Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a serious donor and adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, is now attempting to influence Germany's election by posting on X an endorsement of the country's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

In one post On Thursday evening, Musk wrote: “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

Musk, who has over 200 million listed followers on the web site he owns, made the comment while sharing a post from far-right influencer Naomi Seibt, who claimed that Germany's “presumptive next chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) was appalled by the idea.” “that Germany should follow the example of Elon Musk and Javier Milei,” referring to the Argentine president.

Seibt has a history of promoting white nationalist ideology, The Guardian previously reportedand has disputed the validity of scientific consensus around climate change, namely that it’s brought on by fossil fuel emissions.

In a post on

“The AfD’s task is to restore the image of the Nazi movement,” Murphy wrote. He added that certainly one of the party leaders had a license plate that was “an open homage to Hitler” and one other “described Judaism as the 'inner enemy' in Germany.”

Musk and Tesla's investor relations team didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.

German on Friday Chancellor Olaf Scholza center-left Social Democrat, rejected Musk's claim that only the far-right party could “save Germany.”

Under the leadership of Scholz GermanyGermany's left-wing coalition failed in November and the AfD is currently in second place in polls ahead of February's elections. Across Germany, where the AfD took top positions in state elections, the opposite parties fundamentally refused to enter right into a coalition with it.

According to Pew Research, “The AfD campaigned against arms deliveries to Ukraine and demanded one End of sanctions on Russia,” a view shared by Musk.

Far-right parties have also gained ground within the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and elsewhere. Many cheered Trump's election, which Musk financed with $277 million in donations to the campaign and related Republican causes.

Tesla shares have risen about 75% since Trump's victory and surpassed their previous all-time high set in 2021 last week.

AfD has allegedly criticized Tesla and its factory outside Berlin. The party claimed that a lot of Tesla's hundreds of employees commute from Poland or Berlin, limiting the economic profit to the local people in Brandenburg.

The AfD generally sees electric vehicles as a part of an ideological climate movement and never good for the German auto industry.

Europe has been a difficult marketplace for Tesla this yr. According to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, Tesla automobile sales fell 40.9% in November, outpacing the general 9.5% decline in battery-electric vehicle sales.

Elsewhere in Europe, Musk has backed right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and has expressed support for Nigel Farage within the United Kingdom, a populist politician and head of Reform UK. In South America, Musk supported and maintained a friendship with Argentine President Milei, a self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist.

In Magdeburg, Germany, a driver plowed his automobile right into a crowd at a Christmas market on Friday, leading to deaths and dozens of injuries.

In response to a post on X showing Chancellor Scholz in a press conference after the incident, Musk wrote: “Scholz should resign immediately. Incompetent idiot.”

REGARD: Musk's early influence on government

If you've ever wondered how the right-wing media ecosystem works and why it's effective, try pondering of it as a type of improvisational theater or improv.

In the wake of the 2024 US election, each peculiar people and political pundits have sought to make sense of the outcomes and the related commentary that many Americans look like experiencing very different realities. These realities are very shaped different media ecosystems.

Democrats are inclined to trust institutional media Network news greater than Republicans. In contrast, Republicans have developed what they see as a more trustworthy and explicitly partisan alternative media ecosystem that has rapidly evolved and thrived within the Internet age.

Cultivating robust alternative media has been a political strategy the law for a long time. Given the interactive nature of social media and the fitting's continued investment in digital media, the right-wing media ecosystem has change into a highly participatory space stuffed with influencers, political elites and audiences.

These actors engage in conversations all year long that encourage and adapt political messages. The collaborations should not rigidly predetermined, but quite improvised, facilitated by the interactivity of digital media.

For all these reasons we, as Researcher from Information ecosystems and influencer culture find it useful to view right-wing media as a sort of improvisational theater. This metaphor helps us understand the social and digital structure, culture and persuasive power of right-wing influence Reshaping politics within the US and all over the world.

Elements of improvisation in right-wing media

Influencers are the performers on this real-life improv show that plays out on a stage of social media news feeds, podcasts, cable newsrooms and partisan online media. Performers include political pundits and media personalities, in addition to a dynamic group of online opinion leaders who often rise from the audience to the stage, including by recognizing and exploiting the dynamics of digital media.

These influencers collaborate and perform a wide range of roles based on a set of informal rules and performance conventions: they share vague but emotionally resonant memes, “I'm just asking questions“opposed to each other, trolling a journalist, “proving” claims with data or photos – sometimes taken out of context – while concurrently engaging with one another’s content.

