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Dec. 17, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
37:54
Elon Musk Is Unserious, Sociopathic—And Our Next President!?

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There comes a time when you simply conclude that someone is stupid.
And or a con artist.
And that is what I have concluded about Elon Musk.
Now, this is not to say that intelligent people are always right.
No, in fact, they're often wrong.
Maybe most often wrong, in fact.
Most research is wrong.
Most literary criticism is off-base.
But there is a difference, a distinction to be made.
Everyone can fall into error.
Everyone can have a false assumption or premise.
Everyone can make a miscalculation along the way.
Everyone can reach a conclusion that's a bit of a stretch.
I am certainly not immune to those issues.
But that person is acting in good faith and attempting to say something of importance.
And there's another type of person out there.
They're not merely dumb.
Perhaps dumb people can't really think.
Beyond step one.
But there's a type of person who doesn't think, in fact, but offers ad hoc and post-facto rationalizations for behavior.
And that's very different than thinking.
There's also a type of person, and I'm thinking here of the sociopath as an extreme example of this type of person.
Who doesn't so much think as he or she targets a community of people and understands what affects them in a kind of stimulus and response type way.
And then tells these people what they want to hear.
This is the person who preaches to the choir, so to speak.
This is the, in a rather benign example here, the kind of cheerleader or football coach who tells you you're the greatest and that he believes in you so that you'll go out and perform on the field.
That is a very benign example of maybe a phenomena that can often be quite malign.
I think Elon Musk really is one of these types of people, and I don't think he can actually think.
He's not as smart as he thinks he is, and he's not as smart as you think he is, perhaps.
Let me just react to an example of this that has come up yesterday and this morning.
So, as you might have heard...
Elon went on a banning spree.
We'll see if these things will be permanent.
But he went on a banning spree of many mainstream journalists.
Some from the New York Times, CNN, and tech reporters, etc.
And these are people who have been a thorn in his side.
So it's obvious that this is personal.
And it all relates back to an account, which he also banned, called Elon Jet.
Which was posting the flight plan, effectively, of his private jet so that you could know where he is.
And some of these other accounts were reporting on this, reporting on Elon and linking to the jet, and they have all been banned.
And as many have already pointed out, we have a repetition of the...
Almost exact situation that we had with Hunter Biden's laptop.
So, you know, I think there is something, let's say, dubious about the laptop.
Was it probably hacked by some entity who wants to help Trump, perhaps, but means America no good in all likelihood?
Who that was exactly, I have my suspicions, but I'll keep those to myself for the moment.
But it was a real thing.
There might very well be some false information implanted in this data stash that ended up at the New York Post via Rudy Giuliani or supposedly and dubiously through a computer repairman.
But there might very well be some false information in there.
Most of the information, maybe even most all of the information is in fact real and has been verified.
And so just on a level of the First Amendment and free speech and just civic engagement, people have a right, so to speak, to look at it.
And I agree with that.
And Elon is doing the exact same thing.
The fact is flight plans are public information.
And someone is linking to public information via Twitter.
You see this all the time.
There are accounts that track Bitcoin transactions.
There are accounts that track what someone is doing on another social media site.
There are accounts that simply reproduce public statements by You know, officials or celebrities or whatever.
They're fan accounts that are more or less doing what I'm describing.
The idea that you would ban an account revealing a flight plan that is public information is simply absurd.
The Hunter Biden laptop issue was.
And now you can, of course, point to the hypocrisy of liberal journalists who are up in arms about the banning of some guy from the New York Times or an amateur user talking about Elon Musk's flight schedule.
And yet they were in...
Full support of banning the New York Post and people linking to it.
I get it.
It absolutely is hypocrisy.
But you've got to judge these things on a case-by-case Barrett and to look at what the actual merits are.
There might very well be hypocrisy.
That doesn't mean that this is a sound decision.
And the unsoundness of the decision is revealed by the way that Elon Musk discusses the matter.
So this is a tweet from December 14th.
Any account doxing real-time location info or anyone will be suspended as it is a physical safety violation.
This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn't a safety problem, so is okay on a slightly delayed basis.
Here are some more.
So this is a response to Barry Weiss.
I'm not exactly a fan of Barry Weiss, but I think she's kind of got it right here.
