Fascists Lie (Even When They Seem To Be Confessing)

Elon Musk did not go hard right because of his daughter.

Image credit: Vivian Wilson, CC

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Last week, Rihanna announced that she had hired Vivian Wilson, a trans woman, as a model for her Fenty lingerie line. This should be a win for Wilson and for trans representation. Unfortunately, however, as is his wont, Nazi tech billionaire Elon Musk chose to make the announcement all about him.

Wilson is Musk’s daughter. He has said before that he was radicalized when his daughter came out as trans (or in his words when she was corrupted by the “woke mind virus”). The Fenty announcement inspired some asshole on twitter to reiterate those claims.

We should never forget that if not for Vivian, Elon Musk never would have gotten involved, never would have purchased Twitter, Kamala Harris would be President and the Left-wing would have total instrumental control over construction of Skynet.

Musk, pleased at the chance to once again insult and send harassment at his daughter, responded by boosting the post and declaring, “True.”

Matthew Rodriguez at Them an LGBT outlet, wrote about the exchange because he believed that it showed Musk in a poor light. “Sometimes, a villain origin story is really just that simple,” Rodriguez said. Comedian and actor George Wallace weighed in with a similar framing: “Imagine being so unable to love your child that you set fire to the whole damn world instead.”

I agree that Musk’s vocal, public, vile hatred for his trans daughter is but one reason that he is an evil Nazi piece of shit. But I think it’s important to recognize that Nazis lie absolutely all the time—not least about their own motives.

When Musk says that his daughter turned him into a Nazi, or that his daughter pushed him into politics, he isn’t confessing some unmediated truth about his inner life. He is framing his actions in a way that he believes advances his goals. Those goals being abuse, hate, violence, and genocide. As Elon Musk’s ex Ashley St. Clair has said, whenever Musk posts about Wilson, he (intentionally) “endanger[s]” her. (Wilson has said that she does not feel unsafe—which doesn’t mean that St. Clair is wrong.)

Musk wants to blame his daughter for his own actions

Specifically, when Musk says that Wilson made him go Nazi, he is using a very standard Nazi talking point. Nazis always blame their hate and violence on the people they hate. Hitler, for example, said he was forced to commit a genocide because Jewish people orchestrated World War II.

If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the…victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

Hopefully it’s clear that Hitler is not providing an honest and forthright explanation of his own motives. Just to begin with, Jewish people were not responsible for World War II—Hitler’s program of obsessive territorial expansion was.

More, Hitler did not embrace genocide as a goal in January 1939; his desire to murder all Jewish people was quite clear in Mein Kampf, which was published in 1925, a decade and a half before he claimed that Jewish people made him do it. When Hitler said Jews made him do it, he was not explaining his violence, but justifying that violence—and perpetuating it, inasmuch as demonizing Jewish people was sure to result in attacks on Jewish people.

Similarly, Musk says that Wilson made him buy twitter and intervene in the election because he believes that justifies his abuse and because he knows it perpetuates that abuse. By targeting his daughter on social media, Musk is encouraging people to send her death threats and worse than death threats. And he’s also mocking her and taunting her; it’s the equivalent of saying, “Why are you hitting yourself?” or “Look what you made me do!” Musk is an abuser, and part of the way abusers inflict psychological abuse is through gaslighting and victim-blaming. When Musk denies his own agency as an abuser, he is not explaining the abuse; he is inflicting it.

Wilson is well aware of this. In an interview with Teen Vogue (and in quotes that Them itself reproduced), Wilson said, “It’s such a convenient narrative, that the reason he turned right is because I’m a fucking tr*nny, and that’s just not the case. That’s not what that does to people.” She added:

Him going further on the right, and I’m going to use the word ‘further’ — make sure you put ‘further’ in there — is not because of me. That’s insane.

And more lies

There are many other examples where fascist confessions—even apparently damning fascist confessions—are in fact fascist lies.

There’s another example right there in Musk’s attack on Wilson. Musk’s sycophant asserts, as Musk often has himself, that Musk single-handedly defeated Kamala Harris by spending millions on Trump’s campaign in 2024. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk boasted in June 2025.

Some on the left have taken these claims as a confession that Musk cheated or stole the election—an admission of guilt. Yet (as I explain here) there is precious little evidence that Musk’s intervention helped Trump, and a fair amount that the campaign he orchestrated was so ineffectual that it actually damaged his candidate.

Musk is not admitting guilt when he claims credit for the 2024 win. He is lying about his own perspicuity, power and influence. Musk boasted about winning the election initially when he was feuding with the president; he was advancing his own grievances as Trump forced him out of the government.

Similarly, when Musk asserts that his daughter is responsible for Harris’ 2024 election loss, he is blaming his trans daughter for being trans and therefore blaming her for harming trans people, including herself. Again, these are not statements of fact but lies designed to promote Musk’s own megalomania and to promote his own campaign of abuse.

It’s not just Musk who uses these tactics. In his 2012 divorce deposition when he was separating from his wife Mary Richardson Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr. claimed he was cognitively impaired because a tapeworm had infested his brain. The New York Times headlined the story “RFK Jr Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm In His Brain,” and Democrats have ever since been joking that RFK has brain worms.

RFK may well have had a parasitic infestation. But he disclosed that, and played it up, because he was attempting to make the case that his expected lifetime earnings were going to be negatively affected by his health issues, and that he shouldn’t have to pay much in support to his ex-wife. With help from his powerful family, Kennedy—who was relentlessly unfaithful to Mary for 20 years—pressured her to agree to brutal custody restrictions and circumscribed support. When Mary committed suicide in the middle of the divorce proceedings, her family blamed Kennedy.

It feels fun to mock Kennedy for a supposed cognitive impairment. But taking his confession at face value erases the way in which he used his supposed diagnosis as a tool to harass and abuse his wife. Even if he did have a health condition, health conditions are not a sign of moral iniquity and do not necessarily indicate long term impairment. But using your health condition to torment your ex and perhaps push her to depression and suicide—that is in fact evil.

Don’t believe them

Most people on the left do know that Trump and his sycophants are all lying liars who lie all the time. Yet, when those lies are colorful or seem fun or confirm certain biases, it can be hard not to take the bait.

Them, which is committed to supporting LGBT people, published a story which amplified Musk’s lies and helped him target his daughter, even when they printed quotes from that daughter saying explicitly that those lies were in fact lies. The New York Times headlined their piece with brain worms, even though the real story is not the brain worms, but the fact that RFK subjected his ex-wife to intensive psychological abuse.

Fascists and antisemites, Sartre wrote, “delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.” He also said, “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.” The absurdity is in fact, for fascists, part of the fun—per Sartre, “They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.”

Sartre could have added that the ridiculousness of their arguments can be seductive. Fascists spin out conspiracy theories and nonsense, and that nonsense is arresting, exciting, funny. It makes good headlines. It’s more fun, and feels more objective and newsworthy, to say, “Musk turned evil because of his daughter” than to just say, “Musk is still abusing his daughter.” It’s more interesting to say, “RFK has brain worms” than to say, “RFK abused his wife.”

The dynamics of hatred and cruelty are often banal. Fascists work to make them seem more exciting and interesting. That can seduce even those who hate or oppose fascists.

But it shouldn’t. If fascist evil is framed in a way that seems interesting or exciting—even if the framing seems to damage fascists—you should take a second look. Because fascists aren’t interesting or colorful. They are cruel in tiresome and predictable ways. They lie, often, not to cover up their evil, but to cover up just how tedious that evil is.