Name: Elon Musk Is A Threat To Democracy
Uploaded: 2024-10-29T13:53:06.000Z
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The bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk has frankly reached alarming proportions.

At first it was funny, cute, haha, but now I'm not friggin laughing. And as the election approaches, the stakes are getting higher than ever. Now Elon is making headlines for the eye-watering amount of money he's throwing at the Trump campaign, for the questionable egality of his scheme to hand out random $1 million gifts to voters in swing states, and for the dark money organizations he's funding and their shady disinformation campaigns.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

Elon Musk is a threat to American democracy. And given the fact that his fellow tech billionaire and former business partner Peter Thiel has proclaimed that freedom and democracy are incompatible, that might be entirely the point. Today we're talking Elon Musk's strange political turn from Biden supporter to dark MAGA Trump enthusiast, the vast amounts of power and money he stands to gain in a second Trump presidency, and why he poses an existential threat to this country. And he's not even from here. In a world where the media landscape is increasingly divided, staying informed has become more challenging. The rise of social media, the 24-hour news cycle, and an explosion of alternative news outlets have contributed to echo chambers where people primarily engage with perspectives that align with their beliefs. For example, on Ground News

I found this story about Elon Musk. Elon Musk promises to award $1 million each day to a signer of his petition. In the 181 articles Ground News gathered covering this topic, the left emphasizes the legality concerns surrounding Musk's campaign, while the right underscores Musk's aspirations, portraying his plan as an extraordinary use of wealth to influence voters, while underplaying legal implications. This is a great example of how different the media reports on stories, depending on their bias. You can see left-leaning The Daily Beast used the headline, expert rips Elon Musk's clearly illegal $1 million lottery to sign his MAGA PAX petition, while far-right publication WLT Report uses the headline, yes it's real, here's how to win $1 million each day from Elon Musk. Very different takes, with the left clearly emphasizing the illegality of this scheme, and this far-right publication using a clickbaity headline to make the scheme seem appealing, exciting, and positive. This is where Ground News comes in, and why I've been using them for over a year. Today's partner Ground News is a great tool for understanding the news. They offer helpful context you need when faced with starkly different headlines about the same story. Here you can see the overall bias distribution of the news sources covering this story, with 46% of news sources right-leaning, and only 21% left-leaning, indicating that this isn't being reported on much by the left. If you scroll down, you can see the overall factuality rating of the sources, with only 31% of sources scoring high factuality ratings, meaning a lot of dubious news sources are picking up this story and running with it. You can also see more information about who owns which source, with 30% of these sources owned by media conglomerates, and another 23% owned by wealthy private individuals. All of these tools can be really helpful to provide more context to your own echo chamber. You and your social media bubble may have had one reaction, but it's important to understand the larger picture and what people outside your bubble are saying, and I'm able to get all of this context and information thanks to Ground News.

My favorite Ground News feature at the moment is their Blind Spot feed. With a bird's eye view of issues that tend to get more attention from the left or right than others, I can easily step out of my echo chamber and understand how partisan narratives shape reality and votes. I'm always really impressed with Ground News, and I genuinely think they're a great resource for identifying biases in the media. So scan my QR code, click the link in the description, or go to ground.news.legia to get 40% off the same vantage plan I use to stay informed, which comes to about $5 a month.

Get unlimited access to all Ground News has to offer while helping an independent team keep the media transparent. Thanks, Ground News. Okay, just to set the scene for you, a reminder that Elon Musk leaned center Democrat for years. He voted for Obama and regularly supported Democrats up until very recently. He was concerned about the owners of Twitter being overtly political. Then in 2022, he announced he'd vote for Ron DeSantis if he ran for president in 2024. Elon's rightward turn seemed to have started around that time, due in part because he's a big giant baby who became radicalized when he didn't get his way. Biden vowed to be the most labor-friendly president in history. Really inconvenient for a man who hates unions and loves to run his companies with zero regard for their workers. He's also pointed to criticism from AOC and Elizabeth Warren as central to his decision to abandon the Democratic Party. Basically, because Democrats didn't bend to his will and praise him at every turn, he started trolling them and found that there were a lot of billionaires and dummies on the internet who would praise him for it. From there, he snowballed into promoting right-wing conspiracy theories, disowning his trans daughter, railing against the woke mind virus, and now throwing millions and millions of dollars behind Donald Trump.

