Musk and Vance’s Germany comments and learning history’s lessons
Endorsements of the far-right AfD are misguided; still, those who draw conclusions from Angela Merkel’s historic immigration blunder are realists, not fascists.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Dec 26, 2024
Elon Musk, former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, talk to reporters back stage during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show grounds on October 5, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania.
For those American liberals who spent the last four years smearing their conservative opponents as fascists, it was treated as a belated vindication of their views. Billionaire Elon Musk and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance both spoke out in favor of the AfD in the upcoming German elections, making it seem as if the pair were giving the far-right party the endorsement of the incoming Trump administration.
The AfD’s neo-Nazi origins, coupled with the fact that a number of its parliamentary candidates and regional leaders have either used Nazi slogans or defended members of the SS as not necessarily criminal, have provoked outrage. Indeed, earlier this year, it was expelled from the group of nationalist parties that sit together in the European parliament. If someone like Marine Le Pen—the head of the French National Rally Party, which is also blasted by the left as neo-fascist—thinks AfD isn’t kosher, then how can Republicans, especially members of President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle, embrace it?
But, as is often the case, when Americans comment on foreign political controversies, what they are really doing is using it to validate their own domestic policies.
Musk is Trump’s close ally, campaign funder and the head of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, while Vance is the president-elect’s likely successor. Both are using Germany’s disastrous immigration policies, which have flooded the country with Muslim immigrants from the Middle East who have caused enormous problems, as a rationale for their administration’s plans for decisive action on America’s own illegal immigration problem. It’s a problem exacerbated by the record flood of migrants who have poured into the United States on President Joe Biden’s watch.
Trump’s border promise
This isn’t a sign that the new administration will be fascist or authoritarian. Rather, it is an indication that Trump and his team will, as he did in his first non-consecutive term, try to keep his promises to deal with the U.S. southern border crisis and uphold the rule of law. It’s a concept that, for all of his hyperbole about defending democracy, Biden abandoned. Ironically, Biden’s zeal to appease his party’s left-wing that demanded open border policies played a major role in Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Nevertheless, it is a mistake for Musk, Vance or anyone in the GOP to pretend that AfD is just the German version of Trump’s MAGA movement.
AfD leader Alice Weidel has tried to distance herself and her party from its origins, as well as the predilection of some of its parliamentary candidates and regional leaders to signal their nostalgia for elements of the Hitler regime. The AfD is also consistently pro-Israel. Germany’s main parties have not backtracked on their nation’s post-Holocaust commitment to defend the Jewish state and support efforts to rightly label pro-Hamas agitation as antisemitism in the aftermath of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet Germany’s leftist parties are increasingly hostile to Israel; even centrist leaders, like former Chancellor Angela Merkel, have bashed Israel’s government, making AfD’s support far from inconsequential.
But unlike other European right-wing parties that have grown in prominence in reaction to the surge of Muslim immigration during the last decade, AfD’s efforts to reinvent itself have so far been unconvincing. It is still too closely tied to Germany’s dark past to allow Weidel to be seen in the same light as someone like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Georgia Meloni in Italy or Le Pen. That’s why Germany’s Jewish community, including some who share the right’s concerns about immigration, is overwhelmingly opposed to AfD.
Musk, Vance and others who have expressed sympathy or support for AfD are rightly chided for not learning the lessons of history when it comes to tolerating extremists who traffic in the tropes of Jew-hatred.
Musk’s positions on public-policy questions are all over the place, and it’s hard to argue that his terse endorsements of podcasts or articles on his X social-media platform constitute a consistent pattern on this or any issue. That’s especially true concerning Israel and Jewish issues since he has been outspoken in defense of the Jewish state and even wears a dog tag-style necklace for Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.
Vance is less guarded than most politicians in his comments, but he, too, should not be accused of antisemitism.
The Tucker Carlson problem
Both of them, like Trump, must still explain why they have not distanced themselves from former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In the last month, Carlson once again platformed a notorious Israel-hater on his podcast.
In the last month, Carlson once again platformed a notorious Israel-hater on his podcast.
Carlson ran a two-hour interview with Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, as well as director of its Earth Institute’s Center for Sustainable Development and president of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Carlson nodded along as Sachs, a notorious leftist on most issues, blasted Israel and engaged in recycled traditional tropes of dual loyalty about Jews, in addition to claims about Israel and its American supporters manipulating American policy: “We gave over Middle East foreign policy to Israel a long time ago, not to U.S. interests but to Israel’s interests, that is the Israel lobby.”
Coming on the heels of past episodes of his show that platformed Holocaust denial and other blood libels of the Jewish state post-Oct. 7, Carlson’s ability to maintain his place in Trump’s inner circle—and his friendships with Vance and Musk—remains deeply troubling. As long as that is true, it will be impossible for those who support the new administration to argue that there is no connection between Carlson’s antisemitism problem and episodes like the endorsements of AfD. Unlike the podcaster whose opinions on Israel and Iran policy have always been rejected by Trump, Vance and Musk will have real power starting on Jan. 20.