Just like improvising, artists work every single day to seek out play with their audiences, on web forums, and with one another. The “Game“In improvisation, an idea or story with a novel element around which a performance revolves. Once a compelling game is found, the performers up the ante, one other improvisational concept through which the motion is intensified and expanded.

The actors follow a loose script and work together towards a typical goal. Digital media environments provide additional infrastructure—the platform functions, networks, and algorithms—that shape performances.

Their performances, each individually and in concert with each other, help influencers attract and curate an audience with which they’re highly connected. As in improv shows, the political performers may use a method called a recall: Reference to a previous line, exchange, or game with which the audience is familiar. Or the performers reply to calls from an engaged audience who cheer, taunt and guide the actors because the show progresses. Audiences also can encourage a whole skit by bringing a story to the eye of influencers or politicians.

From this attitude, influence not only flows from influencers on stage and out to the audience, but in addition from the audience to the influencers. This dynamic makes the right-wing media ecosystem extremely reactive. The feedback is immediate and the fitting “parts” get laughs and likes. Influencers – and political leaders – can quickly adapt their messages to the tastes, preferences and grievances of their audience, in addition to the events and trends of the day, without being affected by the lag of traditional news media.

Actors and audiences in right-wing media also engage in transgressive, controversial and even offensive scenes, testing the boundaries of their shared preferences, expectations and – for the political actors – ideologies.

Like many improv shows, these performances feel intimate and authentic. The audience can discuss with the performers after and sometimes in the course of the show. They can be invited “on stage” when an influencer highlights their content.

It could also be only a single scene, but there may be also a possibility for lucky, savvy or persistent contributors to change into a part of the influencer theater. This increases the motivation to participate, the thrill and the audience's feeling of really being a part of the show.

“They eat the pets”

An example of right-wing media improvising got here in the autumn of 2024 with then-candidate Donald Trump baselessly claimed from a debate about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Before Trump mentioned them, rumors about pet eating were circulating in local Facebook groups in Springfield. These claims were reinforced by a neighborhood neo-Nazi leader discussed the subject in a recorded town hall meeting that was shared on apps like Telegram and Gab. Influencers who monitor these channels elevated the storyFind a brand new game with a novel element.

A Reddit post featuring a photograph of a person holding a bird walking down the road was taken out of context by influencers and incorrectly used as “evidence”. of immigrants eating pets. Memes, especially those created using artificial intelligence, spread quickly and caught the eye of Politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greenewho shared it. This raised the stakes of the improv game by connecting these smaller memes to a bigger political narrative concerning the must stop migration on the southern border.

The improvisation reached its peak when Trump and then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance increased their claims in the course of the week of the September debate. They presented the claims with each seriousness and a rather tongue-in-cheek awareness that the story wasn't necessarily about immigrants but concerning the attention the narrative attracted. Vance even admitted that the entire thing “turn out to be wrong.” This improvisation wasn’t about truthfulness.

Growing body of research

The metaphor of right-wing media as improvisation emerged through research, conversations and collaboration facilitated by the University of Washington Center for an informed publicwhere we work.

One of us, Kate Starbird, and colleagues examined the role of political influencers in election denial rumors after the 2020 election and located that these were right-wing political campaigns Participation efforts that were largely improvised. In related work, media researcher Anna Beers described how a “Theater of influencers“on the fitting may very well be identified through their interactions with a typical audience.

PhD student Stephen Prochaska and colleagues built on sociologists Arlie Hochschild's work to characterize the Production of election fraud narratives in 2020 as “deep storytelling” – the telling of stories with strong emotional resonance – between right-wing influencers and their online audiences.

In her study of right-wing influencers, considered one of us, Danielle Lee Tomson, described this performative collaboration between influencers like Kayfabea performance convention in skilled wrestling through which wrestlers agree on a story arc before what appears to be an actual wrestling match.

These studies all depend on different theories and use different methodologies, but agree that improvisation, style, and participatory audiences are integral to the success of right-wing media ecosystems.

A convincing performance

In political improvisation, factuality is less necessary than the convincing nature of the performance, the actors, the main story arc, and the aesthetics. The storylines could be compelling, engaging and participatory, allowing audiences to play their very own role in a grand epic of American activism.