So there are a few headlines animating today's story. There was, of course, the infamous Trump rally where Elon Kubrick stared down the nation, but only after jumping around like on Sims when you're giving them different personality traits. Despite having previously shown support for Trump and pledged huge sums of money to help his campaign, this was the first time Elon took the stage at a rally and gave what can loosely be described as a speech. Since then, I think the media has taken greater notice, and so reports are starting to come out of the shady s**t that he's been doing. And it just gets shadier. So let's take each headline in turn. It was recently revealed through quarterly filings that Elon has given seven million dollars to his own super PAC,

America PAC, which has grown in recent months into a key player in Trump's campaign.

And Elon has been heavily involved in the operations of his super PAC. Super PACs only exist thanks largely to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that ruled money is speech and people therefore shouldn't be denied their free speech right to spend gobs of money on political campaigns. Super PACs circumvent traditional donation restrictions that bar individuals from giving more than $3,300 to any politician. So you and I have that upper limit, but anyone with extra cash to burn interested in influencing American politics can create a super

PAC. Super PACs traditionally have been barred from coordinating directly with the politicians they support. Instead, they tend to spend their money on political ads. However, thanks to a

March ruling by the FEC, campaigns can now share information and data on efforts to promote voter turnout with outside groups. So now super PACs can coordinate directly with candidates and their campaigns, at least on their voter turnout efforts. Because of this, the Trump campaign, strapped for cash, both because they've been out-fundraised by Harris and because they're funding Trump's millions in legal fees, have outsourced their door-knocking and ground game efforts to outside groups like Elon's America PAC. And instead of spending any money on television ads, America PAC has spent over $100 million on canvassing and direct mail, both in support of

Trump, but also in support of Republican candidates in some House and Senate races.

The problem that many experienced campaign organizers have pointed out is that outsourcing arguably the number one way Trump could win this election, turnout of low-propensity Trump-leaning voters, to super PACs run by and organized by inexperienced billionaires who want to play God with US elections, may not be a great strategy. Candidate campaigns tend to be better equipped with knowledge and experience to effectively use their resources in ways that will actually impact the election. Elon Musk buys companies and posts tweets from the Twitter. What the does he know about getting out the vote? That requires empathy and a sense of how ordinary people feel and what motivates them. Scientific studies have found that ultra-wealthy people fundamentally lack basic empathy skills, and reports indicate that Elon has brought his same erratic management style that he's used at Twitter, including insurmountable demands and sudden firings, to the campaign trail. He's even reportedly relocated to Pennsylvania to head the America PAC's office there. Yes, oftentimes if you throw money at a problem you can eventually find a solution, but the Harris campaign just surpassed a billion dollars and has actual campaign experience, so,

I don't know, seems like a losing strategy. Seems like Elon Musk is a big loser. There's also his latest scheme, conducted through his America PAC, to randomly give voters in swing states one million dollars. He created a petition seeking to guarantee freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.

Only registered voters in key swing states, that's Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan,

Wisconsin, and North Carolina, can sign the petition, enter to win the one million dollars, and claim an additional one hundred dollar reward. The offer expires today, October 21st, and he awarded the first one million dollar check at a recent event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Not to mention the fact that his one million dollar giveaway stunt is illegal. Not only is Elon breaking the law, but anyone who accepts his checks is breaking the law too. 52 U.S.C. Section 10307C states, whoever knowingly or willfully pays or offers to pay or accepts payment, either for registration to vote or for voting, shall be fined not more than ten thousand dollars, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. Technically, Musk is paying them to sign a petition, but the rules clearly state the only people that can win are registered voters in key swing states, which indicates that this is a very thinly veiled attempt to pay people to register to vote, which is expressly illegal and could come with prison time. The DOJ election crimes manual indicates that a bribe cannot be used to induce voting activities, including bribing with money or a lottery system.

