Sieg heil Tesla
Yes, you did see what you think you saw. Here's an idea, let's call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute.
Zero days into the second Trump term and America’s most august news publications stumbled at the first hurdle. When Elon Musk made his speech at the inauguration rally and pumped his arm, twice, in a Nazi-style salute, the New York Times Pitchbot, a spoof account that proposes ridiculous-but-plausible headlines for potential NY Times stories, saw Elon Musk’s speech and tapped out the following post:
Minutes later, the New York Times’s actual headline dropped. The NYT Pitchbot had got it wrong: the real headline turned out to be even more asinine.
To give the New York Times credit, like the BBC, it’s guided by an even-handed, see both-sides-of-both-sides ethic. The US is the reverse of the UK. In Britain, much of our print media is wildly partisan but our broadcast media is strictly regulated and has to play by very tightly controlled rules. In the US, it’s the opposite way around: on TV, there’s MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on one side of the political spectrum and Fox & Friends on the other. While, the New York Times and the Washington Post maintain a Gods-eye view of the world in which they affect studious neutrality.
The thing is that there’s a reason why at the beginning of the 20th century, a load of writers came along and rejected the God-like omniscience of the 19th century novel: because, guess what, God maybe doesn’t exist, no-one does know everything, and pretending otherwise is a con. It was a way of cloaking the author’s views in a fake veil of authority and neutrality.
The Great War was the great rupture in reality. New ways of writing came out of that period that broke all the rules from writers who strove to find new ways of communicating what felt like a fractured reality: James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to name just two.
The Washington Post and New York Times and BBC are all, it goes without saying, brilliant newsgathering organisations doing critical work and while the rules-based order held, so did this model. But in this new reality, neither “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture” nor “Elon Musk stirs controversy over hand gesture at Trump rally” gives us any clue of what actually happened. On what may turn out to be one of the most pivotal days in US history, the two US newspapers of record failed to reflect the actual record.
So much has happened this week, so fast, and so many people are “taking a break” from the news. And that’s why this feels so singularly dangerous. Because these headlines are meant to reassure us of their strenuous commitment to fairness and truth but do the opposite. They suggest people shouldn’t actually believe their own eyes. And it’s either too early, or much too late, to point out that this George Orwell said was the final ultimate demand: to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears.
Musk is who he says he is. This was him yesterday, delivering a speech at a far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) rally in Halle in eastern Germany.
If newspapers can’t say out loud that a man who supports the far-right successor party to the Nazis in German made what pretty much everyone watching thought was a Nazi salute including actual Nazis, then we are in a whole new place of danger.
Where’s Wally?
In the last newsletter, I wrote that the image of the tech bros lined up on the presidential dais was going to be an image seared into our brains that would frame our understanding of what is to come. We have now all seen these shots everywhere and even in Britain, the penny has dropped even with political commentators who have ignored this stuff for years. But there’s someone missing. It took about 24 hours for me to realise that that the real revelation here is not who’s on the dais, but who’s not. One man, the dark lord behind all this, was nowhere to be seen. Look at the picture. And then ask: where’s Peter Thiel?
Thiel, the founder of Palantir, PayPal and the first investor into Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor should have been standing right behind JD Vance with a huge smile on his face. This is everything he dreamed of and he, more than anyone, made it come to pass. JD Vance owes everything to Thiel: he’s been sponsored, funded and nurtured by him over years, both in business and in politics.
Watching the ceremony, I’m sure even hardened Dems melted a little to see Vance’s wife holding his toddler daughter, his son and mother, on either side, as he swore his oath on the Bible. And it’s true that the man whose firm was contracted by the first Trump administration to find immigrant children, separate them from their parents and hold them in cages, may have struck the wrong note if he’d joined that touching tableau. But it did make me wonder what he was up to.
Thiel has always been at least five steps ahead. He was the only major Silicon Valley entrepreneur to back Trump in 2016. As I detailed in the last newsletter, he spent years on a plan to take down and kill the news site, Gawker. And, he was seated on Trump’s right-hand side at the first major meet of tech CEOs and Trump in December 2016. So just what’s his game plan now?
On the night of the inauguration, he hosted a lavish party in his Washington mansion, maybe the most A-list of all the inauguration parties, present were Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Don Trump Jr and of course, his boy, JD Vance. According to the New York Times’s man-with-an-in-with-Thiel, it had a Mar A Lago-themed buffet station, deliveries from McDonalds and a guest list that was “heavily male”.
The point, seems to be, that the DC and Silicon Valley elite came to play court to Peter Thiel, not the other way around. If you realise that Bezos, Zuckerberg and even Musk weren’t so much honoured invitees as hostages, everything starts to make much more sense: they were forced to stand behind Trump in an ultimate and non-negotiable show of fealty. They even had to bring their wives. Trump’s cabinet picks didn’t even get a plus one. Not even RFK Jr who is married to an actual celebrity (Cheryl Hines star of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm). Think ISIS but back in its throat-slitting heyday.
None of them had a choice. Peter Thiel, who bought himself a vice president, got to stay away. That’s real power and also a chess move because everything Thiel does is a chess move. What this means - and why he didn’t want himself in those photos for all posterity - will no doubt be revealed in time.
And here we go again…
In 2016, the UK branch of MAGA united - aka the self-styled ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ - held their party in the Hays-Adam Hotel in Washington DC to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump. Nigel Farage was the guest of honour and it was part paid for by his businessman pal, Arron Banks, the man who also paid for Brexit. Pivotal to this entire transatlantic relationship is Farage’s special friend, Steve Bannon.
And so it came to pass again..
