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How should Elon Musk's role in the Trump administration and reactions to it make us update on boogeymen like George Soros/Koch Brothers/Yo Mamma!/Whoever and the rhetorical use of such boogeymen? If you can openly buy power like this, is buying "shadowy" influence more or less likely? Or should we not update at all, because Musk and Trump are so extremely weird (n=1, of course)? What does being a combination Musk-phile and Soros-phobe or Musk-phobee and Soros-apologist (are there Soros-philes?) say about someone?
I mean, Trump ran partly on giving musk a major role in the administration. There’s nothing hidden about it.
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I don't really see how it is "buying" power. Musk and Trump shared similar ideological paths. Starting as moderate dems that became disillusioned with an increasingly authoritarian left as their business projects hit endless red tape and corruption while interacting with government. Spoke up about it and got the state media attacking them. It's not at all surprising that they ended up influencing eachother, they're friends.
If you're referring to the election in general money wasn't the deciding factor, Kamala outspent Trump by like 50% or something, 1.6b to 1b. So whatever power was bought, less of it was bought by Trump. He won on policy.
Soros follows the traditional shady lobbyist m.o. where he doesn't bother trying to convince the voters like Musk does, he just buys low level politicians, or influences vulnerable populations, low iq minorities, vulnerable children at college campuses. It's not really the same.
The left mostly has themselves and their incredibly rigid ideology to blame for Musk.
AIPAC would be the more relevant group to compare to Soros. The things Musk is doing are all things Trump ran on. War with Iran and taking the territory of Gaza are not.
Trump ran on being the most pro-Israel president ever and openly discussed assisting Israel in the war on Hamas many times in the campaign.
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Not quite. Whatever power was bought, was bought by buying Twitter, not direct contributions to either campaign.
A single non censored source of information vs completely managed media = buying power. I think libs are just used to having complete authority over communication via control of media, hollywood and the power of false accusations of the various "isms" to deter any critical speech and formation of grassroots organization.
It's such a load of hypocrisy. Like the whole Bernie, AOC nonsense tour. The Oligarch has bought our government, Trump is Musk's puppet. Trump? a puppet? I think he's easy to manipulate, but he's not someone you buy. Meanwhile they ignore that the dems are propped up by Gates, Bloomberg, Soros, Cuban etc. and the last guy they installed up as president had to literally be led around by handlers and fed his lines.
I mean, yes. If Musk didn't buy Twitter and turned it into the single non censored source of information, Trump likely wouldn't have won, and it's still useful to him now that he's president, otherwise he'd still be operating in a hostile media environment like during the first term.
This is why Elon gets to be one of Trump's closest advisors, while Vivek gets ejected.
Yup, that's me. The biggest lib on the Motte.
If he were actively using it to censor and promote his own viewpoints I'd call it buying power, but since beyond a few erratic bans over personal grudges he is not it doesn't really qualify. More like liberating the public square.
It's all relative. You are far to the left of me.
But as you pointed out, the media landscape is so scewed, that merely not censoring, or "liberating the public square" is enough to make a massive difference in the election. All I'm saying is that if you're looking at expenditures that may have won Elon influence in the Trump administration, you have to look at the purchase of Twitter, not the chump change he spent on the campaign.
Uh... that's certainly possible, but are you sure you know what you're signing up for?
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Arjin, I... I thought I knew you.
Were all these years just a lie?
It's much worse than that, I thought I knew myself, but now I don't what to think anymore!
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It depends if we're talking about big decisions or little ones. One of the pernicious aspects of the administrative state is that you have minutiae that can have huge impacts on businesses, tax classifications of particular business inputs or what constitutes a "tree" or whatever, and I can absolutely believe that those kinds of decisions are influenced by money.
On the other hand, the recent SCOTUS kerfluffles seem goofy to me, in that it seems to be built around the idea that Clarence Thomas can't possibly believe what he does in fact believe.
