The Daily Populous Saturday January 11st, 2025 evening edition
Authored by wired.com and submitted by marketrent

On Thursday, Elon Musk agreed with the leader of a far-right German political party that Adolf Hitler was a communist and that left-wing groups who support Palestinian causes have more in common with Nazis than with her own party.

The deeply weird and disinformation-filled conversation between Musk and Alice Weidel, the leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), took place on X. It came after weeks of Musk’s efforts to boost the far-right party, which has deep links to neo-Nazism and has been surveilled for suspected extremism by Germany’s own intelligence services.

“[Hitler] was a communist, and he considered himself as a socialist,” Weidel said in response to Musk asking about media reports linking the AfD to Nazism.

“The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right[-wing] and conservative, he was exactly the opposite,” Weidel said. “He wasn't a conservative, he wasn't a libertarian, he was a communist, socialist guy, and we are the opposite.”

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, Hitler—who as leader of the German Reich was responsible for the invasion of the Soviet Union and the enslavement and death of millions of its citizens—repeatedly describes communism as an enemy of the German nation. He believed that Marxism was a Jewish conspiracy to control Germany and the world.

Weidel also compared the Nazi Party’s views to those of modern-day left-wing political groups who support Palestine in the face of what a UN commission has called crimes against humanity conducted by Israel. While her AfD colleagues were last month seen attending a secretive meeting organized by former members of a militant neo-Nazi group known for burning the Israeli flag, she said, “The AfD is the ​​only protector of the Jewish people here in Germany.”

Weidel is the AfD’s candidate for chancellor in Germany’s snap elections, which take place next month. As someone who previously worked in finance and lives in Switzerland with her wife, who is from Sri Lanka, and their children, she has been presented as a relatively moderate face for the party.

This is something Musk picked up on in an op-ed he penned last month for a German newspaper.

"The portrayal of the AfD as right-wing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party's leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka,” Musk wrote. “Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!”

Ahead of the conversation on Thursday, the EU said that it would be monitoring the event to see if it was artificially promoted to voters in Germany, something which would be in violation of the region’s sweeping Digital Service Act rules. A European Commission spokesperson told WIRED it would not be commenting on the contents of the livestream.

Weidel referenced the EU’s preoccupation with the conversation, claiming 150 officials at the EU commission were listening in, then claimed the DSA was a censorship tool, before adding: “You know what Adolf Hitler did? He switched off free speech. He controlled the media, and without that he would have never been successful.”

Thanos_exe on January 11st, 2025 at 05:36 UTC »

You can literally read a book written by Hitler himself about how much he hated communism

tommycahil1995 on January 11st, 2025 at 01:25 UTC »

Hitler literally is the biggest killer of Communists in history. Part of the reason for the holocaust was because the Nazis said Communism was part of the Judeo-Bolshevik plot to destroy Western civilisation. You cant divorce Nazi antisemitism from their anticommunism as much as you cant divorce it from its Lutheran Christian influence.

You don't have to like Communism at all to be honest about it. National Socialism wasn't communism and Hitler hated Marx and Communism

BVB_TallMorty on January 10th, 2025 at 23:26 UTC »

This is a demonstrably false viewpoint. Sad to see how quickly we've moved towards misinformation regarding this era, WW2 vets aren't even all in the ground yet and one of the most powerful men in the world is spouting this nonsense