Breaking news: Elon Musk is not a deity here to save the Right from its own shortcomings. Sorry to burst 2022’s weirdest bubble. We’ve now crossed firmly into outright hysteria, but at what cost?
Because congressional Republicans failed to focus on election integrity and reining in Big Tech tyranny when in power (sadly, lobbying money won), desperate conservatives are now latching onto perceived “saviors” who are instead false idols.
In 2020, we had attorney Lin Wood marching in to rectify a stolen election, until he switched gears and encouraged Republicans to stay home for the critical U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia last year. That gave us two new Democrats and an extremist Supreme Court justice.
Working with Wood was Sidney Powell, who promised daily to release a “Kraken” that never appeared. And earlier this year, podcast host Joe Rogan promised in vague terms to do something for us beyond promoting his own career. We’ve gained nothing from any of these people.
Now, with a religious fervor normally reserved for revival tents, the Right has grabbed onto billionaire Silicon Valley tech oligarch Elon Musk. This erratic, eccentric CEO promises an unending reign of “free speech absolutism” with his pending $44 billion purchase of Twitter. (The deal is not final.)
Unfortunately, it’s a mass delusion, one that will blow up in the faces of conservatives, potentially cost Republicans seats, and set the movement back many years. And incredibly, almost no one on the Right (with rare exceptions, such as Steve Bannon) considers this likely outcome.
Of course, for appearances, Elon will restore the accounts of some who were previously banned, but this is to mask a new regime where our words are subject to his personal whims and notoriously thin skin.
What are Musk’s true aims? He craves unending public adulation and a limitless public forum to spout off as he pleases. Purchasing the rest of Twitter isn’t necessary, as his close friendship with cofounder, current board member, and former CEO Jack Dorsey has always given him carte blanche there. Elon is always among the first suggested follows for new sign-ups and there’s no evidence he’s ever been censored personally.
The impulsive need to shut down Jack Sweeney, an enterprising 19-year-old running automated trackers of Musk family private jets (Elon’s own and his brother Kimbal’s) is the best current theory behind what caused him to pull the trigger on the initial 9 percent Twitter stake in early April. Sweeney turned down a $5,000 offer to shut down his accounts. Musk’s late disclosure of this purchase has brought additional scrutiny from federal officials who’ve already been investigating him since the Trump Administration in 2018.
So why bother buying the remainder of the company? It serves as both a distraction from bad news emanating from the many federal agencies up to their eyeballs investigating his business practices and a limitless method of firing back.
Although it is painful to concede a point to the Left, the Washington-based nonprofit Revolving Door Project nailed it in an April 25 press release that calls Musk’s Twitter takeover a backdoor capture of the Securities and Exchange Commission through fraud and intimidation: “By buying Twitter and taking it private, Musk is seemingly trying to ensure he’ll have the full force of the company behind him the next time the SEC questions him about using the platform to commit fraud. And we know that any SEC attorneys who ask questions about any of this should expect reprisal years later.”
For young attorneys, the SEC is usually an early stepping-stone to later work in large law firms. Musk’s many connections to these firms as a client means they will be shut out of future positions through personal pressure.
It’s not speculation. He’s done it before. “In 2018, both Musk and his car company Tesla had to pay a $20 million fine related to Musk’s false claims on Twitter about a buyout manipulating Tesla’s stock price. Four years later, in January 2022, Tesla demanded that the law firm Cooley fire an attorney on its staff who once worked on the SEC investigation which led to the fine,” the Revolving Door Project adds.
Who is this man to which the Right has suddenly sworn total allegiance? Certainly not on our side, unless you consider any of the following “conservative”:
- In 2018, Musk proclaimed himself “a socialist.” “True socialism seeks greatest good for all,” he tweeted.
- Past political support for the Clintons, Obama, California Governor Gavin Newsom and other Democrats has been public and followed up with monetary contributions. Yes, he also gave to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), if that counts as “conservative.”
- Musk’s disturbingly close ties with the tyrannical Chinese Communist Party have been thoroughly documented and require a separate piece to describe in detail, but many examples were spelled out in a 2021 Breitbart story.
- Musk’s drug use has long been out in the open, with no attempt to disguise it. In recent public appearances, his personal health appears to be in decline. If you’ve ever known an addict, the similarities are uncanny.
- In early April, Musk spent an entire weekend at extreme underground sex clubs in Berlin that specialize in fetishes and BDSM. This was widely reported worldwide but barely made a ripple in the U.S. media.
Though he denies it vehemently, Musk has documented connections to notorious convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and perpetual sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell. It’s more than the photo of Musk with Maxwell that has circulated wildly on social media again this week. He’s been caught outright lying on this question, claiming in a 2020 tweet that he didn’t know her.
“She photobombed me once at a Vanity Fair party several years ago. Real question is why VF invited her in the first place,” Musk tweeted at the time. But a 2016 email that surfaced during her 2021 criminal trial indicated that both met up for “kung fu practice.”
Before his death, Epstein himself acknowledged in a 2018 New York Times interview (published posthumously in 2019) that he had served as an “advisor” to Musk and Tesla with a vague job description.
According to the story by James B. Stewart, “Mr. Epstein avoided specifics about his work for Tesla. He told me that he had good reason to be cryptic: Once it became public that he was advising the company, he’d have to stop doing so, because he was ‘radioactive.’ He predicted that everyone at Tesla would deny talking to him or being his friend.”
Conservatives have rightly condemned fellow billionaire Bill Gates over his connections to Epstein, but want to give Musk a free pass? We look like hypocrites and are handing the left an easy talking point.
At this point, large swaths of the Right have dived straight into Musk’s personality cult, and few are going to consider the many obvious red flags. Yet the danger to congressional Republicans tweeting support for Musk and running for re-election this November is extreme. Are you begging for these to be used in campaign ads by opponents?
Hundreds of other examples of Musk’s erratic behavior—enough to fill a book—should send the Right running for cover. Consider yourselves warned: Musk is as toxic as the worst of Silicon Valley’s tech oligarchs. Supporting him will come at a great cost to conservatives.