I hesitate posting stuff like this and I did try to vet it. But there’s not much out there about it.
Anyway, it’s very frightening to me, if true, and I wonder how this kind of chicanery could have gone on unchecked. Some of the claims, again if true, border on the illegal.
Can someone talk me back off the ledge?
By ‘illegal’ do you mean the donations? I don’t know–he probably managed to make sure they were protected by the Citizens United ruling. (Donations to PACs rather than to the Trump Campaign and that sort of thing.) The “random drawing” has been admitted by Musk to be not random at all, but I’ve no idea of the law on this topic. He lied to billions, but since no one paid a fee to enter, there may be no recourse.
Manipulating campaign ads is morally reprehensible but of course Musk will pay no price for that, nor for what he did to Twitter.
The video seems to me to be a good round-up of the argument that Musk is an awful person who will be awful for the USA. However, I’m not seeing anything that could result in negative consequences for Musk.
I like the top comment for that video:
America is like the Titanic. Too big to turn, too slow to react, in denial about sinking, and there aren’t enough life boats for everyone.
Perfect summation. That person deserves a Pulitzer.
Yes. Very apt.
Paying people to vote? Maybe I’m mistaken but I thought that was illegal.
Have you been living in a cave? I’ve only been able to get through half of the clip before rage-quitting, but every single claim up to that point is verifiable fact. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has even casually followed the news over the last year.
I said it at least couple of years ago; Elon Musk wanted to be the Frederich Flick to Trump’s Hitler, and while it doesn’t make me proud I nailed that observation in the X-ring.
No, Musk didn’t pay people to vote. He just ran an illegal lottery, although Pennsylvania Judge Angelo Foglietta declined to impose an injunction against it, deferring to a federal court which will only hear it after the election. This should serve as a object lesson to people who believe that “the courts” will restrain Trump and his enablers in last recourse. They will not.
Stranger
No need to be snarky. Of course I’ve been keeping up with this stuff and hearing about it for the last several years but I haven’t heard about all of it and this being the Dope, I thought i’d cover my bases.
I wasn’t really intending to dunk on you but…yes, this is the crazy shit that has been going on, and that Elon Musk has been doing to facilitate conspiranoia, cultural divisions, and nakedly authoritarian politics over the last two and a half years. It’s so ridiculously bizarre that it has become necessary to check your sources to make sure that The Onion (ironically, now in consideration for actually being “American’s Finest News Source”) didn’t some how sneak into your straight news feed.
And yet, 75 million people voted for Elon’s favorite despot, jumping up on stage with him like a four year old seeing his favorite uncle, because apparently we’re collectively okay with fascism now even though many people, including former members of Trump’s previous administration including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley who, while still in that position became concerned Trump might “go rogue,” and told staff “You never know what a president’s trigger point is.” Milley has since been quoted by journalist Bob Woodward as saying that Trump was a “fascist to the core”, and reporting that CIA Director Gina Haspel told him, “We are on the way to a right-wing coup”.
I mean, are reality is now like a discarded Philip K. Dick novel that his publisher refused because, ‘This shit is too crazy even for you,’ and yet we have the proudly self-proclaimed moderates and even some even more stridently self-proclaimed ‘liberals’ arguing that it won’t be so bad and that we just need to rely on the courts and the Department of Justice to uphold the Constitution and “…protest, speak out, call attention to what’s happening, spread the news, organize, give where we can, donate our time, urge our sane politicians to challenge the admin…” and “point and laugh at them”, because that strategy has been working out so very, very well thus far, and then putting their hopes in a mid-year “Blue Wave” of political opposition because they’ve been so astute in their prediction to this point, and as the 2018 mid-terms showed us, the public will come out in droves to make sure that an incompetent, bellicose, malignant narcissist will be put in check, then impeached and removed by an opposing majority of sane legislators to ensure that he never again can make a run at the highest public office with vast executive authority. Or…not.