She's basically talking about Elon's hypocrisy, not just the hypocrisy of the liberal media.
The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases.
And it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem.
Elon responds to this.
I don't think he's getting replies from Perry.
What should be the consequence of doxing someone's real-time exact location be?
Assume your child is at the location as mine was.
When you become a public figure, you have to assume certain risk.
If you are a public figure, you are now at a heightened risk of being assassinated.
You are now at a higher risk of having a sex scandal on your hands.
You're now at a public risk of having your personal failings broadcast in the mainstream media or on page 6 of the New York Post or whatever.
You simply are.
Additionally, when making a sound decision, you actually probably shouldn't assume that your child is involved.
There's a reason why doctors are forbidden or at least dissuaded from performing surgery on their own child.
The fact is you can't think straight.
You can't make a difficult cost-benefit analysis, let's say, when your own child...
Is the subject.
So, I mean, for instance, if it's my own child, what kind of decisions would I make?
I would make the speed limit on highways 25. I would not allow anyone to drive under the age of 30. And drinking age is pushed to, let's say, 45. And any playground bully...
He's subject to 10 years imprisonment at the very least and so on.
As you can see, you just simply can't think straight when you're talking about your own children.
This is just not an argument.
He's trying to pull at your heartstrings in order to get you on his side by first off presenting himself as a doting father and then making you think of your own children and so on.
It's just not...
And it also goes against the very notion of Twitter itself, which is about real time.
I mean, let's say that Hillary Clinton is giving a speech at a local park that I'm next to, and I go and I photograph it, boom, and I post it immediately, within 10 seconds.
Am I revealing her information?
Am I...
Am I trying to get her assassinated?
Am I endangering children when I do this?
I mean, it's just not serious.
As many have already pointed out on Twitter, I've seen not posting publicly available flight plans.
It would mean that the Epstein Island jet could not be discussed on Twitter.
It doesn't matter if it's for the elites or the hoi polloi.
We've got to have one rule.
That's what Elon's saying.
Well, this clearly benefits elites in this case.
No one is going to post about Sally Smith's vacation to Nebraska or something.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
And I'm not even sure that I would say that Elon is necessarily...
Trying to protect elites and their bad behavior.
I think he's just mad at this account.
And it's all entirely personal.
And similar to sociopathic behavior, he's taking revenge on someone for what is ultimately a small slight.
It would be as if someone insulted you at the office and you responded by...
And I want to return to that other notion that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk.
That is the type of sociopath who...
Tesla recognizes a certain community and really knows how to preach to the choir.
That stimulus and response effect where you know what you say to them and you get a response.
You get an ooh or an ah.
Tesla is probably the least fraudulent of Elon's various companies.
I would say it's a real thing.
You can buy a Tesla car.
Whereas I would say that the boring company, this digging of tunnels, I think most people recognize now that this is just simply absurd.
SolarCity has gone by the wayside.
Neuralink, I mean, I could go on.
SpaceX could have a business plan, but colonizing Mars is not one of them.
There are a lot of people, the smart nerd types, skeptic types, you can think about Thunderfoot, you can think about other people in his milieu who have really gone after Musk.
And these are people who love science.
They're the type that you would think like Elon Musk, yet they have shown him to be a fraud, in my opinion, pretty convincingly.
But Tesla is...
A real thing.
But even Tesla is subject to bizarre over-promising.
Do you remember the Cybertruck?
Really cool design.
I have to say this.
It's an outer-body steel shell.
And it looks cool.
It looks basically like something from Total Recall or 80s sci-fi film.
And it's cool.
If I ever owned a pickup truck, I would like my pickup truck to look like that, to give it credit.
You probably heard about the Cybertruck after Elon promised bulletproof grade glass and then threw a metal ball at the windshield and it just smashed.
It was a pretty embarrassing snafu.
Even that, I mean, everyone...
You know, mistakes happen, of course.
But even that might be kind of telling in the sense that no one around Elon is really telling him no.
No one around Elon is offering him any sort of criticism.
And so he just says things or he wants to get an effect out of people.
He wants to...
Equal Steve Jobs in terms of keynote presentations.
And this is the way to do it.
And no one stops him from making a fool of himself and his company.
Now, beyond that mishap at the presentation, the Cybertruck is nowhere to be seen.