Still, the comments about AfD are not dog-whistles to the sort of characters who are given a voice by Carlson. Instead, they are clearly intended as shots fired in the very different political battle about illegal immigration that is likely to escalate in the coming months. Trump intends to implement efforts to deport illegal immigrants given impunity not only to stay in the United States without permission by Biden but who were also effectively given license to commit outrageous crimes while here. Take, for instance, the recent fatal burning alive of a woman on a New York City subway car.
Merkel’s historic mistake
It’s possible to chide Musk and Vance for brushing aside the lessons history teaches about embracing those with ties to fascism and antisemitism. But that’s not the only lesson Germany has given the world.
In 2015, Merkel opened up her country to refugees created by the Syrian Civil War, as well as a host of other migrants from Muslim lands in the Middle East and Africa clamoring to enter Europe. She famously proclaimed, “We can do this,” in announcing a policy that would inevitably have disastrous ramifications for Germany and Europe. Newcomers who were unable or unwilling to meld to Western cultural and political norms brought with them hatred of the other—mostly Jews—that is normative in their homelands.
If Europe’s nationalist right-wing parties have gone mainstream since then, it is the natural reaction of Europeans to the way their countries have been transformed for the worst by the surge of migrants. The problems of doing this were brilliantly explained by journalists like Douglas Murray in his 2017 book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity and Islam, seven years before his fearless reporting in the aftermath of Oct. 7 made him a hero to supporters of Israel.
But Merkel, who ended her 16-year tenure as Germany’s Chancellor in 2021, is still unwilling to admit her mistake, as her recently published autobiography made clear. In it, she unfairly swipes at Israel. More than that, the recent collapse of the government of her successor, the Social Democratic Party’s Olaf Scholz, is largely due to his failure to adequately deal with the immigration issue. Though Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party may win more seats in the elections scheduled for Feb. 23, it’s not clear they have fully absorbed the need to acknowledge her blunder, and what it has cost Germany and Europe.
Biden’s border catastrophe
One of the key issues that propelled Trump back into the White House was similar failures on immigration by the Democrats. Even The New York Times recently published a piece acknowledging that Biden had let in a record number of migrants. The article, however, didn’t clarify that most of them were either illegal or asserting fraudulent refugee status and that the 2 million it floated was probably a drastic understatement of the real total.
Anger about this is not a function of xenophobia; it stems from the fact that this erasure of the border had terrible consequences for Americans. The social services provided by the states and cities migrants were sent to or flocked to become overwhelmed by this surge. The illegals contributed materially to the lowering of wages for working-class Americans and exacerbated the shortage of affordable housing. It also facilitated the ability of drug cartels that control the border with Mexico to inundate the United States with fentanyl, worsening the opioid epidemic that disproportionately impacts lower- and working-class communities.
Europe’s migrant problems are not identical but were in some ways even worse since Merkel’s decision, which—unlike Biden’s flouting of the rule of law—allowed a similar surge to be sanctioned by her government. And that is why AfD, for all of its faults, is set to gain in the German elections.
If Vance and Musk are opining about Germany’s elections, what they are doing is beginning the campaign to justify Trump’s efforts to clean up the fiasco that Biden created. In 2025, liberals and Democrats who are doubling down on their own political blunders will raise an outcry about the new administration deporting illegal immigrants, including the not inconsiderable number already facing deportation orders because they’re guilty of crimes in addition to the one they committed by entering the country without permission.
Among those who will be the loudest voices in denouncing Trump’s defense of the rule of law on immigration will be liberal Jewish groups who seem committed to open borders. They often claim that the plight of the millions who have entered the country illegally or wish to do so in order to benefit economically is similar to that of Jews who fled Nazi Europe to save their lives. But this is as absurd as it is an outrageous misreading of history.
As Murray rightly argued in 2017 in the aftermath of Merkel’s arrogant and foolish decision, nations that do not defend their borders or cultures rooted in the basic liberal values of Western civilization are doomed to chaos and the loss of their identity. That process is already in full swing in Europe and, among other things, is once again making the continent a hostile environment for Jews only 80 years after the defeat of the Nazis and 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the collapse of the antisemitic regime operating under the Soviet Union.
Critics of Vance and Musk’s decision to dabble in another country’s politics may be right about the AfD not being the answer to Germany’s problems. Still, those who claim that opposing illegal immigration or the way Europe’s Islamization is endangering Jews and others is intrinsically anti-democratic, fascist or hateful are equally wrong. History doesn’t just teach us about the dangers of legitimizing those with ties to fascism or the Nazis. It also instructs us about the potentially catastrophic consequences of ignoring the threat from Muslim antisemitism and the collapse of a nation’s borders.
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