Can you be specific about the SCOTUS kerfluffles and Thomas's beliefs?
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The whole, so and so cant possibly believe the things they plainly believe, is the thing I've found most frustrating about political discourse over the last 10 years or so.
I feel like i am continuously watching affluent liberals tie themselves in knots to avoid grappling with basic arguments and claims.
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They're unrelated, because Musk is openly an advisor to the President. He has influence in the administration and it is quite legible.
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For the last couple years of the Biden administration it was unclear who if anyone was actually exercising presidential authority.
Any complaints about Musk's "undue influence" must be read with that in mind.
No one who was silent while a bunch of unnamed White House staff weekended at bernie's can credibly claim that they are worried about "Musk's influence", or the "dignity of the office". They are obviously just mad at Musk/DOGE for threatening thier sinecures, and at Trump for stealing a base and denying them thier first female president yet again.
To add to this: Mike Johnson claimed he had a meeting with Biden in which Biden denied recently signing an executive order to block natural gas exports. So Biden either signed it and forgot, or staffers signed it for him without his knowledge. Either an unelected cabal was the real president and/or his brain didn't work.
Or he lied. Don't dismiss the third way.
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The natural gas "export ban" wasn't actually an export ban: it just gave a monopoly to the companies the US gov partnered with to build LNG terminal infrastructure. Very much a long term deep state project that started way back in the bush admin.
My suspicion is that someone made a few phone calls to the white house and got the order they wanted added to the auto pen queue. No need to bother Biden with the little details.
If the export ban wasn't actually an export ban, should we consider the possibility that this was a banal miscommunication between Johnson and Biden, not a clear-cut example of him having forgotten something important? You have to be senile enough to lose the ability to communicate normally, for senility to prevent banal miscommunication.
I don't think this was miscommunication. Mike Johnsons was referring to a recent executive order, Biden denied signing such an order. News articles phrase it correctly as a ban on new export permits. But there is no transcript of the actual conversion
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We already know his brain didn’t work.
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Okay but that goes both ways. If you weren't silent about unnamed white house staff being in charge, you ought to also be loudly exercised about a billionaire who's bought his influence.
Why?
Trump was talking about hiring Elon to take a machete to the executive branch the same way he did twitter all the way back in October.
Am I supposed to be holding the fact that he followed through on that against him?
In contrast the Democrats and Legacy-media felt compelled to conceal Biden's decline from the public and tar anyone who called attention to it as a fabulist.
I see this a lot. Trump campaigns on doing something. Then he does it. People are blindsided and demand that Trump supporters be equally shocked and regretful of voting for him.
Probably because during the campaign (and now, for that matter) it was routine for Trump defenders to pretend that he wasn't going to do it, that it was just big talk, take him seriously not literally, etc... Encouraging people not to believe Trump was (and is) standard practice.
"Of course he's not going to do it, that's ridiculous" -> "He said he was going to do it, what are you complaining about?"
It was a delight to be on the other side of that tactic for a change
"For a change." - this being a deviation from Trumpism's usual scrupulous honesty.
Yes
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Like “abolish the police” and “end whiteness”?
It’s mottes and baileys all the way down.
The police and whiteness remain conspicuously intact.
Not for lack of trying, arguably.
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I assume musk has more influence than just through doge cuts.
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By that logic everyone who voted for Biden should have been OK with Democratic aides and advisors running the show because that’s the way it has been forever, it didn’t even need to be mentioned.
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George Soros himself has a vaguely lib, pro-democracy, pro-markets ideology influenced by his youth. His son Alexander, who spent 8 years at Berkeley doing his masters and PhD (graduating 2019), and who is in charge of his charitable giving, is the arch-progressive who, unsurprisingly, supports just about every progressive cause championed in the Berkeley faculty lounge, from homeless drug addicts in San Francisco to Arabs in Israel/Palestine.
