Well, Twitter owner Elon Musk is being vile again. That's a frequent enough occurrence that it usually doesn't rise to the level of news, since Musk spends most of his day looking for affirmation in the mentions of far-right sh-tposters and memelords, but Musk remains one of the richest people on the planet and whenever a man willing to blow $44 billion on a website just so that he could rig it up to give himself a louder voice than anyone else, it becomes news when the very rich cultivator of far-right adulation keeps promoting antisemitism, neo-Nazi themes, and attacks on democracy itself.
So yeah, apparently we have to do this again. As per usual it started with Musk putting his two cents in in the replies of another anti-Muslim tweet by notorious far-right conspiracy promoter and fascism-booster Amy Mek, because—again—Musk appears to crave the attention of every fascist and protofascist on the internet. Mak promoted a video allegedly from an imam vowing France will "become an Islamic country through Jihad," upon which some other ultracreep piped up with "Thanks to the white female vote," which caused allegedly richest person in the world to himself reply that "The childless have little stake in the future."
That's already about five kinds of creepy and weird but we'll set that aside for the moment, because it's yet another of Musk's blue check weirdos who set the ball rolling toward its natural Worst Possible Take.
"Democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents. Helps solve the procreation problem, too," mused blue-check user "fentasyl".
"Yup," replied Elon.
All right, so here's where we're at. Musk is poking around in the replies of one of the most notorious anti-Muslim boosters of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, as he so often does, sees Some Dude opine that "the white female vote" are the reason that France will supposedly fall to jihad, elaborates with his own belief that "the childless have little stake in the future" and are the real problem here—because the imaginary white females are apparently childless, too?—and by the end is agreeing that democracy itself is "probably unworkable" unless we bar non-parents from voting at all. Just another normal day.
Incidentally, while all of this was going on, Twitter itself was going belly up, with engineers having to hastily put together a new Elon scheme to put new caps on how many tweets you're allowed to read, possibly because Musk's previous decision to not pay his damn bills was now reaching the "find out" end stage.
You can understand, then, why the man would need to relax by yet again questioning the usefulness of democracy. It's that or do his damn day job, and he's terrible at his day job.
The reason all of this matters is that Musk is again diving into some very, very sketchy stuff. Musk is perhaps one of the most famous figures in the small and bizarre "natalist" movement, people who believe that society will collapse if human population growth isn't maintained. If you think that sounds suspiciously close to the neo-Nazi belief that it's "white" humanity that is in danger of dwindling, or to the arguments of eugenicists in general, you're right: The movement is almost entirely white and is clogged with just those sorts of people.
"It would be so easy to dismiss this as yet another unhinged comment, except for the deep intersections between natalism and fascism. These ideas are dangerous, and when we start to see them spread casually by people in power, we shouldn't stand idly by," tweets Dr. Jacquelyn Gill, and that is the problem. Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter, a struggling company not likely to be worth half of that, was initially portrayed by Musk as some sort of grand plan to improve society. On taking over, it became evident that Musk's "improvements" consisted of rigging the algorithm to give himself virtual site omnipresence, while using that to boost pandemic conspiracy theories, delegitimize government, and repeatedly call into question whether democracy itself was sustainable.
Musk keeps wallowing through far-right hate accounts and coming up with his own theories of how the world should work. His inability to not share those pearls of wisdom with the rest of us has, however, fully laid to rest any notion that Musk's "genius" consists of anything but relentless narcissism. Most of the billionaire's critiques for society fall somewhere between bizarre and malevolent.
What does it mean, that the "childless have little stake in the future?" That's just crank talk. So children themselves have no stake in the future, until they've either impregnated someone or been impregnated? How does adoption play into this? Do you have a stake in the future if you adopt a child, or is it only the genetic parents who have this stake? When limiting "democracy" to bar everyone but parents from electing the United States government, would voting certificates be transferred along with the child during an adoption?
What if a child dies? Would the parent, again childless, be again barred from voting? How in the artisanal ketamine-tinted hell would any of this work, and do the people making crank suggestions like this even listen to themselves, or is it all pumped out for shock value, unmolested by such trivialities as common sense?
The notion that "white females" in particular are valueless to democracy until and unless they give birth is some deeply creepy Aryan shit, but Musk keeps diving right in to support it, over and over. The man has a fetish for fascism, and he's certainly not shy about showing it off.
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