For a genius, Elon Musk sure got it wrong. He fell for the okey-doke. He took seriously what he was told when he arrived in America. That was a grave error because the story he was told – and the story those of us outside the ruling caste are told – is not the same story that the ruling caste tells itself. It should be, but it isn’t. All that stuff about hard work and free speech – that’s great stuff. But the hard truth is that those who would rule us do not believe a word of it. The hard work part applies only to us; the free speech only to them. And they were understandably baffled when Elon showed up and demonstrated that he fell for their scam.
Dude, what gives? It was all rube bait to get the proles to toil and obey. But now that Elon is acting like what he was told was real, well, that’s screwing everything up.
What was Elon told? He was told that hard work pays off and that it is the key to success. And that is true for us, in the sense that we get to work hard even though it less and less pays off in a country where the deck is stacked against everyone but the feudal few in their blue fiefdoms, like the nicer parts of DC, LA, and NYC. We get to work hard, and we expect a lot from the people we supervise too. Elon worked hard and expected a lot from his folks at Tesla, and he built a massive company with a successful product (successful enough that I own some of its stock and have made a pretty paper profit even after the recent decline resulting from the establishment’s concerted attack on the uppity entrepreneur). Then he did the same at SpaceX, which is doing amazing things. But what do these enterprises have in common?
They make stuff. Unlike so much of what the consultants, scribblers, synergy sellers, and diversity hustlers of the ultra-white-collar class do, what Elon’s companies do is real. A Tesla either runs or does not. SpaceX builds tubes full of explosives that must blow up into space without blowing to bits. It has to work, or that’s the end of that. It’s not how it works for some assistant gender studies professor at Gumbo State, who can publish “Decolonizing the Patriarchal Dynamics of the Male Gaze In the Music of 4 Non-Blondes” in the Northeastern Journal of Phallocentric Resistance and not just keep getting a paycheck but get treated like an intellectual instead of a clown.
Making Teslas was one thing, but Twitter, well, that’s another thing entirely. Twitter operated with mediocre functionality – nothing detonated when Twitter went down except blue check’s heads. It operated while run by a bunch of spoiled brats living in San Francisco presuming to decide what the rest of us can see and hear. And they worked, sort of, three-hour days, often in their footie PJs, often at home or sometimes at an office that seems more like a playground for awkwardly adulting 20-somethings. But Elon did not get that reality. He thought Twitter was a business instead of a framework of sinecures for the sons, daughters, and non-binary otherkin of the ruling caste to act as cultural curators. Disgorged from overpriced colleges, these unaccomplished yet smug twits imagined their worthless credentials gave them some sort of divine right to rule, and also a free pass from actually working hard.
When Elon took over, he saw them lolling about on bean bags drinking subsidized kombucha and fired a whole bunch of them. And you know what? Twitter was just fine without them. But the newly unemployed drones were not fine, nor were their cultural fellow travelers who joined the outrage against the guy who simply expected hard work and focuses from those he wrote a paycheck to. But hard work and focus are for the suckers who sweat when they work, who dig, who hammer, who soldier. It’s not for our precious Kadens and Ashleigh. How could Elon not know that?
Probably because he was focused on actually accomplishing something rather than gliding through life as part of the unaccountable ruling class. Elon believed that the concept of hard work applies to everyone, not just people named Ernie, Roberta, or Jose. But that was never the intent of the people at the top of the pyramid. They expect us to slave for them as they free spirit their way through life following their “passions” and posting Instagram selfies from places the rest of us probably will never see.
And Elon Musk was also told, when he arrived from repressive South Africa (via repressive Canada), that you could say whatever you wanted in America, that free speech was our highest secular value. And it was never a problem for Elon because he was not a conservative guy, not one of those evil right-wingers who were getting censored. What he said was just fine – he was within the paradigm and no one was telling him to shut up and be quiet. It was no big deal because his speech was always free. That’s the thing about free speech – the issue never comes up if you are not saying something that offends those in power.
So Elon believed what he was told, that we could all say what we thought without fear of being gagged or punished since he was never gagged or punished. After all, he was a Democrat. But that restless curiosity that led him to build Tesla and SpaceX from nothing drew him beyond the thought boundaries set out for the ruling caste. Elon started looking at intriguing new ideas, ideas not in vogue within his caste. And what he saw could not be unseen. It was the gagging of the hilarious Babylon Bee that broke it open for him. The Bee made a funny comment about the man pretending to be a woman who is the surgeon general being the Woman of the Year and BOOM – off Twitter.
The ruling caste decreed that you could not point out that a man pretending to be a woman was a man pretending to be a woman. That was mind-blowing to Elon. That’s pretty basic free-speech stuff. We are not talking about incitements to murder, pornography, or the revelation of national defense secrets. No, this was a joke about how a man pretending to be a woman is a man pretending to be a woman. And for making that joke – for crossing one of the red lines of the ruling caste by saying what everyone on earth knows but they don’t want you to say – Babylon Bee, an outlet millions of people read, was to be silenced and perhaps even driven to bankruptcy.
Oh, that Elon and his linear thinking again. He believed in free speech and its inevitable consequence – that people will say things that other people dislike. But Elon is a man of action. So he bought Twitter. And he is now freeing those gagged by the ruling caste.
And the ruling caste is aghast.
It is interesting to watch Elon as he sifts through the censorship regime on Twitter. The disconnect between America he was promised and the America of 2022 is blowing his mind. He’s still not a conservative – all that red-pilling you see is simply him holding Twitter up to the standards he was told America adhered to when he landed here. He was told that you get to say what you want, even if other people – including the most powerful people in society – do not approve. He’s just making that true again.
Elon deserves our thanks for the substantive relief he has brought to the muzzled and the gagged (though I and others are still throttled and stuck within the same 2K follower count band for six months – follow me at @KurtSchlichter and fight the power!). But we should save our greatest gratitude for how his naïveté and innocence – for which he should be applauded for stubbornly clinging to – have revealed the rotten core of our ruling caste. Politicians were outraged that conservatives would be allowed to speak freely and threatened his businesses and even his freedom – notice how all these “investigations” suddenly happened the minute he challenged the liberal Borg? Under leftist pressure, other corporations withdrew advertising to try to kill off Twitter – such is their terror at one outlet not under their Birkenstocks’ heels. And the regime media melted down at the thought of “unmoderated” content escaping to circulate among the proles.
Guess who they think should be the moderators?
They lied to us about hard work. Oh, it was fine for us to toil to get them shiny electric cars or rockets. But hard work was not meant for, you know, them. And they lied to us about free speech. That was meant for them, and only them. And only within the appropriate bounds.
Elon Musk’s crime is that he believed the lies that the ruling caste told him, but he went one step further and dared hold the ruling caste to its lies. That’s why they hate him That’s why they want to destroy him. And that’s why we should not only thank him but also have his back.