We’re dealing with actual Nazis

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For a long time it was considered impertinent to refer to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their henchman as Nazis. “Are they registered members of the American Nazi party?” some have demanded to know. “Did they actually help carry out the Holocaust?” others obtusely inquired. But we’ve reached a point where these distinctions have no meaning. Whatever comes to mind when you think of a Nazi, that is for whom this country is currently being run. And the powers that be aren’t shy about it.

On Saturday, Trump posted this quote on X/Twitter: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." It’s apparently from the 1970 movie Waterloo, which is about Napoleon. Then Musk quote tweeted it at 2:14pm (14:14 in the 24-hour clock) with 14 American flags, a reference to the white supremacist ‘14 Words,’: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” It was about as subtle as his Hitler salute on Inauguration Day.

And on Monday, he did it again.

Musk’s Nazi bonafides have been long established, from his war on the Anti-Defamation League, to his loud support for Germany’s far-right AfD party. At a recent party event he told attendees via a virtual appearance, “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” Referring to Germany’s Nazi past, he said, “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents…There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” Musk is also obsessed with white birth rates and personally repopulating the Earth, and his hatred of migrants is well-documented.

I wrote this in 2023, and it remains just as true today:

Now the Nazi has literally saluted us in the face and is staffing his fake agency with young men willing and able to spread his anti-democratic beliefs.

A now-deleted Substack post by DOGE mercenary Gavin Kliger has gained wide attention because of the part where the 25-year-old said he was inspired by the work of known Holocaust denier Ron Unz to join Elon Musk’s government team. Separately, we learned over the weekend that Kliger would be granted access to the most sensitive information at the IRS. What could possibly go wrong?

The Washington Post reported Sunday: 

Kliger reportedly met with high-ranking IRS officials on Thursday to discuss laying off roughly 9,000 people from the agency in the midst of tax season. How he has the authority to do that remains unclear.

After reviewing the entirety of Kliger’s now-deleted post (a copy of which was provided to me by Mother Jones) it reads like a manifesto—and it makes clear why Musk tapped him to serve as a loyal solider.

“My political awakening began with an article in my Freshman year of high school,” Kliger wrote. “It was Our American Pravda by Ron Unz, a piece that laid out, in relentless detail, the sheer scale of media distortion in modern America…Reading it was like putting on glasses for the first time. The issue wasn’t just bias; it was that entire narratives, the ones we took for granted as truth, were carefully curated illusions.”

The piece to which he refers states, “If the media cannot be trusted to catch and report simple financial misconduct, its reliability on more politically charged matters will surely be lower,” which is particularly ironic in light of Kliger’s illegal access to our country’s most secure financial systems.

Mother Jones, who had the scoop on Kliger’s piece, explained Unz’s work: “The essay that Kliger cited, ‘Our American Pravda,’ was widely discussed on the right in 2013. It was also part of an eventual wider series—”American Pravda,” published on Unz’s website, The Uniz Review—that includes striking comments denying the Holocaust, questioning 9/11, and engaging in anti-Black racism.”

Kliger told Mother Jones he was specifically referring to Unz’s original essay and definitely not his later Nazi writings. No, it’s impossible to imagine that a Musk acolyte could’ve been inspired by Unz’s 2018 post “American Pravda: Holocaust Denial,” that states, “Internet critics have suggested that over the last couple of generations, energetic Jewish activists have successfully lobbied Western nations into replacing their traditional religion of Christianity with the new religion of Holocaustianity.” 

Kliger’s now-deleted piece is dripping with contempt for non-Conservatives, viewing them as enemies of progress. He rips universities and the media for not waging war on “antifa.”  He speaks of protesters and blind zealots, not realizing he’s talking about himself in his current form. 

“They didn’t stop the mob. They emboldened it,” he wrote of the aftermath of protests that took place in Berkley while he was a student there. “They didn’t punish rioters. They rewarded them. They didn’t protect free speech. They exterminated it.”

Exterminated. A fascinating word choice.

Kliger also rages against covid vaccines and lockdowns, only pointing out the public health failures of Democratic politicians and completely ignoring how the Republican Party turned its constituents into human sacrifices. He repeats the lie that FEMA funds never made their way to victims of recent natural disasters and that the money has instead gone overseas. He writes without a hint of irony, “Take from Americans. Give to everyone else.” Now he’s poised to take from Americans to give to himself. 

What jumps out maybe even more than the Nazi undertones is the idea of how much he believes he’s sacrificing to be a force for evil. “The cost is enormous,” he writes. “My stock grants alone are worth multiples of what I'll make DOGE. But this isn't about money. It's about being part of something historic: a real chance to reform the federal government from within.”

How Kliger thinks he’s reforming anything with his smash and grab violation of secure government systems is never spelled out. He thinks because he was on his way to making loads of Silicon Valley money but deigned to work among the federal workforce peasantry that he’s bringing a more refined eye to the business of government. Because he read an essay in high school and felt ostracized for being a conservative in college, he’s qualified to burn it all down and rebuild in the image of his cult-master, Musk. 

Listen, I thought a lot of stupid things when I was 25, and certainly had an inflated sense of how well I understood the world. But to walk up to career public servants and shove them aside so you can impose your will isn’t chutzpah: it’s megalomaniacal brain worms. 

It’s clear Kliger fancies himself a high-brow warrior on the front lines for technocracy, but he’s nothing but a childish foot soldier being sold a bill of goods by Musk—just like the rest of America. 

“On his X account, recently made private, Kliger can be seen wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat and reposting content from Musk, far-right conspiracy theory and misinformation accounts, and the hate-speech account Libs of TikTok,” Rolling Stone recently wrote. “Although Kliger removed his repost of white nationalist Nick Fuentes in December, the engagement was preserved on the Internet Archive. He has used the account to share content from misogynist manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, call Hillary Clinton a slur, and demand military tribunals and executions of undocumented migrants who commit crimes.”

This is no mastermind. This is a run-of-the-mill internet Nazi. But the fact remains that he’s been granted access to the most sensitive information held by the IRS, all at the behest of another Nazi.