America’s Second Civil War and How Elon Musk Destroyed His Brand

First, let’s talk money. Before creating and taking the helm at DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency) Elon Musk’s net worth was valued at $486 billion in December of last year. As of today (March 14, 2025) his net worth has fallen by $148 billion—30 percent—to $338 billion, losing $29 billion last Monday alone. This is due to one thing only: the Musk brand is being destroyed by Musk himself, through his direct involvement in helping to materialize Trump’s isolationist MAGA dream for the United States.

Tesla stock tanks, Musk in tears (X/Grok)

I don’t want to get into recounting the details of how we got here—you can find plenty of that online—Trump’s psychopathy, his lurching insensitivity to any and all relationships, his battle-hardened, ideologically-driven demolition team, including Curtis Yarvin, Michael Anton, Steve Bannon, JD Vance, billionaires like Peter Thiel in the background, and the rest of the Mar-a-Lago followers and acolytes and their aim to gut US democracy and rebuild America. 



An end to the Republic
    

If the aim is to rebuild America, the question becomes, “rebuild into what?” That may not be clear to the general public. But the message is out there. In a 2021 interview on American Mind (a podcast outlet for the right wing Stanford Institute), Anton and Yarvin spoke candidly. They promoted a new vision, “Caesarism”, as the way to lead America out of decadence, which they define as a necessary “form of one-man rule: halfway…between monarchy and tyranny”. In other words, a nation ruled by oligarchs—led by an oligarch. How would that unfold? In Yarvin’s own words, “You’d actually have a mandate to do this. Where would that mandate come from? It would come from basically running on it, saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going to do’…It wouldn’t be unlawful. You’d simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.” So here we are.


What none of this fully considers is the historical and present divisions in the US today. The collapse of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire come to mind. An American friend often tells me that the South won the Civil War, and I get what he means. Since the end of that war the values of the South have spread across heartland America and shaped US politics for over a century and a half. We can see what happened to the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others when they tried to push back on these resistant cultures.



 

Red MAGA and black MAGA, Red America and Blue America


Today, there are two Americas: Red America, the old South and mid-continental US, primarily nativist, fundamentalist, colonial nationalists, and Blue America, the coastal and northern border states of humanist, secular, multicultural internationalists. Early on in his quest for political power, as far back as the 1980s, Trump chose Republican red as his path of least resistance.


It’s easy to see why he made that choice. The Republican base felt disenfranchised and misunderstood by the liberal class and its sanctimonious posturing in America. Trump could feed on that disaffection—and also felt disrespected by the liberal class, on full display when Barack Obama publicly humiliated Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. That moment was the making of President Trump, both v.1 and v.2. From that time forward Trump has pivoted toward appealing to an alienated class of Americans who exist outside the carefully curated social trendsetters from Ivy League schools and The New York Times op-ed columnists, and used the four decades of growing economic inequality as the fuel to feed that fire.

Steve Bannon and the other architects of Trump’s presidential campaigns understood their audience and what they needed to hear. MAGA was born and inserted directly into the existing framework of the Christian right—expertly dispersing its messaging through social media, and through that an alliance emerged with the so-called social media “tech-bros”, Elon Musk and his X platform first among them.

Thus began a marketing war that the blue Democrats didn’t understand much less match. Simple red MAGA hats for red Republicans. Simple messages aimed at fanning the embers of resentment into raging fires of hate. George Clooney and his $100,000 a plate dinners for Hillary Clinton were no match—and in fact adding to the perception of elitist entitlement and liberal disregard for the feelings of the right.
 

Beneath all this was Yarvin and Anton and their “dark enlightenment” movement directed at moving America from a democratic republic to a perhaps benevolent, but in their minds necessary, dictatorship. Again, iconography matters. And there is the image Elon Musk wearing a black T-shirt and a black MAGA hat presiding over President Trump in the Oval Office signalling to his team. That and his two Nazi salutes tell the story. Red MAGA is the public face, black MAGA is the oligarchic back room. Read that again. 

Social malaise, decadence and the ‘need’ for stability



In 2023 Michael Anton wrote in the Up from Conservatism anthology that “The universities have become evil”, “our economy is fake”, “the people are corrupt”, “our civilization has lost the will to live”, and proposed that a new Caesar was needed to provide long term stability for the nation. This particularly nihilistic view doesn’t address causation, rather it moves directly toward a providing the cure: radical surgical amputation (of government services), followed by a surgical transplant (installing a single ruling emperor).
    

Overlooked, of course, is the cause of this loss of “the will to live”. Today, more than half of the American public live in permanent financial precarity. Economic inequality has become so extreme that the middle class is disappearing under a tsunami of personal debt, while the reasonably wealthy struggle to hang on to their financial assets, and the extremely wealthy become extremely wealthier. Homelessness is now at epidemic levels, and has been for quite some time, a depressing and endemic condition that the news media has long ago normalized. Social malaise, decadence in the form of drug-taking, diversion and pleasure seeking are the only reasonable answers to a society insanely out of balance. The need for stability is redistribution of wealth, not the crushing of civic society, destruction social institutions and the invocation of tyranny. 

Unless you’re a billionaire who stands everything to gain. If you’re on the winning team, you become the beneficiary of all those collapsing public services that will soon be privatized. You’re one of the few who will be able to extract more profit from a dying empire.



Foreign interventions and the Second Civil War



In his 2022 non-fiction book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, Stephen Marche poses five scenarios:

 

• a violent confrontation between the federal government and a posse of far-right militias
• the assassination of a Democratic president
• the destruction of New York City in a super hurricane
• the detonation of a dirty bomb in Washington DC, and
• the relatively peaceful secession of states that have realized their cultural and political differences outweigh their shared history

 

While these are all possibilities, we may be well past all five scenarios; what has occurred instead is a coup, whereby the democracy is being dismantled and overwritten by a handful of oligarchs with a plan, some of which has been detailed in Project 2025, now being implemented, some of it unfolding in real time with President Trump’s threats of taking over Panama, Greenland and Canada, and isolating Europe, revealing a hostile, expansionist, imperial presidency which prioritizes dominance over allies for access to resources rather than cooperation. 

