Why Do They Despise Musk? ~ VDH

Townhall 

As the midterms approached, the Left went nearly berserk in its hatred of trillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Yet its escalating venom would have been almost inconceivable before 2022, when Musk publicly declared that he would be voting Republican.

Before Musk's recent political reversal (he voted for both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020), he was beloved by the Left as the first successful upstart challenger to the century-long dominance of the Big Three fossil-fuel automakers. Liberals once loved his revolutionary, electrically powered Teslas and drove them proudly as a green virtue signal.

Not now. Far-left podcaster Jennifer Welch has run out of Nazi epithets for Musk. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — ironically, given her own limited talents — trashed Musk as "probably one of the most unintelligent billionaires I have ever met or seen or witnessed."

Fellow multibillionaire Bill Gates smeared Musk for supposedly "killing the world's poorest children" by promoting cuts to U.S. foreign aid programs.

A few weeks ago, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich even demanded that Musk's SpaceX and Starlink be nationalized and run by the government — a move more associated with Cuba or the old Soviet Union than with the United States of America.

Such unhinged venom can contribute to violence. In early 2025, leftists launched more than 80 attacks against Tesla cars and dealerships — and sometimes even individual Tesla drivers. Similar cases of vandalism and arson have continued into 2026.

So why did the Left go from hailing Musk as the next Thomas Edison to treating him as public enemy No. 1 and targeting him with death threats?

The Left once loved all the tech and Wall Street billionaires who ensured that Democrats always had more money than Republicans.

Billionaire George Soros and his various foundations have channeled well over half a billion dollars to left-wing candidates and causes in just the last six years alone. Billionaires like Reid Hoffman, Tom Steyer, and the now-imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried gave hundreds of millions to the Democratic Party and its candidates.

But Musk now embodies everything the enraged Left hates.

First and most obviously, Musk no longer endorses Democrats. Instead, in 2024 and 2026, he donated hundreds of millions of dollars to help Republican candidates.

Second, Musk gave lavishly to the hated 2024 Trump campaign, especially in critical swing states. Furious Democrats actually blame him for Trump's victory.

Third, Musk paid billions of dollars to buy the liberal social media company Twitter. He eliminated censorship, renamed it X, and turned it into a free-speech platform that no longer catered to left-wing dogmas.

Fourth, Musk was instrumental in conducting the 2025 DOGE cuts that reduced the federal workforce by some 270,000 employees. DOGE also helped slash USAID programs that had often been involved in politicking abroad to support globalist and left-wing causes.

Fifth, the spurned Left has started hating billionaires as much as it once worshiped them. Its members now talk openly about confiscating wealth, nationalizing private corporations, taxing net worth and unrealized gains, and regulating and suing large companies to drive them out of business.

In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated some $420 million to help ensure greater Democratic turnout — and they were deified for helping to defeat Trump.

Now, Zuckerberg has been talking about fleeing left-wing California if it passes a "billionaire tax" on net worth.

Billionaires like Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Oracle's Larry Ellison, and Palantir's Alex Karp — along with other Silicon Valley magnates such as Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and David Sacks — have drifted rightward, fearing the new agenda of the Islamist-sympathizing socialist Democratic Party.

Sixth, and perhaps most important, Musk — one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the last hundred years — is not shy about his own talents and spectacular successes, ensuring even more left-wing envy and venom.

Musk not only brought stranded U.S. astronauts home but also helped revive the moribund NASA space program.

This year, his company will launch more satellites than all other countries and private corporations combined. Indeed, by June 2026, it had sent into space more satellites than humanity had launched in total since Sputnik. SpaceX's behemoth Starship, the most powerful rocket in history, dwarfs its Chinese, European, and Russian rivals.

The upstart Tesla has the highest market capitalization ($1.5 trillion) of any car company in the world. Musk's social media platform X may have nearly 600 million monthly active users.

His artificial intelligence company, SpaceX Super Intelligence, and its Grok model are among the world's best-known.

Musk's Neuralink may become the first company that allows the paralyzed and the blind to regain their lost abilities.

His Boring Company has created a subterranean transport service in Las Vegas and is building another in Nashville.

