Steve Bannon condemns Elon Musk as ‘racist’ and ‘truly evil’

Ex-Trump adviser denounces tech CEO’s embrace of some forms of immigration and vows to ‘take this guy down’

In an escalation of discontent among the highest-profile far-right followers of Donald Trump,
his former adviser Steve Bannon has called Trump’s newest favorite,
Elon Musk,
“racist” and a “truly evil guy”,
pledging to “take this guy down” and kick him out of the Maga movement.

In an interview with the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy, excerpts of which were publishedthis weekend by Breitbart,
Bannon criticised Musk’s embrace of some forms of immigration
and vowed to ensure that Musk does not have top-level access to the White House.

“He is a truly evil guy,
a very bad guy.
I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon said.
“Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it
– I’m not prepared to tolerate it any more.”

He added: “I will have Elon Muskrun out of here by inauguration day”,
which falls on 20 January.
“He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.”

Musk became one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders,
and certainly his richest,
during the Republican’s ultimately successful campaign to regain the US presidency,
spending reportedly about $270m and being rewarded with a place at Trump’s side ever since.
After his victory Trump tapped Musk to help lead an advisory group theoretically dedicated to cutting US government spending by up to $2tn, a quarter of its entire budget.

But Musk’s embrace of H-1B visas, which allow companies – such as Musk’s own SpaceX and Tesla – to hire skilled professionals and engineers from outside the US, has been taken badly by other Maga acolytes who are opposed to nearly all forms of immigration. Musk, who was born in South Africa, has himself held an H1-B visa.

“This thing of the H-1B visas,
it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords.
They use it to their advantage.
The people are furious,”
said Bannon, whom Trump fired from his White House position during his first administration
but who later reinvented himself through his War Room podcast
as one of the chief evangelists of the Maga movement.

Bannon further widened his aim to attack Musk’s fellow tech giants #Peter #Thiel and #David #Sacks for having South African heritage.

“He [Musk] should go back to South Africa,” Bannon said.
“Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans,
we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Arguing that Musk’s “sole objective is to become a trillionaire”
and calling him a proponent of “techno-feudalism on a global scale”,
Bannon said, “I don’t support that and we’ll fight it,”
adding: “He won’t fight. He’s got the maturity of a little boy.

“He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money.

“His aggregation of wealth, and then – through wealth – power:
that’s what he’s focused on.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/12/steve-bannon-calls-elon-musk-racist?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

#Alex #Karp is a multi-billionaire who serves as the CEO of #Palantir,
a controversial software company that has been much more willing than some others in Silicon Valley to provide technology to Western governments for military and policing applications.

The company has been described as
“the West’s AI arms dealer”
and criticized for its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israel Defense Forces.

Unlike his more famous Palantir co-founder #Peter #Thiel,
a reactionary MAGA supporter,
Karp describes himself as a socialist

(he, like Elon Musk, seems to have some idiosyncratic personal definition in mind that has nothing in common with the socialist tradition).

Some comments that Karp recently made at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute about why Democrats lost were widely recirculated online.

#Elon #Musk described the clip of Karp speaking as “based”
and it racked up millions of views.

It’s framed as a critique of woke ideology,
but it is in fact mostly an argument about U.S. foreign policy and as such is a very useful way to examine some common American myths that are used to justify what I consider to be an incredibly dangerous set of policies.

Karp argues, essentially, for a philosophy that is often called (by its advocates) "peace through strength".

He says that America needs to frighten its enemies, and that while the “Berkeley faculty” do not understand this, the Real Americans do, and thus an agenda that wins popular support will focus on keeping people safe against external threats.

"Scare the enemy shitless" seems to be Point 1 of Karp’s thinking about foreign policy,

Point 2 (the only other point) being, We In The West Are Better Than Other People, Who Are Bad And Want To Destroy Us.

“We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,” Karp said.

This is how he justifies his company’s firm support of Israel, a stance that has caused some Palantir employees to quit as Israel has wiped out more and more of Gaza over the last year:
“From my perspective, it’s not just about Israel… It’s like, ‘Do you believe in the West? Do you believe the West has created a superior way of living?’”

