Elon Musk full speed rush to slash the federal government is being fueled by an extreme ideology that aims to virtually halt individual freedoms for everyday people, a columnist warned Monday.
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte claimed Musk buys into the concept of “freedom cities” that is becoming increasingly popular among tech billionaires.
In theory, proponents of the idea say they want “the federal government to set aside land to build cities exempt from federal and state laws.”
In reality, Marcotte claimed, the concept is “simply neo-feudalism, a plan to end the concept of citizenship and make every working person a serf whose entire life is controlled by the whims of their boss.”
“The cities would function as mini-dictatorships, where the CEO of each town runs everything, and the people who live and work there are subject to the boss's whims,” she wrote.
“It would be like being an employee of a controlling company, except you don't clock out at the end of the day or have a life — or rights — outside of what the boss allows you.“
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The idea, she wrote, sounds extremely far-fetched — but is real.
“It sounds too preposterous to believe, but Musk's close friend Peter Thiel has been spending lavishly on organizations designed to make it a reality,” she wrote.
“Pilot programs have begun to create artificial islands where the rich owners rule like kings. One such corporate city, named Próspera, has been built in Honduras, though the government is currently trying to kick them out, disagreeing that the city's owners get to reject any national laws they don't like.”
And Musk’s sympathy with the concept can be seen in the way he’s working to cut government spending in his role in the Department of Government Efficiency, Marcotte wrote.
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“All of this helps illuminate the ideology fueling Musk's war on the federal government, and propping up his faith that he, an unelected billionaire, should have the right to nullify any federal agency or policy created through the democratic process,” she argued.
“It also helps explain why he is happy to go along with Trump's tariffs and other assaults on the economy, even though the chaos is causing the stock market to crash and executives at his own company, Tesla, to panic about the future of the business.
“The possibility that his reckless actions cause social, economic and governmental collapse doesn't bother Musk, because in the ideological waters he swims in, destroying it all so it can be rebuilt as a tech-dystopian dictatorship is very much the point.“