Gold nugget discovered Sutter’s Mill, California (1848) | CC0
The Trump-Musk right repeatedly insists on revealing the true state of the world and of digging this true world out from under the distortions of liberal modernity. From Pizzagate to attacks on DEI, there exists a constant insistence on revealing what is hidden, mediated, and obfuscated. But nowhere is the dynamic as evident as in Trump’s recent declaration that “we’re going to go to Fort Knox, the fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there.” Trump has picked up on a long running conspiracy theory, recently promoted by Musk, that the gold in Fort Knox has secretly been stolen or sold off, and insists that he is going to uncover the truth.
This insistence on identifying a Dan Brown–worthy conspiracy as the necessary first step in seeing things as they really are also finds expression in the idea, now prevalent in right-wing men’s rights circles, of becoming “red-pilled”: an allusion to the 1999 film The Matrix, in which the main character is offered a choice between a blue pill that will allow him to forget all he is learned and stay within the fantasy world of the “Matrix” and a red pill, which will reveal to him the true nature of things. The initial use of the term brought together a series of grievances with a sort of pop social Darwinism to try to explain why young men could not get dates, arguing that the behind the liberal mantra of kindness and self-expression lies a real world of social hierarchy where only through refashioning oneself as an “alpha male” could one secure dates and social worth. This term has since explained to include a wider range of areas where there is a promised true world behind the social niceties and formalities of liberal modernity.
This desire is precisely what Anna Kornbluh diagnoses as the style of our contemporary late capitalism, a condition she encapsulates in the word “immediacy”—that is, an urgent drive for direct access to things as they supposedly are. This immediacy reflects an intensification of circulations brought about by digital technologies but culturally is expressed as a desire for ever more instantaneity and exposure. In contrast to theories of political or philosophical awakening in which we come to perceive the ways class, race, and gender structure social reality, a right-wing drive toward immediacy insists that analysis of deeper social structures, especially those that see these categories as contingent and socially constructed, is exactly the kind of thing we need to dispense with. Instead, we are invited to view the supposedly real concrete material world itself, a simple world where the strongest are rewarded with power.
Fort Knox, officially the United States Bullion Depository, was built in 1936 to store gold reserves and currently houses approximately half of the US government’s gold. Rumors have long circulated that all or some of the gold that is supposed to be there may have been secretly used or stolen. While there are regular inspections of the vaults a full audit has not been completed in over 70 years, in part because to determine that all of the gold is there and is in fact still gold, would likely require at least a year and a half, 44,000 person-hours, and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment.
This act of forcing the world to show its true self always implies a certain level of violence and destruction. This is precisely the ideology of DOGE’s supposed cost cutting tactics—to flush out waste by shocking the system to its core. As the new head of the OMB, Russell Vought said, at an event hosted by his think tank, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” In this paradigm, when civil servants get out of the way, Americans will be able to live truthfully, openly (and exclusively) embracing the rightness of gendered domination, racial hierarchy, ethnonationalist conflict, and class exploitation. In such a world, it’s only natural that the gold must be missing because only a sucker or a chump would pass up an opportunity to steal from Fort Knox. And if somebody really hasn’t already raided the loot, maybe the administration will show us how it’s done.
In fort-raiding and red-pilling, we witness is an odd alliance between a party of “traditional values” and Silicon Valley; of the trad wife and Burning Man aficionados; of the prepper storing gold in their bunker and the crypto speculator; of “drill baby drill” and the vanguard of mass electrified transportation. (It is worth noting, on this last point, the intertwined history of the automobile and fascism, including Henry Ford’s avowed antisemitism and support for Hitler; the latter’s personal involvement in the founding of Volkswagen and investment in making cars available to the average German family; and Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” which begins by recounting rolling his car after swerving to avoid two cyclists, and proceeds to aestheticize speed and danger, a project which influenced and ultimately was absorbed into Mussolini’s National Fascist Party.)
While we should be careful not to take the far right and fascism’s ideological commitments too seriously—it should be obvious that in many cases they do not take them seriously themselves and delight in the hypocrisy of their own statements—it is still worthwhile to account for how these seemingly contradictory currents function in concert. That is to ask, what unites the most wildly speculative and futuristic aims of the Trump-Musk right with its simultaneous drive to return to tradition? Perhaps an answer to this question may lie in the fact that both are premised on the notion that some secret machination has obfuscated what is really going on. If only we can get our hands on the gold, the data, the building, we can easily control and manage the chaos of modern existence.
These actions repeat, in a sense, an analogous ideological move to that which Moishe Postone identified as underlying much of Nazi antisemitism; that is, a desire to—in the figure of Jews and others—destroy the abstract layer of modern existence: finance, media, global politics, et cetera, and rescue the real concrete world concealed behind these distortions and misrepresentations. This project did not oppose modernity but dreamed instead of a concrete modernity stripped of its abstract mediating elements and sought ever more violent means of achieving this access to the real. And, while the real for Lacan—which describes that which cannot enter language and the abstract world of the symbolic—means something rather different than the concrete world of production for Postone, here the drive to reveal them functions in concert.
Yet the gold in Fort Knox is not for Trump “real” simply because of its material weight or value but precisely because it is a symbol. The Trump-Musk right seeks to destroy the abstract and the social, everything that resists their mastery and control, not realizing that it is this symbolic social world of mediated exchange that shapes and creates the very reality they desire to control. Gold—malleable, hypoallergenic, lustrous—has worth and weight, and Trump is surely sensitive to exchange value. But what matters more than wealth is the appearance of wealth. There is no path to escape the symbolic, abstract, and mediated forces that shape society. Even for the President, the 24-carat gold that may or not be at Fort Knox is no different from the gilt that adorns the all too gaudy walls of his Manhattan penthouse: It looks real enough.
