Common Dreams

07/13/2025

In the first flush of Brexit and Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, Steve Bannon attempted to build a National International out of far-right governments, parties, and movements. He largely failed. Now, Elon Musk has stepped up to the plate, with his media platform and his deep pockets.

As NBC reports:

Musk has posted online in support of right-wing street demonstrations in Brazil and Ireland. He has welcomed a new conservative prime minister in New Zealand and expressed agreement with a nationalist right-wing politician in the Netherlands. He’s met in person several times with the right-wing leaders of Argentina and Italy. His social media app X has complied with censorship requests from right-wing leaders in India and Turkey.

As Bannon discovered, the obstacles are many to creating a far-right network. Simply put, entities devoted to the politics of hate often end up hating each other as well.

Musk faces numerous speed bumps at home as well to the creation of a third party. The administrative hurdles are enormous, which is how the Democrats and Republicans have managed to preserve their duopoly. “I was on a Zoom call yesterday with people talking about this,” one political analyst told The New York Times. “A lot of them predicted that he’s the kind of person who, when he finds out how hard this is, he’ll give up.”

But Musk, like his Silicon Valley buddies, knows how to apply maximum pressure to weak points in a system in order to make it crack. He has promised to focus on just a few races where he might have the greatest likelihood of winning. It’s the opposite of Trump, who was interested only in building a vehicle for his own self-advancement.

Musk is far more dangerous. He actually has ideas. They’re terrible ideas, to be sure. But they are motivating him to build something more durable and, in the long term, potentially more disruptive.

It’s too terrifying a prospect to grok.