Musk is history's first trillionaire. He is a mechanical and business genius, and he may well be one of the most brilliant technological entrepreneurs, not just of the last hundred years but of all time.

So is it any wonder that the new democratic socialist Left, with its insistence on equality of results, despises everything that Musk does and represents?

Podcast thread for Nov 6

 

when there's good material, it can make any day feel amazing.

We’ve Gone Soft

Townhall 

Tuesday night was rough. Period.

The conflict in Iran, even without American boots on the ground, seemed to be a major sticking point for people, particularly because of its impact on gas prices and supply chains.

So here’s the shtick — have we gone soft? Have we become so shortsighted that we're no longer willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term security? I'd rather pay more at the pump than face the consequences of a nuclear-armed terrorist regime.

We've become so accustomed to the comfort our freedom affords us that we seem increasingly unwilling to sacrifice any of it to protect that very freedom.

During World War II (or World War Eleven, according to Ilhan Omar), Americans endured extensive rationing and donated household and community metals to support the war effort. Civilians used ration books to purchase restricted goods like sugar, coffee, meat, butter, cheese, gasoline, tires, shoes, and canned goods. Families planted Victory Gardens and saved cooking grease.

Americans understood that protecting their country required sacrifice. But now? We can't stomach higher prices without questioning whether defending our Republic is worth the cost. Yes, I know this conflict with Iran isn’t a world war; the above facts are for illustration purposes.

And before you tell me this wasn't an America First objective, let's review what the administration set out to accomplish:

• Nuclear capabilities: Prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon that could threaten the United States or be used to coerce American allies.

• Ballistic missiles: Destroy missiles, launchers, and production facilities capable of threatening American troops, bases, and interests.

• Terrorist proxies: Reduce Iran's ability to finance and arm organizations responsible for attacks throughout the region.

• Long-term deterrence: Weaken Iran's ability to rebuild those threats rather than continually responding to attacks.

Being America First doesn't mean America must stay out of every foreign conflict. Defending our country sometimes means confronting a threat before it becomes a catastrophe and fighting when our security and interests are at stake.

Trump seized the moment; he had to weaken a longstanding threat to American national security. Was the operation executed perfectly? Did it accomplish 100 percent of its objectives? Meh. Those are fair questions, and we should absolutely ask them. But questioning the execution is different from questioning the objective.

We never should have pursued the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran in the first place. You cannot assume a regime with decades of support for terrorism will honor its commitments simply because it signs a piece of paper.

Now, I'm not saying this hasn't been hard for American families. We've all seen people struggling these past few months, and higher prices have real consequences for households. What I am saying is that the outrage can become shortsighted when we lose sight of the long-term national security objectives.

But Tuesday also exposed something we cannot ignore: We have not done a good enough job explaining those objectives, connecting them to the everyday lives of Americans, or demonstrating that we're listening to their concerns. And that's on us.

We made mistakes while holding the presidency and congressional majorities. We had an opportunity to lead, communicate, and deliver, and there are lessons we need to take seriously if we think we have a shot in 2028. Because leadership isn't just about making difficult decisions; it's about explaining why those decisions matter, acknowledging the sacrifices they require, and earning the trust of the people expected to make them.

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After Deeply Unpleasant Campaign Season, Dems Promise To Soothe Economically Anxious Americans With Screeching Lawfare Jihad

It was a double-negative election, two messages about negating and impugning.

The Federalist 

In the months preceding a disastrous election, the hot controversies in Washington, D.C., were Donald Trump’s authority to put his name on the Kennedy Center, a bitter back-and-forth over the liner of a reflecting pool, and a massively overlawyered fight over the removal of some trees from a federally owned golf course. With startling precision, the Beltway mostly fought over things that no one else anywhere in the world cared about at all.

Republican control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, with a Supreme Court dominated by Republican nominees, produced no significant course correction as the federal government passed $40 trillion in debt. The people in supposed power were bystanders to the business of the country and its people.

Now, with a massive switch toward Democrat control, the big change being signaled is more punishment and retribution, Beltway-class gamesmanship against Beltway-class enemies.

