Elon Musk raises a glass last year at Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s fantasy-themed conference “Atreju,” which celebrated Italy’s right-wing youth. Credit: Shutterstock / Alessia Pierdomenico

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
“We look for elevation of sentiment, and liberality of mind, among those orders of citizens, who, by their fortunes, are relieved from sordid cares and attentions. This was the description of a free man in Sparta; and if the lot of a slave among the ancients was really more wretched than that of the indigent laborer among the moderns, it may be doubted, whether the superior orders, who are in possession of
consideration and honors, do not proportionally fail in the dignity which befits their condition.If the pretensions to equal justice and freedom should terminate in rendering every class equally servile and mercenary, we make a nation of helots, and have no free citizens.” — Adam Ferguson, “An Essay on the History of Civil Society,” 1767

“You’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.” — John Lennon, “Working Class Hero,” 1970

The billionaire class is not sending us their best. Born and bred in South Africa, the world’s richest dude-bro, Elon Musk, “worked illegally in the United States” after shirking graduate school, according to a recent exclusive published by the Washington Post.

Musk, now a Texas resident, could find himself subject to “criminal prosecution if he lied to the government as part of the immigration process” and could even have his citizenship revoked, legal experts told Wired magazine. Guess what’s good for the goose is good for the cisgender.

Hypocrisy proving no obstacle, Musk backed the nativist presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, who’s pledged to carry out the largest mass deportation in US history. And he distinguished himself among the loudest promoters of the Great Replacement conspiracy, which holds that the Biden-Harris administration deliberately imported millions of “unvetted illegal immigrants” — Musk’s words, though presumably not referring to himself — to cast fraudulent ballots in upcoming elections, or sway the 2030 census count, or something.

Journalists at Bloomberg News painstakingly analyzed 53,000 posts sent from Musk’s account on X, the sinking ship that replaced Twitter. This year, “immigration and voter fraud has become Musk’s most frequently engaged with policy topic, garnering about 10 billion views,” according to the wire service’s count. “Musk posted more than 1,300 times about the topic overall, with more than 330 posts in the past 2 months alone.”

Those who swallow this impressive vote-buying scheme, in spite of the pesky detail that noncitizens can’t vote, may have watched Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York one too many times. But if anything resembles the Tammany Hall political machine of old, it’s Musk himself giving away $1 million a day to those who pinky promise to vote for Trump in swing states.

If that ain’t illegal, sure seems like it ought to be.

“Elon’s Kill Democracy or Die Trying Tour” is how the Left Reckoning podcast dubbed Musk’s $100 million-plus investment in Trump’s winning back the White House.

“Whenever you talk about Musk at this point, he has become such a cartoonist character, you can sort of forget the actual material reality,” co-host David Griscom explained on last Sunday’s episode. But Trump’s and Musk’s buddy film is a menacing “alliance of the richest motherfuckers on the planet trying to take control of our democracy,” Griscom warned.

William Randolph Hearst’s media empire could have only dreamt of 10 billion views when villainizing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as a Soviet-sanctioned plot. And Musk has built a disinformation-spewing colossus that runs without much need of micromanagement.

Last month, tech reporter David Ingram blamed X’s algorithmic suggestions for “supercharging the spread of voter-fraud conspiracy theories with the help of artificial intelligence.”

For instance, the “Story For You” user-recommendations boosted “the unsupported claim that a voting machine in Tarrant County, Texas, was ‘flipping’ votes,” NBC News reported. “Local officials said there was no evidence” for the fake news, NBC followed up, and the only voter who came forward with a complaint “may have unintentionally pressed the wrong candidate” and “was able to successfully cast the vote he intended to after he reviewed his ballot.”

Drumming up misplaced doubts in accurate vote tallies is all in a day’s work for the X platform though.

A self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”, Musk has also been suing anyone who dares to express a cross opinion about his devious methods.

A federal judge thankfully tossed out one of his frivolous lawsuits this March. The target in that case was the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which has bravely kept speaking truth to power, exposing supposed fact-checks on X for the farce they are. So-called “community notes” meant to correct “false claims about U.S. elections were not displayed on 209 out of a sample of 283 posts deemed misleading,” the Associated Press reported, based on CCDH analysis.

