A new book called Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed has just been announced. It will be published in April, but I’ve obtained an early copy. Muskism, allegedly, is about Elon Musk and his supposed “dark prophesies” for America. But the timing of this book’s launch could hardly be worse for its authors.
Those authors, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, describe Musk as a racist techno-Nazi who lacks empathy and has dreams of an all-white future where he controls what everyone says and thinks, how many kids they have, and what history teaches. “Dystopian isn’t a strong enough word for the technocratic future the authors prophesy in this bleak but urgent book,” hailed Kirkus Reviews.
Slobodian and Tarnoff acknowledge that some people think of Musk as “a genius entrepreneur, launching humanity toward a science-fiction future,” but in reality, they say, he is “a ketamine-addled meme-lord, inflating bubbles and babbling about birth rates,” or worse, “a cat’s paw of the far right, his brain rotted by Twitter and dark prophecies of migrant invasion.” Muskism, they insist, won’t end well:
The end goal is a purified community defined by cultural and genetic membership in a white, European West garrisoned by superior technology—a fortress to protect the best of humanity from the worst. The technologies of Muskism’s walled garden will fortify the walls of the nation and the home. Harden your heart, harden your borders and debug the codebase. “If tolerance means the end of Western Civilization,” he posted to his 225 million followers in 2025, “then we cannot be tolerant.”
Books are prepared months before their publication dates, so there’s no way the authors of Muskism could have foreseen what was coming. Then again, the authors are leftists, so even if they were clairvoyant, the facts recent events have uncovered wouldn’t have mattered to them. Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at Boston University and the author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Ben Tarnoff is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts and is the author of Internet for the People.
The first and most obvious problem the authors failed to foresee is the massive, unprecedented fraud uncovered in the Minneapolis Somali community. Suddenly, Musk’s “dark prophecies of migrant invasion” don’t seem so crazy. The best estimates of the fraud in Minnesota suggest it could reach $9 billion. Even The New York Times called the scandal “staggering in its scale and brazenness.” This group of protected migrants came here and ripped us off in one of the most shameless fraud schemes in American history. Like most of the left, Slobodian and Tarnoff are inclined to blame such inconvenient facts on racism. For his part, Musk has come out with the sensible, once-liberal position that racism against anybody is wrong. “For a *very* long time,” Musk once wrote, “US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians. Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.” If everybody did that, however, then ideologues like Slobodian and Tarnoff would lose their careers.
Slobodian and Tarnoff further claim that Musk wants us all dependent on him:
He sells the fantasy that, in an increasingly unstable world, both states and individuals can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures. The paradox is that, in doing so, you become reliant on him. What is sold as techno-sovereignty is entry into Musk’s walled garden, to which he holds the master key.
This claim comes at the exact same time as investigations are uncovering the left’s criminal and unprecedented attempt to censor and control information.
In March, Jacob Siegel’s book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, will be released. As I have written in Chronicles, The Information State is a devastating work of journalism that reveals how politicians, the technocratic elite, and the media conspired to spy on and destroy Donald Trump. They did this by launching the Russiagate hoax, censoring information, and promoting lies. In short, they did everything that Muskism falsely claims Elon Musk has done.
Who is the bigger champion of free speech: Elon Musk or John Brennan? Which of these men would be more likely to throttle or shadowban ideas or information that goes against the left’s narrative? Musk or the people who used to run what was Twitter?
The most entertaining part of Muskism is its conclusion. Imagine a drunk but articulate college sophomore who is enamored of Marx and has read Orwell and The Handmaid’s Tale (but not Solzhenitsyn) going off on a crazed dorm room tear. Once you’ve got that picture in your head you can join Slobodian and Tarnoff as they imagine the year 2030 for the daughter of a bureaucrat in Muskworld:
She arrives at school, passing by the mural of a young blond Ukrainian woman murdered by a mentally ill Black man. In a lesson titled “The Rape of Europe,” she is told about a dark time in the early twenty-first century when countries like the United Kingdom were “invaded” by people from non-Western countries welcomed in by deluded politicians practicing “suicidal empathy.” This was remedied by the round-up and deportation drives of the 2030s carried out under the slogan of “generation remigration.” The “defense of Western Civilization,” she is told, was a success and parties once called “far right” are now firmly in power. Their sovereignty is secured by the Starlink communication grid of satellites and networks of rockets capable of carrying hypersonic missiles. Jobs exist for some high-level managers and programmers at automated mines and factories, but most people spend their recreational hours streaming video, scrolling and posting on social media, and gaming. This is an immersive and endlessly diverting experience because everyone is now equipped with a Neuralink that expands the bandwidth of one’s interface with the “collective AI” to a rushing river of data as well as enhancing the senses, letting each person see in ultraviolet like a dragonfly and infrared like a vampire bat.
Sorry guys, I don’t think we’ll ever get that lucky. More likely is the less dramatic but more vital possibility that Elon Musk will continue to want free people to say, think, read, and write what they want.
It would be better for these two washed-up Marxists to go back to the drawing board before Muskism actually launches. Their whole approach to understanding the world is old news, and their book was played out before it even landed. As Paul Valery said, “everything changes except the avant-garde.”