Honestly, even looking at that photo exhausts me.
So many men. Though unemployed former Prime Minister Liz Truss was also there, seems like she didn’t make the photocall cut. (If you want to figure out the names of the filler dudes in the photo, please feel free to message me.)
It felt uncannily familiar to wake up on Monday morning with the following photo in my DMs:
Gunster Strategies is the company that provided millions of pounds of undeclared services to Farage’s Leave.EU Brexit campaign that the Electoral Commission declined to investigate. (No, I’m still not over it.) Gerry Gunster is the man standing to Nigel Farage’s right in the top photo. And to the left…is that Guo Wengui? Or one of his colleagues?
If you don’t know who Guo Wengui is, don’t feel bad about it. You may not have time to follow the ins and outs of a convicted crypto-felon-possible-Chinese-double-agent now funding transatlantic relations between right-wing Brits and MAGA dudes because honestly who does?
The event’s main sponsor, as it says on the noticeboard, is the New Federal State of China. If you’re unfamiliar with that name, it’s an outfit set up by Steve Bannon and the aforesaid Guo Wengui, Bannon’s new sugar daddy. When Bannon fell out with the Mercer family, the biggest donors to Trump’s 2016 campaign and then owners of both Cambridge Analytica and right-wing news site, Breitbart, Bannon needed a new political patron and that’s when Guo Wengui hoved into view. Wengui has funded Bannon to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and in return Bannon helps Wengui with his political projects, one of which is to support the US Chinese dissident movement.
The New Federal State of China which paid for Farage’s Washington SC party positions itself as the Chinese government in exile. Yes, really.
Though here’s the twist: it’s not entirely straightforward if the organisation represents the Chinese opposition. Or - wait for it - the Chinese government. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos did a comprehensive if perplexing deep-dive on who Guo Wengui really is: tldr, no-one really knows.
Wengui was convicted last year of a $1bn crypto scam but that maybe the most mundane thing about him. There’s an unpaywalled NPR interview with Osnos here in which he lays out what a completely baffling character he is. He suggests the man who’s funding Bannon who paid for Farage’s inauguration party may also be…a Chinese spy.
And at one point a couple of years ago, when Guo was in a lawsuit, the company that he was suing accused him of being, as they put it, a dissident hunter, a propagandist and an agent in service of the People's Republic of China. Guo denied that accusation. But the judge in that case in a federal court concluded that it wasn't clear, ultimately. As the judge put it, it wasn't clear whether Guo was, in fact, a dissident or a double agent. The judge wrote, others will have to determine who the true Guo is.
When I went looking for photos of the party on social media, they mostly looked like this:
Just Erik Prince, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage hanging with their new Chinese friends.
Here’s Evan Osnos again:
OSNOS: Yeah. Look, there are people who have watched Guo's case, people in the U.S. national security community, who say that looking at the pattern of disruption that he has generated in this country since coming here, it appears that he is still operating on behalf, according to this view, of some portion of the Chinese power structure, whether it's opponents of Xi Jinping who have fallen out or people who are trying to generate chaos in America's politics because they think, ultimately, it would be for China's benefit. That is a view.
With a character reference like this
Evan Osnos opens his profile on Guo Wengui with a story about how he landed in New York, a complete unknown, with billions in his pocket intent on buying one of the most expensive apartments in Manhattan. Guo - also known as Miles Kwok - was treated with suspicion by the board of the building - who is this dude and where does his money come from? - but then he pulled a blinder: a personal recommendation from another ex-Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
Consider this a cliffhanger. There is much more to say on Tony Blair and his tentacles into this world but let’s leave it here till next time.
More spies
This week, saw a Russian spy ship cruising UK territorial waters and talking of Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, this week’s episode of Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring has some eye-popping material. I’ve deliberately under-advertised it for reasons that may become obvious if you listen to it. Do let me know what you think. And sign up here for more info including a couple of events coming soon.
Finally…
There’s a brilliant deep-dive in Bloomberg this week on the YouTubers who helped elect the President. What’s helpful is that Bloomberg has moved beyond anecdotes to data and discovered that, yes, they really did help swing the vote for Trump.
And this is who they are. See if you can spot any common theme:
It’s not just that they’re all male so is the their audience (80% male) and their guests (88% male).
This is what culture is now: men talking to other men to an audience of men on platforms owned by men powered by algorithms that men built about a political system that men dominate and control.
To quote Guo Wengui’s special friend, Steve Bannon, politics is downstream from culture. This isn’t just a presidential term, it’s a new reality in which the old ways of doing things won’t work. What that means and how we even start is a whole new ballgame. If you have thoughts, please feel free to chuck in a comment below. I have plans that I’d love to share in coming months so if you were forwarded this email or found it on social media, do please consider subscribing. With thanks as ever, Carole
PS The original post had a typo in the headline, ‘Seig’ instead of ‘Sieg’. Grrr. It’s now corrected and, once again, it affirms why I believe in editors. That’s why supporting this newsletter may enable me to have one. I’d much prefer to keep writing in the Guardian with my Observer colleagues but given that’s not an option, there will be typos. Thanks for your understanding.
I wonder if this is what it felt like to be an indigenous person when the conquistadors arrived? A feeling that one doesn't quite know what the next move is or precisely why this small number of organised people are so successful. But an ominous feeling that, despite the disparity in numbers, they're dividing and conquering us even though we could and should be crushing them?
"This is what culture is now: men talking to other men to an audience of men on platforms owned by men powered by algorithms that men built about a political system that men dominate and control."
It's not that I didn't know this, but it really made something click for me. Thanks as ever for your work.