NYT “Censors” Elon Musk’s Jokes about Assassinating the Vice President and His “Censorship” of JD Vance Dossier
As journalists who focus on social media-enabled disinformation grow overwhelmed by the extent to which broad swathes of Americans have become detached from reality…
The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”
As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.
… NYT decided to do a puff piece on Elon Musk’s support for Trump.
Done as anything else than a corruption (which the piece largely ignores) or GOTV story, such a piece is in exceedingly bad taste.
All the more so given the way the NYT buries some of the most scandalous parts of the story.
In paragraph 23, for example, NYT cites two sources confirming that the Trump campaign intervened to get Xitter to take down links to the JD Vance dossier that Ken Klippenstein posted; it neither explains what was in the dossier nor names Klippenstein (indeed, aside from a photo caption, the article as a whole ignores JD Vance’s role in the Musk-Trump bromance).
The relationship has proved significant in other ways. After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.
Donald Trump and top Republicans have spent years complaining that Twitter throttled, for two days, a NY Post story on the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s personal data that Trump’s personal attorney was disseminating. Elon Musk allowed propagandists to sort through Xitter’s internal discussions, and when Matty Taibbi misrepresented a reference to the takedown of dick pics, some of which Guo Wengui had altered, Musk outraged, “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?”
Congress has held hearings! Trump still whines about the throttling of the NY Post story in his campaign rallies. That’s the excuse he uses for dodging the 60 Minutes interview.
This has been a central theme of right wing grievance for years. The Hunter Biden “laptop” is the founding myth in a far right reconceptualization of “free speech.” And when NYT catches Trump and Musk doing what they complain about, NYT buried that in paragraph 23.
More dangerous still is the way NYT misrepresents Elon Musk’s dangerous disinformation.
In the very last section of the 2,200 word story, starting around paragraph 33, NYT purports to describe Musk’s “misinformation,” suggesting he’s dumb, not deliberate.
If America PAC is the most ambitious and costly manifestation of Mr. Musk’s support for Mr. Trump, nowhere has his cheerleading been more evident than on X.
Since publicly endorsing the former president in July, he has posted at least 109 times about Mr. Trump and the election. And while he has said in the past that the platform should be “politically neutral,” he has used it to advance election misinformation and the baseless claim that Democrats are engaging in “deliberate voter importation” and “fast-tracking” immigrants to citizenship to gain control over the electorate.
One post with that claim this month has garnered nearly 34 million views, according to X’s own metrics, underscoring the scale of attention that Mr. Musk, owner of the platform’s most followed account, can command.
“Unless Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulations (that have nothing to do with safety!), humanity will never reach Mars,” Mr. Musk wrote this month in a post that has gained nearly 18 million views. “This is existential.”
Online, Mr. Musk has painted a dark picture of what would happen if Mr. Trump lost, a circumstance that could hurt Mr. Musk personally. In an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he acknowledged “trashing Kamala nonstop” and being all in for Mr. Trump.
If Mr. Trump loses, he joked, “how long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”
This passage ignores Musk’s most important disinformation — things like his misrepresentation of hurricane response and his magnification of the most dehumanizing propaganda about migrants (including Haitians in Springfield, OH). NYT stupidly parroted Trump’s claim that they would replace normal turnout by sowing disinformation about this stuff, yet now they soft pedal how Musk is doing things that might get people killed.
Crazier still, NYT chooses not to mention Musk’s personal role in stoking far right anti-migrant violence in the UK, including his Tweet asserting that Civil War is inevitable. (NYT also doesn’t mention Musk’s attempt — with a legal fight all the way to the Supreme Court — to thwart Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump and his intransigence in the face of Brazilian legal requests as part of its response to a coup attempt.)
Musk has become a transnational vector for far right political violence.
NYT doesn’t mention that.
And finally, most insane of all, NYT doesn’t mention that Elon Musk has, more than once, joked about assassination and Kamala Harris.
After the Secret Service reached out to him the first time, Musk repeated the claim in the last week, joking with Tucker Carlson.
NYT calls this — repeated “jokes” about assassinating Kamala Harris — “insult[ing the Democratic Party’s] candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Elon Musk isn’t helping Trump get elected, NYT’s excuse for posting this puff piece. He’s helping Trump stoke fascism.
And rather than explaining the risk, NYT simply buries it.