I haven’t found Karp saying anything more sophisticated about foreign policy than these two talking points,*
namely that the West is good and must be protected from the bad people,
and that the way to do that is through threatening violence against not just those who hurt us, but also everyone from their “friends” to their “mistress.”

Taken together, I think these add up to a highly irrational worldview that,
if it is held by powerful people who may shape the future of U.S. foreign policy,
endangers the entire future of human civilization. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-fables-of-weapons-dealers

Rather than buying Greenland,
Dryden Brown wondered whether he could work with the government to create a new city,
purposefully built on uninhabitable land.

“What if we can sort of build a prototype of Terminus?” he said,
referencing Elon Musk’s preferred name for a city on Mars.

A member of the Danish parliament was not amused.

“Greenlandic independence requires approval by the Danish parliament and a change of our constitution,” politician Rasmus Jarlov tweeted.

“I can guarantee you that there is no way we would approve independence so that you could buy Greenland.”

But, if building a new city in Greenland were just a question of financials,
Brown has the resources to do it
— kind of.

For the last five years, Brown,
along with co-founder Charlie Callinan,
has been at the helm of #Praxis,
a network state startup with the explicit goal of creating a city.

He emphasized Praxis as an internet-first ideology
— one that has courted controversy,
like when a Praxis member guide reportedly said that
“traditional, European/Western beauty standards on which the civilized world, at its best points, has always found success.”

Despite the controversy, the #Peter #Thiel-backed project recently raised $525 million,
with a major asterisk:

The startup has the ability to draw down the money as it hits specific milestones in its city-building project.

So for now, Praxis is an internet ideology in search of a physical home.

The group hosted 250 Praxis-supporters in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, earlier this month,
where attendees like Bedrock’s #Geoff #Lewis
and #Mamuka #Bakhtadze, former prime minister of Georgia,
were presented with different location options for Praxis.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/15/i-went-to-greenland-to-try-to-buy-it-meet-the-founder-who-wants-to-re-create-mars-on-earth/

Scientific racism today must be seen and rejected for what it truly is
—a hollow attempt to dress discrimination in the garb of science and reason

Across Europe and the U.S., racist and anti-immigrant groups have embraced
long-discredited ideas that races constitute biologically separate groups
differing in everything from intelligence to birthrate.

With immigration a defining topic in fractious debates on both sides of the Atlantic,
#scientific #racism is now explicit in right-wing discourse.

In October an exposé in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed a network dedicated to proliferating race science worldwide had received years of funding from Silicon Valley.

That same month came Donald Trump’s comment decrying immigration as
“a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

In June it was revealed that a U.K. Reform Party candidate had previously insisted that sub-Saharan Africans were lowering IQ in the country.

But while its modern advocates rebrand scientific racism as “human biodiversity,”
such insidious euphemisms are just attempts to give a veneer of respectability to hateful, pseudoscientific beliefs.

These beliefs have a dark history tied to the racial pseudoscience of #eugenics,
and its popularity sadly continues unabated.

On social media, avowed racists misrepresent genetic research to bolster the narrative that white people are intrinsically superior.

In the rarefied world of Silicon Valley, race science has made a dark renaissance,
elevated by Google and other search engines.

(In response to a request for comment from Scientific American, a representative of Google cited a statement from the company that had been included in a Wired article on this subject:
“Our goal is for AI Overviews to provide links to high quality content so that people can click through to learn more,
but for some queries there may not be a lot of high quality web content available.”)

Last year a then forthcoming book,
"The Origins of Woke", by right-wing author #Richard #Hanania was lauded by tech industry figures
#David #Sacks and #Peter #Thiel.

That same year the Huffington Post reported that Hanania had previously written under a pseudonym for white supremacist websites.

He then wrote an essay in which he claimed to give “an explanation for why I wrote such things,
and why I no longer hold such views.”