Soros Sr had, I suppose, some kind of shadowy influence in that he funded huge numbers of educational and think tank type institutions that promoted his ideas, especially in Eastern Europe. Soros Jr just realized that local politics was even more important to progressivism than national politics and so funded huge numbers of leftist DAs, city council members and so on very strategically in competitive races. I don’t know if that influence counts as ‘shadowy’ given it was all very public.
I think one of the things that's unusual about the pairing of Trump and Musk, at least for politicians, is the way that they're very intentionally brash and attention seeking.... and provocative, and, for Trump especially, fractious.
It seems to me that, in the normal course of things, activist parts of a coalition's base tend to be very noisy and confrontational, and then the more technocratic part of of a coalition, or the finance-oriented part of a coalition, tends to let that activist part suck up all the negative oxygen and emotion and then respond to in in the most anodyne, bloodless, quiet ways possible, generally making the really big changes. They tend to be more in the Politics and the English Language camp when it comes to attention management. And of course there is often more financial or organizational connections between the two parts of coalitions.
Trump and Musk seem like they're collapsing that distinction, which is... interesting.
Anyway, whether or not this way of behaving, this division of labor between funders/organizers/NGOs and the groups they fund, is shadowy is kind of a tricky issue, or so it seems to me. On the one hand, when I read, say, this Tablet story about the Pritzker family, their wealth, and the way they use it, and all the programs they fund, I could see the argument that none of what they're doing is secret; it's all in public, in some literal sense. That's what makes it possible to write that Tablet article, after all. And yet I also know that my fairly well-educated progressive in-laws, who live in Illinois and follow CNN and MSNBC, absolutely don't know any of this stuff, and it absolutely isn't worth the time trying to get them to know about it, because they have all sorts of ideological white blood cells about even the framing of topic. Same with the topics covered by Jacob Siegel in this article about the rise of the disinfo industry. Same with this famous Time magazine article. Same with all the discussion about the role and influence of USAID. Obama was famously very swayed by Cass Sunstein's theory of nudging groups, which is quite literally about recognizing problems with the attention that normies pay to things and then making policy that leverages those flaws (ostensibly towards pro-social ends). Is Moldbug's Cathedral shadowy? Or is it just normal and inevitable, the reality of complicated modern states dealing with the cognitive realities of their "citizens"?
I feel like this is a major fault line right now. Over and over, one set of people is inclined to say, I think, "Everything is legal and above the board, and this is just what our system literally IS. This kind of technocratic organizing is simple how power works, and how it must inevitably work." And another side says, "Even if it's ostensibly legal, there are so many layers of indirection, and so much rhetorical obfuscation, and so much artful shifting of attention, that surely the goal is not democratic deliberation and self-governance. TPOSIWID." Much like with the USAID stories, whether or not these different organizations or funders or whoever else is shadowy, large blocks of voters sure seem to respond like the organizations have been shadowy when those voters finally realize what the organizations have been up to...
Ironic that the collapse of their savings-and-loan-whatever, due to a strategy of chasing subprime loans to create securities, should have been heeded as a warning to the Bush administration for what locked in Obama's 2008 general election win. Can anyone explain why dhey held FDIC-uninsured money and how their settlement prevented account-holders from being made whole?
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They have very different styles, so I can understand people having different opinions of them. Soros is about aligning government and society with his ideology, he doesn't necessarily have to go for the top dog, and in fact I think he rarely does, and instead opts for influencing education and putting the right people in lower ranking, but important positions. Musk on the other hand did a hail mary pass hoping he could bail himself out if it works.
I think being pro-Soros and anti-Koch would be more incoherent, than being pro-Soros and anti-Musk.
Musk's methods being more crass and offputting to a certain type of democracy enjoyer, I'll opt for "more likely".
Do you mean, "Most people with enough money to buy influence wouldn't do so as openly as Musk has, but can be assumed to want to do so in a discreet way; since Musk has bought influence at the highest level, we should take that as an indication that others do so, conditional on whatever we assume about discretion from the associated politicians?"
Very well put!
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