I would have used “enables” as the penultimate word in this post, but YMMV.
When I was a kid, I used to laugh at the irony and sarcasm presented in cartoons like the Bullwinkle episode about “Goof Gas.” Boris Badanov felt that he did not need to spray the gas on Congress because the work was already done. Then there was an Underdog episode with Simon Bar Sinister and his weather machine that could be used to destroy the earth. Now, we have people in Congress talking about such machines as they really exist. As a child under 10 years old, I thought that cartoon funny and ridiculous. Certain people are exhibiting reasoning abilities that are inferior to that of children under ten years old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4HnT5AiBng
Bullwinkle’s voice, writer, and co-producer Bill Scott and his family were close friends of ours in the 1960s in a rightwing LA suburb. They and we and one other family constituted the local Democratic Club. During California’s fair housing crisis, after a disgustingly racist issue of the local weekly Bill wrote, designed, had printed, and delivered to every local household a parody edition with a big headline: RED HAIRED FAMILY MOVES TO SUNLAND. (The only difficulty was that many recipients thought it was real.)
What a fantastic neighbor to have. He was a unique writer with a keen sense of parody. At my age, in the 1960s, I recognized caricature and ridicule. After a while, I then realized that the caricature was based on observations about real people and their beliefs.
Man, you recalled it all :) Had forgotten all about Sweet Polly Purebread, but do remember Under Dog! and Simon Bar Sinister. Those old shows we grew up on were just too good.
Meanwhile, Elon is shortly to go into detox after signing a waiver to block his own NMDA channels. He will refigure himself, and we will get ourselves to Mars. But right now there’s a lot more heat than light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrjHhIGl90I
Musk is the richest man on Earth. It’s not so much that “He’s helping Trump stoke fascism.” HE is stoking fascism. The scary part is that his god complex is still forming.
Musk may be getting a tongue job from the Times but Bloomberg has been skinning him alive today, and the stock market agrees. Not about his politics but his stupid cars and vaporware.
With regard to the NYT description of Mr. Musk as “owner of the platform’s most followed account,” they might have acknowledged that after Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl drew fewer followers than he thought he deserved, he apparently had X engineers adjust the platform’s algorithm to make his tweet immune to filters, effectively force-feeding users.
https :// finance. yahoo. com/news/musk-forced-algorithm-change-help-021953214.html
(I put a space in the link to disable it, in case an operating link is not allowed.)
While they can do anything they want, speechwise, RT online has posted online a link to a part of the Carson – Musk conversation, bypassing Carson’s subscription wall:
title: ” ‘If Trump loses, I’m f**ked’ – Musk — The Tesla and Space-X boss has joked that he’ll be arrested if Democratic nominee Kamala Harris becomes president —
“‘If Trump loses, I’m f**ked’ – Musk — Tesla CEO Elon Musk sits for an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson © Twitter / @TuckerCarlson ”
With a lead blurb, “Tech mogul Elon Musk has told American journalist Tucker Carlson that he’s “all in” on Donald Trump winning the US presidential election in November”
Link broken: https://www. rt.com/ news/605396-trump-loses-im-fed-musk/
RT showing an interest is what it is. Trump touting Orban and with alleged Putin ties, and RT noting Musk fits a pattern of “strong man” governmental favoritism.
Also of interest, “Donald Trump says he’ll task Elon Musk with auditing the entire federal government.” https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/6/24237429/donald-trump-elon-musk-government-efficiency-commission
That’s arguably a quid pro quo, but how it fits Footnoot 3 is anyone’s guess.
Harris represents a status quo. Musk seems allied to Project 2025 on the downsizing theme, if not the Christian Nationalist theme. Having moved from CA to TX, where regulation is more lax, Musk has emphasized the difference.
Still, credit him with launching electric vehicles ahead of where the movement would be without him, and owning a space launch firm with a better success record than Boeing. GM would not have innovated electric autos – they had market share and did not, the best evidence they would not.
Credit him? No thanks.
He may have encouraged other automakers to step up their EV game, but he did it by exploiting his workers, cutting corners, skirting environmental regulations, demanding enormous tax breaks that screwed local communities, and producing vehicles that never live up to their hype. His EVs have mid-to-poor reliability ratings per Consumer Reports, and each of them rank in the bottom half when laid next to comparable vehicles from other makers. In Germany, his factories have had numerous safety issues and have triple the levels of employees taking sick leave when compared with other German automakers.
