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Thus Comes Musk [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-08
Men such as Elon Musk have always been with us, hateful and contemptuous of democratic norms.
What is different is the degree to which he flaunts it. MUSK publicly telling the MAGA faithful to "fuck themselves in the face" over the H1B visa issue, otherwise known as the import of cheap foreign labor, is stunning. After all, he just donated 250-million to a supposed populist political campaign targeted toward working people. Few grifters have ever so publicly taken satisfaction in their grift.
Sometimes, silence speaks so loudly. There was no criticism on the right of MUSK's very public and very crude remarks toward the MAGA faithful. Yes, there was criticism of his H1B support, but nothing about the crudeness of the language. The days when someone from the right would condemn the coarsening of public discourse, the lack of civility, X rated political speech, and so on, are over.
Beginning in 2016, Trump tore these standards down. He said what he thought and gave others permission to say what they thought. Which many experienced as liberating. So thin, indeed, is the veneer of civilization. The GOP hides less and less behind Christian virtue.
It would be better if they did, hypocrisy being the respect that vice pays to virtue. We will mourn the passing of our better selves from public life. Recasting the January 6th. insurrection as the work of freedom fighters is how it begins, the political violence to come.
Trump will soon be President, but MUSK now owns the GOP. He bought it. Or if you have a cynical turn of mind, he stole it, fair and square. It has been coming for so long that the truth finally had to show its face. Confess its contempt, for both MAGA and us all. For democracy.
The world's richest man jumps up and down, takes to his mega media social platform, X, and tells the congress what to do. Nothing going on here. Or to use the callous street term, It is what it is. Get used to it. And then there is MUSK cheering on the AfD, Germany's new Nazi party, because WTF, why not.
This is what MUSK represents, the end of pretense, of having to lie about fidelity to democratic norms. It is the end of the money interest professing faith in God and family, the working man. Instead, we get Elon, telling us that AI will create heaven on Earth, blabbering on about type two civilizations, improving the gene pool, the great America on the horizon. Or maybe the great America on Mars.
All before a nodding GOP.
For the philosophically inclined, you can't help but think about Nietzsche, the death of God and Christianity, and the Übermensch, the great giver of new values. But then the new values look so much like the pre-Christian values of the Roman Empire,
Which is what always lurks in the dark.
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