Missing from this analysis is acknowledgement of the outright hostility shown Elon by the Dems and current administration: having an EV "summit" and not inviting the pioneering biggest EV producer (Tesla), claiming that SpaceX was not eligible for an $800 mm rural coms contract when it was the only viable competitor, throwing all kinds of regulatory BS at SpaceX (would a rocket fall on a shark?). Trying to force X to heel with many varieties of economic pressure etc etc. For Trump this is not just about opportunities in a Trump admin, it's literally about a threat to survival under a Harris admin.
The Tesla company has been relatively conservative about the self-driving capabilities of its cars. Broadly stated, self-driving has a lower fatality rate than having humans do the driving. Data to date, shows that self-driving net saves lives. It turns out that the delta is not small.
"Since the summer he has explicitly—and repeatedly—endorsed the idea that the Democrats are engaged in a wide-ranging plan to actively import millions of immigrants into the United States for their own electoral benefit...."
Biden revoked executive orders limiting illegal immigration on his very first day in office, spurring an unprecedented flow of illegals, with massive caravans launched that very day. Then, he used CBP to expedite the flow of illegals rather than stem it, putting call buttons at the border so that illegals could call CPB and be ushered into the country.
Nobody even knows who they are or how many have crossed: 10 Million? 20 Million? We do know they're mostly young men.
We also know that the Biden administration could have stemmed the flow at any time, because they finally did it when it became a political liability before this election.
This was such a massive betrayal of our country, that it virtually defies explanation -- or it requires a really wild explanation (i.e. "conspiracy theory"). I'd say the administration and its enablers were either spectacularly stupid or malevolently self-seeking. Those are the only possibilities. Neither is a conspiracy theory.
Yes, Biden reversed the Trump travel ban and attempted (and failed) to offer a path to citizenship for the 12 million or so undocumented noncitizens in the U.S. with the U.S. Citizenship Act (which didn't pass) and made various other reforms. But none of this constitutes "importing millions of immigrants." That's just absurd wording. And that 12 million figure is the most authoritative estimate of the total number of undocumented noncitizens currently in the U.S. (equal to the number at the end of the Bush administration) so it's also not true to say that 10 or 20 million illegals have somehow crossed the border in the last four years alone. Also, I'm assuming your reference to "call buttons at the border" means the CBP One app that allows migrants to make appointments with border control. Lots of organizations complain that the app has done nothing but make it *harder* to get an appointment, let alone to enter the country.
More importantly, there is just no proof of any conspiracy run by Democrats or the government to first get tens of million illegals into the country, then to somehow authorize them all to vote (even lawful permanent residence doesn't give you the right to vote) and then to somehow use their hypothetical electoral support to ban future elections or turn the U.S. into a one-party state. It simply has zero basis in fact. So yes, I think it amounts to a conspiracy theory.
All of this is made more absurd by the fact that there are obviously real debates to be had about immigration policy – including the merits of Trump's Remain in Mexico policy or Biden's recent tightening of asylum limits. Because yes the number of illegal crossings has skyrocketed under Biden at least in part due to the fact that his administration was clearly more migrant friendly than Trump's (but also due to other factors including the end of the pandemic). But Musk and people who support his framing of the immigration situation just don't seem to want to have that debate and instead they both exaggerate the facts and attribute immigration flows to an all-powerful conspiracy.
That's just LAND encounters and that's just the ones that the CPB actually recorded. Most reasonable folks would concur that another 20-50% undectected entries is entirely plausible.
Hi Jens: an encounter is just an encounter, it doesn't mean the person actually crossed the border. And the same person can (and often does) have multiple encounters with border patrol. The definition of an encounter is
"CBP encounter: Any encounter of a removable noncitizen by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field Operations (OFO) or U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), including the arrest of a removable noncitizen by USBP under Title 8 authority, a determination of inadmissibility for a person requesting admission at a port of entry (land, sea, or air) under Title 8 authority, or an expulsion from the United States to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 disease pursuant to Title 42 authority."
So, these figures include all the people who were arrested, turned away, who didn't even attempt to cross, and who had their applications denied - and many of them are duplicates from individuals who had multiple encounters. It is not the same as a successful crossing.
So there might have been some repeats and there are certainly a whole lot more that never got detected at all -- or came by sea. So we're still left with a really big number.