This was announced in 2019.
I think there was a recent announcement around two weeks ago that it might be coming out in 2023 or 2024, but who knows?
You can buy a Tesla.
There are Teslas out there.
I get that.
But the amount of overpromising just makes the entire project seem exceedingly dubious.
Remember self-driving cars?
You can get into a car?
In San Francisco, and it can just drive you to New York City while you sit back and post on Twitter or read a book or sleep or something.
Oh, that's coming in 2020.
All of this stuff is just nonsense.
I think, to a degree, it's coming from this...
Hole in America's and the world's soul after the death of Steve Jobs.
As the good, visionary capitalist who doesn't actually care about money.
That's at least the myth of Steve Jobs.
I'll say this.
I've been an Apple and Mac user for my entire life.
Even in the dark days of the 1990s when Steve Jobs wasn't there, I was still a Mac user.
I can remember going to the computer labs at the University of Virginia or Chicago or Duke or whatever, and they would usually have a big bay of 50...
IBM, or I shouldn't say IBM, Windows-compatible PCs, and then there'd be like two Macs up in the corner.
And using them was kind of unusual, you know, people might ask.
Why?
But I also remember the Mac and IBM wars.
I remember the Mac and PC wars.
It's all good fun.
So I am predisposed to like Steve Jobs.
And I do like Steve Jobs.
Maybe that's a real failing of mine.
I admire him.
I think he did have a vision.
And he did deliver.
He overpromised on occasion.
But those go by the wayside.
But there's a way in which Steve Jobs redeemed capitalism for people.
It's not just about money.
It's not just about fossil fuel companies destroying the earth.
It's actually a kind of affordable luxury product that's cool.
You know, I can remember in grad school my iMac, which had this see-through design.
It was plastic, but it was a transparent design.
I had a granite iMac one piece, so you could kind of see the machine working in there.
Very cool.
The MacBook design, this clean, minimalist, sci-fi, almost aluminum.
Very cool.
And I do genuinely like macOS or all the different names it's had over PCs.
I do find PCs kind of junky and gross.
I'm predisposed to Steve Jobs.
But my major point here, beyond all this reminiscing, is that there was a need for that myth after Steve Jobs' death in 2011.
We wanted this good, great, visionary capitalist who kind of transcends capitalism.
And I think there are many people who tried to fill that void.
I think you could even say that about SBF, Bankman Freed.
This nerd wearing gym shorts and flip-flops and who hasn't gotten a haircut in the last six months, who sleeps on the floor of his office.
There's something, you know, this is the kind of guy we can trust.
He's so outside of the box that he almost becomes reliable.
It's a weird thing.
That has gone up in flames, obviously, as is crypto in general.
I think Elon offered himself as a Steve Jobs type, and it wasn't so much about products being amazing, although that is the case with Tesla.
Although what I've heard from real car guys, I'm not a real car guy, but what I've heard from some of these real car guys is that Teslas leave a hell of a lot to be desired.
But anyway.
He promised to solve big problems.
And so if you look back at that Cybertruck announcement session, which very much resembled the Steve Jobs keynotes you can find on YouTube, but it was almost like a Las Vegas version of that, with bright lights shining everywhere and, you know...
He'll even use dancers later on.
He'll talk about a Tesla robot that he's building.
And he'll basically have a dancer in a leotard jumping around.
It's ridiculous.
I think it would make Steve Jobs cringe to a great degree.
He did not do that.
But anyway, there was a kind of sex bot looking girl who came out.
At the opener of the Cybertruck event.
And she said, you know, in the future there will be no straws.
So he's kind of, you know, referencing that controversy of banning straws and stuff like that.
And then she says, you know, in 2019 the skies are polluted.
We're addicted to fossil fuels.
But finally, Elon comes and solves the problem for us, and the skies cleared, rainbows came out, and ponies, and we cracked global warming, and so on.
Let me introduce you to my creator, Elon.
First off, there was a lot of sex cells, as we know, and there was a lot of sexualization of this very cute girl acting as a robot.
And I think in this case, Elon was really going after a certain audience.
It is these nerd Silicon Valley types who want to hoot and holler about the latest iPhone or a new Tesla machine or some great new Facebook app or something like that.
Just a bunch of really annoying nerd types.
And they loved it.
