On July 23 the editor-in-chief of The Economist published her interview with Elon Musk, recorded three days earlier at Tesla’s Texas plant, in which she told the world’s richest man that “some people do loathe you”. Zanny Minton Beddoes asked him whether what he was doing was “helpful for Western democracy”, although I suspect what she meant to say was Western democracy as she and the von der Leyens of the world interpret it. Many of our readers certainly have noticed the newest trend of our current cadre of leaders to speak ever more frantically of “our” democracy the worse they are doing in the polls. Democracy, as they understand it, means that there can be no alternative available for the voters that would actually alter any of the current policies that touch on existential issues: Mass migration, energy policies, surveillance. “Our democracy” is just another way of saying “we have decided and you have to shut up.” Musk, for his part, seemed unbothered by the insinuation of being unpopular: a quarter of a billion people follow him on X, and “a lot more people actually like me than don’t”. “Do you realise the media is despised?” Journalists, he reminded her, poll at around 15 per cent approval, a figure she conceded she knew of in the United States: “They hate you far more than they hate me.”
The exchange that demonstrated why so many people have come to hate the mainstream media happened a bit earlier: Accused of backing fringe right-wing parties, Musk offered a test: “That we should have secure borders, that we should have safe cities, that we should have sensible spending. Which of those three are far-right fringe?” His old warning that on current trends civil war in Britain is a matter of when rather than if drew the immediate objection: “I live there. I’m there the whole time. That is nonsense.” The perception of people like Minton Beddoes is that if only Elon Musk would stop talking, then Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel and Herbert Kickl would disappear. An odd notion, to be honest, given that, for example, around 16 per cent of Austrians use X. Current polls show the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) at 38 per cent, according to the Market institute’s July survey for Der Standard — does The Economist really believe that nearly two-fifths of the Austrian electorate base their voting decisions on Musk’s tweets? Or the German, British, or French electorate? Or could it be that a growing number of people feel their living conditions deteriorating? That the comforts of a shared culture and respected behavioural norms are slipping away? Maybe murder rates are trending down, but personal security consists of more than the fear of being killed. It also includes a sense that you do not have to fear being raped, mugged, stabbed or run over by a car.
In a cruel confirmation of this point, two days after its publication, on the evening of July 25, a white van drove into a crowd in Berlin’s Tiergarten, some 400 metres from the Christopher Street Day parade, and the driver then attacked passers-by with a machete. A 65-year-old Polish woman is dead and 31 people injured, several critically. It turned out to be yet another Islamist terror attack, and the perpetrator, shot dead by police the following evening in an allotment garden in the Spandau district, was no stranger to the German state. Abdul Ballout, 21, born in Berlin, had been watched by Berlin’s domestic intelligence service since November 2021, as reconstructed by the German magazine Cicero: convicted of assault and robbery-extortion in February 2022, posting Islamic State propaganda on Instagram in June 2024, then repeatedly trying to reach the caliphate in 2025, the last time via Lebanon, where he was arrested en route to Syria. A Lebanese military court gave him three months for religious incitement, which he served in full. He was returned to Germany in the autumn of 2025 and held in pre-trial custody: the only successful remigration in this story, and it went in the wrong direction. In May 2026 a Berlin juvenile court convicted him of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state, lifted his arrest warrant and released him under Vorbewährung, a device of juvenile law under which the decision on suspending a sentence — here one year and 10 months — is deferred. Prosecutors appealed against it as too lenient and the judgment is not final. The conditions attached were counselling with the Violence Prevention Network, supervision by a probation officer and a fixed address. He attended two sessions, on June 15 and July 8, before making the fateful decision to rent a van and kill his fellow citizens. To summarise: An individual well known to the authorities for planning a terrorist attack was not taken into custody, but remained on probation with a few hours of therapy. A police camera installed opposite his front door recorded him leaving the building at 8.58pm that evening. Why, one has to ask, would the German government do such a thing?