I can’t talk you off the ledge because we are now all living on the ledge; the ledge is our home, and you better find a delicate sense of balance and hold onto as many friends as you can because this scenario just got dialed up from “Dumpster Fire Insane” to “Tragically Ludicrous” by 75 million voters who couldn’t look past their own prejudices to avoid voting for a 78 year old nakedly fascist autocrat with 34 felony convictions and more potential indictments hanging over his head and no history whatsoever with self-restraint or moderation, buoyed by a bunch of Heritage Foundations fucks who watched The Handmaid’s Tale (at least the first few episodes, I’m guessing), and said to themselves, “Yes, we’d like some of that, please” and then drew up a plan full of spiteful, petty commentary and created a personnel database and “Presidential Administration Academy” to make it a literal reality.
Get comfortable with being on the ledge because we’re going to be there for a while, and it is not entirely clear that we’re going to come back with an intact democracy despite obtuse claims that “This has happened many times before. Sooner or later the pendulum will swing to the left.”
Stranger
I am with you; the false comfort some are clinging to will be proven to be utterly delusional.
Anti-democracy Republicans have all the power now. (I realize the House hasn’t been called yet, but: come on.) Why on earth would there be actually free-and-fair elections in two years? Sure, the blue states will continue mostly free and fair, but money and dirty tricks will be imported to those states to make sure Senate and House races go the “right” way. They won’t succeed in subverting all blue-state elections but they’ll succeed in enough. Meanwhile, states controlled by the anti-democracy forces will make sure no pro-democracy candidate gets office.
And the courts will be useless.
And our power to organize will last only as long as our power to communicate. Trumpites won’t have to outlaw MSNBC and Reddit and all mention of (say) demonstrations on TikTok and Instagram—they’ll just quietly let the cable and Internet service providers know that if those outlets continue to be carried, the providers will…regret it. (And we should be enjoying this site while we can.)
I’m not suggesting hopelessness. But “hold on to friends” is good advice, both from the emotional and from the communications standpoint. The Trumpites are a ways from being able to control all email and texting—but we must be aware that they are working toward exactly that.
Do the false-comfort folks really believe that Trump and Elon and the rest do NOT take China and Russia as their models for controlling a population?
I find it useful, in gauging what might or might not be possible, to just mentally rewind the clock and look back at the things that actually happened, and ask myself whether I would’ve considered them plausible back then. A convicted felon being elected president? Preposterous. The guy who after losing the presidency once instigated a violent riot to overthrow the democratically elected government being voted back in? Unimaginable.
So clearly, the world doesn’t give a flying fuck about what I consider plausible. And we can only ever hope to defend against that which we consider possible in the first place—brushing things off the table for being unthinkable just means we’ll be blindsided if they happen anyway.
Does saying “Hurry up and jump to make room for the rest of us” count as talking you off the ledge?
(Note, to be clear, I am not encouraging Jackson commit suicide just metaphorically saying that I’m feeling the same way and don’t have much comfort to give.)
How did that saying go? “If you not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space”
Or, come on it the water’s fine.
I just have this feeling we are in a terrible, slow motion car wreck with Bach playing in the background and no one realizes the violent end that is in store.
Well, about 40% of the country realizes it. They’re just not in a position to do anything about it until after the crunching noises get really, really loud.
Meanwhile another 40% is cheering loudly, and the remaining 20% has, as always, no idea about anything except their job, their family, and their tiktok or whatever.
Between tariffs and “government efficiency”, a lot of those jobs may evaporate.
Granted.
But my point is they walk through life looking down at their shoelaces and whatever happens to them will be a total surprise. Those folks aren’t evil and aren’t necessarily stupid. They’re just totally self-absorbed / disengaged. And they’re content enough with a life that contains random surprises that any alert informed person would have seen coming a mile away.
Most of them did not vote. A few did, and some decent fraction of that few voted for trump.