By Victor Davis Hanson
Have you noticed, everyone, that the crescendo of hatred toward Elon Musk is becoming surreal?
We had a congresswoman from Ohio, I think her name was Marcy Kaptur, she recently said that she wasn’t sure where Elon Musk’s loyalties lay because he’d only been a citizen for 22 years.
He’s a naturalized citizen. This is very interesting because, remember, the Left says that people who are here illegally, and not citizens, should gain all of the protections and rights of citizens. They should be de facto citizens. Anybody who would question a naturalized citizen’s loyalty, according to the Left, would be xenophobic, nativist.
I think Rep. Kaptur has actually voted for resolutions damning—if I could use that word—Republicans for being insensitive to the status of immigrants, whether legal or illegal.
This follows a whole series of personal attacks. We had posters in Washington, D.C., saying, “Eliminate Musk.” We had a man arrested from Indiana online for promising, threatening to kill Elon Musk.
Here in California we have Rep. [Robert] Garcia, I think his name is. And he was on television and he said that Elon Musk was a d—. And when called on it, he said you had to bring weapons, i.e., against Musk, for this bar fight. WEAPONS.
Then we had this unhinged minister, Caudle—was that his name? I think it was. Steve Caudle from Tennessee. And he got up in his pulpit—and it was televised—and he said that Elon Musk was satanic, a devil, and sometimes you had to use violence to stop such devilry.
Add all of this up and you’re getting to the situation in which the bar of what is permissible has been drastically lowered.
We have turned someone who has saved the U.S. space program and will probably save two astronauts, who otherwise would perish in space if it was left to the government program; who reinvented the entire auto industry; who opened up all of social media with X—we have turned this person into a demon. A disloyal demon. A traitor. Someone that we smear and we slander all day long.
For what? For saying the following: that the $36 trillion in debt and the $1.5-$2 trillion, and Joe Biden in some years had $5 trillion and $6 trillion deficits, are unsustainable. And through a series of revenue enhancements and drastic cuts of programs that are unnecessary, we can get near a balanced budget.
He takes no money. He’s not confirmed as the head of a government agency, but, of course, there’s all sorts of deputies and heads of agencies that require no confirmation, including the national security adviser of the United States of America.
So, what is my point? We saw this earlier with Donald Trump.
Just a few days before the first assassination attempt, Joe Biden told a group of people that it’s time “to put Donald Trump in the bull’s-eye.” He ranted and raved about semi-fascist and ultra-MAGA, as if they were somehow dangerous insurrectionaries and threatened the republic. At the same time he was saying this, The New Republic ran a cover story of Elon Musk as Hitler, with a Hitlerian mustache.
Remember, we had had retired generals who said he was Nazi-like. He was equivalent to people who had set up the concentration and, indeed, death camps at Auschwitz. And he was synonymous with Mussolini.
And what did that do? That lowered the acceptable discourse. And that lowering of discourse led to acceptable behavior, such as two assassination attempts.
So, all I would warn the Left is, I think it’s time to stop this. Because if you continue this rhetoric, somebody—as this person in Indiana or this minister in Tennessee—is going to openly call for violence, if they have not already, against one of the most iconic Americans in our history. And when that happens, the responsibility is going to be on you.
So, it’s time to tone down the rhetoric and stop comparing a Renaissance American citizen—A CITIZEN, A CITIZEN—to one of the worst mass murders in history.
First published in the Daily Signal
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2 Responses
The fools and their testy tool
Yes, the ones who malign Musk,
From dawn to dusk,
Their brains are dried to mindless husks.
So, pity them, let them choke on their green grievous phlegm.
They cannot stop!
The fact is that the modern Left has arrived at a point where all their obsessions can be justified in the medium which we all use to communicate and think with: language. It is therefore self-evident to them that anyone who disagrees with their current narrative is morally beyond the pale. Here’s a very fine quote I once came across:
“Unfortunately, in the past ten years, corruption of language, together with its evil cousins, suppression of speech not desired by those in power, and irrationality masquerading as insight, have all reached a frenzy. It’s like going down a greased slide – eventually gravity and momentum take over, finishing the trends that began tentatively not so long ago.”
That was written 8 years ago. We have clearly reached the bottom of that greased slide. The full frenzy is upon us. It is inconceivable to these people on the Left that they can ever be wrong or that a fellow citizen might have an opinion different to their own. This is, of course, the mentality required for the foot soldiers of an eventual ‘Holodomor’ or ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Great Leap Forward’. The writer concludes that hopes that common decency, reason or “democracy” might prevail and rectify our current situation are in vain. There is no way back. And the choices are stark:
“Unfortunately, today, the real choices are either to retreat from engaging the Left, or to have hard men engage in a gutter struggle, hoping that once the serpents have been strangled by means fair or foul, men of equipoise and virtue will come forth to retire the hard men and rebuild a new polity.”
Mr Hanson’s gently warning to the Left to “stop this” is misplaced hope. They will not stop! Evidence? There has not been a single apology from any of the figures in the media, academia, the military, the entertainment business or the wider political class regarding the absurd assertions, accusations and lawfare they supported before the election; and nary a word of recognition about assassination attempts!