Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month. This is not the first time Musk has publicly thrown his support behind the AfD. At the end of last month, he wrote an op-ed in a German newspaper endorsing the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over suspected links to such groups, though others still remain).

Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has waged on U.S. politics. In addition to backing the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, of enabling child sex abuse by failing to address grooming gangs as a previous head of England and Wales’s Crown Prosecution Services, and calling for his ouster. (Starmer has defended his record, noting that he reopened the cases and was the first to prosecute the perpetrators.) Musk posted a poll on Monday asking X users whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Musk has also started posting in support of Tommy Robinson, an Islamaphobic far-right political activist in the U.K. who is currently in prison for repeatedly breaching court orders related to a libel case he lost; Robinson falsely claimed in Facebook videos that a Syrian refugee had “violently attack[ed] young English girls in his school.”

After Nigel Farage, who leads the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party, said that he disagreed with Musk about Robinson, Musk posted: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.” As Musk has waged this pressure campaign, he has incessantly posted in support of the far right in Europe and their current causes célèbres. On Wednesday, he suggested that there were “Sharia Law courts” in the United Kingdom, that “UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes,” and that “Irish citizens get longer sentences than illegal immigrants. That’s messed up.”

Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it’s not clear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will work. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign regulations that curb the role of money in politics. In addition to his online campaign during the U.S. presidential election, he donated more than $250 million to help Trump, in part funding ads that ran in swing states. But in Germany, radio and TV ads can air only within a month of the election. In the U.K., national campaign spending in the 365 days prior to an election is capped at about $40 million per party. The perspective of an avaricious billionaire may not mean the same thing in Europe that it does in the U.S.: A YouGov poll in November showed that just 18 percent of people in the U.K. view Musk favorably, down from 23 percent in 2022, after he initiated his purchase of Twitter. In the U.S., by contrast, more than a third of Americans have a favorable view of Musk.

Some European leaders, perhaps sensing that their constituents share a dim view of Musk, have pushed back. Starmer has accused him of spreading “lies and misformation.” Even officials in European countries who haven’t been targeted are speaking out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently welcomed Musk to the reopening of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, accused him of “supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections.”

But even if Musk falls short of his goals of propelling AfD to power in Germany and ousting Starmer as prime minister, he’ll likely still have made some gains for the European far right. A YouGov poll from earlier this month showed the AfD polling at 21 percent, behind only the mainstream center-right party. The party has gained two points since the beginning of last month, suggesting that Musk’s campaign is at least not stifling the party. Even though the AfD is a formal party with considerable support, it’s still considered taboo in much of Germany. Every other party has agreed not to work with the AfD, effectively ostracizing it. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD “is a problem,” Miro Dittrich, a co-CEO of CeMAS, a Berlin-based nonprofit that tracks the far right, told me. “It’s seen as legitimizing them.” During the conversation with Weidel, Musk tried to sanitize and downplay the Afd’s far-right tendencies and neo-Nazi ties by accusing the media of misportraying the party, and giving Weidel space to do the same: Adolf Hiter “wasn’t a conservative; he wasn’t a libertarian,” she told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy, so full stop, no more comment on that, and we are exactly the opposite.” (Hitler, of course, was an anti-communist, anti-Semitic dictator.)

Musk doesn’t need to make endorsements or post aggressively to exert his influence over Europe. Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Musk gained significant leverage over governments through Starlink, his satellite-internet service. In 2022, Musk reportedly made the decision to not provide Starlink service to Ukraine while it was launching an attack on Russian forces in Crimea, after speaking with the Russian ambassador to the United States. In September, he used the company to partially circumvent a temporary ban on X in Brazil, by refusing to block the website for Starlink customers in the country.

Unless something truly intractable stands between Musk and a goal, he will relentlessly go for it, no matter how trivial or ill-advised it may be, often no matter the cost to those around him. That pattern is probably how Musk’s political ambitions will play out. Unless he gets bored, governments across the world will be forced to at least listen to his whims—especially as European leaders contend with the possibility of retaliation from the president of the United States. Perhaps a fallout between Trump and Musk is coming. Trump has reportedly started complaining about how much Musk is hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, where he pays $2,000 a night to stay at a villa to regularly dine with Trump. Still, even without the president-elect, he has the wealth and connections to exert his will on politics worldwide. Musk is here for as long as he wants to be.

My parents spend half of the year on an island off the coast of North Carolina where many of the residents speak a distinct and alienating dialect of English—the Ocracoke or “Hoi Toider” brogue, which the BBC describes as “a mix of Elizabethan English, Irish and Scottish accents, and pirate slang.” The other half, they spend around their four children, who are in their 20s and early 30s and also speak in a manner that can be perplexing.

One of my sisters, who is a math genius, will interject, “New lore just dropped!” while my mom relays family gossip. My other sister, who has an advanced degree, will refer to minor inconveniences by claiming that she’s about to “unalive” herself. The other, who is in medical school, will express surprise or approval by saying “not” at the front of a sentence—like, “Not mom making an extra batch of molasses cookies for me.” And I’m probably the worst offender, even though I’m the sister whose job is “sentences.” I’ll tell my parents that I’m frustrated with the vacant shelves at their local grocery store by saying, “It’s giving apocalypse,” or that I don’t want to order Chinese food for dinner because I’m more “in a place of pizza.”