When you take a look at it this manner, the persuasive power of the right-wing media on the common American becomes more apparent. When there may be a 24/7 chorus of collaborative web influencers speaking on to their audience, institutional media feels too distant and disinterested to have a comparable impact.

When she lifted the large book above her head, it looked as if Mallory McMorrow was about to throw her out again.

McMorrow, a senator from Michigan, had just introduced herself to the audience on the United Center in Chicago on the primary night of the Democratic National Convention.

“And this,” she said, dropping the large tome onto the lectern with a dramatic thud, “is Project 2025.”

There was a hail of dutiful boos when McMorrow explained what the document was: “A Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Over the past few days, several readers have reached out wanting to learn more about Project 2025. Like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, this project has gained dramatic notoriety recently as increasingly Democratic politicians warn people about its contents.

So I contacted one in all those that raised the alarm.

North Coast U.S. Representative Jared Huffman spoke to me Monday from Chicago, where he’ll take part in several DNC panels.

But Huffman's biggest contribution to the convention could also be his role in raising awareness of Project 2025, which calls for a sweeping overhaul of the federal government, including a dramatic expansion of presidential powers.

Published in 2023 by the conservative Heritage Foundation with the assistance of 140 former Trump aides, the 920-page MAGA magnum opus proposes a comprehensive redesign of the federal government, including a dramatic expansion of presidential power.

Empowered in this manner, McMorrow warned Monday evening, Trump could fire tens of 1000’s of officials – “intelligence officials, engineers and even federal prosecutors” – and replace them with “loyalists who are accountable only to Donald Trump.”

Huffman had been briefed on the project by the ACLU and the Center for American Progress several months ago. After the meeting, he was “extremely disturbed” and concluded that “the most important thing I could do was to promote it as loudly as possible.”

To that end, he founded Stop Project 2025, a congressional task force that’s spotlighting what he describes as a “dystopian plan” for Trump to seize “supreme” power to “dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish the system of checks and balances, undermine the separation of church and state, and push through a far-right agenda that violates basic freedoms and disregards the public will.”

The investigation was made easier, Huffman added, by “the fact that these idiots wrote everything down.”

Project 2025 also calls for the dissolution of the Departments of Education and Homeland Security and the creation of a militarized force to deport hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants.

In its short existence, in keeping with Huffman, the group has grown from “this little shadow project to something that has been fully absorbed into the Democratic Caucus, the leadership and all of our communications resources.”

Californians not immune

He warned that Californians, whether it’s a state with a Democratic majority or not, wouldn’t give you the chance to completely escape the influence of this conservative manifesto if Trump prevails against Harris.

The Clean Air Act waivers that had allowed the Golden State to set higher air quality and public health standards – “that all went away under the second Trump administration,” Huffman said.

Supporters of the so-called “unitary executive theory” imagine the president can “simply ignore the constraints of Congress's budget bills,” Huffman said. “That means if California is allocated a certain amount for our roads and bridges, the president can simply withhold that amount to push through certain policy changes.”

Under such a rule, he said, “you can forget the idea that California is a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.”

While residents of Democratic states imagine they’re resistant to abortion bans and extreme immigration policies, Project 2025 is “full of strategies to impose all of these things even on a place like California,” Huffman says.

Another harmless-sounding provision within the document stipulates that independent agencies are directly subordinate to the president under the idea of the unitary executive.

Those agencies would come with the Food and Drug Administration, which a future President Trump could order to revoke its approval of abortion pills. Project 2025 also advocates reviving the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law passed in 1873 that will allow the federal government to criminalize the shipment of any material or device used to terminate a pregnancy.

Trump dissatisfied some conservatives on Monday when he told CBS News he wouldn’t implement the Comstock Act restricting mail delivery of abortion drugs.

Project What?

As Project 2025's public profile grew, Trump and his campaign team increasingly sought to distance themselves from it. Trump wrote on Truth Social on July 11 that he knew “nothing” in regards to the project and had “no idea” who was liable for it – a baseless claim that has been challenged in quite a few places.

(CNN identified 140 former Trump administration advisers who were involved.)

Liz Burch is a pro-choice activist, Fulbright scholar, and director of media and communications at Sonoma State University.

“Of course not,” she replied when asked if she believed Trump's claim that Project 2025 was completely recent to him.