However you define or measure "encounters," we do know that they increased by 300% under the Biden-Harris administration (and that's not even counting the full year for 2024). Why would they do something that disruptive and destructive to our country? Hard to think of a reasonable reason. So we're left with unreasonable reasons (conspiracy theories).
That "authoritative" government figure number has seemed impossible for a long time. How could border crossing continue at their current pace with the number of illegal immigrants not increasing in almost 16 years? That extraordinary claim should require extraordinary proof. A study at Yale/MIT found the number to be at least twice that, and that was in 2018 before the recent influx. I don't think 30 million is an unrealistic figure.
Regarding the anti-immigration riots in England, I don't think the "misinformation" was all that off the mark - the kid has been charged with manufacturing ricin in addition to the stabbing, and had either ISIS or Al Qaeda literature explaining how to use chemical weapons.
To be clear I don't disagree with the general thrust of the article (it's bad to embrace conspiracy theories) but an awful lot of what is portrayed as a conspiracy theory these days ends up being confirmed as fact within six to twelve months.
Of course Rudakubana was a terrorist, that comes definitionally from the atrocity he committed. The original fake story that sparked the riots claimed that the attack was committed by a Muslim asylum seeker called Ali al-Shakati who was known to the UK security services. The only part of that which *might* be true, based on the newest evidence, is that he was a Muslim - but we don't even know that yet. Of course, it may well also be revealed that he was previously known to the security services. But again, nothing to suggest that yet. But it doesn't matter at all - if you make x false claim based on zero knowledge (i.e. you make it up from nothing, out of thin air), and then some limited portions of x claim turn out to be correct, it doesn't erase the fact that the claim was produced out of thin air. You can't just guess at the truth and hope to be correct. You have to wait for evidence - and making a claim based on zero evidence is the definition of misinformation.
I'd need to go back and read the contemporary statements, but IIRC the initial reaction was to say that he was "English" and try to muddy the details.
I'm not going to make any excuses for the jerk that made up a specific lie about the nonexistent Ali al-Shakti, that's inexcusable. But I think the conspiracy theorizing is part and parcel of the official response to these events - e.g. hiding the gender identity/motivation of Audrey Hale, trying as hard as possible to obfuscate about whether the stabber in this case was "British" or not, etc.
People don't trust authorities and news media to tell them the actual truth, so they apply heuristics that gel with their perception of reality - mass stabbings in Europe tend to come from radical Islamists, not schoolboys named Aelfric Angle (my attempt to come up with the most English name possible), but the suggestion that the stabbing may have been the result of "foreign" people and ideologies was treated like pure Nazism. Now we know that heuristic gave a better evaluation of reality than the official story until yesterday when they charged him.
The complication I'm trying to describe here is that in an environment with unreliable official information, some amount of "theorizing" is necessary to try to figure out what is actually happening. Where I think you're totally right, and where I think "open-minded" people go wrong, is that there's a big difference between suspecting something and believing something. I don't talk about my suspicions very much, and I think that's a good rule.
I read your article. You are only talking about one of the genius’s of our time. How can he be so right about Tesla, space x, solar, starlink, X etc etc.. and wrong and conspiratorial regarding Trump?
You can bash Trump but not Musk. You should be grateful he’s alive in our lifetime.
I love the fact that we're closer than ever to getting to Mars. It doesn't mean I automatically have to show deference to the man who could make it happen when he posts stuff that is simply untrue
Also re: the memes and "doctored headlines" - I agree that Musk shouldn't share fake stuff, but I'm not sure if you saw the MSNBC coverage of the recent rally at MSG, but they did do the "Trump is literally Hitler" thing pretty extensively.
It seems like he's sort of drawing out what these media outlets really think. I'm trying to find it now but there was a major outlet that ran a headline along the lines of "Trump cancels event for dinner with the worst person in the world [Musk]". And I can understand how he's willing to play a bit fast and loose with accuracy when he is under such immense pressure from so many agencies and activists.
To expand a bit on my last sentence, it would be nice if humans reacted to being attacked by saying "now I must behave with epistemological perfection and only make the most completely true statements possible," but that is not how we're wired.
Yeah... all those conspiracy theories... that Trump-Russia collusion was a hoax, that Hunter's laptop was real and not Russian disinformation, that covid was not any more dangerous than the seasonal flu for healthy people 55 and under, that the virus likely originated from a Wuhan lab, that the US government paid for gain of function research, that the untested mRNA drugs were not really covid vaccines and they had other health risks, that Joe Biden was unfit for office.
