“Gut gemacht!” Elon Musk said to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party leader, Alice Weidel, on X.
Musk posted “well done” on September 6, 2026. AfD had won the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the first time an ideological descendant of the Nazi Party had won a state election in Germany. The ideological descent: great replacement theory.
While Nazis described “international Jewry” as a powerful force enabling Jews to displace Aryan Germans and positioned Adolf Hitler as Germany’s savior, the neo-Nazi AfD identifies “globalist elites” as enabling peoples of color to replace and harm White Germans.
“Only AfD can save Germany,” Musk once wrote.
Musk is one of the world’s prime investors in great replacement theory and artificial intelligence. That’s not a coincidence, I suspect.
Musk invested early in DeepMind, an early AI lab behind Gemini that Google acquired in 2014.
In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Atlmann (and others) before leaving the board three years later.
In 2023, Musk founded xAI, which later became the parent company of X, formally connecting AI with a global super-spreader of great replacement theory. Musk pushed replacement theory to his 230 million X followers on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to a Guardian analysis.
If you are investing heavily in unfettered AI tools that appear to be taking lives, taking jobs, taking livelihoods, taking resources, invading cultures, invading elections, and invading neighborhoods, then why not invest heavily in a political conspiracy theory that immigrants, Black people, and Muslims are doing all that taking and invading?
Why not get people to believe that peoples of color are coming to replace them, so they don’t fully realize that unregulated AI is coming to replace them?
Corporate executives and shareholders are likely to hoard most of any profits from an AI boom, continuing the multi-decade decline in the share workers amass from U.S. economic growth. This share fell to a historic low this month.
Rather than worry about this latest mass extraction from capital, Texas Rep. Chip Roy introduced a bill in May to address “the inextricably linked harmful effects of unchecked legal and illegal immigration and the drain of American dollars leaving the economy through remittances for decades.”
In 34 of 37 countries, people tend to believe AI tools are leading to fewer jobs, including 71% of Americans, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. A Microsoft executive cast AI as the “largest theft of labor” in history. Tufts University researchers projected 9.3 million jobs could be replaced by AI tools. Right now, AI may be disproportionately taking white-collar jobs from recent college graduates.
West Virginia Rep. Riley Moore diverted attention from this job-taking in July. “We’re sending all of our kids to college, trade school,” Moore told Fox News viewers, “…and we’re coming in with H-1B visas and displacing them with lower-skilled, lower-paid workers, and many of [sic] young people are ending up either unemployed, or baristas at Starbucks, or you name it with $200,000 in debt.”
Beyond blaming immigrants, politicians are framing Black Americans as taking opportunities from White Americans through diversity programs and antiracist laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well, and they were not invited to go into a university to college,” Trump told the New York Times in January, referring to the Civil Rights Act.
The regime’s focus on White people (especially White men) facing “discrimination” removes focus on the AI tools used in hiring and the criminal punishment system that are biased against Black people. And many Black people—alongside their non-Black peers—are seeing new data centers invade their nations and neighborhoods, gobbling up land and resources, like water and power, polluting the environment, and displacing residents.
Distracting from this displacement, Vice President JD Vance once told supporters that “in communities all across this country. . .you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”
YouTube had to change its policies to stop the monetization of AI-generated content while Spotify recently removed 75 million AI-generated songs, as AI-generated content overruns the creations of everyday people. AI-generated items are being sold and submitted for art competitions. AI-generated books are invading the virtual shelves of the largest bookseller, Amazon, replacing authored books in carts, which are being pirated to train AI tools. Anthropic settled a copyright lawsuit with authors for $1.5 billion after mining our books to train AI tools.
How do you distract from AI companies threatening the future of civilization, all of us producing, consuming, reproducing, and sharing cultural productions from songs to art to literature?
Reposition the threat as the protector (and racialize civilization), just as Nazis did.
Musk claimed at the World Economic Forum in January that his companies aim “to maximize the probability that civilization has a great future.” Days prior, Musk reshared a racist influencer’s post on X that declared: “white genocide is the official Democrat party platform.”
In May, Martin Hess, an AfD spokesperson, imagined that “the truth is this: Violence in Germany is fundamentally linked to migration from certain countries, particularly from the Middle East and Africa.”
Positioning White people as facing a genocide and Black and Brown peoples as fundamentally violent diverts attention away from what can really kill human beings of all races and ethnicities: AI-powered cyberattacks on power and water systems. Not to mention perhaps the deadliest killing machine ever created after nuclear weapons: AI-powered autonomous weapons that identify, select, and attack human targets without humans involved.
An AI tool may have helped select the girls’ school that the U.S. bombed in Iran in February, killing about 160 people. An investigation from +972 Magazine, which publishes Israelis and Palestinians, found that the Israeli army used Lavender, an AI-powered tool, to select targets for air strikes during its genocide of Palestinians. The Israeli army allowed the program latitude to murder 15 to 20 Palestinian civilians in the blast if it presumed to locate one junior Hamas operative.
And then there’s the poisoning of electoral behavior through AI-generated disinformation and misinformation, which researchers find can change and chain the ideas of voters. AfD developed its own AI software, Alternita, to quickly produce inflammatory content. The Trump administration routinely circulates AI-generated disinformation.
Instead of investigating the influence of AI-generated disinformation on American voters, the Department of Homeland Security has directed focus elsewhere. “DHS has identified over 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote in just 4 U.S. states,” Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote in letters in July to the Secretaries of State of California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada. “Only Americans should be electing American leaders.”
The fictitious harms of the great replacement are the ultimate distraction from the actual harms of unregulated and unfettered AI companies. But American politicians gearing up to strictly regulate AI companies are seeing their opponents receive millions from two new AI political action committees (PACs)—Leading the Future and Public First Action—that have collectively amassed $200 million from AI investors and executives.
There are a number of super-wealthy people beyond Musk invested in the spread of AI and great replacement theory.
There is Musk’s mentor and Vance’s benefactor, billionaire Peter Thiel. He is investing heavily in data centers running AI and Cognition, an AI startup.
There is billionaire Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, a company selling AI-powered software that militaries are using to identify, plan, and execute strikes. Last year, Karp co-wrote a book, The Technological Republic, touting AI and framing multiculturalism as the threat, a key talking point of great replacement theorists.
There is venture capitalist David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar. He has promoted the conspiracy that Democrats are importing voters and thwarting “mass deportations because illegal immigrants are a vital part of their power base.”
Then there’s Trump. His personal stocks are heavily invested in AI. Not to mention Palantir donated to Trump’s ballroom, as did AI chipmaker Nvidia, as did Alphabet and Microsoft. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon each donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund last year.
To secure his investments, Trump recently called AI fears “a hoax.” Instead, he has incited his supporters to fear diversity programs, antiracist Black people, Muslims, and immigrants of color as harmful.
“Sadly, if you import people from Third World Countries, you quickly become a Third World Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social on June 16, 2016. “Make America Great Again!”
Inflaming people against demographic change covers up the likely ravages from unfettered technological change. What better way for AI investors to get away with their crimes against humanity than to frame another force for those crimes?
Black and Brown people are not coming to replace White people. Unregulated AI is coming to replace us all.
