The sparks that ignited the 33 Raptor engines of Starship Heavy late last fall and again last month blasted to space one of the largest rockets ever built. With the successful launch, great things portend for Elon Musk and SpaceX. But something else came into focus, too. As the ground shook and the heavens parted, a single man’s vision became a symbol of the long-dormant spirit of the Americans.

Buried under the detritus of a demoralized culture, a lethargic and idiotic government, a benighted academia, an entrenched financial sector that destroys more than it creates, and a rigged legal system that impedes more than it facilitates, the spiritus Americanus is all but dead. Indeed, most Americans have no historical memory that it ever existed. They do not know that once, not so long ago, we had The Right Stuff.
And yet! Paralleling the literal sparks that hurled hundreds of tons of gleaming metal triumphantly into space are metaphorical sparks that illuminate a growing divide. The divide between life and death. On the one side is the excitement of meaningful adventure in pursuit of the good and the grand. The ambition to build, advance, create, explore, discover, colonize, learn, know, wonder, and inspire. On the other, anesthetized self-loathing and the desire to destroy, stop, impede, inhibit, abort, stultify, depress, conceal, obscure, benight, resent, and demoralize. The awesome and awe-inspiring versus the lamentable and dumb.

In a very loose sense, this is the fundamental dichotomy of our times. Two competing visions. The anti-human death cult vision offered by the radical left and, well, literally everything else that doesn’t celebrate death. And though the “everything else” is still inchoate, it is beginning to take shape. Elon Musk is emerging as one of the forms to which that shape aspires. Sure, some of his ideas are crazy; but some also work. And the ones that work are fantastic. There’s something special in his recipe: 75% industrious visionary, 25% inspirational fabulist.

 

Behold the Man of Action

Whether you like him or not, Musk has goals. And he means to achieve them. This drives the death cult insane with rage. In a gloomy and increasingly inert world, the man who says we can do things and then does them is startling to behold. This is not the same thing as technological utopianism or effective accelerationism, which present interesting challenges and opportunities for humanity. To be clear, Musk may be of that sort. For present purposes, though, Musk is relevant because he’s like Magellan, the Mayflower voyagers, Lewis and Clark, Chuck Yeager, Neil Armstrong, or just plain old homesteaders moving West in 1830s America, not because he may want to merge man with machine like Ray Kurzweil. That will be the subject of a different essay.

The death vision offered by the radical left, on the other hand, is no figure of speech. In both thought and deed, the cult celebrates death and those who bring it. Literally. It aborted tens of millions of human beings since 1970; in a form of Michael Anton’s celebration parallax, it denies that inner-city homicide is skyrocketing while simultaneously blaming the increase on non-existent systemic racism; it murders the elderly or sick using Orwellian terminology; it destroys boys by turning them into girls and destroys girls by turning them to boys; it kills nations by cheering and facilitating mass invasions of First World nations by Third World aliens; it kills jobs by impeding energy production under the guise of gibberish words like “sustainability” and “net-zero”; and it kills civilizations by rewriting their history and ignoring their accomplishments. In short, the death cult opposes any action that might raise the human spirit to gaze at something beyond itself or marvel at its glorious past.

And, for each of its obstructionist positions, the anti-human death cult offers some putative rationale. In killing babies, it exhorts us to place a premium on “choice” over life itself (the quintessential triumph of beastly appetite over life); it claims that shutting down energy production will, preposterously, save lives; and it laments that “migrants” are “mistreated by law enforcement” even as they invade and destroy Western civilization. But make no mistake, while these justifications are mostly nonsense, they are also wholly insincere and entirely anti-human. They do not seek to advance humanity, but to end it by anesthetizing vital human beings into a meaningless stupor rationalized by nonsense. The anti-human death cult exists to take the wind out of your sails.

 

Attack Musk to Control You

In Musk’s case, the death cult resents his advances towards Mars. The cultists hate the idea that humanity might someday slip not merely the surly bonds of Earth, but the devouring bonds of their ideological control. So they pretend that his efforts must be curtailed because sending people to Mars might be risky or dangerous, as described below. But life is risky and dangerous. The dead are the only people not taking any risk. If you’re not taking some risk—if you are not exposing yourself to reasonable dangers—then you are not living. And not living, of course, is the goal of the anti-human death cult.

The anti-human death cult is not concerned that people might die if Musk’s attempt to reach Mars fails. On the contrary, it is terrified that Musk might succeed even if people die in the attempt. Why? Because a Musk success would radically expand the physical and mental horizons of the human species, increasing our courage for great adventures and grand quests for knowledge and discovery. If he succeeds, we Americans might just want to explore the universe, take fantastic voyages to places unknown, and discover things never dreamt of, all while basking in the glory of this great and mysterious gift we call life. And if we do that, well, that means we won’t be griping about the meaning of words with a tribe of self-loathing gender confused anti-human dipshits.

