It was a more verbal eye roll at that being the thing that a man with Elon’s money and reach chooses to focus on.
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What I take from the interview will obviously differ from what you do, but the main topics covered are preparing for the inevitable next pandemic, vaccines, conspiracy theories, Twitter/Elon Musk, Jeffrey Epstein, his future plans.
It’s on the BBC Sounds app; go to Search > Today > 05/05/2022 then interview starts at the 1:35:10 mark.
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In your heads just imagine I’ve used the same caption with every single tweet that Musk has made in the last month.
Every tweet makes it clearer that his, in fact, a moron.
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Musk, in his latest piece of performative nonsense, posted this on Wednesday afternoon.
Yesterday it broke that Musk had paid off a Space X flight attendant who he showed his erect penis to and tried to pressure her into performing sex acts on him. It then broke that the team breaking that story had gone to musk on Wednesday morning, several hours before that tweet, to ask for his comment on the story.
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I don’t care how much money he has, the guy is a moron. Didn’t he notice armed Republicans storming the Capitol? Has he never heard the vile hate speech of Trumpists and their Fuhrer? How can he be so out of touch with reality?
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Maybe he isn’t?
Meaning?
That those events might reflect his own world view…?
The “I used to be Dem and they made me become Republican” is propoganda meme for the right they’ve invented stories of over and over again with increasing frequency since Obama. This sort of performative trollery from him is now just what the US right does. They say things that are easily disprovable and not only dont they care that they’re going to get called out on it, it seems that everyone knowing they are talking shit is actually kind of the point. It’s one of the ways they own the libs, but getting them so angry and their brazen lying. Often the more brazen the lie, the more contradictory to other stuff they’ve said or done, the better. But often underappreciated is that even their supporters understand its a lie. A big part driving the animosity on the right is the believe that the ruling elite lie and cheat, and so if those people are going to do it then they’re not going to worry about their team doing it. It has become a completely nihilistic issue where the lying and cheating becomes almost the point, especially if it can be done in a way to anger or hurt the things and people they oppose. So where at a stage where when you see things like this the default should be understand that he doesn’t actually think what he just said.
He may have voted democrat in the past, but that post did not reflect any sort of real about turn for him. Of his public record political donations, in the past 2 years at least they have gone 100% towards GOP politicians and causes. So he may well be a moron, but he is not a moron for believing this nonsense because he doesnt actually believe it.
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I like the twitter account “NY Times Pitchbot” for these. They’ll suggest a headline such as “I used to be a Democrat but then the left wrote in chalk outside Susan Collins’ house” etc.
They’re funny but also almost indistinguishable from actual NYT headlines.
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NB: see also, Russia.
Not so much of a free speech absolutist when it’s about him, is he?
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They never are, cf. Peter Thiel.
Many right-wingers are just pathetic fragile snowflakes. The intellectual right disappeared a long time ago (although you can still see a few isolated examples).
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Doug Balloon. He is absolutely superb. Pope Hat is another good one
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I think what is becoming ever more apparent is the intellectual right was always disconnected from the desires and belief of the voting right. These were DC and NYC elites who agreed with the right in their gut and then used their galaxy brains to post-facto justify the things their gut was telling them, often inventing an empirical basis for the belief (see laffer curve as a way to justify their gut feeling that its unfair to be taxed on money they earned) and from there they derived some form of supposed conservative guiding principles. That led us to the austerity, small government Paul Ryan types that the NYT and WaPo told us represented the GOP. But it never did. Fiscal conservatism was never really what drove the voters on the right, which is why they never really cared about the deficits GOP governments ran or wanted to eliminate the government programs they benefited from. They just agreed on who the enemy was, and after the soviet union collapsed they were forced to look inwards to the closest thing they had at home to the soviets - “the liberals”.
I don’t agree with very much of what he says, but there is an American Enterprise Institute (think tank for the “intellectual right”) guy, Matthew Continettit, doing the rounds at present supporting his new book that basically comes clean about the fact that the American right never really cared about the things he, as an “intellectual conservative” always told himself the movement was about. You cannot understand Trump and Trumpism without understanding this disconnect.
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But it’s a disaster for democracy when public discourse becomes so divorced from reality. When there is no agreement at all on any basic truths and values the system is in deep danger of collapse. Of course, this is what the extreme right want, but it really seems that the US is on course to become a dictatorship. It may not be Trump, but he and his movement have created the conditions in which it has become a credible threat.
Conservatism per American Political Scientist Frank Wilhoit - There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect
So sure, its dangerous to democracy, but democracy is antithetical to Wilhoit’s premise.
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