“I'm not convinced at all,” she said. “His agenda has always been very clear, and he delivered for evangelicals” – by selecting the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The looming limitations of Project 2025—banning medication abortion, attacking contraception, enforcing the “humanity of the fetus” principle and thus undermining in vitro fertilization—“keep us on the course of what already happened with Roe v. Wade,” Burch said.

“I'm worried about my daughters,” she said. “The thought that their freedoms could be restricted in this way is devastating.”

“We are considered one of the most progressive countries in the world and the strongest democracy. The idea that American women have lost the right to control their own bodies is simply shocking.”

In November, she said, “I hope Americans make the right choice.”

To reach editor Austin Murphy, who writes the Political Pulse column on special project during election season, you possibly can reach him at politicalpulse@pressdemocrat.com, austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter at @ausmurph88.

(c)2024 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Originally published: August 20, 2024 at 21:14

Interrogations of university leaders led by conservative members of Congress. Calls from right-wing senators that troops intervene in campus demonstrations. hundrets of Arrests of scholars and teacherswith non-violent dissidents thrown to the bottom, tear gassed and insulted.

We've been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America“I explain how conservative activists within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies led a counterattack against antiwar and civil rights demonstrators on campus by demanding motion from college presidents and police.

They made quite a lot of familiar claims about student protesters: that they were concurrently pampered elites, out-of-state agitators, and violent communists sowing discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests disrupted the flow of university activities and that the administration had an obligation to make sure each day operations funded by student fees.

Back then, university presidents routinely gave in to the demands of conservative lawmakers, offended taxpayers and other sources of anti-Communist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.

Today they’re university directors get knotted to appease offended donors and lawmakers. But as Columbia University President Minouche Shafik called the NYPD They were hit to suppress protests a transparent rebuke from the American Association of University Professors.

If the past is any indication, the road ahead won't be any easier for faculty presidents like Shafik.

Lawfare from the fitting

In the Nineteen Sixties, students organized quite a few peace and civil rights protests that conservatives labeled communist.

The students spoke out against American involvement within the Vietnam War, the draft and mandatory ROTC participation. They demanded protection of civil rights and racially representative curricula. The intervention of the police and the National Guard often escalates Peaceful protests was violent riots and complete campus closures.

From 1968 through the Nineteen Seventies, conservative lawyers coordinated a nationwide lawsuit campaign “indecisive and discouraged” College presidents and trustees whose approach to campus demonstrations was too lenient, in response to conservatives.

The right-wing organization Young Americans for Freedom Blow 32 universities with lawsuits including private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, in addition to public land-grant universities like Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin.

The legal claim was for breach of contract: that the presidents had reneged on their end of the tutoring agreement by not keeping campuses open and breaking up protests. Young Americans for Freedom desired to set a legal precedent in order that students, parents and broadly defined “taxpayers” could force private and public institutions to remain open.

Conservative students also demanded that their allegedly communist fellow students be indefinitely expelled, arrested for trespassing, and prosecuted.

Of course, expulsions in these years had an impact on conscription. A running joke amongst right-wing activists and politicians was that protesters were a “McNamara Scholarship” to Hanoi, referring to Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense and architect of the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, right-wing activists pursued college leaders with public pressure campaigns, collecting signatures from students and alumni calling on them to finish demonstrations on campus. Conservatives also called for donors to withhold financial support until the administration overwhelms protesting students.

Police officers on campus

Below the Kent State massacre in 1970When the National Guard fired on students, killing 4 and wounding nine, nearly half of all colleges temporarily closed, sparking a nationwide wave of youth outrage. With only per week or two left of the semester, many colleges canceled remaining classes, and even some Opening ceremonies.

In response, Conservatives launched a brand new wave of injunctions against these universities to force them to reopen.

Given the continuing protests — and continued calls from the fitting to crack down on them — many university administrators resorted to using and dealing with police and the National Guard to clear student protesters from campus.

In fact, this very moment marked the birth of modernity Campus Police.

Administrators and lawmakers, fearful that local police wouldn’t have the opportunity to handle the sheer variety of student protesters, arranged for campus police — who prior to now had acted as parking enforcement officers and to implement curfews in dorms — to have the authority was entrusted with making arrests and carrying firearms.

State and federal lawmakers attempted to further suppress student dissent with quite a few laws. In 1969 Legislatures in seven states passed laws Punish student activists arrested during protests by withdrawing financial support, expelling them, and imprisoning them.