So, the anti-human death cult launched a global assault on Musk because it knows that it must defeat him and people like him in order to control people like you. It must eliminate all public examples of qualitative superiority. It must crush inspiration. It smother kill motivation and ambition in their cradle. It must annihilate the very idea of superlative excellence. And it is trying. Enlisting every tool at its disposal–media, corporate, and governmental–the anti-human death cult will do anything to destroy Musk and men like him. It has no other choice. Thus, the battle rages: from inane America-defeating lawsuits, to enforcement actions by a litany of three-letter agencies including DOJ, FTC, FAA, SEC, and even the Fish and Wildlife Service, as The Hill put it:

 

“The viciousness of the investigations being conducted … against a successful American business leader is unprecedented. It says much more about the vindictive nature of Joe Biden than it does about the founder of Tesla, SpaceX and the Boring Company.”

 

And, in the case of Musk’s most fantastic and inspiring vision—his desire to set foot on Mars—the best way to prevent Musk from succeeding is to prevent him from trying at all. One way to do that is to demoralize the public by lecturing about danger, risk, and waste. This is exactly the tact adopted by the anti-human death cult.

Don’t believe me? Check out these headlines: “Bill Gates says Elon Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars is not a good use of money.” “Sorry Elon Musk, colonizing Mars is a horrible idea.” “Sorry Elon Musk, I refuse to die on Mars.” “4 experts explain why Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars is … not realistic.” There are even podcasts and books that spread the defeatist milquetoast death-cult message packaged as a feigned concern for safety and risk.

And if you’re wondering why Bill Gates’ view on Musk’s use of Musk’s money is news, or why one author’s unwillingness “to die” has any bearing on whether other people might want to go to Mars, just remember that none of this is about Musk per se. It’s about you, a point which one New York Times book review unwittingly made clear: “This book will make you happy to live on this planet–a good thing, because you’re not leaving anytime soon.” Got it? You are not leaving anytime soon. As in, they won’t allow it. Of course, this is a fantastic planet and most of us have no interest “in leaving.” But that’s not the point. The point is that Musk’s attempt to explore Mars is representative of everything the death cult opposes: human endeavor.

The anti-human death cult doesn’t want humanity to reach Mars because exploring new frontiers is the antithesis of the death cult’s infatuation with itself. Exploration, discovery, invention, creation, growth—these are the actions of a mind reaching beyond itself to better ideas, better people, and nobler things. The death cult, however, wants to know nothing but itself. It seeks to turn inward in a perpetually shrinking domain of narcissistic self-reference vanishing ultimately into nothingness. Into death. As a result, the anti-human death cult is antagonized by anything that disrupts this process, questions its worth, or points in the direction of life affirming adventure, curiosity, danger, and risk.

This is why fantastic and potentially achievable goals—like landing a man on another planet—raise the ire of the anti-human death cult. Goals like this make them livid. The very idea that an ambitious and fearless man may seek to accomplish, let alone actually accomplish, something so bold foments in the emasculated mind of each death cult member a toxic brew of norepinephrine that saturates their amygdalas. As a result, they seethe with anger while barely disguising their rage with pretextual claims about risk and safety. It just so happens that the amygdala also controls fear. And the thing that the anti-human death cults fears above all else is the possibility that human beings might aspire to truly live.

Ultimately, the anti-human death cult wants Elon Musk to fail because it wants you to fail. It needs to believe, and it insists that you believe, that there is no grander vision for yourself or for humanity. There is nothing to strive for. That not only must you be reduced to an aggregation of your animal appetites, but that you should desire it.

Musk, despite his faults, reminds us that we can lift our gaze to the profound and enduring mystery and be inspired. That we don’t have to live a small and meaningless life defined by a narrow focus on ourselves and our petty appetites. The former is the path to life; the latter to death. In Musk’s lofty goals we have a symbolic embodiment of the winning team, a team he’s inviting you to join. In doing so, he defies the death cult and its vision of a debased humanity. If you have read this far, I suspect you do too.

TJ Harker is the General Counsel of a Knoxville, Tennessee company. Until recently, he was a federal prosecutor, where he investigated and tried national white-collar fraud and espionage matters for the Department of Justice. He recently launched Amicus Republicae on Substack and is a contributor to the American Mind, the James G. Martin Center, and other outlets.