As we all know, Elon Musk went nuts a few years ago. Nobody seems to know quite why, but it seems to have been brought on by frustration with California business rules; his dealings with unions; and liberals making fun of him. Since then he's become obsessed with the "woke mind virus," childbirth rates, and.......illegal immigrants voting for Democrats. The latter has produced a tsunami of tweets and retweets like this one:
Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!
Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast… https://t.co/u3HBdd5Bv0
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2024
This particular tweet is a sober-minded graduate thesis compared to most of them, but it lays out the argument in simple terms:
- Democrats are deliberately opening the border to an army of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.
- ???
- They will all vote for Democrats and democracy will be over.
The magic in the middle is that somehow all these illegal immigrants become citizens and start voting in large numbers. How? That's something of a mystery, since even the most liberal immigration legislation requires a waiting period of 10-20 years for citizenship. That might as well be the 30th century. The politician who risks his career over a possible advantage a decade away hasn't been born. Most of them think of the "long term" as next year.
Want more? Virtually all naturalized citizens have been in the country for many years and almost none of them arrived illegally. And anyway, of those who did most aren't even big fans of Democrats. A KFF poll suggests that among immigrants who are "likely undocumented," only 18% say the Democratic Party represents their views. This is not the stuff of landslides.
Musk seems like he's too smart to believe his own nonsense. Does he, really? Or is it all an act? But if it is, what's the endgame? Quicker FAA approval for his rocket launches? Starlink expansion into the hinterlands? Letters patent declaring him Emperor of Mars?
Or is he just nuts?
We shouldnt consider it a coincidence that Musk veered off into MAGA land as soon as immigrants and brown people became the sole platform and cultural movement of one of the 2 US political parties.
See other commenters here who had this same jag at the same time over the same issues.
The civil war and Jim Crow had lots of these people as well.
Musk famously does a lot of drugs.
All I know for sure is that Taylor Swift does not want to have Elon's baby.
And neither do I.
And I suspect a for a growing number of people who are capable of having babies feel the same way.
No, Elon. No.
Musk went nuts when he discovered slavery was illegal and he can't understand how we ever got to this point.
A point that many people are ignoring, and which provides context, is the following:
- John Kerry "complains" about the first amendment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/1ft54e8/john_kerry_calls_the_first_amendment_a_major/
- Meanwhile The New Yorker is complaining about the entire constitution:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/30/constitution-book-reviews-chemerinsky-pierson-schickler
All this in the context of higher education that glorifies Hamas and Hezbollah, and mainstream media that cover certain things obsessively, others not at all.
Is it over-reaction to say that there's one group in America that does in fact want to redesign the political system top to bottom? Possibly so, but I'm not sure.
The way these things work is that, in the absence of countervailing forces, extremism feeds on extremism, so that we go from a few profs lecturing how the constitution needs to be dismantled to an elite of 1% or so that have been socialized to believe this (but who control most of the culture) to large fractions of the population that go along with what they see repeatedly on TV. Each step takes about a generation, but we've seen it play out enough times that you have to be extremely dishonest to claim that it doesn't happen.
So when we start seeing the uppermost crust of US opinion makers feeling out the response to killing the 1st Amendment and the Constitution, I don't think it's utterly crazy to start publicizing who has what stance on these issues.
This is a pretty fundamentally dishonest post. "Name99"'s, not Drum's original.
Yeah , reads like a post from the Russian troll farm.
He's on a lot of drugs, he's extremely autistic, and he has nobody in his life who will tell him not to do things.
I remain perplexed as to why Kevin continues to believe that Elon Musk is a smart guy. But then again Kevin continues to give Trump more credit than he ever deserved, too. Rich white boys fail upwards because people give them too much credit (literally) and then their ability to succeed despite themselves is somehow evidence of them deserving the credit they received in the first place.