From Fortune on Sept 30, with internal links omitted:
Given that kind of track record, it seems to me that astronauts are rolling the dice when getting into his spacecraft.
Tesla’s health and safety record reflects what those within the global automotive industry especially in the US have known for a long time.
Musk’s management style rejects what had been learned and proven within the industry, so intent he was on making something new. We’ve heard about gross inefficiencies in Tesla manufacturing because the company wouldn’t use any automotive industry equipment. Unfortunately Tesla workers are proving to Musk what the existing automotive industry learned over decades, shaping its manufacturing equipment and operations.
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-teslas-arrival-in-germany-could-set-off-labor-showdown
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_and_unions
https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/teslas-anti-union-model-faces-massive-challenge-europe
Strong union, strong management. Butting heads. The cars selll in Sweden, home of Volvo. Quality does not seem the issue.
Sweden is the oddball Nordic country which didn’t adopt lockdown and mask usage like the other Nordics — it’s further to the right than its neighbors.
Its rightward bent unfortunately shows in cumulative COVID deaths. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coronavirus-deaths-in-the-nordics/
You can bet that same attitude applies to manufacturing as well.
Der Technischer Überwachungsverein begs to differ:
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-model-3-is-the-car-that-failed-the-most-in-germany-s-mandatory-vehicle-inspection-224595.html
Call me crazy, but I want a better than 85% chance that my car is still safe after three years.
As for plant safety, the German magazine Stern did a big investigation last year, painting a very ugly picture. The series in behind a paywall, but a summary of the highpoints can be found here. A taste:
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/german-magazine-makes-demolishing-report-about-tesla-s-factory-in-gruenheide-222332.html
We’ll have to disagree about that last paragraph. Musk is a freeloader. He’s another Ueber and Lyft, relying on the work of others while dissing it. He violates labor and labor rules, but blames his workers when management-designed systems – built on his ego and whimsy – go as badly as experienced observers predict.
Since its merger with McDonnell Douglas, beating Boeing on anything safety-related is not much of a hurdle.
100% this. Elmo is such a freeloader, he’s been making the Air Force do the hard work of conducting environmental impact analysis for SpaceX launches from Vandenburg AFB, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of the payloads are private for-profit equipment. The CA Coastal Commission recently refused to authorize an increase in SpaceX launches, in part because Elmo refuses to apply for a Coastal Development Permit, something regular people have to do if they want to put in a septic tank, never mind barge equipment up and down the coast in order to launch 50 rockets a year. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/10/california-reject-musk-spacex-00183371
Commissioner Newsom’s remarks are worth a listen for those inclined to learn more about how Elmo’s disregard for workers and regulation is being watched. Video here: (05:42:00): https://cal-span.org/meeting/ccc_20241010/
An item a few years ago mainly on Peter Thiel, in light of his Vance ties and Musk’s being also in tech innovation, is relevant, tangentally, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/06/peter-thiel.html
Thiel and Musk put their money into Trump – Vance; Musk being anti-trans too, over his son to disaffiliated daughter transition. Thiel and Musk, not congruent, but in ways like-minded. Vance being the chosen VP candidate seems to have the fingerprints of both. The press seems to ignore a possible Musk-Vance tie that screams for attention. Prove it or disprove it, but don’t ignore it.
“This is existential!” screams the one man on Earth for whom “this” could be remotely existential…and in fact is closer to being inconvenient. Maybe annoying.
Just like DJT: It is all, always, about Elon Musk. No one else, because for him there IS no one else.
I think we should start a pool about when Elno and Convict-1 have their falling out (tiebreaker is what and why triggered it). That is bound to happen since neither ego is willing to stand behind the other on a permanent basis. Elno has the money so I think he comes out on top, but Convict-1 has his connections that will flee once the cases proceed and Convict-1 is cleaned out.
Agree, Rugger. It’s inevitable. Especially since it’s already happened at least once.
I wonder if part of Musk’s push for Trump has a bit of QPQ to it. I think the job of cabinet secretary is a ruse, but a big slice of the NASA budget would make a nice addition to SpaceX’s coffers. Republicans see public money and their first instinct is to privatize. Whether it be public schools, NOAA, Social Security, Medicare – it seems to be all about the money. Not trying to run a CT up the flagpole, but following the money is usually prudent. Big Business always believes it can control the authoritarian. Usually with mixed results.
