Elon Musk's war on Social Security unmasks the GOP's true disdain for retirees
Terms like "vampires," "fraud," "scam" and "definitely dead" are how the DOGE leader demonizes elderly people
Musk frames retired people in parasitical terms, not seeing them as those who have paid their dues and have earned their reward. In light of that, when he speaks of "waste" in Social Security, he's hinting at this broader view that retired people are inherently illegitimate. While he couches language like "vampire" and "fraud" in false claims that he's talking about illegal payments, the accumulated impact of his rhetoric is to demonize elderly people as a useless burden on society. When the end goal is "efficiency," it's easy to get to this view that retired people are an "inefficiency" and "redundancy" that should no longer be funded. . . .
Musk hinted at this during his Rogan interview, complaining, "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit." While insisting "you should care about other people," he made it clear this was rear-covering nonsense. His larger point was that empathy is "civilizational suicidal" and "the empathy response" is "a bug in Western civilization." The larger interview painted a picture of a man full of contempt for other people, with all their needs and subjective experiences, when he would rather they be compliant automatons who fulfill his demands without resistance. He fantasized about replacing people with "artificial intelligence" and robots, even talking up the incel-inflected dream of replacing women with sex robots.
Musk and his fellow techno-fascists often cast themselves as the saviors of "civilization," but that rhetoric is only there to put an ennobling gloss on a deeply sociopathic view: that human beings exist to serve the system, and not that the system is there to serve humanity. In this case, the system is capitalism, which has taken on a near-religious status to Silicon Valley's billionaire elite. It's an attitude that's inherently eugenicist, measuring people's value solely in terms of whether they can be utilized to make more money for the already-wealthy investor class. It's why Musk has no respect for federal workers whose labor is centered around helping people, not profits. And it's certainly not a worldview that has space for retirees, people who, by definition, are out of the paid labor market.
Causing people who have earned their Social Security to lose benefits doesn't look like an unintended consequence of "efficiency." It's becoming clear that it is Musk's end goal.
