NUTTIGE IDIOOT

“Nuttige Idioot” is Afrikaans for “Useful Idiot.” Two words that explain unreconstructed Afrikaner white boy Elon Muck perfectly.

And his useful idiocy to the Fascist American Right is accelerating.

Muck probably does personally believe in white supremacy; certainly the rest of his dodgy family, who made their money profiteering off Afrikaner war crimes in the era of Apartheid, hve shown no indication that they have accepted the changes of the past 30 years in South Africa. His best friend is German immigrant Peter Thiel, who brought and active love for Hitler and Nazism with him. Birds of a feather do indeed flock together. As to whether he believes any of the rest of it is not exacty proven, but if he’s doing it for a lark and doesn’t believe any of it, then he’s even more dangerous than he appears to be.

Yes, everybody’s sick of Elon Muck; I’m sick of him, too. But the problem for all of us, even people like me who won’t be found dead on the platform is that Twitter, with all the myriad flaws it’s floundered through since Day One, has managed to become the most influential social media platform out there. Just like what Facebook, it isn’t limited to pop culture and sports and cat pictures. It’s now used by journalists, activists, researchers, doctors, diplomats, and heads of state and has managed to become a critical source of both news and learned opinion. The fact that some readers of my genre of books declared that my friend Barrett Tillman and I are the “best” authors in our minnow pond - and that a bunch of Twitter users agreed with them - got me noticed by a New York literary agent who now represents me (and Barrett) on some projects I didn’t think I could ever find a way to do - and I didn’t even have to go bother myself with twittering! That’s how powerful Twitter can be.

So, for Muck to dismantle Twitter is bad enough. But to then turn it into a geyser of fake news, disinformation, and hate speech, far beyond what it was in the Bad Old Days, makes us all less safe as a country. Elon Muck is a national security risk and needs to be treated as such. By the government.

The narcissism/radicalization cycle that took hold of Muck at some point in the past two years has been accelerating rapidly, with acceleration growing on acceleration, since he finalized his acquisition of Twitter - was it only six weeks ago?

Within days of the takeover, Muck established relations with every member of the Dark Forces that had wrecked the place and led to those individuals being de-platformed beginning in 2020. He is now in near constant contact and dialogue with the most rabid conspiratorial fantasists and anti-Semites on the internet. Whether he really knows or understands any of his new enthusiasms is irrelevant. He jumped head first into the “globalist”/pedophile vortex which created the “Pizzagate” conspiratorial fantasy that led to the rise of the entire QAnon cult. He accuses former Twitter management who he has organization arguments with of intentionally allowing Twitter to become a breeding ground of pedophilia and child sex trafficking - all the while working with the people who probably are the pedophiles and sex traffickers if recent arrests mean anything! These false accusations and defamations rose to the level last week that last Friday Muck drew a rebuke from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey - up until that tweet, one of his bigger supporters in the takeover.

The message Muck is now broadcasting on the most powerful social media platform is indistinguishable from the far-right claims that “globalist” enemies are behind a vast Satanic network of pedophiles who prey on our children. Despite our surprise that a guy who once appeared to be a Liberal Hero with his “invention” of “the best electric car,” and his “invention” of a successful space exploration company has now “turned” 180 degrees shouldn’t be so surprising. Musk’s main allies now are literally the people who created Pizzagate and all the other conspiratorial fantasies and blood libels.

Watching Muck tells us where liberalism and conservatism are these days. Back when Musk was playing at being a liberal, he was a normal billionaire liberal. Flamboyant and egotistical, but the politics were more or less on the side. His pet issue was climate change, which he rode hard, though now one wonders if he’d have been such an environmental warrior if the government subsidies for his tinny electric toys - the primary source of Tesla’s semi-existant profits - had been less than they were. Had he not been the lib’rul fanboi he was, the Rich White Libs might not have bought in on the cars - and now that he’s gone Nazi, the cars are no longer the Official Car of Rich White Lib’ruls.

