Inside the twisted mind of Elon Musk’s favorite YouTuber
Over the last year, Elon Musk has developed a fascination with a 24-year-old podcaster and YouTuber from Pennsylvania who claimed he communicated “with God about what he believes the future of the right, philosophically, should be.”
Rudyard Lynch, addressing his 737,000 subscribers on YouTube, has also envisioned a violent “incel revolution” engulfing the US in the very near future. “I have been betting my money for years that America will have a rape crisis,” he said in a 2024 video in which he rebuked women for treating “incels as if they’re subhuman vermin.”
“Women,” he added, had placed themselves in a “precarious position” by alienating “men who could protect them.”
Since May of last year, Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, two of the world’s most valuable companies, has shared podcasts recorded by Lynch on more than 10 occasions, most recently in March. “Thoughtful” and “worth listening to” are two ways the centibillionaire has described Lynch and his material.
On the YouTube channel Whatifalthist, Lynch began posting videos at the age of 13, focusing initially on speculative history, such as a different world in which the Americas were discovered by the Phoenician empire. His breathless, rambling monologues have since grown darker in tone and more present in subject matter, as he toggles between the roles of historian, anthropologist, and prophet.
In late 2024, roughly five months before Musk began sharing his content, Lynch published an eight hour video series explaining that he had been “regularly communicating with god” about remaking conservative philosophy, and that “god told me I should integrate science, Christianity, and Darwinism into a single coherent theory.”
“I thought I was a weirdo, and nerdy, and a loser,” Lynch raved. “Now here we are, I’m fucking talking to God, and I’m giving you a message.”
He then recanted those claims a few weeks later, insisting, simultaneously, that he was “trying to make something go as viral as possible for advertising reasons” and that he had experienced a legitimate spiritual revelation. “I recently had a religious experience which was the best thing that ever happened in my life which kinda drove me crazy,” Lynch wrote on X.
“America is getting quite resentful of Black America”
Musk has often revisited a 2024 podcast from Lynch in which he discussed scientific racism, a pseudoscientific practice used to place different racial groups within a biological hierarchy.
“The genetic differences in men and women, between races and classes have all been completely proven,” said Lynch. “I know five PhDs in genetics, who all say that biological race and class has been irrefutably proven at this point.”
Musk was delighted by the 48-minute jeremiad. “Listen to this podcast to understand the greatest lie ever told,” he wrote in a September post recommending the podcast episode to his 240 million followers on X, the social media platform he owns. Musk has posted the link to that particular episode on three other occasions. At first, in June, and then on Columbus Day (he attempted to pass the podcast off as evidence for the claim that indigenous tribes of the Americas “were savages”), and again in January of this year.
In the episode, Lynch raged frantically about a supposed “suicidal cult” of “liberal elites” who ruled over the Western world for much of the 20th century and nearly destroyed it by attempting to create “human equality,” or what the host called “the greatest lie ever told.”
Lynch, a college dropout, said he uncovered the “lie” by searching for consensus wisdom from “other thinkers more brilliant than I,” including “Isaac Newton, Christ, Confucius, Buddha, Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle.”
There were also other smaller but interdependent lies. Among them were alleged sweeping conspiracies in academia to “hide that tribal peoples are violent,” to ban the use of books published “before, let’s say, 1990,” and to bury the “ethnic breakdown” of Americans. “This is important stuff,” he insisted, “whether or not Wisconsin is German or Missouri is Anglo determines how people live their lives today.”
And another delusion. “The CIA sat on their discoveries of the spirit world for decades,” Lynch lamented. “This always shocked me, given if I discovered a huge spiritual dimension scientifically, I would want to share it with the public.”
Despite his belief that class and intelligence are genetically predetermined by “inherent biological reality,” Lynch, who refers to himself as a “white guy” and “ethnic Briton,” said he wouldn’t trust the creation of “a racial caste system based off race and IQ.” The science could later turn “out to be wrong,” he explained.
In August, Musk, who regularly replies to the YouTuber on X, shared another episode from Lynch, one that promised to expose the “Real History of Black America.” In it, the host rattled off two of Musk’s favorite talking points on slavery, that African slavers procured for Europeans and that the Muslim world operated a slave trade of its own. “On the plus side, African Americans were materially the best off of any slave culture,” Lynch asserted. (While his methodology for ranking the most desirable systems of slavery is unclear, the arrant brutality experienced by enslaved people in North America is a matter of historical record.)
The hour-long episode — which Musk endorsed as “thoughtful” in his post promoting it, which he pinned to the top of his profile on X — includes many of Lynch’s other observations about “Blacks”: That their “antisocial behaviors” have “cultural parallels in Africa;” violence in Black communities is unrelated to poverty and instead an extension of their “genetic differences” and natural disposition; the “similarities” between “rappers” and “African chieftains or dictators;” and the widespread adoption of Black cultural creations as a contemporary play on “how barbarian fashions were popular in the royal court as Rome fell to decadence.”
Lynch concluded with a warning, saying, “America is getting quite resentful of Black America free riding… I know Black Americans want to be men, and the way to be men is to take responsibility.”
“America will have a rape crisis”
In the version of reality contrived by Lynch, the recipients of real oppression are “young white men,” whose victimization is as bad as “the Irish under English colonialism” — the only difference being that “the Irish weren’t allowed to vote or own property, while modern whites can.”
In a 2024 video, Lynch reasoned that the “horrifying inequality” experienced by his cohort can be observed in the lack of reciprocal interest they receive on “dating apps” and the treatment of incels as “if they’re subhuman vermin.” He added that if Tinder “was a country, it would be the second most unequal in the world.” This lack of digital romantic attention will trigger a violent “incel revolution,” Lynch predicted. “Men like violence, and if they’re not incentivized against it, things are going to get really ugly,” he continued. “I have been betting my money for years that America will have a rape crisis at some point in the future… The right would win a civil war. That being said, you’ve suddenly armed a group of sexually frustrated, resentful young men. They’ll probably view women as a leftist enemy, and thus feel no remorse for being brutal.”
This is the matter-of-fact commentary spewed by someone whose media output serves as a favorite educational source for the wealthiest man on Earth. Last year, while bellyaching on X about how “White people as a culture” are treated like “slaves,” Lynch wrote, “Only a slave gets punched in the face and doesn’t fight back.” Musk then replied as if Lynch’s post were a call that commanded a response, repeating his line that “Only a slave does not fight back.” More recently, in February, Musk requested that Lynch publish a project examining “how different cultures communicate or value things.”
This guy sounds like an even bigger wack job than Musk and that’s saying something.
Where do these miserable numpties come from?