Elon Musk is promoting a video that rewrites the history of Nazism to suit today’s far right. Here’s what happened in 1933, who made the video, and why it matters. Within weeks of Hitler taking power in January 1933, the organised left was being dismantled. Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists were rounded up, and Dachau opened in March, initially to imprison political opponents, above all Communists. On 2 May the Nazis smashed the independent trade unions and replaced them with the state-controlled German Labour Front. A week later, students burned the works of Marx and Kautsky, with a fire oath declaring itself “against class struggle and materialism”. Dachau’s first murders came on 12 April 1933, when the SS shot four Jewish prisoners: Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann, Arthur Kahn and Erwin Kahn. Benario and Goldmann were young left-wing activists from Fürth. The very rich were treated differently. Many industrialists had feared the Nazis were socialists, so in January 1932 Hitler addressed Düsseldorf’s Industry Club, playing down his antisemitism and stressing his anti-Marxism to reassure them. Few backed him openly until he took power. On 20 February 1933, Hitler met leading industrialists, Gustav Krupp among them, and told them: “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy.” It was conceivable, he said, only where people had “a sound idea of authority and personality”. They contributed more than two million Reichsmarks to the election fund of Hitler’s coalition. Private ownership was preserved for compliant industrialists, company profits rose sharply, and in the mid-1930s the regime even sold state stakes in banks, steelworks and shipping back into private hands. In 1934, Hitler also had members of his own movement who took its anti-capitalist rhetoric seriously murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. Yes, the Nazis controlled prices, wages and investment, as Britain did in wartime. State control tells you how an economy is run, and the question that matters is whom it serves. The Nazi state crushed independent labour, protected compliant employers, and harnessed the economy to rearmament and conquest. That is why historians place Nazism on the far right, including conservatives such as Ernst Nolte, who saw anti-Marxism as fascism’s defining feature. The word in the party’s name was largely a recruiting device, designed to lure workers away from the real socialist and communist parties. A name settles nothing, any more than North Korea’s makes it democratic. The man Musk is amplifying is Brivael Le Pogam, the Paris-based co-founder of Argil, a Silicon Valley-backed company selling AI video avatars, who boasts of using AI to win hundreds of millions of views. His self-described “masterclass” spends minutes on price controls and the voting habits of American professors. It never once mentions the Holocaust. Race appears once, as “fuel”. He is candid about why. With Hitler on the right, he complains, anyone defending “borders” or “the nation” is “one step away from fascism”. That is “why Milei is far right” and “why people call Elon Musk a Nazi”. A nationalist politics is to be cleansed by relabelling history’s most murderous nationalist. He even cites Leo Strauss’s “reductio ad Hitlerum”, the fallacy of condemning an idea because Hitler held it, and then commits it from start to finish. And his test of freedom is simply the free market, which would place Pinochet’s Chile, with its torture and disappearances, on the side of freedom. So the world’s richest man is promoting an attempt to free the far right from its own history, turning the Nazis’ first victims into props for their persecutors. History records which side Germany’s richest men chose in 1933. It’s worth noticing who is now keen to blur it. It’s polished, confident and wrong, and it’s built to divide: anyone who objects is cast as the enemy of freedom. Freedom for whom? Remember who filled Dachau first.

🧵 Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU) is reeling from internal grievances involving allegations of racism, workplace discrimination, and sexually inappropriate remarks by senior members of staff. What? Surely not! I'm old enough to remember when In January 2018, Toby Young was appointed to the board of the new universities regulator, the Office for Students, and his old tweets, mostly from 2009, quickly resurfaced. He had tweeted “What happened to Winkleman’s breasts Put on some weight girlie”, asked “Do Padma’s breasts look bigger than normal?”, said a female MP had “quite a cleavage”, and joked of a woman pictured with him that he “had my dick up her arse”. He called lesbians “dykes” and George Michael “queer as a coot”. He deleted around 50,000 tweets, a petition against him passed 220,000 signatures, and on 9 January he resigned, saying his appointment had “become a distraction”. The just announced controversy claims that a key figure in the campaign group, the chief operating officer, Sigrun Olafsdottir, departed late last week after employees alleged that she told a junior member of staff she would “never hire a black person” as a part of a one-on-one meeting late last year. The organisation’s legislative affairs director, Sam Armstrong, who is also head of communications for the Reform MP Robert Jenrick, has meanwhile been accused of making staff members uncomfortable by discussing the American actor Sydney Sweeney’s “assets” in a meeting with more than a dozen staff. The claims cap a difficult period for the FSU, founded by the Conservative life peer Toby Young, and which critics see as a partisan rallying point for anti-woke grievance. And they may complicate how the organisation seeks to publicly present itself, as a nonpartisan group that seeks to defend “free speech” from the overreach of censorious authorities – one which often raises money from its 50,000 members to do so. In July, the Guardian reported that the US state department had allocated $5m to the international umbrella organisation that oversees the FSU, part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to promote rightwing causes in Europe. The state department appeared to withdraw this grant after the Guardian reported on the allocation. In August, the Guardian reported on questions about the organisation’s practices around charity crowdfunding, centred on an instance in which the FSU appeared to raise £60,000 for a legal case that was ultimately fought pro-bono. Much of the FSU’s work consists of raising money for people who it argues have faced inappropriate consequences for exercising their right to free speech. Lord Young told the Guardian that that case was “not handled on an exclusively pro bono basis”, saying there was another lawyer involved and the person whose case it was had separate legal costs. These revelations have come alongside a period of internal turmoil. Eight members of the FSU’s small staff have departed within the past year. The Guardian understands that a crucial part of this disquiet has been the allegation of racism against Olafsdottir. The Guardian has spoken to multiple sources about these allegations and viewed documentation related to parts of the claims. Employees complained that Olafsdottir was frequently “hostile” towards younger members of staff. This alleged hostility was said to occur during the FSU’s in-person gatherings. The staff of the FSU work remotely but meet regularly for in-person events. These often take place at pubs and hotels, with some personnel said to drink heavily late into the night. Employees of the FSU described blurred boundaries and instances of aggression and discriminatory behaviour on the part of some senior staff during these sessions. Olafsdottir and Armstrong declined to comment. Young told the Guardian he could not comment on “internal employment matters”. (Continued...) theguardian.com/uk-news/2026…