Let’s remember something that was there from the beginning: Muck is not this “creative genius.” HE DID NOT INVENT ANYTHING. Not Paypal. Not Tesla. Not Space-X. What he did was bring his part of his dodgy family’s dodgy profits from their participation in Apartheid Afrikaner war crimes to America and invest it in these projects, which had all been created by other people. Other people from whom he stole the credit when he claimed invention of Pay-Pal and named himself “Chief Engineer” of Space-X. He’s the modern version of the Swedish Nazi who went to Germany in 1938 and became an SS officer, and then at the end of the war stole a couple suitcases full of gold fillings taken from dead Jews in the concentration camp he worked at and returned to Sweden to found IKEA.

Muck regularly engages with and affirms the various claims and attacks of Mike Cernovich, the main promoter of “Pizzagate,” the conspiratorial fantasy that Democratic elites were using a D.C. pizza shop as the center of a child sex ring, that eventually evolved into QAnon. He’s also affirmed the claims of Lara Logan, who was recently banned form Newsmax - of all places! - for claiming World Economic Forum “elites” were “dining on the blood of children.” We now know that literal blood libels can get you banned from Newsmax. But Muck loves her.

Musk’s giving these people the keys to the Twitter kingdom. Former “contrarian” journalist Matt Taibbi, who jumped through the looking glass back in 2020 and Bari Weiss have become Muck’s in-house “reporters.” Whatever their problems, neither ranks with Cernovich and Logan and their “Scoops” from “The Twitter Files” have merely demonstrated that former Twitter executives were worried about doing their jobs right. But each new “revelation” has brought a new round of accusations from the far-right media sources working with them.

Jim Baker, the former FBI general counsel who later joined Twitter was working with Taibbi and Weiss on their initial releases. But then Muck’s new “friends” informed him of Baker’s background with his role in the purported Russia-Russia-Russia “hoax.” He was summarily fired.

Just last week, Muck’s new “friends” have decided that the current Twitter employees assigned to feed them information are actually part of the larger anti-conservative conspiracy. And it comes with the defamatory accusations that these people are promoting pedophilia and child sexual exploitation. In the Far right fever swamp, these are not those actual terrible things, but are rather clubs to be used against political enemies: anyone seen to support the rights of the LBGT community.

This past weekend, Muck went after Yoel Roth, head of Trust and Safety at Twitter. Because Roth is gay and Jewish he’s been a particular target for the far-right. Roth stayed on during Muck’s early weeks at Twitter and was frequently put forward to defend against claims Muck was promoting hate on the platform. But last week Roth took the fateful step of mildly criticizing Muck’s engagement with the right in public. Saturday night Muck retaliated by insinuating that Roth might be a pedophile, which explained Twitter’s purported laxity toward “groomers” and pedophiles.

Cheerleading a smear campaign by the global far right against a gay Jew is not only morally terrible and vicious. This stuff frequently leads to real world violence, with online conversations now filled with every kind of anti-Semitism, images of gas chambers, hook-nosed cartoons and worse. There is really no limit to the predation and malevolence Muck is capable of. He’s done this before when someone didn’t recognize his Glorious Genius, most prominently to a British caver in 2018 when the man who ultimately saved a group of Thai youths trapped in a flooded cave had the temerity to decline Muck’s suggestion he use a submarine during the rerscue effort. Muck then cut loose with “claims” of the rescuer’s involvement in pedophilia, which seriously negatively affected the rescue effort.

For questioning Muck even mildly, Roth is on the receiving end of just the sort of campaign he was charged with preventing, now led by the owner of the platform he was charged with policing. When its led by the guy with 120 million followers who owns the platform it’s a different matter entirely.

Muck’s outrage on Sunday was to promote a tweet that pushes the right wing goal of prosecuting Dr.Fauci. For what criminal offense?

The fact is that Muck doesn’t mean anything with this. He didn’t mean it when he said that Twitter removing Hunter Biden dick pics at the request of the Biden campaign was the clearest possible example of a First Amendment violation - an event that didn’t actually happen.

