Confessions of a Muskophrenic

by Roger L. Simon

When Donald Trump was first running for president back in 2015–2016, I described myself in several postings to PJMedia as a “Trumpophrenic,” since I supported the business tycoon’s policies while sometimes recoiling at his style.

No longer. For some time now I have been 100 percent pro-Trump and regard his presidency as one of the best ever.

On the other hand (OTOH, as the dreadful acronym goes), I have been a “Muskophrenic” with conflicting opinions about mega-entrepreneur Elon Musk for almost as long and remain so.

Before I explain, please factor in that I’m one of the few (for reasons unknown to me) still banned by Twitter/X that allegedly is letting everyone back on.

Perhaps then I’m a sorehead—or need a dose of lithium to ameliorate my schizoid behavior—even though I applaud Elon Musk’s having opened up the platform (theoretically) to all.

He has vastly improved the site that had become a conduit for government-sourced disinformation more advanced and, in some ways, more sinister than the former Soviet Union.

Also, I don’t in any way think Mr. Musk is remotely guilty of the antisemitism for which he has been accused. As a Jew, I share his disdain for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that lives so far in the past that it still acts as if the main threat to my co-religionists comes from mythical “white supremacists.” Don’t ADL executives look out their office windows?

I further applaud several of Mr. Musk’s ventures, including Space X (though not ready to try it—I have a family), Starlink (internet for all), and the ambitious Neuralink that aims to cure different forms of paralysis and a variety of other serious conditions from blindness to dementia through embedding computer chips in the brain.

I probably missed a few other companies, given the man’s extraordinary energy and inventiveness.

He also has valid, to the extent I understand it anyway, things to say about AI, not to mention myriad other subjects.

But I will cut to what troubles me that you likely already have guessed: the company that has made him the world’s richest man on almost any given day, Tesla.

The problems, however, are numerous.

“Climate change” (that euphemism) almost always comes in near the bottom of the list of voter concerns for good reason. The public has realized it’s basically a scam, only profiting owners of companies with public subsidies and those clever enough to get in early on the carbon credits fiddle.

Moreover, if all automobiles were electric, the effect on the Earth’s temperature would be insignificant. Cars don’t nearly dominate the atmosphere the way industry does.

It also may be, as Danish author Bjorn Lomborg has been telling us for years, that the minimal amount of warming that has occurred is good for the real greening of the Earth, providing food for the starving; Africa, particularly, has improved.

But this is the easy part. I’m not even going to go into the high cost of these vehicles that some have put equivalent to $17 per gallon, nor the ugly history of their construction in communist China and in Congo, where child labor is used to extract cobalt for the batteries.

What really worries me about electric cars is that they’re another instrument of state control, the very thing Elon Musk frequently inveighs against.

Through the control of the power grid and all the high-tech upload capabilities built into these automobiles, actors from governments—national and state—utilities companies, other large corporations, and, perhaps most ominously, Big Tech can dictate our mobility, monitoring our movements and shutting us down at will.

This is a huge step in the ability to restrict human freedom.

(Yes, I’ve heard the rumors that the same governance is being considered for internal combustion cars, and that also is highly disturbing.)

If I know all this, Elon Musk surely does, and vastly more.

This is why I remain a Muskophrenic, although I still give him great credit for his strong support of the First Amendment on X.

I only wish he had built a more sensible hybrid.

First published in the Epoch Times.