None of this, I believe, is stupidity. It is something much more dangerous: wounded vanity of the overeducated elite. Think about it: For 60 years the warnings about mass migration came from people the respectable class found embarrassing — Enoch Powell, sacked from the shadow cabinet a day after his April 1968 speech, Franz Schönhuber’s Republikaner party in Germany, Jean-Marie Le Pen with his convictions — men who made dismissal easy, because the warning could always be filed under the warner. They were no saints, to be sure, and their prophecies were often crude and bordered on neo-fascism. Yet the substance of the unease they captured, namely that importing large numbers of people from cultures with very different views of women, Jews, homosexuals and unbelievers would produce exactly the kind of conflicts that we see today, has turned out to be correct. The people with the sociology degrees said it was an irrational moral panic instigated by irresponsible populists. The people without them also said it was a moral panic, but not an irrational one, but one that is founded in the lived experience of everyday life, like the parents of those schoolchildren in Austria and Germany who are attending classes where fewer than 30 per cent have German as their everyday language — in Vienna’s Favoriten district 72 per cent of pupils came from a non-German-speaking home in 2023-24, according to the Austrian Integration Fund. The Austrian Freedom Party was warning about these developments as early as 1993, with its “Austria first” referendum, but then as now these concerns were condemned instead of being taken seriously. All the supposedly smart people downplayed the obvious and derided those who sounded the alarm.
This, I suspect, is the true source of the fury directed at Musk: not that he is wrong, but that he decided to side with those who were right all along, and even in public and not just behind closed doors. When he told The Economist the obvious fact that “if you have a large and growing, rapidly growing, group of people whose beliefs are antithetical to Western beliefs, at some point there will be a reckoning”, one only had to look at the official statistics in Germany to see what he meant: 788 group rapes in 2024, more than two per day, and 51 per cent of the suspects without a German passport, according to figures the federal government gave parliament. Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and Turks are leading among foreign suspects and are vastly overrepresented in crime statistics. Swiss forensic psychiatrist Frank Urbaniok, who spent decades assessing violent offenders, provides further evidence: Afghan suspects are overrepresented in sexual offences by about 1,000 per cent in German police statistics for 2023 and Algerians in dangerous assault by 3,400 per cent, while Indians and East Asians are, if anything, underrepresented. Merely a decade ago anyone citing such numbers would have been called a racist, today one would still be called such, but also a “threat to democracy”. The numbers themselves, alas, are rarely refuted but downplayed which angers people even more. Misguided policies are one thing, but pretending that the consequences of such policies (like open borders) do not exist or are only noticed by racists adds a sense of insult to the people that very often suffer from real injuries, like the victims of Britain’s grooming gangs.
This is also why the argument about murder rates in the US misses the point. London and Berlin may well be safer than any American city, yet the residents of Neukölln, a district of Berlin, do not commute to Chicago. People measure security by whether their daughter can cross the park after dark, whether her school suggests she not eat in front of fasting classmates during Ramadan, whether the city’s answer to the machete is a knife-free zone, and whether a man convicted of preparing a terrorist attack walks free a matter of weeks before committing one. The wounded class does have a programme, though. Its answer to Berlin is not a migration policy but a communications policy: Chat Control, digital IDs and age checks for social media, the standing demand to ban the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the ineligibility imposed on Marine Le Pen, cut on appeal on July 7 to a term she has already served, though with a year of home detention under an electronic tag attached. The problem, in other words, is not the problem but the fact that people are able to talk about it. When Elon Musk told his interviewer that the media are hated far more than he is, he actually flattered them: hatred would presuppose that anyone still expects better, but no one really does anymore. The real dividing line in Western politics no longer runs between Left and Right. It runs between those who want to represent the people and those who despise them, and a class persuaded that a third of its electorate is too stupid for democracy will sooner or later have to choose between the electorate and its self-regard.
