Elon Musk
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Elon Musk’s Bleak House-Cleaning March 13, 2025
Near the beginning of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a novel I am reading for the first time, we meet Mrs. Jellyby—a Victorian era philanthropist obsessed with bringing education, colonizers, and the coffee trade to a remote region of Africa, Borriob...
What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain March 06, 2025
Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-m...
DOGE Gets Serious March 05, 2025
I have argued for over a decade that America has a fourth, largely unaccountable branch of government in the administrative state. My 2012 book, Stealing You Blind, describes how federal bureaucrats were making bank while ruining people’s lives and c...
On Mending Over Ending March 03, 2025
As someone deeply concerned about institutional corruption, much has been refreshing about Elon Musk’s merry band of DOGE barbarians laying waste to dubious federal programs and expenditures. Sure, the cuts are mainly symbolic window dressing that do...
DOGE as Class War February 17, 2025
t might strike some as odd: The new president of the United States won the election by rallying the working class against the establishment swamp, yet he has placed at the helm of his assault on the elite-controlled Deep State none other than the ric...
Has Cancel Culture Been Canceled? February 14, 2025
Marko Elez, a software engineer working in Elon Musk’s DOGE, was recently “canceled” due to some offensive remarks . . . and then uncanceled the next day. Elez had posted some very obnoxious things, such as “Normalize Indian hate,” and “Just for the ...
DOGE and the Backlash to the Backlash February 12, 2025
Late last week, Elon Musk announced that the initiative he’s heading up, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would rehire Marko Elez, the 25-year-old staffer who was fired after a Wall Street Journal story unearthed several offensive X ...
How to Defeat DEI February 06, 2025
Many conservatives have objected strongly to the spate of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives undertaken by many schools, corporations, and government agencies over the last decade. Elon Musk recently claimed that “DEI means people DIE...
An Unusual Cultural Artifact of Religious Revival February 04, 2025
Religiosity in America, measured in denominational affiliation and church attendance, has never been lower. Over the past decades, a growing culture of atheism (and non-denominationalism) has spread across the country and permeated into our art, trad...
Stop Blaming Misinformation for Cynicism and Mistrust February 03, 2025
Meta is ending fact-checking and removing restrictions on speech across Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, its CEO, recently announced, calling the move an attempt to restore free expression on its platforms. Fact-checkers will be replaced with...
Emperor Elon January 10, 2025
It is very strange, the ever-expanding realm of Elon Musk. He is a man whose power crosses vast industries, who now sets the total political agenda for nations around the world, and whose followers are so devoted, they would put his face on a coin th...
It Can’t Just Be DOGE January 10, 2025
President-elect Donald Trump’s return to Washington will surely bring with it a renewed focus on the administrative state and its excesses. Exemplifying that effort is the much–media–maligned Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, headed by El...
Why Is the Right Obsessed With Epic Poetry? January 07, 2025
In September 2023, the richest man in the world was daydreaming about the Trojan War. “I sometimes wonder if perhaps Rome was started by exiles from Troy,” Elon Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he had bought and swiftly renamed. His thought...
America Should Not Become a Nation of Tiger Moms January 01, 2025
A rift in the MAGA coalition emerged last week as Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk—co-chairs of DOGE, a Trump advisory committee—advocated for more H-1B visas, angering immigration hard-liners in the GOP base. Generally, the debate over H-1B is an econo...
The Guardian’s Retreat from the Battlefield of Ideas November 21, 2024
It was quite the flounce. “This is something we have been considering for a while,” The Guardian intoned with the gravity of an Old Testament prophet as it declared in an editorial that the organization would no longer post on X. “The U.S. presidenti...
Our Countercultural Revolution November 20, 2024
Some presidential elections are decided by tactical moves: a stronger ground game to get out the vote, for example, or by superior media messaging. Donald Trump’s sweeping victory over Kamala Harris was none of those things. It was strategic and epoc...
The Real Problem with X November 15, 2024
Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, particularly in light of Elon Musk’s highly visible support for his campaign, has again raised the question of the political significance of X (formerly Twitter). Since Musk acquired the platf...
Total Victory November 08, 2024
Madness, memes, and media malfeasance (must be Tuesday). It’s embarrassing to admit, but just a little earlier this year I thought the election would be boring. Sure, the Democrats were calling Donald Trump a fascist, but they do that every four year...
The Gospel According to Elon Musk October 29, 2024
It felt a bit like a joke: The wealthiest man in the world walks into a church to pay people to vote for his porn-star-loving friend—all in the name of God. But no one laughed at the spectacle of Elon Musk’s recent Get Out the Vote rally at the Life ...
Elon Musk, Meet Michael Anton and Friends October 21, 2024
The season has come again (actually, we’re a few weeks behind schedule) for the restorative quadrennial reading of Michael Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election,” first published at the website of the Claremont Review of Books in September 2016....
How to Fight Tech Censorship October 16, 2024
The news that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign pressured X, formerly Twitter, to censor journalist Ken Klippenstein has reignited the controversy over tech censorship in terms that replicate, almost word for word, what transpired four years ago w...
The Fall of the Century October 16, 2024
On Sunday morning, shortly after 7:25 a.m. Boca Chica, Texas, time, the world looked up to watch the fall of the century. Barreling back to Earth after pushing a 40-story spacecraft through the skies, the Super Heavy booster plummeted back to Texas, ...
We Are in Need of Renaissance People October 08, 2024
The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristoff...
Jail the Tech Bros September 04, 2024
Speak now, or forever hold your peace. Saturday, X went dark across Brazil, as Alexandre de Moraes, a judge in name, but something more like a dictator in terms of power, not only banned the platform from operation, but introduced exorbitant daily fi...
Musk’s Two-Tier Vision of Free Speech August 16, 2024
According to the feverish visions of some in the US at the moment, England has undergone a radical transformation. Gone are all those entrancingly acerbic dowager duchesses, curtseying maids, wizards and crumpets. Right now, asylum-seeking grooming g...