This is speculation, and based on the 5-day NASDAQ graph, which can be hard to read, but …
On Oct. 7, Trump’s media stock opened at 16.81, and within an hour, jumped to 19.47.
Overnight it went down to 18.53; by 2pm on the 8th, it had climbed back to 21.67.
Overnight, it dipped a little to 20.66, and nothing much happened on the 9th.
On Oct. 10 it opened at 20.75, and within 2 hours it hit 24.02.
On Oct. 11 it opened at 26.00.
On the graph these look like really sharp, sudden, jumps.
I’m not a stock market guy. But to me, it looks like the natural tendency of Trump’s stock is to decline, mostly because the fundamentals aren’t there: the company does almost no business, and has been losing money hand over fist.
Except over the last week or so, on three out of four days, around the opening bell someone, or some people, have dumped enough money into the stock to raise its price, each time by two or three dollars.
So my speculation is as follows: Musk is dumping money into Trump Media to prop it up because the value of the stock is widely seen as a proxy for Trump’s political fortunes, that is, if it is Musk, those purchases amount to disinformation by dollar. Some of the activity could be (I have read) short sellers abandoning their positions. But I doubt that all of it could be explained that way.
Would love to hear from those who actually know the market, rather than (as I) distantly observe.
Musk or the Saudis or perhaps Putin (though the Russian economy is barely holding on) or some techbro (Thiel to prop up Vance as the heir apparent). However, the point is valid about the fundamentals and until there is a real prospect of profit the blame game will continue at DJT.
A few days earlier than when your timeline starts, Trump’s DJT stock traded about $13 and change. So, yes, something has caused the stock’s price to double.
It’s not Trump’s standing in the polls or anything intrinsic to the company’s management or prospects. The latter, in fact, especially when you include its massive operating losses and the rapid departure of several top managers, in quick succession, should move the price the other way.
Something else that caught my eye this week:
On Monday, Oct. 7 at 2:50pm, Musk retweeted a big and sudden change in the Polymarket.com betting for the 2024 US presidential election winner. The candidates were 3 points apart and then suddenly jumped to 9 points apart at 11:00am. They remain about 9 points apart right now.
I don’t know how much money it takes to move that betting line, but there seem to be some rich people that are looking to generate propaganda to make Trump look like he’s ahead. Ugh. It could also be that Trump supporters are more prone to on-line betting, but I don’t know what would have caused such a jump on Monday at 11:00am other than one or more big individual bets.
Thomas Miller’s Virtual Tout analysis (based on PredictIT) also shows a huge flip, which he says he cannot link to any news. I wondered if a Fortune piece on Miller alerted RW moneybags to try to manipulate the options. (Difficulty: PredictIT has an $850 limit so you’d have to create scads of accounts.)
Something screwy going on in the options casino, for sure.
Some time in July DJT and TSLA stock prices began to run inversely to each other. Interesting.
Sadly, a 6-month chart doesn’t show the market’s reaction to Elon’s cybercab bullshit as crisply as a 1-week chart would.
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TSLA:NASDAQ?window=5D
Elmo tried similar “fully self-driving” cybertaxi bullshit in 2017. As with Trump’s infrastructure legislation and his long-touted replacement for Obama’s ACA, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Decided to read the NYT article AFTER seeing this Post (following Marcy’s recos won’t steer an old guy wrong).
My fav is this caption: “Elon Musk, right, and James F. Bridenstine, then the administrator of NASA, during a briefing in 2020 with President Donald J. Trump, left, and Melania Trump at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.”
Briefing Donald and Melania!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Laughed so hard, I cried!
The unraveling of City government here (not convinced yet that the The Unraveling is worse than Business As Usual). But Wall Street’s booming, so we got good (or, at least expensive, restaurants opening), so there’s that.
Personally, I think Elmo is dumb in many ways, but he’s very smart in others. Regardless, he’s certainly deliberate. He wildly overpaid for Xitter and intends to use it to advance his ego and his billionaire politics, which do not include a tolerance for democracy. As Marcy writes, “Musk has become a transnational vector for far right political violence.”