And this is kind of their own personal sex fantasy, because they obviously are probably not surrounded by attractive, robust women, and so they have some nerd fantasy about owning a sex bot or something like this.
And he's just playing to them.
And I think he's also playing to that, you know, as I mentioned, that kind of hole in America's soul where we want a new Steve Jobs and we see our very lives as polluting the planet.
I mean, understandably.
Put global warming aside.
Just pollution.
We all produce a bunch of trash.
We're driving around polluting the air.
We don't like it.
We want some vision that corrects this.
Well, the problem is, even in best-case scenarios, An electric car of any kind, no matter how coolly it's designed, doesn't actually solve any of these issues whatsoever.
The rainforests are still going to burn.
The ocean is still going to be filled with plastic, regardless of the electric car you own.
Electricity is not a resource.
Yes, electricity is available in nature and the atom itself, but...
For all intents and purposes, electricity is produced by other resource extraction.
It's not a resource.
It's not a renewable resource.
It's a product.
So you need to mine the coal.
You need to have a nuclear fission reactor.
You need to pull out the oil in order to get the electricity.
Now, maybe in a future state of affairs, like what I talked about in my last monologue, with the nuclear fusion reactor and electric cars and trains and planes, wow, that is amazing.
But that's not really what Elon's offering.
Elon's offering this electric car as a kind of affordable luxury good for people who want to be a part of that changing of the world.
That is what he is doing, and he presents himself as such to that community.
Now, there have been many worse examples than the cyber truck in terms of Elon Musk bullshitting everyone.
He's stood in front of a house with fake solar panels and talked about how roof slate is going to be solarized and will charge your car.
It's all bullshit.
It's all bullshit.
It's all a kind of stimulus that he offers a particular community to get a response.
Now, we see this again with the new fangled Elon that's been invented.
Elon's become a Republican.
And he's become a conservative movement hero.
And he offered...
Pure catnip to all of the conservatives with these Twitter files which he released via Barry Weiss in Matt Taibbi and which were released by a journalist.
It was a kind of self-leak but it was a kind of controlled leak too.
It was released in cooperation with these journalists and posted on Twitter and talked up by the man releasing them.
These are the sins of the old regime, which he's repeating, of course.
But it was catnip to conservatives and it really played to a certain kind of conservative anxiety about the elite Democrats.
Being in control of everything and censoring you and preventing you from posting Hunter Biden's dick pics and thus the election was stolen.
That's what it was playing to.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't, you know, serious concern regarding Twitter censorship.
I mean, I can certainly speak to this myself.
I was kicked off Twitter pretty early on in 2016, actually, then let back on.
I seem to kind of remain there, which is good.
I don't even want to go into it all.
It's not about me and some sob story about me.
But, you know, I am sensitive to all these things.
I think it is a serious issue.
But I'm also going to call bullshit when I see it.
This was catnip for the conservative movement.
And it let them indulge in a fantasy that Trump won the 2020 election.
That's what it was.
So Elon...
Has moved on to a new audience.
And these audiences that he cultivates are, I would say, in our polarized environment, mutually exclusive or incompatible.
You can't go after the tech nerd incel crowd or the concerned suburban professional who might own a Tesla.
And also go after Charlie Kirk fans.
It's just not going to work.
You're going to have one or the other.
You've got to make a choice if you want to be a massive public figure.
And what it seems to me is that Elon has kind of squeezed the lemon until the pipsqueak with the tech nerds, incels, and...
Suburban, concerned wine moms, and now he's moving on to conservatives.
And I think in many ways, he has become the global right-wing troll that Trump was previously.
You know, we lived in the Trump era from about 2015 through, let's say, 2022.
In the sense that every single headline was about Trump, ultimately.
And so, there are certain eras that I've lived through in my own relatively short life.
There was the 9-11 era, where from 2001, let's say through 2006 or 2007, Every headline was ultimately about 9-11 on some level.
It was all about 9-11, and the Iraq War was a kind of result of 9-11 in many ways.
So we were focused on national security, terrorism, war abroad, etc.
That was a particular moment in time.
I think a kind of shorter moment occurred with the financial collapse in 2008.
Stock market and mortgage collapse.
And for, let's say, two to three years, we were obsessed with Wall Street and corruption and massive amounts of debt and all this kind of stuff.
