Elon Musk is a free speech hero and a brilliant entrepreneur, but he’s not wise when it comes to politics.
Most of us have spheres of life where we are excellent and spheres where we’re terrible.
I’m not the type of guy you want checking the engines before the plane takes off. You wouldn’t want to employ me to do accounting all day. On the other hand, when it comes to creating and deconstructing narratives, I’m good. If you lend me something, I’ll return it to you in good condition or I will pay for any loss that occurred.
I enjoy too much saying provocative things which makes me a little mad, bad and dangerous to know, but this same quality sometimes translates into compelling vlogs and blogs.
I have no patience for consigning most people into broad categories of good and bad. It is more effective to place people in their correct genre.
Elon Musk is a tech and business visionary. That’s not a skill that necessarily translates into effective politics.
What Musk did was not just dumb, it had no chance of success. That’s the worst part, I think: The coup attempt had no hope of achieving its purported goals, the most it could have done was derail a productive effort and allow liberals to win. This is not how internal disputes can be allowed to proceed in a political movement. There is nothing but vanity, ego, and stupidity behind these moves.
Certainly, heavy drug use explains Musk’s erratic behavior, but at every turn Musk just seems to be divorced from reality and lashing out blindly. He has no idea what he’s doing. He is out of his depth. In short, his political inexperience has generated all sorts of problems for himself and others.
As quickly as Musk’s attempted rebellion failed, it’s important to remember that it was harmful even in failure. Musk was an asset and now he’s a huge and permanent liability. He provided Democrats and various anti-Trump bad actors on the Right with ammunition to deploy against Trump and undermine the very necessary implementation of Trump’s agenda. Musk set a terrible example for others, who might mistakenly believe that all this is “normal” rather than a counterproductive clown show. Panic and despair and bad behavior are contagious in modern conditions, where they have become so common that there are no real social barriers to their spread anymore. We are not working with the historical American middle class and the norms that propelled it (and the country) to such success.
So, what is to be done? It’s embarrassing to have to deal with Musk because it begs the question as to why such an unstable and moronic person, who apparently is a heavy drug user, was allowed into such a high position to begin with. However, I think harsh treatment is very necessary anyway. Bad actors often try to create these hostage situations: They cause trouble because they know getting rid of them would be trouble in its own right. In these situations, people are better off shooting the hostage rather than allowing bad behavior to go unpunished forever. As I’m sure most of you have noticed, someone who behaves in this way usually only gets worse.
I wrote most of this article a month ago but decided to sit on it because it was a little unfocused (it might still be) and too harsh after Musk disappeared with his tail between his legs when the coup failed. However, it seems that Musk has elected to once again reenter the public stage to try to block the Big Beautiful Bill, an item that I don’t know much about and don’t care much about beyond the historic increase in immigration funding that the bill will provide (more than $100 billion for border security and internal enforcement, along with numerous increases in fees and taxes to discourage immigration).
There doesn’t seem to be any alternative way to secure this funding in whole or in part, and in my opinion immigration is Trump’s most important issue, so one way or another at the end of the day the bill has to pass.
Having embarrassed himself in the way he has, Musk is likely going to try to play the spoiler forever. Every anti-Trump figure follows the same pattern: They get ejected from practical politics (to which Trump provides the only access) for bad behavior and realize that their only potential path back to influence is to engineer some kind of catastrophic collapse that will get Trump and his supporters out of the way, without regard to the consequences that that collapse, which would entail total liberal victory, might have. That’s what Massie and Paul are trying to do in their attempt to block the BBB. They complain that Trump has not achieved X, Y, or Z campaign promise while simultaneously trying to take away the tools that might allow him to do so.
People assume this kind of sabotage is a natural reaction to an internal political split. It’s not. One of the biggest mistakes I think Trump made was his treatment of former Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions was an early Trump supporter and outspoken immigration restrictionist, one of the earliest senior and respected politicians to support Trump during his 2016 primary run. Trump requested Sessions resign over Session’s decision to recuse himself from the Russiagate investigation, which caused Trump all sorts of problems. Even though I think Sessions made a big mistake there, it was motivated by Sessions’ good faith understanding of the situation and the law. Trump continued to treat Sessions harshly after Sessions left the White House, supporting his primary opponent during a 2020 Alabama Senate race.
Despite the harsh treatment he received, Sessions has not staked himself out as some outspoken opponent of Trump. He has not engaged in the kind of self-indulgent counterproductive behavior that typifies people who have fallings out with the Trump camp. He hasn’t cynically changed his views to account for his turn of political fortunes. This is all because Jeff Sessions is actually a patriot who loves his country and wants good things to happen to it, even if he’s not involved, while most conservatives who have elected to be anti-Trump are ultimately just in it for themselves. I hope there’s a reconciliation between Sessions and Trumpworld at some point, because people like Sessions are rare and always have something to offer.
For people like Musk, the only way to get rid of the threat they pose is to get rid of them. I hope that Musk is run out of politics and that the Trump administration pulls every lever they can against him: Piss test him at an inconvenient moment and take away his security clearance. Charge him with assault on a federal official for attacking Bessent and throw him in jail. Sue him for defamation by implication for his tweets about the Epstein list. Support shareholder efforts to get him removed from his companies in light of the huge fluctuations in stock prices that his erratic behavior has caused.
Musk has demonstrated that he’s only going to get worse and not learn anything from his mistakes. He made a lot of real contributions, but he did not buy a license to fuck everything up forever and no one should sell him one. Similar harsh treatment should be extended to anyone who supported Musk or who used Musk’s failed moment as an opportunity to get in cheap shots at the Trump admin. These guys are going to do this forever until they’re stopped. People must learn not to interact with them without hostility.
It’s unlikely that someone as wealthy and prominent as Musk could ever be fully removed from politics. However, he can be brought down a peg or three to permanently reduce his influence. He’s broken the law and should suffer the consequences for it. It’s not like Musk can go back to the Left, they’ll set out to kill him if they ever manage to regain political control. Most importantly, harsh treatment of Musk and his associates would demonstrate that bad behavior on the Right actually has consequences, which it currently doesn’t.
There are basically zero standards on the American Right. It is incredible the kind of characters who are tolerated and excused. Someone can engage in bad behavior for years, even directly advocating for liberals to be given full control, and still be welcomed back into the fold for merely saying the right words. That’s a consequence of how most people treat this stuff, as an idea contest or game rather than a struggle for political power with very real effects on you and everyone you know.