At some point, even the richest men in the world will overstep the final boundaries and the people of the world who have been exploited and abused will rise up in revolution. It is a pattern throughout history. It is inevitable.
That is no comfort to me, as I am an old lady, but, I believe in a future which will emerge with better environmental regulations, better governance, because the money which has obscenely tainted government around the world, will not be controlled to the degree it is now by such megalomaniacs as Musk and other oligarchs, and his pet political doggie, Trump, and his companions on the governing couch, Orban and Putin.
Like you I want to have hope in such a future. But then I read about billionaire Texas Dominionists who would happily burn the planet down with fossil fuels for God and profits…or should I say profits and God.
https://www.propublica.org/article/tim-dunn-farris-wilks-texas-christian-nationalism-dominionism-elections-voting
My regard in the past for Musk has taken quite a beating let me tell you. That boy ain’t right.
Not mentioned above about the hurricane/FEMA misinformation I found it interesting that the story involved Pete Buttigieg ending up on a phone call with Musk where they discussed the FAA, FEMA, and other subjects of disinformation. Reportedly the call ended with Musk saying something like “it looks like you are on the ball.” After that I don’t think Musk did any more postings on the subject.
Is that all it takes? Having an adult talk the autistic child down from an emotional episode? If so more of that please.
Unlike Trump, Musk IS capable of admitting error and changing his point of view. And if you don’t like how his point of view has changed over the last couple of years then you should be aware of, if not acknowledge, the role of left and Democrat politicians in bringing that about. The utterly contemptuous treatment of Musk by Biden. Elizabeth Warren provide by his Time magazine cover calling him a “freeloader” in a tax year when he ended up with liability of about $1.5M for every day he had been a U.S. citizen. The dismissive attitude of California politicians in regulatory skirmishes. Probably other incidents as well.
All that left the naive and politically hapless Musk primed for Trump’s message after his brief infatuation with “anti-woke” DeSantis. He has grievances, some actually real and more that are imagined, but that is exactly the constituency Trump ably cultivates.
Musk’s point of view has not changed over the last couple of years. He has always been anti-environmental regulation, anti-financial regulation, and anti-oversight of any kind. His version of the golden rule has *always* been “Whoever has the gold makes the rules.”
Where and when Republicans have been in control, they have been happy to go along with that kind of rule. When and where Democrats or Independents have been in control, it has pissed him off because he has always viewed himself above such pettiness as following the rules. Musk adheres to the famous Leona Helmsley adage, “Rules are for the little people” and he hates anyone who has the power to force him to follow rules.
Musk is not naive, nor politically hapless. On the other hand, he can be petulant and whiny when he doesn’t get his way, which in TrumpWorld is proof that he is on The Right Side of Things.
To add to Peterr’s comment, it’s easy in a sense to change your tune as Muskrat allegedly did when speaking with Mayo Pete. Does anyone actually think that Muskrat has a single person around him who credibly challenges his ideas? We’re talking about a man who has spent untold millions because he slept with employees, so the answer should be obvious.
More
Trump publicly admonished Elmo for getting on his knees begging for tax breaks.
It’s ALWAYS been the Right.
(Can provide more instances upon request.)
Ayn Rand would have loved Elon. And Thiel.
The Guardian’s Marina Hyde, on a similar topic. “Hurricane Milton has left two worlds in its wake. Elon Musk lives in one of them. The other is called reality.”
“Once upon a time….You couldn’t “debate” a natural disaster any more than you could disagree with gravity. There is a point….where shit gets real.” Not any longer, it seems, at least among members of Donald Trump’s now wholly-owned subsidiary, the Republican Party.
Hyde notes that Trump has had “what the polls suggest was a good storm.” She means that he and an entire industry, including Musk, have politicized through lies what used to be apolitical facts. Just one of Musk’s disinformation posts about the hurricanes has already been viewed 41 million times. They’ve created a whole new front in their war on elections and democracy. In honor of Sgt Schultz, I would call it the Russian Front.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/11/hurricane-milton-elon-musk-natural-disasters
JD Vance used the “suppression” of the Hunter Biden laptop when justifying his non answer to the New York Times question: Did Trump lose the 2020 election? To my knowledge no one asked his (Vance) opinion about suppressed news this cycle.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/us/politics/vance-trump-2020-election-results.html?ogrp=dpl&unlocked_article_code=1.RU4.4WpN.jP7rMKqkY1cY&smid=url-share
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Thanks for the gift link but please avoid sharing links without any context, ex.:
Musk, like Trump, is good friends with Putin. Very likely taking talking points from the Kremlin, as Trump does. From Putin’s POV, even tho Trump will probably loose, between now and then, and after the election, they can cause a lot of trouble for the USA and the US Government they all so heartily despise.
