On Saturday, billionaire Elon Musk made a brief appearance at a rally for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party a growing, far-right nationalist contingency boasting ties to neo-Nazism and looking to take power in a fast-approaching German election to urge the crowd to"move beyond"the sins of Germany's not-too-distant genocidal past."There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that," Musk, appearing to refer to the evils of the Holocaust and the Second World War, told roughly 4,500 rallygoers, according to The Washington Post. "Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents."As Axios notes, this type of rhetoric is commonly employed by neo-Nazis and skinheads when discussing Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.Last week, at a post-inaugural ball for US president Donald Trump, Musk made what appeared to be multiple fascist salutes to the crowd; a few days later, he took to X to make gross Holocaust jokes. And now, at a nationalist rally amidst a global shift towards autocracy,the antisemitic billionaire reportedly slated to have an office in the West Wing is again urging a nation not to learn from the traumas of the 20th Century and instead to forget.As the eternal wisdom goes: if it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck well, then it probably is a duck.Over the past several months, Musk has frequently espoused his support for the AfD, which counts itself as the first nationalist party to win a regional election in Germany since World War II. He often interacts on X-formerly-Twitter, the social media platform he owns, with party acolytes and leaders, for example agreeing with the bizarre claim made by AfD figurehead Alice Weidel that the Nazis weren't far-right fascists which they certainly were but instead far-left communists. (As Wired pointed out at the time, everything said in that exchange was grotesquely false and not at all rooted in history.)Musk's statements fell just before today's 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, where Nazis brutally murdered around 1.1 million people, primarily Jews.The world's richest man also used his allotted time at the rally to rail against immigration, saying that Germans should be "proud" of their culture and values and not "lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything." This isn't surprising at an AfD rally, which can attribute its rise largely to anti-immigration sentiment across the West.Germany's forthcoming election will take place in February. In the weeks ahead, we can likely expect Musk to continue to use his platform to push for a nationalist, AfD victory and, presumably, to dig his hole deeper in ways we can't even imagine yet.Share This Article