Basically every one of these claimed conspiracies have proven to be true. Your odds of being right are higher than believing what is claimed by the corporate media and Democrats as a conspiracy.
The far-left (cultural, not economic) has taken over the Democratic party and the media, driving Bezos and Musk out. Musk actually has a funny and correct tweet about this. Quote
"True, the Democratic Party has moved so far left that the Republican Party is now closest to the center"
And Musk retweeted a cartoon show how 'woke' progressives have take over the Democratic part. This is not just his opinion. See the actual data provided by Pew Research "Political Polarization in the American Public"
I recently read the book Animal Farm. It is a political allegory for Stalinism, but Orwell was an excellent observer of human behavior - particularly when it comes to the ruling class. In the book there is a communist revolution in which the animals take over a farm, but the pigs quickly become the new ruling class. They eventually become corrupt and begin to rule through propaganda and egalitarian lies meant to deceive the rest of the animals but enrich themselves, eventually ending with famous saying, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
The United States did not have a communist revolution, but we did have several smaller revolutions regarding humans rights (abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights movement, end of immigration restrictions) which radically changed the makeup and values of the ruling class. Over the last few decades, this ruling class has been championing more and more human rights causes (gay marriage, racial justice, trans rights) at the same time as the quality of life for many citizens has been in rapid decline, drug overdoses have reached insane levels, and mass immigration has radically altered their communities.
For many people, they have started to believe that the current situation is like Animal Farm - where the ruling class hates them and is deceiving them with propaganda and a self-serving human rights agenda that completely ignores the issues they are facing, and often mocks them and the accomplishment of their ancestors. Musk is one the rare people in the ruling class who switched sides - he is a class traitor.
The points made in this article are not all wrong, but it requires a certain lack of distance and perspective to think that in 20 years from now this era will be viewed primarily in terms of "online right wing culture". To say the least. Surely this phenomenon (right wing online culture) will be considered and put into proper historical perspective, but not as the author seems to be suggesting. In modern western history the far left has routinely, over and over, played the role of dividing the liberals while galvanizing the right, each time with predictable and ghastly consequences--including the murderous right wing populist uprisings. This is exactly the same old pattern that emerged online over ten years ago and it has spilled over into all our most important institutions. I get that we had FOX news to contend with, but I don't remember any sudden explosion of right wing commentators online in 2012 when smart phones and social media hit the scene. As a classic liberal--who is often accused and derided by leftists as being right wing-- I have never been a fan of Trump but I also have not become hysterical over his rise. The reason is that his existence is our own fault. It would be intellectually and morally inappropriate for me to catastrophize a phenomenon that I myself personally contributed to. Let's face it, in the Clinton years we threw labor to the wolves and rushed off to represent big tech and other emerging business interests. This is not a controversial point. Think about it--labor(!)--that's a lot of folks, and not all of them were white and/or right wing. It was blazingly clear that joining the traditional republican party was not an option for labor because that party had traditionally represented capital and had been openly hostile to labor in the old two-party order. In the post Clinton years elections morphed into a process of voting against hated candidates as opposed to voting for loved politicians, and it has long been obvious that a populist would inevitably emerge as a magnet for long suffering labor and other savagely disenfranchised Americans. Those of you that are completely confused about the preferences of black men in this election should stop and think about this point: it is well documented that black men and their communities were hit first and hardest as manufacturing jobs declined even well before the Clinton years. And not all of this was due to racism--in fact it is well documented that much if not most of it occurred because this group was less well established (certainly because of past racism) and was therefore the most vulnerable and the first to suffer. All it took for a populist to emerge was for white laborers, and others as well, to suffer the same economic fate as had already been inflicted on so many black men and women. It certainly did not help that post-Clinton we assuaged our guilty conscious by constantly lecturing, mocking, satirizing, belittling and gaslighting the very groups that we had abandoned. Deep down we knew that we had prioritized our short term self interest at the expense of long term societal and economic balance and health. Our collective shame and guilt was real and we handled it with good old fashioned denial. I think that's why we got refocused on racial politics with the emergence of identity politics and unhelpful explosion of victim-victimizer narratives --this was the easiest way to justify pointing the finger at the new underclass we had created. If we liberals and democrats can take ownership of the role we played in this terrible cycle perhaps we can stop with all the hysterical accusations and contemplate the possibility that we are actually quite lucky we ended up with Trump as opposed to someone far, far more dangerous as we so easily could have. It's sometimes hard to swallow but I actually do feel lucky that the second major populist (behind the original populist Obama Version 2.0) comes from New York City and embraces jews and people of all races and creeds. The same argument applies to people like Musk and Thiel who, granted, can get a little nutty but who are plainly and obviously no more or less evil that the Soros's and Gate's of the world. I am sure I am not the only reader here who remembers back when we used to refer to out of touch billionaires as "eccentric". If we keep just gaslighting conservatives and denying our own culpability we are going to remain confused and we will continue to enact terrible policies while fielding terrible candidates, and we will ultimately get just exactly what we deserve while the whole world suffers for it. Let's all stop lecturing (or screaming at) our enemies to turn down their temperature and let's dial down our own body temperature. Before it is well and truly too late. If we keep accusing Trump of literally being a Nazi we will eventually get a one, but probably only after the left has completely dominated and censored out conservatism. Please exercise caution when undermining, censoring or cancelling conservative voices and viewpoints.