They’ve already done severe damage in Springfield, and now they’ve screwed up rescue and aid efforts in states affected by two monster hurricanes. In fact, Musk is demanding close to $400 from N Carolina people trying to use his StarLink. Something like they must purchase $385 worth of equipment, and sign up for a year’s service at around $125 a month. People who have lost their homes!
Musk is just Trump 2.1. Greedy, stupid, vindictive, and drug addled. Possibly incontinent if we only knew.
Just my opinion but we’re in the throes of an oligarchs smoke & mirrors attempt to overthrow evolution, i.e. this election? The interesting thing to me is the younger gens have advanced to non discrimination, self worth & most with the ability to filter the flood of info.
What I don’t understand is why us of our older generations of normal intelligence are not using the tools of, to teach also the construct of boycott.
You couldn’t give me a Telsa. I’d like an artistic type to turn the insignia into the finger. tXitter previously if one didn’t have an account, it wouldn’t let one see from a link. It now does. Hmm? I still don’t click the bait. I believe in boycott.
I’m 73. Viet Nam protests to today. The powers that be(were) always attacked the younger gens with disinformation to put it mildly. Psych out. Mamma’s boy in waiting elon jumped up & down at a TFG rally in BUTLER, Pa. (excuse the highlight) right before the Oct 7th anniversary of the hamas terrorists raping, mutilating & murdering people at a music festival in the terror attack of Israel. The psych out of fascists. If you’re not hep, the younger gens continually jump up & down to music at music festivals.
Long/short. I hope the Democratic Party officials are giving the good group of younger generation led organizations the money to reach their base & ways of. They’re energized. A lot know & can narrate what bullshit is, like anti climate change, disinformation for example.
Please watch word counts on opinions which don’t introduce new content for discussion. At 257 words you’re close to the limit.
Please also use paragraph breaks. Whatever you’re doing now doesn’t actually break up text; long blocks of text are difficult to read on small displays many comment readers use.
Thank You. When typing in this comment space what do I add to make a new paragraph? Thank You for putting up with me a bit of an eccentric, not that I don’t feel like I’m in a bit of company. lol
could it just be
double spacing?
La tah… It is : )
tiny… lol
Remember “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”? Now you’re twice that, and I am – with another ten years of life – three times it, and we both are trustworthy. Perspectives do change, but the young and middle aged own it and we’re town elders. watching. Some of our age cohorts, they like Trump and we are amazed and appalled at that because they are old enough to know better.
It is good for both parties’ survival, Harris in her fifties, Vance in late forties, (I think). Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn easing up, and soon, out.
We’re elder commentators here at EW, so – others – respect your elders, those on the left side of things.
Thank You for the compliment: “we both are trustworthy.” Ditto. It’s an astonishing thing to simply be a good person & blessed by being a baby boomer.
My memories are shaped by, in my working class neighborhood, going to school and seeing the war widows on their way to early morning services. We were the loved kids of all religions. I don’t know why someone loses that.
I hate to be the “other old guy here” but my memories differs.
This country has always been divided, let’s not accept the “let’s Make America Great” propaganda!
In my neighborhood (I’m a couple of years older) there WERE war widows, but also holocoust survivors and generational survivors of slavery. Refugees from the Islands and refugees from the South.
They have ALWAYS been f’king with us.
Watch the rallies. F’n MSG!!!!
IMO Trump loses. He’s off base and extreme. Assuming Harris takes the next four years, Trump at his age could run again, if he lives that long.
Realistically, traditional Republicans really, really try to dump him, more than now where the election is uncertain. Vance is the one with staying power, the ability to soften and blur stances, talk smoothly, tight with Christian Nationalism, and Musk and Thiel have the money. Vance is the counterforce to keep Silicon Valley Money’s political and regulatory Angst and MAGA together, and evangelicals on script.
Vance is a danger to unskilled labor and free trade, a tech elitist, where the MAGA faction don’t have a sense of how that might play out against their economic best interests..