But critics suggest those views are reflected in his book and in racist comments he has continued to make,
including his suggestions that people of color need aggressive policing and more incarceration.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silicon-valley-is-reviving-the-discredited-and-discriminatory-idea-of-race/

Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody!

And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies:

using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.

These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing.

They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large.

They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy.

Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic.

And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion
(with a 6,200-square-foot guest house)
that serves as the home address of secretary of education #Betsy #DeVos,
or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by #Robert #Mercer, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist #Stephen K. #Bannon.

(Mercer’s daughter, #Rebekah, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)

The source of Mercer’s wealth is Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor,
which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades.

After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman,
Mercer became co-CEO with #Peter #Brown, his longtime research partner.

At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino
—one that moves billions of dollars around the world.

Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.

Renaissance is spectacularly successful
—Investopedia named Renaissance Institutional Equities, the LLC’s largest entity,
the top-performing hedge fund of 2016,
after it yielded investors a return of 20 percent for the year.

Mercer’s genius as a data and systems geek is part of the super-secret sauce of this “quant fund”
that turned other people’s assets-minus-liabilities into riches for his investors.

It’s like a very complicated version of counting cards at the blackjack table.

But the best-performing fund at Renaissance is one that only its employees can join
—and indeed they must in order to actualize their full compensation package.

Bloomberg’s Katherine Burton described the employee-only Medallion fund as
“finance’s blackest box.”
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar
But some dollars are different, because of how their owners obtain them and move them about.

These are the dark dollars of private companies, dollars slithery in their expert avoidance of taxes, their paths rendered invisible by the absence of footprints.

Critics of the Trump White House point to the obscene levels of wealth that you find among the inner circle of President Trump’s appointees and associates.

Just as striking, though, is the provenance of all this loose cash:
Trump’s trusted advisers have come into much of this wealth through private companies,
whose financial balance sheets and so much more are shielded from public view.

At least ten of Trump’s close political associates, including some of his cabinet picks, hail from the carefully shrouded world of private capital.

Private companies play by a different set of rules than those governing firms that trade their shares on stock exchanges.

Unlike their publicly traded counterparts, private companies don’t have to worry about facing irate shareholders.

That’s because a private company’s principals have chosen those shareholders, who are often drawn from a founder’s family.

No proxy fights or hostile takeovers to worry about; no bending to the will of big institutional investors.

This is not to say that there are no big donors to Democrats who don’t also get their dough from private companies.

For example, Democrats have long enjoyed the largesse of the Pritzker family, who took their Hyatt Corporation public only in 2009.

Until then, it was a closely held private company.

But no Democratic administration was ever dominated by the owners of privately held entities,
and no administration of either party has ever represented so much wealth derived from such secretive entities.

Little in the way of financial disclosure is required of privately held companies. When it comes to financial regulation, these companies reap the benefit of the government’s failure to call them to account.

The same is true of private companies as large as the Koch Industries conglomerate or as adorably tiny as a startup founded by a lone millennial in a stocking cap.

Sanctums of Privilege

This is not a screed against private companies. As a red-blooded American, I revel in tales of heroic entrepreneurship
—of hatched-in-the-garage ideas that yield their underdog executors an unlikely pot of gold.

This is, rather, a scream, the wail of a blues tune sung to my fellow red-blooded Americans:

Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody!

And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies:

using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.

These are people who have thrived in a culture of unaccountability and self-dealing.

They are also people who have convinced themselves that the accrual of wealth to themselves is a boon to the nation at large.

They like to think of themselves as job creators, dynamic players in shaping the global economy.

Because their magnificence exists to benefit us all, the reasoning goes, they need not show us the methods by which they perform their magic.

And indeed we do all stand, mouths agape, at the show, dazzled by the 22,000-square-foot mansion
(with a 6,200-square-foot guest house)
that serves as the home address of secretary of education #Betsy #DeVos,
or the 203-foot yacht (with an elevator inside) owned by #Robert #Mercer, the Trump donor and patron of chief White House strategist #Stephen K. #Bannon.

(Mercer’s daughter, #Rebekah, is said to have great influence in the West Wing.)