And you go on.
There are kind of paradigms that inflect news.
We lived through, and this one's the most obvious, we lived through the Trump era.
Every headline you ever read was ultimately related to Trump, his election, Racism, immigration, Charlottesville, COVID was kind of about Trump on some level.
January 6th, Mar-a-Lago, the stolen election.
I could go on, but it was all about Trump.
We've lived through that, and I think we might be kind of moving out of it.
People are making fun of Trump.
People have contempt for Trump.
He's lost his magic.
He doesn't seem to have...
The ability to control discourse.
And maybe there can only be one.
There can only be one person that we talk about.
And I think it's reasonable to conclude that Elon, who reminds me quite a bit of sociopaths, high-functioning sociopaths who can operate at a very large scale,
He wants to be the next Trump, and he has actually successfully displaced Trump as the right-wing troll that everyone's talking about, including me doing this 30-45 minute monologue on him, of course.
He wants to be that type of person.
And I don't think it's too outrageous to suggest that he wants to run for president.
And yes, yes, yes, I know.
Elon Musk was not born in the United States, so we would have a real Obama birth certificate controversy on our hands.
But two things.
First, Musk is the type to think that the rules just don't apply to him.
You actually see that among many Silicon Valley tycoons who will...
Break the rules and then change them later.
Now, this would be a major task to run for president.
But I'm going to say this.
I think that is his ambition.
He's never been a typical rich person or even a typical billionaire.
The vast majority of billionaires, you have no earthly idea who they are.
They're quiet.
They have these investments.
Might go on elaborate vacations, but you could mistake them for an average Joe sometimes, at least when they're not on their yacht.
You don't know who they are, and they operate behind the scenes.
And you only find out about them through reports on giving to political campaigns or something like that.
Musk isn't like that.
Musk wants to be...
On center stage.
He wants you to know about his wealth.
Very similar to Donald Trump, who of course had money problems throughout his life, and was kind of floating on air many times, and of course has had many well-documented bankruptcies.
But he's always on stage embodying the persona of the American rich guy.
Elon Musk, ditto.
A little bit different, on stage embodying the visionary capitalist who's in it to save the world, but very similar to Trump in many respects, and I think ultimately has the same level of ambition.
He learned something from the Trump era, and he's going there, and he's cultivating a base through very easy stimulus and response, just like Trump did.
You know, he learned that you talk about immigration, boom, you get mmm.
It's like red meat, people eat it up.
It just works immediately.
He recognized that and kept doing it.
Later on, he cultivated the religious right, and they actually became his most loyal following.
Go to Liberty University and say, you know, well, you might not like me, but you gotta vote for me because of the judges and abortion and all that kind of stuff you guys care about, and I actually don't.
But he successfully cultivated that base through stimulus and response, and they remained loyal to him long after the Republican establishment, which might never have actually been loyal to him.
dropped him and long after he lost an election and long after the alt-right was kind of history or displaced by QAnon or I guess in my case it turned on Trump altogether.
there.
It's the big con.
And you can, if you're not really a serious and self-aware and self-critical thinker, you can successfully Agitate, motivate, and corral these types of bases.
Now, the good news, I guess, is that these people don't actually do anything in office, like Trump, or when they actually try to seize power, they do it in such a buffoonish, outrageous, and obviously unsuccessful manner that they can't really get anywhere.
They're best on Twitter.
That's the domain in which they rule.
It kind of is fascinating that it is all on Twitter.
That's another story.
But these people will ultimately be unsuccessful, but they can go a long way, and they certainly can affect people's minds pretty profoundly.
And they certainly go a long way in creating a kind of paradigm where we have to talk with them.
They become a kind of construct in our mind for something else.
Trump was a construct for racism.
He was a construct for white, rural America.
He was a construct for dangerous foreign policy in some instances.
He was a construct for QAnon and lying.
He was a construct for other things.
I think Musk can kind of fill that role as well.
I don't think he's a particularly brilliant man, as I've said.
I don't find any of his thinking to be sound or serious, even.
But he can kind of become a construct for something.
He can become a construct for the conservatives.
Certainly in the past for Silicon Valley visionaries.
And I do think that his ultimate goal is the same as Trump's.
We'll see if he's successful at that.
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