One factor missing from the analysis: Musk is self-described as being on the spectrum/Asperger syndrome. That goes along with notorious gullibility. They don't get jokes, humor, or satire. They tend to take things literally. So if a conspiracy lines up with his preferred narrative, he'll run with it.
Well, since our First Amendment jurisprudence and the Yale Law-educated poindexters who own it consider lies made in service of political campaigns and politicians constitutionally protected speech, the only thing mere voter-taxpayers can do is march over to ye olde Marketplace of Ideas and flood the zone with truth. That'll fix that insane South African goblin.
Missing from this analysis is acknowledgement of the outright hostility shown Elon by the Dems and current administration: having an EV "summit" and not inviting the pioneering biggest EV producer (Tesla), claiming that SpaceX was not eligible for an $800 mm rural coms contract when it was the only viable competitor, throwing all kinds of regulatory BS at SpaceX (would a rocket fall on a shark?). Trying to force X to heel with many varieties of economic pressure etc etc. For Trump this is not just about opportunities in a Trump admin, it's literally about a threat to survival under a Harris admin.
Libertarian ideology won't do much to save the dead who believed Tesla's lies about self-driving cars and paid for it with their lives.
The Tesla company has been relatively conservative about the self-driving capabilities of its cars. Broadly stated, self-driving has a lower fatality rate than having humans do the driving. Data to date, shows that self-driving net saves lives. It turns out that the delta is not small.
Are you claiming that this is the reason why the Biden administration is giving the cold shoulder to Tesla?
Great point
"Since the summer he has explicitly—and repeatedly—endorsed the idea that the Democrats are engaged in a wide-ranging plan to actively import millions of immigrants into the United States for their own electoral benefit...."
Biden revoked executive orders limiting illegal immigration on his very first day in office, spurring an unprecedented flow of illegals, with massive caravans launched that very day. Then, he used CBP to expedite the flow of illegals rather than stem it, putting call buttons at the border so that illegals could call CPB and be ushered into the country.
Nobody even knows who they are or how many have crossed: 10 Million? 20 Million? We do know they're mostly young men.
We also know that the Biden administration could have stemmed the flow at any time, because they finally did it when it became a political liability before this election.
This was such a massive betrayal of our country, that it virtually defies explanation -- or it requires a really wild explanation (i.e. "conspiracy theory"). I'd say the administration and its enablers were either spectacularly stupid or malevolently self-seeking. Those are the only possibilities. Neither is a conspiracy theory.
Yes, Biden reversed the Trump travel ban and attempted (and failed) to offer a path to citizenship for the 12 million or so undocumented noncitizens in the U.S. with the U.S. Citizenship Act (which didn't pass) and made various other reforms. But none of this constitutes "importing millions of immigrants." That's just absurd wording. And that 12 million figure is the most authoritative estimate of the total number of undocumented noncitizens currently in the U.S. (equal to the number at the end of the Bush administration) so it's also not true to say that 10 or 20 million illegals have somehow crossed the border in the last four years alone. Also, I'm assuming your reference to "call buttons at the border" means the CBP One app that allows migrants to make appointments with border control. Lots of organizations complain that the app has done nothing but make it *harder* to get an appointment, let alone to enter the country.
