Elon is an Existential Insurgent, Not a Polling Question
The Stop-Laundering-Criminality-Through-Polling Challenge
What is Osama bin Laden’s approval rating? How about the favorable/unfavorable on Jeffrey Dahmer? Is El Chapo above 50%? We’re not asking Americans for their opinions on these notorious criminals, so why are we polling the favorability of Elon Musk?
In just the last few days CBS News/YouGov, Groundwork Collaborative/Public Citizen, and The Economist/YouGov all released public opinion polls on Musk and his fraudulent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But Musk is not a politician, elected official, or confirmed appointee. The Trump administration claims the white power billionaire as a “special government employee” but Musk has not filed a required financial disclosure nor sought a waiver for his world-historic conflicts of interest. The status of Musk as actual government employee would be most generously labeled “provisional,” or more accurately, “fake.”
Applying the old Orwellian GOP technique where nomenclature obfuscates or outright inverts the true meaning of an act, DOGE itself has been presented as a legitimate department of the federal bureaucracy. In reality, DOGE is an extralegal invention organized to commandeer and dismantle the very bureaucracy it mimics in its name. DOGE is fake, Musk is a fake employee, the whole thing is as fraudulent as Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.
Yet in response to Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government, since 2021 pollsters and journalists alike have felt it appropriate to simply ask respondents and elected officials if Biden was the legitimately elected President. These sanitized, context-free questions about fundamentally anti-democratic actions only further the propaganda narrative that destroying constitutional governance is just another policy preference to measure—rather than plainly treasonous conduct.
None of this is normal, none of this is up for debate. We don’t measure public opinion on rape, arson, or theft—yet when Musk and his team of racist incels assault, burn down and steal from the federal government we ask if Americans support these acts very much, somewhat, not at all, or "unsure.”
When ending democracy is polled as just another valid choice, media coverage of said polling further validates the illegitimate and signals to politicians to continue furthering the big lie. We’re in an increasingly unhinged feedback loop with each cycle of polls and coverage further normalizing what should be beyond the pale in a constitutional democracy.
As a result the big lie that Trump won in 2020 has self-pollinated and flowered a new lie: That Elon Musk is a legit government official and DOGE is a real federal agency. Polling on Musk and DOGE launders their criminality by failing to root the questions in relevant context of illegality, threats to political opponents, and profligate anti-American extremism.
None of this is normal, none of this is up for debate. We don’t measure public opinion on rape, arson, or theft—yet when Musk and his team of racist incels assault, burn down and steal from the federal government we ask if Americans support these acts very much, somewhat, not at all, or "unsure.”
I’m calling for a total and complete shutdown of Elon Musk polling entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on. And if pollsters just can’t resist asking about Musk, at least give respondents some context and place his name alongside the likes of Timothy McVeigh and the late, great Hannibal Lecter.
ICYMI, check out these related essays:
Substack's Nazi Takeover
Elon Musk is a Nazi and I will not pretend that he isn’t. Donald Trump is a Nazi. This administration has, in very short order, demonstrated itself to be a Nazi regime through and through. So why, after everything we’ve seen from this administration’s first ten days in office, has Substack chosen to celebrate Elon Musk? Adding insult to injury, why is Substack praising Elon for his laughably bad faith posture as a free speech absolutist?
In Case of Emergency, Break Glass. Literally.
The asymmetry in American politics has reached absurd levels. Republicans deploy every dirty trick in the book – from the proto-January 6 riot that ratfucked the Florida 2000 recount, to stealing Obama's Supreme Court seat, to the current corporate hostile takeover of federal agencies. Meanwhile, Democrats remain imprisoned by their fealty to "norms" and "civility" and that most elite of concepts: congressional comity. (A word so pretentious it only exists to describe the unbreakable friendships between the most corrupt and powerful people in our country.)
Central Park: Center of the Moral Universe
Trump’s cultivation of the disinformation ecosystem threatens the individual and the collective: from his bungling of the COVID crisis, to climate science denialism, to the coup attempt and big stolen election lie that live on as Republican dogma. “Alternative facts” drive the anti-abortion movement unshackled by Trump’s extremist Supreme Court.
…we don’t have government anymore, we are dealing with REGIME and that’s how it works
He left S. Africa as Apparteid ended w8th Mandela. He ran crying to his Mama in Canada. He's been a bigot from the get!