There are some lawyers online saying, well, it's arguable because technically he's paying them to sign a petition not to register to vote. But this is the legal shit that really grinds my gears.

He's clearly using it as enticement to get voters in swing states to register to vote.

If they want the million bucks, they have to register. The veil is thin at best and saying it's arguable just to be a contrarian online lawyer gives legitimacy to what is clearly a scheme that is against the law. And this is indicative of a larger issue with Elon Musk and with all billionaires. The law simply doesn't apply to them. Even if the DOJ were to file an injunction to make him stop and then prosecute him, the likelihood of him facing actual jail time is slim to none because he would post bail ahead of trial, he could take a plea deal to avoid it, and he doesn't have any serious priors that would indicate putting him in prison for five years is the correct option. Though perhaps deportation would be better since he's an immigrant committing a crime. Just a thought. But in reality, he'd likely face a fine. A fine of not more than $10,000. Even with the lawyer's fees in this scenario, the penalty doesn't even amount to a slap on the wrist. It's not even a blip on his radar. This is why billionaires shouldn't exist, period. It allows them to take full advantage of our two-tiered justice system and buy their way out of anything. So on top of the clinical lack of empathy they possess, they also don't have to ever legally answer for their actions in any serious way so long as they make a tiny minutiae of effort to create plausible deniability or some sort of pretense to point to for why they're doing what they're doing. Then the legal system is like, oh crap, he got away with it again.

He's too smart for us. And then there's a new article from Open Secrets, a super important organization you should absolutely have on your radar for understanding how money impacts our politics. They investigated his ties to a pro-Trump dark money network that has been creating fake pro-Harris propaganda meant to undermine her messages, creating a fake liberal answer to

Project 2025 called Progress 2028, and claiming her policies include expanding Medicaid to undocumented immigrants and getting rid of borders. These ads are created by a dark money group called

Building America's Future. Thanks to unconscionable loopholes in our campaign finance laws, 501c4 groups, aka dark money groups, don't have to disclose their donors. They're meant to be a social welfare organization that doesn't spend most of their money on political purposes, but many of these organizations come close to the line or just completely cross it.

Many also claim to be fighting for a cause like banning abortion, for example, and then strategically place ads about abortion in districts where there are elections where abortion is a contested issue. But this is really a network primed for mob-like movement of money because Building America's Future also helps fund other PACs like Future Coalition PAC,

Duty to America PAC, Stand for Us PAC, and Citizens for Sanity, another dark money group that

Elon Musk has donated millions to over the years that operates out of the headquarters of the

Conservative Partnership Institute. That institute is led by Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint with former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows serving as senior advisor. The web is purposely tangled because that's how you launder money and obscure your aims, make it too complicated to follow. And these are just the things we know about. Thanks to our absolutely bad campaign finance laws in the U.S., Elon could be throwing millions more at getting Trump elected and there's no way we could know about it. And that's perfectly legal. As are the misleading ads produced by Elon backed dark money group Building America's Future. Generally, the First Amendment protects against government intervention of speech except for very specific circumstances, and political speech is highly protected. Truth and advertising rules only apply to businesses untruthfully advertising products or services they're trying to sell, and they don't apply to political ads. Defamation claims brought by public officials have a notoriously high bar and I don't think these would qualify. Voter suppression is illegal, but it requires that the actor deceived qualified voters to prevent them from voting generally, not to prevent them from voting for a specific candidate. States are starting to pass laws barring the use of deceptive AI generated content in political ads, but that doesn't apply here either. Again, for Elon and the other billionaires both here and abroad using their money to influence us and how we vote in this election, campaign finance laws and the FEC provide enough loopholes and weak enforcement that they can get away with pretty much anything scot-free. And outside the realm of directly tampering with our elections through funding dark money networks and door knocking for Trump, Elon also has the benefit of owning one of the largest social media companies in the world and sending daily propaganda to his 200 million followers. Lately, this has included tweets wondering why no one has tried to unalive Kamala

