And what about fears that this marks the rise of techno-fascism? “I mean, we are funding companies that will operate non-democratic cities,” he says, shrugging. “And if you’re not into that you shouldn’t move there.”

Andrea Stroppa, a confidant of Musk who has connected him with far-right Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, was reported by Italian media to have posted the clip of Musk with the caption: "Roman Empire is back starting from Roman salute".

The Roman salute was widely used in Italy by Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party, before later being adopted by Adolf Hitler in Germany.

Stroppa later deleted his post, Italian media said. He later posted that "that gesture, which some mistook for a Nazi salute, is simply Elon, who has autism, expressing his feelings by saying, 'I want to give my heart to you'".

The seeds of fascism, like the climate emergency, were apparent decades ago. The leading scholars of fascism told us that unless American society halted its slide to ever greater levels of social inequality and returned democratic power to a betrayed populace, fascism would metastasize and consume the state. The ruling class, blinded by greed, a lust for power and willful ignorance, was as deaf to these warnings as they were to those of climate scientists.

Dallas real estate investor Harlan Crow's rare papers and statues are powerful on their own.

“You see all these kids wearing Che T-shirts,” Crow says. “I don’t think they know who he is. He is a killer, a murderer.”

When I emailed Griffin again after the Capitol attack, he hadn’t changed his mind. “Trump is far too pathologically incoherent and intellectually challenged to be a fascist, and suffers from both Attention Deficiency Disorder, lack of self-knowledge, capacity for denial, narcissism and sheer ignorance and lack of either culture or education to a degree that precludes the Machiavellian intelligence and voracious curiosity about and knowledge about contemporary history and politics needed to seize power in the manner of Mussolini and Hitler,” Griffin wrote back.

Stanley Payne, a University of Wisconsin historian of Spain and author of A History of Fascism 1914-1945, agrees that Trump’s lack of coherent revolutionary fervor makes him fall short of fascism. “Never founded a new fascist party, never embraced a coherent new revolutionary ideology, never announced a radical new doctrine but introduced a noninterventionist foreign military policy,” Payne wrote to me in an email. “Not even a poor man’s fascist. Ever an incoherent nationalist-populist with sometimes destructive tendencies.”