What Elon really wants to eliminate is your ability to rule yourself
That's why the survival of America depends on the #TeslaTakedown.
The devil's greatest trick is getting anyone to believe that Elon Musk—a man who has sucked a fortune from the taxpayers’ teat—gives a shit about budgets.
Not giving a shit is the defining aspect of what he imagines as his Inigo Montoya-like quest to seek revenge. You, an actual adult who has had an adult conversation with a woman in your life, may ask, “Revenge for what?”
Inigo’s father was killed. Elon’s dad is still around, impregnating his stepsister! Is it revenge for his daughter having her own life? The nebula of neediness between ears? The end of Apartheid?
Who knows or really cares? All we know is that he doesn’t give a shit about you or me. We’re just NPCs in the way of his revenge fantasy. So why would Elon Musk give a shit about infinite horrors he’s unleashing with the destruction of the infastructure that makes democracy in this country and around this world possible?
He’s taking a sledgehammer tied to a blowtorch to generations of progress made by the best of the American people. The list is endless. To begin with, he’s wrecking higher education, HIV prevention, the Great Lakes, global health in general, skiing, Social Security, free tax filing, actual government efficiency, lower education, farming, forests, the Veterans Administration, anything racists don’t like, cheap prescriptions, USAID, aviation safety, the planet, and the Constitution. (I’ll keep updating this list, so please include anything I missed with links in the comments.)
Elon will cost us tens of trillions
Meanwhile, any effort to document savings to taxpayers is a joke, designed to mock anyone who cares. And the chances he’ll eliminate more in spending taxpayers that would take in if he, Tesla, and other billionaires were taxed like typical citizens or companies is less than zero. I doubt it even gets close to cutting the amount of taxpayer milk he’s personally sucked up. And anything he’s cutting will likely do more harm than good. The actual price of eliminating the essential work he’s lawlessly stopping will eventually be measured in trillions, if not tens of trillions.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Republicans and our corporate right are thrilled by their opportunity to destroy everything good the government does.
The obsession with the “deficit” has always been a dog whistle. It’s intended to reverse the civil rights movement and retreat the government to where it was when it played the decisive role in enabling segregation. Elon is carrying out Grover Norquist’s dream of drowning America in a bathtub.
But the punchline is that the government will not be any smaller or cost less.
Republicans are about to pass a budget that will explode the amount we spend on deportations, another effort that is the equivalent of strip mining our economy and will also have costs that will have trillions of echo for generations.
Eliminating your ability to rule yourself
There’s a long tradition of pretending to care about government spending by picking random budget items and confusing the public with the details of some effort that likely has decades of serious study. The idea that the (white) people are being robbed by the wonders we do as a government is the core of the conservative tradition.
And it is the perfect facade for Elon, who is just trying to eliminate one thing—democracy. That’s vague, so let’s put it in terms people might care about: he thinks his ill-gotten wealth has given him the power to take away your ability to rule yourself.
More than anything, Elon wants to convince this country and the world that democracy, America’s greatest export, cannot be trusted. To give himself the power democracy has won for this nation, he’s trying to convince America and the world that representational government lacks the vigor of the kind of regimes he salutes with his straight arm.
That’s why even the idea that he’s doing this for personal gain or to avoid consequences for his crimes is too piddling—correct but too small. Yes, of course. But what he wants to do is destroy our freedom to hold him accountable. And if he takes a billion-dollar contract from Verizon, he’s doing that because he knows that anything his companies do will not follow the law or be accountable to anyone.
I’ve started thinking about Elonald as what this country’s authoritarians have always wanted: A Reverse FDR.
They want to gut what made the middle class possible, the institutions that empowered workers to educate themselves and organize. But that’s not it. They want to end a world order where democracy is seen as a goal that every country should aspire to and participate in on a global basis.
Why else would you want to effectively end NATO and the UN? How does sabotaging the United States do anything but empower tyranny and set the people who wish to work together to tackle many actual crises we face on our asses?
Sucks at Twitter, rules at fascism
There’s one story in my life that I’ve nailed. Compared to E.W. Niedermeyer, Paris Marx, and those who have been trying to expose Elon’s fraudulence for most of the last decade, I was way behind. But I had the best headline in April of 2023, almost two years and a different reality ago:
In that piece, I explained:
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter would rank among the worst business decisions in human history if the goal were … business. But since the Tesla CEO has become increasingly fixated on the objective of empowering rightwingers and weakening democracy everywhere – especially in the United States – you’d have to say the acquisition makes some sense.
And it could help Republicans win in 2024.
Soon after, I warned you that Elon was building a “Death Star” that was “all about empowering authoritarians and weakening democracy.”
In this week’s “Next Comes What,” Andrea explained why Elon makes such a useful target as we try to summon a mass civil movement that can save our Constitution:
I added the he’s not just a convenient target. He’s the real target. He’s the reason Trump won, and it’s his agenda Trump is enacting. It rhymes with Project 2025 and includes all the hostility to democracy and public good that the Republican Party always has had. But it sheds any pretense of caring about liberty or rights other than as a cudgel to take power from the people.
He shocked the world by getting inside the payment systems of the most powerful government on Day One of Trump’s administration. Remember the promise that Trump would be a dictator on day one? It was kept, but by Elon.
If democracy survives, we’ll look at what Elon is doing now the same way we now view the aftermath of 9/11 or January 6th itself—unforgivable attacks on our democracy that, in retrospect, everyone should have seen coming.
Elon goes down or we do
The difference between Elon and the GOP isn’t in philosophy but it in shamelessness. Elon can afford to be even more ridiculously absurd in his callousness and harm than even Donald Trump.
He’s confident he can get away with hacking the organs out of a living government for many reasons. He owns the loudest megaphone in the world, the app that still today most journalists use to get and share their news. He’s expert in the sort of scam tactics that define the rise of cryptocurrency. But foremost, he thinks even if we ever have fair elections again, he’ll be able to buy them, again.
That’s why the #TeslaTakedown isn’t just good fun, but it’s definitely that. Stopping Elon’s revenge fixation is a matter of national survival. It’s also our best hope for eliminating the Citizens United regime that made Elon’s domination possible and beginning the century of repair that will be needed to recover from what Elon’s destroying now.
The best revenge is a mass movement against billionaire rule
Elon Musk feels wronged.
And this large bleating child believes the only way that wrong can be righted is if he gets to spend the rest of his life deciding exactly what hundreds of millions of Americans want. It’s absurd that this is even a possibility. But it’s more than that at this point, it’s a likelihood. And it grows more likely every day we wait for someone else to stop him.
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