Meanwhile at home in the US, public justice, finance and social security institutions are under attack. In every instance the general public both at home and abroad will be the ones who will suffer. As a Canadian, along with my fellow Canadians, I see this as an existential threat to not only our nation but to our entire way of life. And as such, we have become more unified than ever in the face of this threat.
 

On the other side of the border, public consciousness hasn’t yet coalesced into a coherent, unified understanding of what’s happening. Behind the mainstream media filters most Americans don’t really see what’s happening in Canada and elsewhere. They are still confused, reeling in shock, and paralyzed by recent edicts from the White House. Red Republicans are becoming uneasy and beginning to fear speaking out against Trump for fear of reprisals. Democrats are unsure of what to do next. If they have the financial resources, should they be considering leaving the country for safer, greener pastures? If not, then what? 

    

Silence and complicity of establishment Democrats



What should be most disturbing to centrist Americans is: where are the voices of the old Democrat establishment? Where are the voices of the Obamas and Clintons and other past leaders? Where are the voices of the old centrist Republican leaders like Bush and Romney?

Chris Hedges has an answer. He views the last election as a contest between the oligarchs and the corporatists, and the oligarchs won. In other words, both support the rule of the rich. The separation lies in the form. Both parties have pushed the rule of law toward increasing privilege for the wealthy at the expense of the rest of the population. Regressive taxation for the masses, and reduced—or zero—taxation for the rich. The proof is in a $4.5 trillion tax gift to the wealthy over ten years at a time when the US government is sliding ever deeper into debt—and installing tariffs to make up the difference, which only really impact the lower and middle income earners in America. Not only are these new policies aimed at destroying US government institutions, they are indirectly aimed at destroying the agency of all ordinary US citizens. This is, in truth, a war of the rich vs the rest, not only in the US but anywhere in the world with trade connections to the United States.


To be even more clear, the oligarchs are the new technofeudalists (who have been enslaving us to our tech), while the corporatists are the existing bankers, financiers and Wall Street brokers (farming us for fees and interest on 'loans'), who don't yet realize that the techno faction now hold the digital keys to then entire realm. The days of finance ruling nations are numbered, perhaps in weeks.

You shall know the enemy by their complicity: silent Republicans and silent Democrats. 

‘Brand Musk’ is ‘Brand America’

There’s a rumour that, reacting to the collapse of Tesla value on the stock market over the past few weeks, Elon Musk has been reduced to tears. And so we see Donald Trump to the rescue on national TV promoting Tesla EVs like a car salesman hawking cars to affluent Americans who’e been dropping the Tesla brand like it’s the plague. Protesters are picketing Tesla dealerships, Tesla cars are being vandalized, and Tesla owners are being bullied. Who are these people? Are they terrorists? Of course not. They’re Americans who are beginning to get the play. They’re probably lifelong Democrats or independents, who like lifelong Republicans, are feeling that they’ve been betrayed by their leaders. And the leader du jour is Elon Musk.


Yet Musk seems unwilling to appreciate his retail customers. He does understand that the principal customer for Space X is the government. But until now, he hasn’t seemed to fully grasp that his Tesla customers are the very blue state Democrats he’s working so hard to sideline, disparage and disempower. Right or wrong, they are the ones who bought EVs because they cared about the existential threat that climate change poses to all of us. And it’s not only Musk. The same lack of market concern is true of the rest of the tech-bro oligarchs. Those scientifically-aware and literate blue state citizens are potentially their best supporters. But the inflated egos of the tech-bros dwarf their intelligence, as has Trump’s, obviously. They’re really all following nut-bars like Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton, really.

I reposted a piece a week ago that focuses on Donald Trump’s mental health. And there are other op-eds about Musk’s mental stability. But it doesn’t matter whether they are or aren’t. To achieve the positions they occupy, and to espouse the philosophies they do, puts them—and their less visible team members—well outside acceptable standards of human behaviour. Empathy and civil collaboration with those whose views one does not exactly align, actually matter a great deal. But not to these people, who work overtime to polarize society into right vs. left, ‘us vs. them’, to gain and retain power, taking down the very institutions that protect citizens from people like them.

Trump & Company’s response to the possibility of internal unrest is primarily external. He doubles down on annexing Greenland and Canada, neutering Europe and cozying up to Putin, Viktor Orbán, Kim Jong Un and any other ‘strong man’ dictator type. It’s a policy of distraction, diversion and short term solutions to overshadow national dissension, tactics which will inevitably lead to a shitload of long term intended and unintended outcomes, not the least of which is the peonage of ‘the masses’—not only at home but around the world.

Inside the US, creating fear, degrading basic education and authoritarian tyranny are the principal ways the controlling elites, whoever they might be, will be able to forestall civil war. But ultimately, whichever way it goes—civil war, regional wars, global conflagration or a combination of some or all—the United States of America, as we once knew it, is over. As goes Musk’s reputation, brand and net worth, so goes America’s.


You might want to start stockpiling fuel now, and invest in a gas generator, barring installing a $100,000 array of solar panels, to keep your TVs, cell phones and EV running. It’s building up to be quite a show. As Trump says, “this will make great television”. You can bet your life it will.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Roman_Republic

https://thewalrus.ca/americas-next-civil-war/

https://www.project2025.org/

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/watch-inside-the-night-president-obama-took-on-donald-trump/