Democrats embraced this message with remarkable uniformity about 10 minutes after the polls closed: We’re going to get you.

The question in this cycle of narcissistic factional nihilism is whether the imperial green zone has any remaining connection to the country it governs, and can rediscover the existence of the America outside the clubhouse.

I wrote in September that we were having an election about nothing, as Republicans declined to offer a record or an agenda, instead framing the contest as a “contrast election” in which the message was purely negative: Don’t vote for crazy Democrats. But the Democrats did the same, meeting a contrast election with a contrast election.

Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump, they explained.

So the Republican message was don’t vote for weird Democrats, and the Democrat message was don’t vote for Trump Republicans. It was a double-negative election, two messages about negating and impugning.

This descent into the politics of pure negation and repudiation, a politics of what we aren’t that doesn’t have a whole lot of what we are or what we hope to be, is a massive bummer. It’s unpleasant to watch, unpleasant to think about, and deeply unpleasant to join. And one of the effects of such a spectacularly miserable politics is that very few sane, smart, decent people want to run for office.

The single most striking fact of this election was how hard it was on the ears. A bunch of repellent fools won: Troy Jackson just absolutely sucked as a candidate, and Peggy Flanagan just absolutely sucked as a candidate, and Amy Klobuchar’s voice has the precise effect of fingernails on a blackboard, and Arizona reelected a dead-eyed toddler as its governor, and so on. Mary Peltola’s voice is an irritant.

The odd little Talarico man-boy barely seems like a real person. The upcoming freshman class in Congress is made up of a bunch of people who are just dreadful: dreadful as people, human beings whose voices grate. Katy Padilla Stout just won a seat in the House, and she can’t speak. She struggles to form sentences in which the words mean something:

I would bet a kidney that this woman struggles to find the cognitive firepower to complete her order at Taco Bell, and she’s headed for the House of Representatives.

We’re in a lull, a part of the cycle in which the dismal impotence of a system only attracts dismal impotents. Someone occasionally breaks out of one of these cycles, as we saw in 2016, but the sewer seems to have a whirlpool effect that drags people back to the bottom.

When politics is broken, the first thing to do is to decline to be broken along with it. Turn to family, friends, faith, community, nature. Find health and life in other things. Don’t ever stake your sanity on the quality of Congress. Keep your perspective and look for healthy things that you can do. Leave the house and do something. Look to the brilliant example of Erin Lee in Colorado.

We’re probably not headed into an enormously healthy period in national politics. Don’t give it power over your life, and we’ll look for the chance to change it. “Society is in its late or decadent phase,” Camille Paglia wrote about another moment in history. “The ruling hierarchy consists of the senile and the adolescent.” It happens. Keep going.

Post-Election Data: Immigration Is A Winning Issue For Republicans

The Federalist 

Amid Republicans’ many losses in the 2026 midterms is a silver lining indicating that the party still holds an advantage over Democrats on a key policy issue: immigration.

NBC News exit polling suggests that, despite Democrat-led opposition to immigration enforcement and deportations, the GOP is generally viewed as more trustworthy on the topic. When asked how important immigration policies were in determining their vote for Congress, 73 percent said it was “crucial or a major factor,” while 23 percent said it was “a minor factor or not a factor.” Among the 73 percent who indicated the former, Republicans won 51 percent to 47 percent.

Upon further analysis, the same poll found that, among the 36 percent who said the issue was “crucial” to their vote, Republicans won 57 to 42 percent. Among the 64 percent who said the issue was “a major factor or a minor factor or not a factor,” Democrats won 63 percent to 36 percent.

The poll did find a majority of voters (60 to 40 percent) disapprove of the way ICE “is handling its job,” however.

Data from CNN’s exit polling similarly appears to indicate that immigration enforcement remains a winning issue for Republicans.

Of the 73 percent of respondents said such policy was a “crucial” or a “major factor” to their vote, Republicans won 51 to 47 percent. Among the 36 percent who said immigration enforcement was “crucial” to their vote, Republicans won 57 to 42 percent.

Democrats also seemed to recognize that their opposition to enforcing America’s immigration laws was not a winning issue for their party heading into Tuesday’s elections.