The source of Mercer’s wealth is Renaissance Technologies LLC, a privately owned firm known as a hedge-fund sponsor,
which was built by scientists who learned how to run algorithms that identify signals emanating from great masses of data in order to generate profitable financial trades.

After Renaissance founder and math wizard James Simons, a big donor to Democratic candidates and political action committees, retired and kicked himself upstairs to serve as the company’s chairman,
Mercer became co-CEO with #Peter #Brown, his longtime research partner.

At the Renaissance office in East Setauket on New York’s Long Island, no sign is visible from the road to tell you you’ve arrived at the headquarters of a rare kind of casino
—one that moves billions of dollars around the world.

Thick plantings of trees obscure any view of the low-slung Renaissance building from the public side of the security gate.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan

This isn’t about J.D. #Vance hanging out with pro-Russian fascist podcasters who gleefully platform Holocaust deniers,
-- although that’s definitely a thing.

And it’s not specifically about the libertarian/authoritarian #Peter #Thiel techbro creepers who basically created J.D. in a lab, without whom he’d literally be nothing.
-- But both of those things are related to these things.

This is about the #Christian #nationalists who find themselves in J.D. Vance’s orbit, and he in theirs
— people who are literally prayer-gasming themselves right now at the idea of having one of their own freaks a heartbeat away from the presidency.

To start off with, did y’all hear about the town hall Vance just did with #Lance #Wallnau, one of the most #dangerous “Seven Mountains” Christian Nationalist #Dominionists in the country?

Lance Wallnau is perhaps the foremost figure in what’s called the #New #Apostolic #Reformation movement, which teaches that Christians have a mandate from Heaven to exert dominion over what they call the seven “mountains” of American life
— family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government.

There is no room for democracy in this movement,
it’s authoritarian,
and it craves a dictator.

Wallnau is fucking bonkers.
His movement is fucking bonkers.

Wallnau believes people on the left are literal #demons,
that Kamala Harris has a “Jezebel Spirit,” and so much more.

Oh, and of course, Wallnau and the New Apostolic Reformation believe Donald Trump is a modern-day King Cyrus,
a pagan emperor being used by God to bring forth his kingdom on earth.

Ayup. So it’s not surprising that Wallnau and his movement are deeply entwined with the “Stop the Steal” movement,
which did what it did on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.

Wallnau has been doing something called the #Courage #Tour.

And sweet, kind, caring, moderate J.D. Vance was a special guest on that Courage Tour last weekend in Pennsylvania,
though he was careful not to appear with Wallnau, and did his best to make the event seem as innocuous as possible.

As it happens, Stephanie McCrummen published an article in The Atlantic this week called
“The Christian Radicals Are Coming,”
which is all about the tour’s stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Half Pentecostal tent revival, half voter registration and mobilization event, the thousands who attended were treated to several days of the kind of radicalizing, violent rhetoric you usually hear in documentaries about, well, radicalized movements that turn violent.

Wallnau told congregants about a scene from Gladiator featuring its main character Maximus, and asked the crowd if they were ready to be “activated in your Maximus anointing.”

He told attendees he suspected they were “nobodies on earth who are somebodies in the spirit.” That’ll make ‘em feel special.

Another speaker, a weirdo author named #Bill #Federer, who seems to think he’s a historian, told them they were “important people,” and that “God has chosen you” for this moment in history.

He cited a quote from Peter Thiel
— hi, gay libertarian techbro Peter Thiel!
— which said that “The political slogan of the antichrist is ‘peace and safety.’ ”

(Which is funny because isn’t that what all Trump’s Nazi scaremongering about being women’s protector is?)

Federer, jumping the shark completely, told the crowd that
“Someday, you’re going to be dead” and in Heaven
— specifically in Moses’s living room,
some kind of celestial onesie party, I guess
— and Moses will tell stories of all the hot shit he did and David will talk about that one time he fucked up Goliath,

and then everybody will look at the MAGA Christians and ask them what they did.
https://evanhurst.substack.com/p/lets-meet-jd-vances-creepy-christian