President Richard Nixon, who had heavily criticized campus disruptions during his successful run for the White House in 1968, encouraged college presidents to follow the law and applauded them for carrying out the expulsions.

Is “anti-Semitism” the brand new “communism”?

As the US presidential election approaches, I might be monitoring how the Trump and Biden campaigns reply to the continuing student protests.

For now, Trump described the recent protests as “anti-Semitic” and “Much worse” than the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Biden also condemned “the anti-Semitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Both repeat the false framework laid out by Republican Reps. Elise Stefanik and Virginia Foxx, a trap that university administrators have fallen into during House investigations because the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

They actually existed anti-Semitic incidents in reference to pro-Palestinian demonstrations on university campuses.

But in these hearings, Stefanik and Foxx got 4 presidents to endorse the fitting's politicized portrayal of the protests as filled with anti-SemitismThis leads the general public to imagine that individual incidents are representative and widespread.

Like their association of civil rights and peace protesters with communism in the course of the Cold War, politicians on either side of the aisle today largely achieve this too Hurling claims of anti-Semitism against anyone who protests Israel's war in Gaza, lots of them are Jews.

The purpose then, as now, is to intimidate the administration into making the improper policy decision: Will they protect students' right to show or be seen as condoning anti-Semitism?

The divide between right and left around the globe has rarely been more polarized. Of course, there have at all times been differences between people at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but now it looks like they live in completely different worlds. This could also be related to the appropriate's tendency to give attention to the past and strive for a world that after existed, and the left's tendency to do the other.

Take two of essentially the most famous political slogans of recent times: Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” and Donald Trump’s “Make America great again.” While Obama's message evokes prospects of a successful future, Trump's message expresses a nostalgic take a look at the past.

In the United Kingdom, the successful Brexit campaign, led largely by Conservatives, famously called on people to “take back control,” while Labor has just launched its local government election campaign under the slogan “Britain’s Future.”

The pattern is analogous worldwide. In South Africa, the right-wing Freedom Front Plus recently adopted the slogan “Stop the decay”. For the upcoming presidential elections in Mexico, the left-wing National Regeneration Movement is mobilizing voters with “Together for change“.

In one Recent studyI examined whether in most people people on the appropriate evaluate the past, present and future in another way than people on the left. I asked a sample of 1,200 people to judge different periods of history.

They were interviewed concerning the period from 1950 to 2000, the current and the near future (explaining their view of society in 25 years). I attracted participants from the US, UK, Italy, South Africa, Mexico and Poland – countries with different economies, cultures and political regimes.

In all countries, those on the appropriate viewed the recent past more positively than those on the left. In the US, Poland and Britain, nonetheless, leftists were more optimistic about what humanity could achieve within the near future.

Interestingly, the effect on the left didn’t occur in Italy, Mexico and South Africa. Therefore, the appropriate's more positive view of the past appears to be shared in all countries, while the left's higher optimism just isn’t.

The glorious past

In an experiment for the study, a gaggle of participants were made to view the past more positively. These participants didn’t look like more open to right-wing opinions afterwards. This suggests that the connection just isn’t in that direction. Greater nostalgia for the past doesn’t predispose people to support right-wing beliefs.

On the opposite hand, one other experiment encouraged a gaggle of participants to think freely about their political views. In response to this request, right-wing participants on this group became more nostalgic concerning the past.

Left-wing participants became fewer. This suggests that endorsing right-leaning opinions initially causes people to change into more nostalgic, while endorsing left-leaning opinions does the other.

A final experiment examined nostalgia in additional detail. Here I actually have considered two possible types of nostalgia. Some people may feel nostalgic for traditional communities, for the old hierarchical order, for stronger family ties, and for traditional culture. Other people could also be nostalgic concerning the economy, remembering a time when governments tended to intervene more.

Is the appropriate person nostalgic about tradition, economics, or each? In my experiment, it was people on the left, not the appropriate, who were more nostalgic concerning the economy. Those on the appropriate had greater nostalgia for the tradition.

The data also shows that economic nostalgia on the left just isn’t as strong as traditional nostalgia on the appropriate, which explains why the appropriate might be viewed as more nostalgic overall than the left.

These results help explain why it’s so common for right-wing politicians to appeal to voters with guarantees to take them back to the great old days, and why left-wing slogans mobilize voters to construct a greater future – and maybe offer the politicians who’ve done so, a lesson like to achieve across the divide.