An Axios analysis of each party’s campaign ads found that “ICE” was the third most-featured policy issue in Democrat ads during the 2026 primary season. When it came to the general election, however, “ICE” plummeted to the 35th policy issue talked about in Democrat ads. The party’s general election ads instead focused heavily on health care and inflation, among other issues.

The post-election data comes amid concerns that the White House and Republicans could collaborate with open-border Democrats on “immigration reform,” which has often served as a euphemism for both parties to push mass amnesty for illegal aliens in the United States.

President Trump signaled openness to working with Democrats on the issue during a Wednesday interview with Fox News. Speaking with network anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the president said, “We could work with them on immigration, I think. Immigration is a big deal. I’ve always felt we should be able to work on immigration.”

When later pressed on the comments, a White House official told The Daily Caller that “[t]here has never been a stronger administration on immigration enforcement than the Trump Administration,” and that “[t]he Administration will never allow for mass amnesty.”

Vice President J.D. Vance also appeared to pour cold water on amnesty. In a post-election assessment of Republicans’ defeat published on X, the Ohio native wrote in part, “In the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I’m open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.”

The Wall Street Journal Pretends To Not Understand J.D. Vance Or Iran

‘This’ll be over by August, by the end of August. And we’ll have two months before the midterm elections for gas prices to come down and for Americans to sense victory.’

The Federalist 

Sometimes you can watch an argument wind through a topic like a river creating oxbows, taking care to divert around the points that don’t help. The Wall Street Journal has just done exactly this, offering what reads like a third of an editorial about Vice President J.D. Vance and his election postmortem. If you read the editorial, notice what they don’t notice.

“Amid the rubble on the morning after the election, JD Vance posted a mini-essay on X.com to pin the defeat entirely on the war in Iran and suggest that ending it is a political necessity,” the editorial board wrote. “By doing so in public, Mr. Vance signals desperation to Iran’s regime, undermining his boss at a critical moment in the war.”

But top Iranian officials have access to an elite geopolitical intelligence technique, known to experts as “reading stuff on the Internet,” and they were already aware of all that.

Image CreditScreenshot

They could spend 10 minutes every morning with Google News over their first cup of coffee and understand that ending the unpopular war is a political necessity. Vance didn’t crack open a safe to show off the previously hidden crown jewels. Like the Soviet ambassador says in Doctor Strangelove, “Our source was the New York Times.”

Armed with the shocking and deeply buried secret that Americans don’t like high gas prices, the Iranians are now empowered to manipulate the negotiations: “But to post it on social media is to tell the Iranians they now have the upper hand in nuclear and Strait of Hormuz negotiations.” The premise fails if literally any Iranian owned a computer with a web browser before the exact moment Vance posted. The mullahs have set a tone in their response to the war, and their frequently absurd confidence isn’t a sudden response to a new message.

They’ve been doing the “Death to America” thing for a while, and have developed a certain consistency of perception. They embody the old joke about playing chess with a pigeon: They always think the enemy is desperate. No one in Tehran leapt out of his chair this week and shouted, “Their vice president just revealed that the war is unpopular! This changes everything!”

The Federalist was unable to get a comment on the Journal’s editorial from the vice president’s office, but Steve Cortes, a Republican strategist who campaigned with Vance, told us that the editorial made a “patently absurd” argument. The Iranian leadership, Cortes said, is “dangerous and even evil, but they’re not stupid.” They already knew the war was unpopular among Americans, because they can read. The vice president, Cortes told The Federalist, is thinking about America and America’s interests.

Rendering the choice binary, go to war / don’t go to war, the Journal evades the enormously important question of how the Trump administration went to war. Whatever you think of Colin Powell, his view that Americans have developed a habit of sending the military to war without assuring that the country regards itself as being at war was not wrong. Powell argued that the United States shouldn’t go to war without a clear military objective and a view of what the end will look like: Why are we doing this? How will we know when it’s over and we’ve won?

But the president didn’t open the war with a message to Congress or a primetime address to the nation. He didn’t explain. And the administration and the people giving advice to the president have made the ridiculous choice to continually underplay and dismiss the whole thing: No big deal, over in a jiffy, pay it no mind. Gas prices, they’ve said over and over again, will be a little high for a couple of weeks.

