The left hates This Man because he’s a twin threat that doesn’t tolerate BS
Why does the left hate Elon Musk?
It’s simple, really: Because he can’t be controlled, and because he doesn’t tolerate BS.
The left can’t stand either. It insists on control, to the point of systematically eliminating or co-opting anything that might serve as an independent power center. (Their fear is justified: “Music clubs” turned out to be a major factor in Czechoslovakia’s 1989 anticommunist Velvet Revolution.) And it insists on not merely spreading BS, but on requiring people to repeat and endorse its BS as a sign of submission.
Musk is thus a twin threat. As the sometime richest man in the world, he has a lot of power, and it’s not under anyone else’s control. And he’s a nerd, with a nerd’s low tolerance for bull. Where more socially “polished” people would go out of their way to show fealty to leftist tropes popular among the Gentry Class regardless of their absurdity, Musk is happy to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
When I was a kid, comic books and novels were full of “tycoons” — brash, vigorous men who had made fortunes and were out to change the world. But in real life, tycoons were pretty scarce. It was an era when IBM was the biggest tech company, and everything was done by committee. Which was disappointing, because the tycoons seemed to be the ones interested in funding spaceships, time machines, moon bases and so on.
Well, now it’s the 21st century, and the tycoons are back.
And the thing about tycoons is that they’re not timid creatures of committees. They speak and act on their own, and they don’t let themselves be constrained by the conventions of less capable people.
Musk is our greatest tycoon, and while NASA can’t seem to get a spaceship into orbit reliably, he’s been launching rockets and satellites and astronauts at a pace that no mere nation-state can achieve. And he’s doing this while also manufacturing electric cars that no one else can match, digging tunnels that no one else can equal, and dominating the field of residential solar energy. His critics, meanwhile, only dominate the field of kvetching.
And he’s had it with their BS. After Twitter censorship reached the point of ridiculousness, he responded by setting out to buy it. Now as a result of that effort, it turns out that Twitter is, well, kind of a sham. About half of President Biden’s followers turn out to be fake. (So do nearly a quarter of Musk’s.) Much of America’s journalistic and political agenda appears to be directed by bots.
Worse yet, Musk’s intolerance for BS is starting to spread to his fellow tycoons. Amazon pioneer and fellow space-enthusiast Jeff Bezos recently mocked the Biden administration’s Ministry of Truth by suggesting that it fact-check Biden’s nonsensical claim that today’s inflation is the result of corporations not paying enough in taxes.
Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, has been a reliable supporter of the establishment. If he’s straying from the reservation, who knows what’s next?
This is a mortal threat, because the left’s BS can only flourish in an environment where no one challenges it.
Expect blowback: Musk recently warned that he would become the target of political attacks, and that’s already happening. He’s also facing attacks from the Democrats’ weaponized federal bureaucracy, with the SEC — what Musk calls the “short sellers’ enrichment commission” — going after him for suddenly discovered “issues” with Tesla. Meanwhile the FAA and EPA are suddenly slowing down SpaceX’s work with dubious environmental demands. Democrats are particularly incensed that Musk has built successful businesses without unions.
The problem for the Biden administration is that it’s become weak and contemptible, meaning that fewer people are afraid. (Biden’s Hispanic support has fallen to an incredibly low of 26%).
“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk wrote this week. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”
Expect more lefty defections, as Musk reminds people that there’s no need to kowtow.
That it took an immigrant to remind Americans of this fundamental American truth doesn’t speak well of our current political culture. But thank God — and Elon — that someone’s doing it.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
Why the left is trying so hard to paint Elon Musk as a dangerous man
A year after being named Time magazine’s person of the year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is attempting to acquire Twitter.
To listen to Musk’s critics, you’d believe it’s a betrayal almost on par with Hitler invading Poland not long after being named Time’s man of the year in 1938.
A writer for the left-wing Web site Salon worried that a Musk takeover of Twitter would enable fascism in America. A New York University journalism professor lamented that posting on Twitter with the threat of Musk looming feels like partying at a Berlin nightclub “at the twilight of Weimar Germany.” Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich warned, “This is what oligarchy looks like.” And so on.
A report for the news site Axios compared Musk to “a movie super-villain” and related — accurately — that journalists who break news and opine on Twitter “really don’t want to be working in Elon Musk’s private playpen.”
No, they much prefer to be working in a playpen whose ever-shifting rules — constantly changing to keep up with the latest progressive priorities — are written by the kind of people who thought the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop should have been suppressed.
In their eyes, Elon Musk is guilty of a thought crime — namely, believing that thought should be free and should be freely expressed on a social media platform with outsize influence on the nation’s public life.
Not too long ago, this would have been considered a core American belief, especially welcome to journalists whose work depends on the First Amendment. That was before content moderation, weaponized against one side of the political spectrum, supposedly became the thin line protecting American democracy from the onset of misinformation-driven dictatorship.
Who knew that so much could depend on policing what pronouns apply to trans people or cracking down on users who believed in the lab-leak theory early in the pandemic?
Musk presents a clear and present danger to the use of Twitter as a one-sided instrument to impose progressive rules on the public debate.
From one point of view, Twitter should be beneath him. In contrast to many other Silicon Valley giants, Musk has focused on creating revolutionary physical products in the real world, whether electric cars or rockets. Transforming the American space program makes figuring out a better way for people to share their opinions 280 characters at a time seem quite puny in comparison.
Musk is firmly in the tradition of great American entrepreneurs whose audacious vision, business acumen and showmanship have made them larger-than-life celebrities — think Thomas Edison.
They have usually been willing to think for themselves, a quality now in short supply.
In today’s America, world-famous entrepreneurs and the companies that they’ve created, which are supposed to be all about innovation and disruption, happily let themselves get pulled along in the slipstream of progressive groupthink.
Companies built on great risks are deathly afraid that they might have to weather a critical hashtag or a tantrum from their woke millennial employees.
People who would presumably object to the government telling them what to say and think are too willing to let free-floating social-media mobs effectively dictate to them.
Musk, a kind of libertarian who has a puckish sense of humor and willingness to defy authority (just ask the Securities and Exchange Commission), rejects this thoughtless and often cowardly conformity.
They have usually been willing to think for themselves, a quality now in short supply.
In today’s America, world-famous entrepreneurs and the companies that they’ve created, which are supposed to be all about innovation and disruption, happily let themselves get pulled along in the slipstream of progressive groupthink.
Companies built on great risks are deathly afraid that they might have to weather a critical hashtag or a tantrum from their woke millennial employees.
People who would presumably object to the government telling them what to say and think are too willing to let free-floating social-media mobs effectively dictate to them.
Musk, a kind of libertarian who has a puckish sense of humor and willingness to defy authority (just ask the Securities and Exchange Commission), rejects this thoughtless and often cowardly conformity.
As with the podcaster Joe Rogan, another recent target of progressive ire, his fundamental offense is being uncategorizable and willing to question conventional wisdom. Like Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling, Musk is too rich and famous to be canceled or cowed — to be more precise, he’s the richest man in the world, and he enjoys a public fight and genuinely disdains the censors and scolds.
All this makes him a very dangerous man indeed, and perhaps just the guy to make the statement against intimidation and in favor of free speech that this moment so desperately needs.