Elon Musk tries to dismantle the foundations of US democracy
9th August 2024
Elon Musk is busy. No, not because he’s attending to any of his multibillion-dollar companies.
For Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink, he’s full of wild promises with very little actual progress. But what Musk is really spending time on these days is attacking the core foundations of American democracy on multiple fronts.
There’s his thus-far successful effort to get rid of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). There’s his political action committee, America PAC, which pretends to help register people to vote but is just hoovering up voter data to give to the Trump campaign. And there’s his lawsuit seeking to force companies to advertise on X, despite the fact advertisers generally do not want their ads running next to the Nazi content X is full of now.
All of these efforts have the potential to succeed because the federal courts are broken, and the administrative state is dying a slow and painful death.
So–what exactly are these ‘core foundations of American democracy’? Apparently they include the NLRB, a keystone of centralized governmental intrusion into business; hatred of Donald Trump; hatred of the ‘Nazi content’ on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter); the (pre-Trump) federal courts; and the administrative state.
Good to know.