More importantly, there is just no proof of any conspiracy run by Democrats or the government to first get tens of million illegals into the country, then to somehow authorize them all to vote (even lawful permanent residence doesn't give you the right to vote) and then to somehow use their hypothetical electoral support to ban future elections or turn the U.S. into a one-party state. It simply has zero basis in fact. So yes, I think it amounts to a conspiracy theory.
All of this is made more absurd by the fact that there are obviously real debates to be had about immigration policy – including the merits of Trump's Remain in Mexico policy or Biden's recent tightening of asylum limits. Because yes the number of illegal crossings has skyrocketed under Biden at least in part due to the fact that his administration was clearly more migrant friendly than Trump's (but also due to other factors including the end of the pandemic). But Musk and people who support his framing of the immigration situation just don't seem to want to have that debate and instead they both exaggerate the facts and attribute immigration flows to an all-powerful conspiracy.
Sorry Luke, but actual data disagree with you
Land border encounters
2021 1,734,686
2022 2,378,944
2023 2,766,582
2024 2,060,000
Total: 8,940,212
(https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters-fy22)
That's just LAND encounters and that's just the ones that the CPB actually recorded. Most reasonable folks would concur that another 20-50% undectected entries is entirely plausible.
Hi Jens: an encounter is just an encounter, it doesn't mean the person actually crossed the border. And the same person can (and often does) have multiple encounters with border patrol. The definition of an encounter is
"CBP encounter: Any encounter of a removable noncitizen by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field Operations (OFO) or U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), including the arrest of a removable noncitizen by USBP under Title 8 authority, a determination of inadmissibility for a person requesting admission at a port of entry (land, sea, or air) under Title 8 authority, or an expulsion from the United States to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 disease pursuant to Title 42 authority."
Source: https://ohss.dhs.gov/glossary#:~:text=CBP%20encounter%3A%20Any%20encounter%20of,admission%20at%20a%20port%20of
So, these figures include all the people who were arrested, turned away, who didn't even attempt to cross, and who had their applications denied - and many of them are duplicates from individuals who had multiple encounters. It is not the same as a successful crossing.
So there might have been some repeats and there are certainly a whole lot more that never got detected at all -- or came by sea. So we're still left with a really big number.
However you define or measure "encounters," we do know that they increased by 300% under the Biden-Harris administration (and that's not even counting the full year for 2024). Why would they do something that disruptive and destructive to our country? Hard to think of a reasonable reason. So we're left with unreasonable reasons (conspiracy theories).
"12 million or so undocumented noncitizens"
That "authoritative" government figure number has seemed impossible for a long time. How could border crossing continue at their current pace with the number of illegal immigrants not increasing in almost 16 years? That extraordinary claim should require extraordinary proof. A study at Yale/MIT found the number to be at least twice that, and that was in 2018 before the recent influx. I don't think 30 million is an unrealistic figure.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201193
Don't forget that they're eating DAWGS in Ohio.
Non sequitur much?
Regarding the anti-immigration riots in England, I don't think the "misinformation" was all that off the mark - the kid has been charged with manufacturing ricin in addition to the stabbing, and had either ISIS or Al Qaeda literature explaining how to use chemical weapons.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/articles/c05zpdq0lzgo.amp
To be clear I don't disagree with the general thrust of the article (it's bad to embrace conspiracy theories) but an awful lot of what is portrayed as a conspiracy theory these days ends up being confirmed as fact within six to twelve months.
Of course Rudakubana was a terrorist, that comes definitionally from the atrocity he committed. The original fake story that sparked the riots claimed that the attack was committed by a Muslim asylum seeker called Ali al-Shakati who was known to the UK security services. The only part of that which *might* be true, based on the newest evidence, is that he was a Muslim - but we don't even know that yet. Of course, it may well also be revealed that he was previously known to the security services. But again, nothing to suggest that yet. But it doesn't matter at all - if you make x false claim based on zero knowledge (i.e. you make it up from nothing, out of thin air), and then some limited portions of x claim turn out to be correct, it doesn't erase the fact that the claim was produced out of thin air. You can't just guess at the truth and hope to be correct. You have to wait for evidence - and making a claim based on zero evidence is the definition of misinformation.
I'd need to go back and read the contemporary statements, but IIRC the initial reaction was to say that he was "English" and try to muddy the details.
