oops, minus his trans daughter, of course, who he seems to view as a glitch in the selection machine). Did you think Trump’s Executive Order yesterday to make IVF cheap or free was about helping families make more cute little babies? Think again.

I’ve said they are not Grandpa’s Nazis, but everything old is new again. Their feeds are spews of hate on “dysgenic” and “low IQ” humans, stated or inferred to be not white and/or immigrants. These are ideas Spencer and Duke surely appreciate, plus fantasies of master race domination.

They hide behind noms de guerre and quote the classics – many appear to have broken connections to academic positions and humanities departments. Fascist publisher Jonathan Keeperman taught creative writing at UC Irvine. He now tweets to 104,000 followers as “Lomez” and runs a publishing company Passage Press, under his own name, that revives current and forgotten race scientists and borderline neoNazis. Keeperman made “veiled legal threats” at the Guardian for outing him last year. (In a sign of just how normalized these people are, the New York Times last week quoted Keeperman, who publishes the works of out-of-print fascists, and called his press “influential among conservative intellectuals.”)

Many of the new white nationalist Twitter anons like magisterial, Latin names. Former and current Trump White House Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton first supported Trump anonymously in 2016 under the nom de plume Publius Decius Mus. Peter Thiel’s monarchist Silicon Valley court philosophe Curtis Yarvin wrote anti-democratic screeds for years as the mysterious Mencius Moldbug.

Many go to great effort to remain “anons” — perhaps to keep jobs or girlfriends. You can see these anons on X, chortling and getting retweeted by JD Vance, Donald Trump Junior, Musk, Marc Andreesen.

In “woke” America, it was dangerous to alert employers or colleagues to a devotion to fascism and race science, but now, maybe not so bad. One who has clung to anonymity is a man who goes by Captive Dreamer. Dreamer was the original amplifier of the claim that Haitians were eating dogs and cats in Ohio. He has named himself after the title of a book by a French fascist who joined the Waffen SS. He was beyond ecstatic during the 2024 VP debate when JD Vance doubled down on the Haitian pet-eaters: “Springfield in the FIRST FUCKING QUESTION. MY FUCKING PRESIDENT!!”

The day after the November election, Captive took another Twitter victory lap. “Really proud of this one,” he tweeted, over his original tweet containing the now-infamous lie. “Apparently it put the whole situation back onto JD Vance’s radar. “

Captive Dreamer and Bronze Age Pervert did some recorded Twitter spaces where the host opened the show with “Heil Hitler. Fuck N*****s.” On one of these confabs, Bronze Age Pervert aka Alamariu was explicit about the usefulness of the MAGAs: “The Trump movement is a white middle class uprising. It is the best possible cover for us.” Bronze Age Pervert also observes that Obama’s Americorps was intended to turn “high IQ white guys to become slaves essentially to inner city development projects.”

Read that paragraph again and then think about this: The Vice President of the United States, the President’s chief of everything Musk, and a sizable number of Trump allies and staff follow, interact with, and retweet men who open or close public conversations with Heil Hitler and the n-word.

One of the most out and proud of these men is Trump administration official Darren Beattie, whose white nationalist affiliations were too much for Trump 1.0. He was canned after appearing at a white nationalist confab.

But in Trump 2.0, the same extremism is a job qualification: Beattie was recently appointed Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Put on the spot, Secretary of State Lil Marco Rubio could only sputter that the “Trump Transition team” appointed him. Beattie wrote his PhD thesis on Nazi Martin Heidegger. It is not an exaggeration to say he is an unapologetic white nationalist eugenicist.

Beattie has repeatedly shared his scorn for filthy “low IQ trash” who are destroying our culture. Here’s a screenshot of some Beattie Xitter repartee from last year.

One might take them seriously on their higher educational and moral standards for the franchise but their “low IQ trash” always excludes some of the white MAGA rabble who can’t spell common English and hang F*ck Biden flags outdoors for schoolchildren to see. The cognitive dissonance is profound.

Musk’s Gen Z coders chipping away at American privacy also have white nationalist bonafides. Their online noms de guerre were cracked, revealing support for “eugenic immigration” and “normalizing Indian hate” and enthusiasm for fascist rapist Andrew Tate. Is it really that hard to find stable, normie-smart people in the algorithm business these days? Maybe.

So their ideology won. The saddest thing about the rise and influence of these racist termites is that they were radicalized and have themselves radicalized untold numbers of other white people, all while the U.S. government was focused on radicalized Islam.

Before the 2016 election, few appreciated the magnitude of the audience for such a message. Surprisingly, few academic programs study “white” politics. One who does is Ashley Jardina, a Duke political scientist who published some of her research in a book titled “White Identity Politics” in 2019. Using large poll data sets, she determined that at least 40 percent of Caucasian Americans acknowledge having some degree of "white identity," a loose term that exists on a spectrum.

Racists who support hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan are a small minority of these so-called white identifiers, about 10 percent. The rest, she told me, are usually more animated by political and economic forces. "When we think of racial prejudice, we think of antipathy toward people of color, a general sense of animus," Jardina said. "There is a subset of people in the U.S. who feel their white race is important to them and feel the demographics are changing and the privileges and advantages that they have are under attack. That is different from 'I just don't like black people…although the consequences of these two attitudes might sometimes be the same."

The consequences are indeed the same. And we are living with them now.

Before I go, I recommend glancing at two articles today. Gabe Sherman of Vanity Fair reports that Senate Republicans are “terrified” of Trump, not just of being primaries but for their physical safety.

Related to that, it was reported yesterday that acting DC Attorney General Ed Martin (a lifelong anti-choice extremist and Phyllis Schlafly cohort who shouldn’t be anywhere near the kind of power he’s got right now) has issued a legal threat to Democratic elected officials who criticize Trump in language far, far less incendiary than Trump’s trademark mobster talk.

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