I WAS in Wisconsin, in America’s Midwest, the week before the presidential inauguration, to join a panel of economists and social scientists looking ahead at what the next four years might bring.   

We might call the purpose “Trump Preparedness” — an attempt to brace ourselves for what could be coming. 

I was there to add a British perspective on what only one side — ours — tends to still call the “special relationship.”

The first thing I learned was that Midwesterners have their own way of saying goodbye in winter. 
 “Stay warm!” they’ll call cheerily after you, as wrestle on hat, scarf and gloves in the café doorway before stepping out into the snow. 

But it’s not always so friendly. 

During my visit I spoke to university students from all over the US, and the world: Rwanda, Morocco, Bangladesh, Korea. There’s a lot they have to tell us. 

First of all, they want the UK to understand that even those who are white and US-born are not all in the Maga camp — far from it. 

I heard about colleges and schools cancelling classes on the day the election results were announced, because students were too upset to come in. “People were crying.” 

University students in the US have seen hate crimes worsen since the Trump era. Campuses can contain the most obviously diverse population in some US towns; and students tell me that cars sometimes drive up and down the roads encircling them, occupants calling out racial abuse and threats: “We’re going to deport you n******.”

One student tells me he makes a point to take white friends with him if he needs to go to a department store like Target — if he doesn’t, he’ll be openly followed by security every step of the way. 

Young Americans want to warn us, too, not to underestimate the radicalising potential of social media — they’ve seen friends radicalised by the right on Reddit and TikTok. 

It’s a growing problem in Britain too. Nigel Farage and Reform UK slavishly “cut and paste” from the Trump and Musk playbook, and are proving much better at the social media game than we might expect: they have the money to employ tech-savvy people who know how to manipulate the algorithms. 

I’ve heard from many worried British parents about this. Once their kids have watched one or two Andrew Tate videos, they are relentlessly targeted with far-right content, until it’s virtually all they see.  
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has also joined the far-right bandwagon, ditching Facebook’s DEI policy, and complaining “feminised” workplaces need to “man up”; as well as ditching curbs on misinformation on the app.  

Before the 2024 UK general election, mock votes in British schools saw a high number of victories for Reform; ageing millionaires of whom our kids should surely only be aware to sneer at, if at all.   
I told my American audience about Musk’s incendiary intervention into British politics: that 2025 had barely begun before he’d cynically weaponised the UK’s “grooming gang” scandal to attack Starmer’s government. 

Musk has also begun to openly support fascist agitator Tommy Robinson. Since then, he’s made a surprise appearance in Germany at an AfD campaign launch, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, urging the nation to forget its “past guilt.”
 
I told them Robinson will be out of prison soon, and claims that Musk will be funding him. If so, Robinson will inevitably spend most of it on cocaine, gambling and strip clubs: but whatever is left will no doubt be spent relaunching his political “career.”

Robinson crashed out of the 2019 European elections with a humiliating 2.2 per cent of the vote — but those were different times, and even then it took a determined campaign by local anti-fascists from Stand up to Racism and Unite Against Fascism, some of whom were wounded by far-right thugs in the process.  

After months of campaigning in Telford and making a series of “documentaries” on the sexual abuse scandal, “The Rape of Britain,” Robinson suddenly and without warning dropped the whole issue last year. 

I had joined counter-protests in Telford several times, taking with me a display copy of the list of convicted far-right sex offenders who Robinson never mentions (they include close friends of his, and currently number 102 men). We did our best to counter his Islamophobia with facts — while they must all be broken and members imprisoned without fear or favour, the majority of “gangs” of paedophile abusers are, in fact, white.

While this had some impact, what actually drove Robinson out was of town were angry locals. His team were discovered to be having sex with vulnerable young survivors they were supposed to be working with there — sexually exploiting the sexually exploited. 
But Robinson will pick the issue up again as fast as he dropped it, if money is at stake. He has grown rich on donations, from individuals as well as organisations like the Middle East Forum, set up by Islamophobic activist Daniel Pipes, and designated anti-Muslim hate group the David Horowitz Foundation. 

During one of his many highly deserved prison stints, Robinson panhandled so effectively he was able to buy a new £700,000 house on his release. But Musk Money is in a different league to anything even he’s been able to get his hands on before, and he will be able to do serious mischief with it. 
I shared with my Midwestern audience the recent research I’d done into Musk, too, which has helped me understand the true aims of this strange and dangerous man.  

Musk’s father Errol has said his son was fairly liberal as a young man, but is now embracing his “destiny” and “South African heritage.” 