I'm not going to make any excuses for the jerk that made up a specific lie about the nonexistent Ali al-Shakti, that's inexcusable. But I think the conspiracy theorizing is part and parcel of the official response to these events - e.g. hiding the gender identity/motivation of Audrey Hale, trying as hard as possible to obfuscate about whether the stabber in this case was "British" or not, etc.
People don't trust authorities and news media to tell them the actual truth, so they apply heuristics that gel with their perception of reality - mass stabbings in Europe tend to come from radical Islamists, not schoolboys named Aelfric Angle (my attempt to come up with the most English name possible), but the suggestion that the stabbing may have been the result of "foreign" people and ideologies was treated like pure Nazism. Now we know that heuristic gave a better evaluation of reality than the official story until yesterday when they charged him.
The complication I'm trying to describe here is that in an environment with unreliable official information, some amount of "theorizing" is necessary to try to figure out what is actually happening. Where I think you're totally right, and where I think "open-minded" people go wrong, is that there's a big difference between suspecting something and believing something. I don't talk about my suspicions very much, and I think that's a good rule.
I read your article. You are only talking about one of the genius’s of our time. How can he be so right about Tesla, space x, solar, starlink, X etc etc.. and wrong and conspiratorial regarding Trump?
You can bash Trump but not Musk. You should be grateful he’s alive in our lifetime.
I love the fact that we're closer than ever to getting to Mars. It doesn't mean I automatically have to show deference to the man who could make it happen when he posts stuff that is simply untrue
Also re: the memes and "doctored headlines" - I agree that Musk shouldn't share fake stuff, but I'm not sure if you saw the MSNBC coverage of the recent rally at MSG, but they did do the "Trump is literally Hitler" thing pretty extensively.
It seems like he's sort of drawing out what these media outlets really think. I'm trying to find it now but there was a major outlet that ran a headline along the lines of "Trump cancels event for dinner with the worst person in the world [Musk]". And I can understand how he's willing to play a bit fast and loose with accuracy when he is under such immense pressure from so many agencies and activists.
To expand a bit on my last sentence, it would be nice if humans reacted to being attacked by saying "now I must behave with epistemological perfection and only make the most completely true statements possible," but that is not how we're wired.
Yeah... all those conspiracy theories... that Trump-Russia collusion was a hoax, that Hunter's laptop was real and not Russian disinformation, that covid was not any more dangerous than the seasonal flu for healthy people 55 and under, that the virus likely originated from a Wuhan lab, that the US government paid for gain of function research, that the untested mRNA drugs were not really covid vaccines and they had other health risks, that Joe Biden was unfit for office.
Basically every one of these claimed conspiracies have proven to be true. Your odds of being right are higher than believing what is claimed by the corporate media and Democrats as a conspiracy.
The far-left (cultural, not economic) has taken over the Democratic party and the media, driving Bezos and Musk out. Musk actually has a funny and correct tweet about this. Quote
"True, the Democratic Party has moved so far left that the Republican Party is now closest to the center"
And Musk retweeted a cartoon show how 'woke' progressives have take over the Democratic part. This is not just his opinion. See the actual data provided by Pew Research "Political Polarization in the American Public"
I recently read the book Animal Farm. It is a political allegory for Stalinism, but Orwell was an excellent observer of human behavior - particularly when it comes to the ruling class. In the book there is a communist revolution in which the animals take over a farm, but the pigs quickly become the new ruling class. They eventually become corrupt and begin to rule through propaganda and egalitarian lies meant to deceive the rest of the animals but enrich themselves, eventually ending with famous saying, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
The United States did not have a communist revolution, but we did have several smaller revolutions regarding humans rights (abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights movement, end of immigration restrictions) which radically changed the makeup and values of the ruling class. Over the last few decades, this ruling class has been championing more and more human rights causes (gay marriage, racial justice, trans rights) at the same time as the quality of life for many citizens has been in rapid decline, drug overdoses have reached insane levels, and mass immigration has radically altered their communities.
For many people, they have started to believe that the current situation is like Animal Farm - where the ruling class hates them and is deceiving them with propaganda and a self-serving human rights agenda that completely ignores the issues they are facing, and often mocks them and the accomplishment of their ancestors. Musk is one the rare people in the ruling class who switched sides - he is a class traitor.