These aren’t arguments. They’re poses. They’re Muck “virtue signaling” to his new in-group. Muck’s model for Twitter 2.0 is 8chan, the site you go to when you’re looking to connection with the worst filth the internet has to offer - neo-Nazi indoctrination, misogynistic trolling, and every form of bigotry and hate you can imagine.

As far as Muck being anything close to “conservative,” there is no evidence he opposes abortion. His constant pursuit of government subsidies suggests he is not in favor of free markets. His sympathyand support for Putin in Russia and XI in China suggests that he has no understanding of the idea of American-lead internationalism. His “conservatism” is limited to shitposting and “triggering the libs.”

Four years ago, Muck tweeted, "Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI." This pas weekend, he tweeted, “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters.”

If “Woke Mind Virus,” AI, and Climate Change are now his three interests, if he really believed any of them, wouldn’t her find allies for the struggle against WMV are don’t also insist climate change is a hoax?

The truth is, Muck doesn’t really have political beliefs; he has personal interests, and they are closely connected to his financial interests.

The hypocrisy at the center of Muck’s tenure at Twitter is crucial to understanding his political activism. Under his management, Twitter let back on its platform organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville; neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin; and election deniers and insurrectionists like Roger Stone, while at the same time suspending accounts that mocked Muck or expressed left-leaning views. He is promoting what Adam Serwer defined as a “belief in a new constitutional right. Most important, this new right supersedes the free-speech rights of everyone else: the conservative right to post.”

Muck’s far-right activism, like everything else in his life, is personally motivated by the accumulation of money and “being perceived as a visionary who will reshape human society.”

But unlike Trum, the epitome of the Twitter Troll, Muck is a try-hard - as he has been with everything else he has pursued. Over at 4chan, his Fauci tweet barely merited discussion. “Elon is just being controversial to drive traffic to his website,” as one poster there put it. Muck is a failure at being anything other than cringey.

Saturday night in San Francisco, alleged “comedian” who’s no longer so funny Dave Chapelle called Muck to the stage during his show, where he was booed relentlessly by the crowd for over ten minutes, unable to get a word in, and according to people there he “looked stunned.” The ever-tasteful Chapelle then tried to claim the boos were coming from Twitter employees that Musk fired. Chappelle then said that all the people booing had terrible seats, and they were “way up there.”

In response to the Fauci outrage, he received the following”

“Re Musk tweet? Courting vaccine-deniers doesn’t seem like a smart business strategy, but the issue is this: could you just leave a good man alone in your seemingly endless quest for attention?" Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).

"Elon Musk wants to criminalize Anthony Fauci because he disagrees with him. Elon is no champion of free speech," Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.).

"It’s America. You can select any pronouns you damn well please. But Anthony Fauci has likely saved more human lives than any living person in the world. Shame on you," Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.).

"Dr. Fauci is a national hero who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness & many contributions to public health. Despite your business success, you will be remembered most for fueling public hate & divisions. You may have money, but you have no class." former CIA director John Brennan.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre condemned the tweets as "incredibly dangerous" when asked at a briefing on Monday. Musk's "personal attacks ... are disgusting and they are divorced from reality, and we will continue to call that out and be very clear about that," she said.

The other side: "I affirm your pronouns Elon," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

Last night, the Twitter Trust and Safety Council scheduled a meeting to “discuss recent developments” at Twitter. Feeling anxious about what might happen, Muck dissolved the Council twenty minutes before the meeting.

And this morning, Elton John - who probably has more followers on Twitter than Muck, announced he was leaving Twitter and recommended his followers do the same.

All of the major advertisers Muck needs to pay that looming multi-billion interest payment 100 days from now have either left Twitter or paused their advertising. If a few hundred milliong Twitter users leave, that list of departing advertisers is going to get longer. Muck will either declare bankruptcy, which will destroy his relationships with his fellow richies who personally invested in his game, or be forced to sell even more Tesla stock, which will drive its value down, at the same time that the Wall Street vultures are developing plans to short Tesla stock into a forced bankruptcy.

Muck may soon be wishing those kids he was hiding from at school when he was 12 had found him and put him out of his misery then.

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