the ELON edition

NF, One L
Issue #9

1. Okay, okay, let’s just get this all straight: Elon Musk donated 277 million dollars to the Trump Campaign, the single greatest amount by an individual in American history.

2. Elon Musk, at least for now, at least on paper, is the wealthiest man in the world.

3. Elon Musk owns Twitter, which has 586 million users. For over a year, Elon Musk used his social media arm to shovel free advertising/propaganda for Donald Trump into the maw of 586 million people, and altered the site’s algorithm to promote those promoting Trump, which unquestionably altered the election results to whatever degree anyone wishes to throw graphs/charts/or percentages at.

4. The reason Elon Musk could do so is primarily because in 2010 the Republican Supreme Court codified the idea that money was free speech in the Citizens United decision. Money is not free speech. Money is a tool with which to sway elections in a way that far surpasses speech. Money is money that can be used to buy speech, which means buying up enough speech to restrict less-desired speech. So money, at least in terms of politics, is actually most effective as a weapon of silencing dissent.

5. If money were Free Speech, there would have been no reason for the American Revolution, to have left Britain, to purport that we live in a democratic republic instead of a monarchy, or to have any problem with living under the rule of kings, who as kings have all the money, and therefore all the speech, and so the constitution we spend so much time patting ourselves on the back for might as well be a $20 bill.

6. Elon Musk is an immigrant. Elon Musk is South African via Canada. Elon Musk’s grandfather was an avowed Nazi supporter who spent time in jail because of it. Elon Musk seems to have adopted his grandfather’s Nazi leanings, and isn’t shy about letting people know about them by, for instance, regularly giving Nazi salutes, supporting far right proto-Nazi German political parties, and promoting/retweeting accounts with Nazi leanings to his 200 million followers. Oddly enough, South Africa, home of mandated racial separation, was a haven for post WWII Nazis and their supporters to relocate. Like, for instance, Elon Musk’s grandfather.

7. Elon Musk, in exchange for his support of Donald Trump, was for the first four months of Donald Trump’s presidency made an entirely un-vetted, un-elected, un-confirmed by legislature or judiciary business figure who, instead of the president himself, was the most powerful man in the world.

8. As head of DOGE, Elon Musk was given unfettered access to vital personal and financial information of American Citizens. Elon Musk owns many businesses which are likely to benefit, when armed with the personal financial information of American Citizens, in any number of yet-to-be considered ways.

9. Elon Musk does a lot of drugs. Ketamine is apparently his primary jam. We know this because he talks about it freely, as do his friends and ex-wives, on the record, who have done those drugs with him. Ketamine is an equestrian veterinary tranquilizer that is said to put human users in a dissociative state. I have never taken Ketamine because, due to the fact that I spend a lot of my sober time attempting to be less societally dissociative, it does not sound like a lot of fun. Dissociation as recreation is therefore debatable, but I think both Republicans and Democrats can admit that someone who regularly chemically disassociates should probably not be wielding chain saws, celebrated for saluting Nazis, or allowed to carve up social programs on a whim.

10. The inevitable rift between Elon Musk and Donald Trump appears to have become flammable following Donald Trump’s decision to pull Musk’s right-hand-man, Jared Isaacman, from contention to head NASA. In a possibly unrelated coincidence, NASA is a government-funded space agency. Elon Musk owns SPACE X, a privately funded space agency. If Elon Musk’s right-hand man ran NASA, it is conceivable the information one is privy to while running NASA could be valuable to someone owning SPACE X.

11. In high-level academic circles this is known as a “conflict of interest.” In even higher-level academic circles, paying 277 million dollars to help someone get elected and then be awarded massive government contracts for your businesses, plus being given blind control to alter policy or arms of government without oversight, is known as “Cronyism”, “Pay For Play”, “The Antithesis of Democracy”, and even “Illegal”.

12. It is therefore a fascinating situation on any number of levels, the main one to me being this: Forget the 30% of MAGA that is clinically brain dead, why are all the supposed adults in the room, the America-first, freedom-loving, patriotic, founding father Republicans okay with any part of this anti-democratic travesty? Let alone all of it?

13. Elon Musk says the reason the Jeffrey Epstein files have never been released is because Donald Trump is in them.
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14. There is no thirteen.