If Trump wins, Vance has to put up with four years of , “Yes sir. Good idea, sir.” Movement that happens okay with Vance. Then he sets his own course, whatever it will be. From a base of four Trump vengeance years. Folks soured, more likely than not, as in 2020, Rubio and Cruz and perhaps Haley again and DeSantis too, all in a different direction.
In effect. his career is better off if Trump makes is close but loses. The money will stay, and he can then grandstand in the Senate and get reelected there. If reelection fails, he’d still be positioned with a base and time to plan and act. At a guess Emmer and crypto would still be receptive, Emmer happy where he is.
Basically, long term Vance is the present and future danger.
The value of his Tesla shares is how Elmo bankrolls a lot of his shit. So, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/11/teslas-value-drops-60bn-after-self-driving-cybercab-fails-to-excite-investors
Keen observation (“The value of his Tesla shares is how Elmo bankrolls a lot of his shit.
“)!
Out here in THE Hamptons, the ride of chice is this year’s Tesla (every year, so there must be a lot of one-year-old Teslas at the dealers). And guess who the owners of those Tesla’s are? Richies.
[As an aside, the second most popular is the Lamborghini. Different motivation; not virtue signaling but attracting young girls. Nothing funnier that an old richie trying to get out of his low-slung Lamborghini as he escorts his fashion model guest into Winston Jewelers for some bling.]
“stoking far right anti-migrant violence in the UK, including his Tweet asserting that Civil War is inevitable”
As a UK citizen, his assertion is risible and I can only conclude he’s an ignorant moron like his pal Trump or deliberately stirring shit up, or both.
I find the prophecies on social media regarding similar strife in the US suspect in the same way, even accounting for the huge number of firearms available there.
You are right that “Musk has become a transnational vector for far right political violence” and I’m reminded of Spitting Image’s satirical apartheid era song, “I’ve never met a nice South African”:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x64b8uq
Elon Musk & Peter Theil’s relationship dates back decades to PayPal & X.com.
Theil took over as CEO after merging with X.com. I believe their end game is to destroy democracy. After all, democracy & capitalism afforded them their wealth and they no longer need her.
https://www.businessinsider.com/paypal-mafia-members-elon-musk-peter-thiel-reid-hoffman-companies#nosek-explored-angel-investing-10
Their long game with Trump | Vance, according to Dave Troy, is destroying the dollar by forcing the default on US debt in early 2025, & eliminating the Federal Reserve which is also part of Project 2025.
https://washingtonspectator.org/peter-thiel-and-the-american-apocalypse/
And “Cui Bono?” when the USD fails? Why the cryptobros and transnational organized crime, as BTC becomes the new reserve currency and money laundering can occur at scale, plowing trillions of illicit dollars into the economy and pauperizing the entire planet.
This is exactly what the autocratic strongmen of the world want, as it makes them the most powerful folks around.
The long game includes much more than toppling the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
The more fundamental failing of this Times piece, in my opinion, is that it ignores that this is kleptocracy in plain site.
The Times has noted that this is a Musk business strategy: Elon Musk’s Diplomacy: Woo Right-Wing World Leaders. Then Benefit: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/technology/elon-musk-world-leaders.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Rk4.G5-4.zMVSQRJEaYJE&smid=url-share
And that the Biden administration considers him abhorrent: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-pentagon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Rk4.Lsxe.XZy_i6qUCall&smid=url-share
There are all sorts of reasons Trump and Musk are aligned. One of them has to be the return on his investment Musk expects.
Granted, Musk is pretty crazy right now, and the most important thing for the whole wide Free World is that Harris wins. But maybe he’ll eventually cool down, get the shakes and just go cold turkey on the ketamine.
Fellow rocket hounds: FAA bureacrats have finally said SpaceX is go for Five, with the launch window opening tomorrow 8 AM EST. Like him or hate the guy, he is hellbent on changing the world. Maybe smart lawyers in the future can give folks like him some room so he can quit the NMDA blockers and go back to being a Democrat and a human being. Fingers crossed, but the booster catch on Five is crazy new dangerous. If it works we are halfway to Mars. And a new orbital economy will bloom. Considering the recent Nobel prizes some would say that maybe we don’t got all that long to dilly dally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkhddj7Alic