Harris yet and pushing false claims about immigration and voter fraud. He took those conspiracy theories on the road, pushing the debunked Dominion voting conspiracy theory at his first solo Pennsylvania rally in support of Donald Trump just this week. Say the Dominion voting machines, it is weird that the, you know, I think they're used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa

County, um, but not in a lot of other places. And that seemed like a heck of a coincidence.

And Elon Musk's ramblings reveal, I think one reason why these two men have grown such a bromance in recent months. They speak the same language and that language is literal nonsense, nonsense, which neither of them has ever had to answer for because they were both born millionaires and handed every opportunity in life. Elon Musk didn't create businesses. He bought them. He didn't come up with anything other than millions of dollars in inherited wealth. The man is not a genius. And yet just like Trump, because we have a illness in this country where we see wealth and assume intelligence and we see success and assume hard work, we've given these men over the years, this God-like status. People still call Musk a genius, even while criticizing his actions.

We need to kill that narrative. Musk is not that smart. You're not very pretty and you're not very bright. A cursory glance at his ex feed indicates as much. His tenuous grasp on first amendment law is another indicator. Also, anytime he opens his mouth, this is a man who has never been told he can't do whatever he wants, has never had to face consequences. And because of all this, he knows how to speak in a tone that is authoritative and sounds smart while saying words that are complete nonsense. And I think seeing these men for what they are prep school boys who always get their way throw tantrums when they don't lack any empathy or emotional intelligence and have skated through life on the backs of their family fortune while doing everything in their power to infect our politics with ideology that protects that fortune no matter what, never having to form personalities or any significant intelligence because they can buy their way into any room they want, it helps to deflate the pedestal we've put them on, but also the fear we feel when faced with the power of their billions of dollars. On the one hand, it is terrifying that these man-baby idiots wield so much power because of their wealth. On the other hand, they're too stupid to form the vast conspiracies we often give them credit for. Yes, they obfuscate their political activities behind complex dark money networks and plausible deniability, but one of the reasons they're so complex is because they have the resources to just make a bunch of shell organizations and stack them on top of each other.

It's like giving a baby a pile of blocks with letters on them and letting them throw them across the room and create indecipherable words out of the letters. That doesn't mean they're a genius, it means they were handed the blocks and allowed to throw them and they fell where they may and you were left to pick up the pieces. The only thing they're good at is using their money to create chaos and maybe five percent of the time it gets them where they're trying to go, which is enough to appear like you're a genius when you have 240 billion dollars worth of blocks to throw around.

So no, these men are not geniuses. No, they do not deserve their billions. But much like toddlers throwing blocks, they require guardrails because their chaos can hurt the people around them, which is why regulations are necessary to block them from doing their self-serving bidding, or really from ever existing in the first place but we haven't gotten there yet, and from getting their grubby baby hands on the reins of government. And without greater regulation, and in the case of a future Trump presidency, we're staring down the barrel of a future where billionaires are empowered to drive us all straight off a cliff and Elon will be the first pied piper in line guiding us to our death. Meanwhile, he's got a bunker and a rocket to his new colony for billionaires on Mars.