This is interesting, because Musk Snr has also revealed that his own in-laws, Elon’s grandparents, were members of the German Nazi Party, despite being Canadian by birth and residence. They subsequently moved to South Africa because they positively wanted to live under apartheid.   

All the more surprising that some, on both sides of the political divide, are still arguing as I write that Musk wouldn’t understand he’d performed a Nazi salute at the Trump inauguration. 

However, Musk’s ultimate ambitions extend far beyond his current plans: to remove Keir Starmer, and get Robinson into a leadership role in Reform or some other party. Even beyond the forging of a wider international far right alliance. 

Musk is a “Long-Termist.”

Long -Termism began as philosophical concern for the far-distant future of humanity, evolving from Effective Altruism (EA), a broadly Benthamite philanthropic programme. Oxford philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord coined the term “Long-Termism” around 2017. 

So far so unimpeachable — but the philosopher Alice Crary warned in 2023 that the ideology had become “toxic” and been taken over by the mega-rich, citing Musk’s endorsement of it as one substantial red flag.  

Crary points out Long-Termists are blasé about anthropogenic hazards that won’t completely wipe out humanity, regardless of the terrible suffering they could cause. 

It is perhaps no surprise that Long-Termism has become popular among billionaires, such great contributors to the destruction of the environment, when it rather conveniently lets then off the hook.
Long-Termism argues that if humanity ultimately survives environmental collapse, all is well, and we must simply accept the short-term cost. It is indifferent to the terrible harms of climate destruction, which are already being felt disproportionately by racialised and Indigenous groups globally. They are merely collateral damage.

Crary has said this “theory-induced callousness” gives weight to those who suspect a “racist strain in Long-Termist thinking.”

American activist and philosopher Emile Torres calls Long-Termism quite simply “the world’s most dangerous secular belief system.”

The media and cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff tells a story of as deeply unsettling encounter with some of its advocates.  

Rushkoff says he was summoned to an unnamed island by five also unnamed billionaires. 

The conversation began, he said, as he would have expected: the group wanted his advice on their investments, and talked about the best places to construct “billionaire bunkers” to, as Rushkoff phrased it, insulate themselves from the very harm they were causing by their means of accumulating wealth. 

New Zealand and Alaska were popular locations (New Zealand has begun to challenge the building of these compounds in its territory). 

Then, Rushkoff said, one of the men casually broached a new topic: how to ensure the loyalty of one’s private army once money had become worthless.

The group had already thought sufficiently far ahead to have teams of Navy Seals or similar on retainer, to protect them and their families in the event of climate and/or societal collapse. But how to keep them compliant once they couldn’t be paid?  

The man in question told them he had had an idea: shock collars. These cruel devices are employed in the “training” of dogs, dispensing electric shocks at will.  

This is the future is billionaires have their sights on: a tiny minority of oligarchs living like feudal warlords, unrestricted by laws or regulations.

It explains why Musk needs to accumulate more and more money despite being worth an estimated $436 billion — securing global domination requites even more obscene levels of wealth. 

Long-Termist centi-billionaires see no downside to the destruction to human life from climate catastrophes — they envisage themselves repopulating the world, or other planets, with their own offspring (Musk, of course, already has 12 children. No doubt the luxury bunkers will be furnished with young women).

If many of us die in the process, that is a sacrifice they are willing, if not eager, to make. 

It is, I suppose, the logical result of very rich men on a waning planet adopting a eugenicist enthusiasm for “pro-Natalism” (the “right” people having huge families) as a response to the far right’s beloved “Great Replacement Theory.”

This elite hopes to not merely survive but thrive, dominating a landscape where the majority of the poor — who just so happen to be largely black, brown and Muslim — removed; and all without them having to resort to wars or Holocausts. Climate collapse is, in this view, a rather convenient “cleansing.” All a little reminiscent of another group that made plans for a thousand years into the future...

In the conversation after the panel in the US, we all agreed that failure in resisting this New World Order is genuinely not an option: this is the fight of, and for, our lives. The young people I spoke to were resolute.

One positive is that creeping fascism requires many hands, and much compliance as well as mass apathy, to work. 

We are now the front line. We have to dispense absolutely with sectarianism, a luxury we cannot afford, and unite against the 1 per cent and the horrific future they have planned for us. 

As a first step, please join me on Stand up to Racism and Unite Against Fascism’s unity demonstration against Tommy Robinson and the Far Right on February 1 in central London, and look out for demonstrations by the Coalition against Trump, which includes both of those organisations plus CND, the Black Liberation Alliance, Friends of the Earth, Stop the War and many more.  

Resistance starts here. 

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