This manner of speaking is a symptom (mild, I think) of what many people have started terming “brain rot.” Oxford University Press chose this as its word of the year for 2024 and defined it as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” In general, brain rot can also refer to surrealist content created to entertain people whose attention spans have presumably withered away thanks to time spent scrolling, or to a state of general onlineness that has rewired one’s mind. Writing about the term last month, my colleague John Hendrickson described the tendency of online ephemera to just sort of “seep into our skulls.”  

On the one hand, talking this way is just about fitting in. It’s a trend, like any other in the history of young people using words their parents and other authority figures don’t know. On the other, the ease with which my friends, siblings, and I slide into this mode is a bit unsettling. It’s so simple to start tacking “if you even care” onto the end of sentences for effect and so difficult to stop. When I hear myself tell a co-worker that I’m “not beating the idiot allegations” after making a silly mistake, I worry that something has really gone wrong.

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These turns of phrase have infected my speech even though I deliberately limit my exposure to short-form video. It’s the way my friends talk in our group chats and the way my co-workers talk in Slack. It’s the way that podcast hosts talk in my ear. I know I’m not alone, because people in my life complain about their own brain-rot speech patterns all the time. I’ve also seen strangers do it. “This might just be a me thing, but do you guys ever have those phrases that if you don’t say them, like, your brain doesn’t work?” a young woman asked in a TikTok video I came across recently. Two of her examples were “WHICH COULD MEAN NOTHING!!!” and “(Derogatory),” which are meant to be written in comments or short-form posts, but have slid across the have slid across the barrier between the online and real worlds and are now spoken aloud.

That barrier seems especially porous at the moment, and naturally some hand-wringing has followed. Children have begun deploying such phrases (and related nonsense words), to the vexation of their parents and teachers. The New York Times found health experts who view brain rot as a “a coping mechanism for people who may have other underlying disorders that may lead them to numb themselves with mindless scrolling or overlong gaming sessions”; others have called it “a condition of mental fogginess, lethargy, reduced attention span, and cognitive decline that results from an overabundance of screen time.”

But these concerns are a bit overwrought. Brain rot is an entertaining way to talk—more appealing and adaptable than the manic “TikTok voice” used by would-be professional influencers, which is inappropriate in offline conversation because it makes the speaker sound like a haunted doll. Older internet vernacular involved quoting memes or making references to nerd culture, but brain rot offers strange sentence constructions and rhetorical tics with a broad range of possible applications. These are easy ways to spruce up otherwise bland statements. For instance, I recently saw a post that read, “No because what do you mean it’s Christmas Eve and not just another random Tuesday.” The explanation for these turns of phrase has to be, at least partly, that the enormous audience of the internet puts some pressure on us to be entertaining at all times. “He’s so me for this” just sounds better than “This is something I would do!” and “We’re so back” has more impact than “Cool!” or “Yay!”

A lot of these linguistic quirks originated in written text from various online fandoms. Stans tend to type out phrases like “no because what do you mean” when experiencing intense emotion or surprise (which happens a lot). This is why a sudden litany of “no because what do you mean” posts was actually how I learned that Liam Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, had died unexpectedly last October. (“No because what do you mean liam payne died …”) Fans also abbreviate phrases a lot because they’re usually speaking in some kind of shorthand to other people for whom it will be legible. This leads to randomly truncated thoughts: Instead of writing, “I love the way she sings,” one might simply write, “The way she sings” (or whatever it is she does).

To help my thinking about how brain-rot language has evolved into its current state, I returned to the internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s 2019 book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. The book was published before TikTok’s ascendancy and the total dominance of short-form video, and it dealt almost exclusively with written internet speech—a huge corpus, which McCulloch described as a historically anomalous collection of “informal writing” by regular people. We were living in a “revolutionary period in linguistic history,” she argued, in part because of how much writing we were producing and how much better we get at expressing ourselves the more we try. In other words, posting is a skill. However low your opinion of the social internet is, it would be hard to deny that what is considered funny on social media now is incredibly sophisticated compared with what was considered funny 15 years ago (pictures of cats saying “I CAN HAZ CHEESEBURGER?”).

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McCulloch also wrote a linguistic analysis of doge memes for the now-defunct blog The Toast in 2014, in which she explained the en vogue internet grammar of that day as the awkward tacking on of common modifiers in places they didn’t belong. These were often two-word phrases, she wrote, giving the examples of “much feels” and “very art.” She thought the roots of this manner of speaking were both online and off—a combination of the “stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence” that was (and is) popular on social media and the baby talk that people use with their pets. Some people at the time feared that this incredibly irritating way of speaking would stick around. It mostly hasn’t, though you can clearly see its influence in the way that internet language innovators strip sentences down to make new oddities today.

The truth is that brain-rot phrases are a conversational crutch. They signal that you are in the know; when you say them out loud, you can give them a tinge of irony and make clear that you are aware it’s kind of silly. The tone is internet-y because it is weird but also because it’s glib and a bit removed. There’s plausible deniability in every phrase, which makes sense because being sincere online is often how you ended up getting humiliated—dunked on for being wrong, “canceled” after being interpreted in bad faith. The most humiliating thing you can do is, of course, say something boring, and saying something in a nonsensical way for no reason helps avoid that, too.

Today, a going theory about the cause of brain-rot language—as implied by its name—is that people have gotten stupider. But I don’t think this is true. The people I know who talk this way are sometimes frustrated with themselves for saying “Let him cook” too much, but they’re not dumb—they’re amusing, perceptive, have a broad range of reference, and think critically about the things they’re talking about in such a doofy way. They are also, like me, being a bit lazy and noncommittal when speaking casually. There are worse things to be.