Because behind all of Elon's fanfare and claims of caring about freedom and the first amendment is the knowledge that if Trump wins this election, Elon will acquire more power than he's ever even dreamed of. Trump has promised that if he wins, he will create a presidential government efficiency task force tasked with identifying government waste and trimming the fat, and he's pledged to put Elon Musk at the helm of that effort. In that role, Elon would have the power to exact revenge on all the administrative agencies that have plagued his efforts for maximum profits with zero accountability. His companies have been targets of at least 20 different investigations and actions by government agencies over the safety of Tesla cars, environmental damage caused by his rockets, OSHA violations, and more. In a world where Elon Musk becomes czar of government efficiency, the Labor Department and National Labor Relations Board get gutted. No more labor protections. The

Environmental Protection Agency? Obliterated. Consumer protections, environmental protections, securities and fraud protections? Gone. Not only would the role give the world's richest man the power to do away with government regulations, the wet dream of every conservative millionaire and billionaire, it would also give that power to a man who is already a huge beneficiary of government contracts. Yes, while Elon rails against regulations and taxes, he is also the recipient of huge government contracts through his businesses. Contracts which wouldn't exist but for our taxes.

The bulk of those government contracts are through SpaceX, which has received at least 15.4 billion taxpayer dollars in the form of government contracts. SpaceX's role in NASA is so huge at this point that it effectively dictates NASA's rocket launch schedule. The Department of Defense relies on Elon to get most of its satellites into orbit. Last year alone, his companies were promised $3 billion across 17 federal agencies, and that's with a Democrat in office. If Trump wins,

Elon will have a direct line to the White House and the ability to recommend the gutting or bolstering of whatever government spending he wants, despite conflicts of interest that span billions of dollars and dozens of regulatory agencies. And this also means that any regulator who doesn't want to be on the chopping block will need to ingratiate themselves to both Trump but also to Elon Musk. We can see it in Elon's newly cozy relationship with Republican Federal

Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr. Brendan Carr has been rumored to be up for FCC chair under a second Trump presidency, giving him more power but also more to lose if he gets on the wrong side of Trump's efficiency czar Elon Musk. Carr has in the past said the FCC has treated Musk unfairly and has attacked Democratic FCC commissioners for denying Starlink money. Carr is going to bat for

Musk. He also wrote a chapter of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. He's a Republican regulator who hates regulations, but he wants the government to play a bigger role in fostering the expansion of Starlink. And so he knows by brown nosing his way all the way up Elon's poll and promising that huge amounts of government money will go into Elon's pocket, he'll gain some power in a future Trump presidency. Imagine selling your soul to become chair of the FCC. Yikes. So now not only would the law not apply to Elon, he'll have the power to do away with whatever pesky law or regulation he wants, and to toy with people's professional aspirations to demand loyalty and government handouts. This is unprecedented and dangerous. It's especially dangerous given that remember, Elon is a big dummy, a dum-dum. Never forget. Not to mention the fact that Musk is connected to even shadier billionaires like Peter Thiel, who I made an episode about a couple months ago and who has directly funded JD Vance's entire career, who not only doesn't believe that freedom and democracy are compatible, he wants freedom, not democracy, but also genuinely thinks that competition is bad for capitalism. Like when Peter Thiel hears Make America Great Again, he's not thinking, ah, yes, the 1950s. He's thinking, ah, yes, 1890. He lusts after gilded age robber barons. And in a Trump-Vance administration, those are whose interests would come first and foremost. The ultimate end cap to late stage capitalism and the birth of true plutocracy in this country. And this is why I don't have patience for people, especially in swing states, who aren't voting or who are voting third party in protest. Sometimes you have to do the thing that avoids the most damage, not the thing that brings you the most joy. The damage of a second Trump presidency cannot be overstated. We need to get Kamala Harris elected next month.

And then we need to work to get money out of politics. Money is not speech. Billionaires should be taxed out of existence. You can be a good leftist and also vote for Kamala Harris because your work as an activist should not start and stop on election day. And with Trump as president, we don't stand a fucking chance. So go vote. And check out my episode from last week about why you shouldn't throw your vote away on Jill Stein. If you want to add free uncensored access to these videos, check out my Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash legionmiller. And a special shout out to my multi-platinum supporters, Tay Latranger-Lucas, Joshua Cole, Thomas Johnson,

Anthony Giles, and Brett Piantek. Your generosity makes this channel what it is. So thank you.

 Thanks so much for watching. Have a good day. Buh-bye!