Musk doubles down on latest ‘socialist’ Hitler claims, but there’s one problem | indy100

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It was back in January when SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk – who infamously gave a salute at US president Donald Trump’s inauguration many considered to be a Nazi salute (which he denied) – wrongly claimed Adolf Hitler was a “far left socialist”, and now, he’s pushing the idea once again.

On Saturday, Musk quote tweeted an X/Twitter post from one Alice Smith which claimed the Nazi leader was a “leftist” and added: “Hitler was a left-wing socialist”. Fellow social media users were quick to fact check the tech billionaire once again.

The next day, though, the entrepreneur was doubling down, sharing another tweet from Smith which said Hitler “self-identified as a socialist” and writing: “True.”

Musk went further than his usual one-word responses two hours later, when he quote tweeted a post from Brivael Le Pogam, CEO of the artificial intelligence platform Argil, who said “sticking Hitler in the ‘far right’ box” was the “biggest ideological scam of the 20^th century”.

Musk commented: “Hitler was a far-left socialist. Therefore, socialists are Hitler. Inescapable logic.”

Except, in addition to X/Twitter users shutting down the incorrect claims yet again, people pointed out that Musk once referred to himself as a socialist:

In the full tweet, shared back in June 2018, the former head of Doge said: “By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from the most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all.”

Writer Jim Stewartson shared a screenshot of the tweet and asked: “Is this you?”

And in addition to digging out a past tweet, social media users responded by arguing that the “national socialist” reference in the fascist’s party “proves Hitler was socialist in exactly the same way ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’ proves North Korea is a liberal democracy”:

Journalist Mehdi Hasan made a similar point while writing that “the richest man in the world has the logic of a child”:

As indy100 reported at the start of the year when Musk last made this claim, the Holocaust Encyclopedia notes the Nazi Party - formally known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party - was a “far-right racist and antisemitic political party” which “sought to woo German workers away from socialism and communism and commit them to its antisemitic and anti-Marxist ideology”.

Its article goes on to add ‘National Socialism’ was a “racist and antisemitic political theory” and the Nazi Party campaigned to eradicate ‘Marxism’ which it used to mean “both communism and socialism”.

Meanwhile, Brittanica states that in April 1933, “communists, socialists, democrats and Jews were purged from the German civil service, and trade unions were outlawed the following month”, with “prominent members” of the country’s communist and social democratic parties arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps.

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