“This’ll be over by August, by the end of August. And we’ll have two months before the midterm elections for gas prices to come down and for Americans to sense victory.” That wasn’t true, and you can’t honestly discuss the war as a political topic without taking on this point. The Journal simply doesn’t. They slide around the failures in political communication without deigning to mention them. That choice doesn’t work.

Special notice is needed here for the maneuvers the Journal attempts around the topic of illegal immigration and the enforcement of immigration laws. Looking at voters, they say this: “Fifty-eight percent also say Trump immigration enforcement went too far.” After a four-year period in which the southern border was wide open and somewhere north of 10 million unvetted people walked across it, what does this mean? Can they define an alternative version of immigration enforcement that would be perceived as going just far enough?

What happened in 2025 and 2026 was that Democrats and the media acted out an information operation in which the ordinary enforcement of immigration laws, which are not a new invention of the second Trump administration, became cruel and extreme acts of kidnapping. That rhetoric was always complete nonsense, and it’s embarrassing to accept that framing at face value. During the Obama administration, CNN embedded with ICE agents for a long story about their important work:

Ten years later, they’re pretending that ICE arrests are a shocking new development that amounts to bizarrely aggressive state kidnapping. We all need to stop playing along with this calculated fearmongering.

Finally, the Journal writes, “Mr. Vance set up a straw man by warning against ‘establishment’ calls for ‘amnesty’ that no Republican is calling for.” But this is make-believe around the performance of pretending to use different words. In a message that several other Republican members of Congress echoed, Republican Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar called on Trump to give illegal immigrants “a dignified life in this promised land.” See, that’s not amnesty, that’s just a permanent waiver of immigration laws that lets people who entered the country illegally stay here forever.

Honest politics, if such a thing is possible, starts with openness and clarity. The Iran war and its domestic effects are unpopular, and at the very least offer a warning about making the case for war to Congress and the nation. There are lessons to be learned. It’s sort of baffling that we’re still trying to start learning lessons about going to war in the Middle East. But it’s not bad news that an elected official said what he thinks, so we can consider his argument and discuss it. That should be regarded as normal behavior.

First Lady Melania Trump Delivers Remarks with Representatives from Russia and Ukraine

First Lady Melania Trump delivers remarks from the White House following a historic 6-day ceasefire and humanitarian effort in Oleshky, Ukraine.

Following her remarks Melania Trump gave personal letters of appreciation to the representatives from Ukraine and Russia to be delivered to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Zelensky Awards First Lady Melania Trump one of Ukraine’s Highest Honors

Initially, following the success of the humanitarian effort in the southern Ukrainian town of Oleshky, Russian officials praised Melania Trump for her diplomatic initiative in creating the six-day ceasefire. However, Ukraine officials praised themselves and their magnanimity in agreeing to the ceasefire.

A very typically Ukrainian response.  People noticed the contrast.

A few days later Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to tamp down the issue, by announcing Melania Trump would be awarded the Order of Princess Olga, 1st class for her charitable contribution. Perhaps that will be a part of the event we may see today.

The Independent – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has awarded US First Lady Melania Trump a state honour.

The presidential decree, dated November 2, cited her “significant personal contribution” to humanitarian support for Ukraine and her work to help Ukrainian children, including those deported or forcibly moved from Russian-occupied territory.

The Order of Princess Olga, 1st class honours women who have made exceptional contributions in spheres including science, education, culture and charitable work.

Ukrainian officials said Melania Trump played a pivotal role in securing a six-day ceasefire to evacuate civilians from the Russian-occupied southern Ukrainian town of Oleshky, which began on Tuesday and concluded on Sunday.

It marked the longest local pause in fighting since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Previous attempts to pause the fighting have either failed to take hold or quickly unravelled. (read more)

Representatives from Ukraine, Russia and the USA are scheduled to meet in Abu Dhabi next week for another round of negotiations toward a peaceful resolution.  European leaders are upset that they have not been asked to participate.  Zelensky’s team usually doesn’t do very well without their European guides.