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.
…we don’t have government anymore, we are dealing with REGIME and that’s how it works
Another spot on reflection, Evan!