So, three out of four lies flow right through Musk’s sewer line with no filter, including the hooey about Trump winning in 2020. Is it any wonder the polls are close?

“Never, ever, let anyone tell you he supports free speech,” Tech Dirt edtior Mike Masnick wrote in September, referencing Musk’s litigious harassment of watchdog organization Media Matters. “He is actively abusing the judicial system to suppress speech, and he’s doing it gleefully with support from fans who also, falsely, insist they favor free speech.”

If Musk’s swath of destruction stayed within the confines of the information superhighway, that’d be bad enough. Unfortunately, he seems intent on messing with Texas’ air and water IRL too.

“Nearly four dozen people gave Texas environmental regulators an earful at a
recent public meeting in Brownsville over [Musk’s company SpaceX’s] request for a permit that would allow it to dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of industrial wastewater into the sensitive wetlands surrounding its launch site,” Brandon Lingle reported for the Express-News late last month.

The “discharged water could carry as much as 190 pounds of heavy metals, including chromium, iron and nickel …, according to a review conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration,” Lingle wrote.

SpaceX has also operated the discharge system since last year without the proper permit, according to the report, leading the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality as well as the Environmental Protection Agency to finally issue a fine of $152,000 — a slap on the wrist for a $200 billion business.

The heedless disregard for ecological stewardship adds another toxic layer to Musk’s camaraderie with Trump. If you happened to be one of the 44 million views accrued by Austin-based comedian Joe Rogan’s interview with Don the Con, you may have noted the former president’s persistent downplaying of legitimate environmental concerns.

In Trump’s revisionist memory, his discarded plans to put a pesticide-soaked golf course near a lake that supplied drinking water to a town in upstate New York were thanks to undue anxiety over “a puddle.” And when his border wall obsession threatened a severely endangered species in Arizona with extinction, Trump dismissed this as much ado about “a rare plant.”

“I have these people saying the oceans will rise one-eighth of an inch over the next hundred years,” Trump also told Rogan of the threat of irreversible sea-level rise caused by greenhouse gas emissions. FackCheck.org already labelled that whopper — a revival of an earlier statement — an “absurdly low estimate.”

“Israeli climate scientists came out a couple weeks ago with a dire estimate,” veteran know-it-all Noam Chomsky related on The Analysis podcast two days back. “They said their own estimates of the rising sea level had been way too low and, in fact, sea level in the Eastern Mediterranean will rise a meter by mid-century, up to two-and-a-half meters by the end of the century.”

That’s between three-plus feet and eight-plus feet for those of us who refused to learn the metric system. And for low-lying countries, it would mean frequent flooding, habitat destruction, saltwater contamination, lost tourism and the potential escalation of already fiery regional tensions. Apparently, Trump’s zealous support for Israel doesn’t include defending her coastlines from falling into the ocean.

Professor Chomsky, at age 95, is arguably the foremost U.S. public intellectual. This election will be the 20th he’s been alive for.

“We’re approaching points where human existence will be virtually impossible,” Chomsky said of climate change, adding that “the Republican Party is 100% denialists.” Although the GOP’s refusal to admit the reality of human-induced global warming “has been going on for over a decade, Trump made it worse,” Chomsky assessed.

“They are saying anything that might save us from disaster has to be prevented,” Chomsky added, describing this as “savage capitalism run amok.”

What could be a more globally important reason to not back Republicans than that, Non-Citizen Musk?

But who will curb Trump’s fever for what he calls “the black gold”? Who will stop Musk from dumping metallic sludge in our wetlands? When public outcry gets a pat on the head. When Texas judges pucker up to corporate ass cheeks without so much as blushing. Without state and federal agency oversight, we’re all but screwed. And who will appoint them, with Trump and Musk in charge?

From ancient Spartiates to the robber barons of the relatively recent past, for all their cruelty and greed, monied elites used to at least represent a modicum of culture and sophistication. Today, those at the top seem as tabloid-gawking and easy to fool as the rest of us, and Trump and Musk in particular revel in schoolyard insults and willful ignorance.

Should Trump prevail, it will mean nothing’s to be expected from the 1% for the indefinite future, while the 160 million Americans who get up for work on Monday must remain content with running the treadmill.

But hey, at least transgender immigrants won’t get healthcare either, am I right?

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