The points made in this article are not all wrong, but it requires a certain lack of distance and perspective to think that in 20 years from now this era will be viewed primarily in terms of "online right wing culture". To say the least. Surely this phenomenon (right wing online culture) will be considered and put into proper historical perspective, but not as the author seems to be suggesting. In modern western history the far left has routinely, over and over, played the role of dividing the liberals while galvanizing the right, each time with predictable and ghastly consequences--including the murderous right wing populist uprisings. This is exactly the same old pattern that emerged online over ten years ago and it has spilled over into all our most important institutions. I get that we had FOX news to contend with, but I don't remember any sudden explosion of right wing commentators online in 2012 when smart phones and social media hit the scene. As a classic liberal--who is often accused and derided by leftists as being right wing-- I have never been a fan of Trump but I also have not become hysterical over his rise. The reason is that his existence is our own fault. It would be intellectually and morally inappropriate for me to catastrophize a phenomenon that I myself personally contributed to. Let's face it, in the Clinton years we threw labor to the wolves and rushed off to represent big tech and other emerging business interests. This is not a controversial point. Think about it--labor(!)--that's a lot of folks, and not all of them were white and/or right wing. It was blazingly clear that joining the traditional republican party was not an option for labor because that party had traditionally represented capital and had been openly hostile to labor in the old two-party order. In the post Clinton years elections morphed into a process of voting against hated candidates as opposed to voting for loved politicians, and it has long been obvious that a populist would inevitably emerge as a magnet for long suffering labor and other savagely disenfranchised Americans. Those of you that are completely confused about the preferences of black men in this election should stop and think about this point: it is well documented that black men and their communities were hit first and hardest as manufacturing jobs declined even well before the Clinton years. And not all of this was due to racism--in fact it is well documented that much if not most of it occurred because this group was less well established (certainly because of past racism) and was therefore the most vulnerable and the first to suffer. All it took for a populist to emerge was for white laborers, and others as well, to suffer the same economic fate as had already been inflicted on so many black men and women. It certainly did not help that post-Clinton we assuaged our guilty conscious by constantly lecturing, mocking, satirizing, belittling and gaslighting the very groups that we had abandoned. Deep down we knew that we had prioritized our short term self interest at the expense of long term societal and economic balance and health. Our collective shame and guilt was real and we handled it with good old fashioned denial. I think that's why we got refocused on racial politics with the emergence of identity politics and unhelpful explosion of victim-victimizer narratives --this was the easiest way to justify pointing the finger at the new underclass we had created. If we liberals and democrats can take ownership of the role we played in this terrible cycle perhaps we can stop with all the hysterical accusations and contemplate the possibility that we are actually quite lucky we ended up with Trump as opposed to someone far, far more dangerous as we so easily could have. It's sometimes hard to swallow but I actually do feel lucky that the second major populist (behind the original populist Obama Version 2.0) comes from New York City and embraces jews and people of all races and creeds. The same argument applies to people like Musk and Thiel who, granted, can get a little nutty but who are plainly and obviously no more or less evil that the Soros's and Gate's of the world. I am sure I am not the only reader here who remembers back when we used to refer to out of touch billionaires as "eccentric". If we keep just gaslighting conservatives and denying our own culpability we are going to remain confused and we will continue to enact terrible policies while fielding terrible candidates, and we will ultimately get just exactly what we deserve while the whole world suffers for it. Let's all stop lecturing (or screaming at) our enemies to turn down their temperature and let's dial down our own body temperature. Before it is well and truly too late. If we keep accusing Trump of literally being a Nazi we will eventually get a one, but probably only after the left has completely dominated and censored out conservatism. Please exercise caution when undermining, censoring or cancelling conservative voices and viewpoints.
Kneeling Nancy is reality?
One factor missing from the analysis: Musk is self-described as being on the spectrum/Asperger syndrome. That goes along with notorious gullibility. They don't get jokes, humor, or satire. They tend to take things literally. So if a conspiracy lines up with his preferred narrative, he'll run with it.
Luke, I think you have a future writing for the Washington Post.
Well, since our First Amendment jurisprudence and the Yale Law-educated poindexters who own it consider lies made in service of political campaigns and politicians constitutionally protected speech, the only thing mere voter-taxpayers can do is march over to ye olde Marketplace of Ideas and flood the zone with truth. That'll fix that insane South African goblin.
Don’t forget Poe’s Law works in reverse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/democrats-insanity-defense