Elon is Finding Out + Charlie Kirk Says Jesus Was Not a Refugee
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In this episode, Brad discusses the recent social media clash involving Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Laura Loomer, shedding light on tensions within the MAGA community. He examines the implications of Musk's influence, Trump's cognitive decline, and potential policy changes under another Trump term, and the episode wraps up with thoughts on Charlie Kirk's comments about Jesus and a reflection on the challenges and hopes for the upcoming year.
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Hope you had a good week of eating and drinking and celebrating, whether you were with a bunch of family members or at home, taking it easy by yourself, whatever you celebrate.
However, I hope it was enjoyable.
I want to jump in today with one of our last episodes of the year.
To talk about something that happened on Twitter this week and why it's giving me a strange flicker of hope as we head into 2025. You might have noticed this already, but in the days right after Christmas,
December 26 and 27, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the two very efficient, very streamlined co-leaders, just like Jim and Michael in that season of The Office, co-leaders of Doge,
Department of Government Efficiency, had a little bit of a Twitter storm because Musk said that what the U.S. needs is more skilled laborers, and that includes tech engineers, who in many cases come from The controversy spread across X after far-right activist Laura Loomer on Monday
criticized Trump's choice to name Siram Krishnan, a technology entrepreneur and investor who was born in India, as his senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence.
So this led Loomer to kind of make a wide, broadside attack on Musk himself.
She talked about the ways that Musk basically is jumping into MAGA in order to buy the presidency and Now, Laura Loomer is, of course, the person who was flying around on Trump's airplane during the campaign for a minute.
She is a far-right nationalist, white nationalist activist who is, in many ways, even too far-right for much of MAGA nation.
She was deemed not okay to be on Trump's plane, particularly because rumors were spreading that there was an affair happening.
Here's what she said on December 26. The elephant in the room is that Elon Musk, who is not MAGA and never has been, is a total effing drag on the Trump transition.
He's a stage 5 clinger who overstayed his welcome at Mar-a-Lago in an effort to become Trump's side piece and be the point man for all of his accomplices in big tech to slither in to Mar-a-Lago.
Elon Musk responded, I quote, Laura Loomer then responded, Telling the truth isn't trolling.
Read the room, Elon Musk.
You bought your way into MAGA five minutes ago, and after Trump almost had his head blown off in Butler.
Remember when you voted for Biden and propped up Governor Ron DeSantis, and you said Trump was too old?
We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy, Xi Jinping.
So all of this was of course in response to Musk saying that there is a need in this country for high skilled tech workers and engineers and entrepreneurs, people who obviously are really popular and needed and part of the tech industry.
This was a storm because not only did Loomer jump in, but there were so many white nationalists and racists and white power folks who started piling on Elon Musk.
Well, Vivek Ramaswamy jumped in with one of the strangest tweets I think I've ever seen.
And I just, I'm sorry, friends, I'm going to have to spend a minute on it.
Here's what he said.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over, quote, Native Americans, isn't because of an innate American IQ deficit.
A key part of it comes down to the C word, culture.
Tough questions demand tough answers, and if we're really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the truth, all caps.
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long, at least since the 1990s, and likely longer.
That doesn't start in college, it starts young, all caps.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from Boy Meets World or Zack Slater over Screech and Saved by the Bell or Stefan over Steve Urkel and the Family Matters will not produce the best.
So Vivek comes out and basically says the reason that so many folks come from India and Pakistan and other places in the tech industry and the reason why there's so many tech companies who hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers is because American culture prizes mediocrity.
I think Vivek thought he was going to turn into kind of a truth teller and kind of somebody who was confronting a little elephant in the room, as Laura Loomer might say, about American culture, but this did not work out for him.
Here are some of the responses to Ramaswamy and in some case to Musk.
Brendan Dilley, the pro-Trump podcaster says, I always love when these tech bros flat out tell you that they have zero understanding of American culture and then have the gall to tell you that you are the problem with America.
Loomer, Laura Loomer, the original poster in this case, went totally racist and totally disgusting.
She said that Indian people are third-world invaders with low IQs and talked about how this is a brewing civil war between Trump's far-right base and the tech guys like Ramaswamy and Musk who have infiltrated the MAGA world.
Looking forward to the inevitable divorce between President Trump and Big Tech, Loomer said.
Let's pray this fake Big Tech love fest with Trump ends sooner than later.
Now, I do think that this portends something important, and I want to talk about that.
But first, come on, friends.
We have to just talk about that Ramaswamy tweet, don't we?
I mean, we really got a Stefan Urkel reference.
That's incredible.
Like, who is writing this season?
A Stefan Urkel reference?
And then he, like, praised Screech on Saved by the Bell.
Like, don't get me wrong.
Screech, in many ways, was an outcast.
And, you know, the real-life Screech had a pretty tragic path after the show ended.
But I'm not sure that Screech was, like, exemplary in all those many ways.
He might not have fit in in the cool, jock, good-looking Zack Morris situation.
Slater, Kelly Kapowski crew, and he was not beautiful and he was not slick like they were, but, you know, I'm not sure that he was, like, doing things that we would call virtuous.
Anyway, Steve Urkel as well.
Steve is so smart, Steve Urkel.
I'm now revealing my, like, knowledge of 90s sitcoms.
Anyway, I'm going to stop now.
I'm just saying, friends...
How do we get a Stefan Urkel reference?
It's insane.
It's insane.
It's insane that I'm talking about Stefan Urkel on this podcast.
All right, I'm done now.
One of the things that I think came to mind for me about Trump and Musk and all of this is I do think that there have been some serious, scary, and startling aspects of the Trump-Musk marriage.
And the ways that Musk seemingly has dubbed himself the kind of co-president or something.
He was with Benjamin Netanyahu who called him the kind of unofficial president.
Trump had to come out and say a few days ago that Elon Musk won't be president.
And Trump also had a very bizarre explanation as to why because Musk was not born in this country.
So anyway, I don't know why he thought that's what everyone was talking about.
Whatever.
I don't want to spend much time on that.
But the idea that there would be a Department of Government deficiency that doesn't exist, but that they are cosplaying right now, is startling.
They're going to cut $2 trillion from the budget, they say.
They're going to do this.
They're going to do that.
It's been pretty scary.
I think for me, the scariest aspect is thinking about Elon Musk as the richest man in the world, who is saying that AFD is the only party or group that can save Germany.
Days before there was an AFD terrorist attack in Germany, Somebody who we now know, and reports have shown, is a paid subscriber to a South African apartheid account on X. Somebody who seems unhinged in every way, who is completely anti-trans, who is completely...
Off the rails when it comes to all kinds of issues surrounding gender and sexuality, as it comes to thinking about what it means for us to live in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-pluralist society.
Anyway, I don't want to spend much time on Musk in this sense, but that has been scary to me.
And to think that a robber baron, a tech baron of the 21st century could simply buy an election It has bothered me, and I have stayed up at night thinking about this.
What the Loomer kind of tweet fest and tweet storm and the fight between Ramaswamy and the muskets versus the white nationalists and the far-right racists, I think, brings up, We do have a situation where Donald Trump is going to be president again, and Donald Trump is a notoriously narcissistic, short-tempered, and short-attention-spanned human being.
There is a piece at the New Republic this week from Timothy Noah, and he talks about the ways that this will come into play during Trump's second term.
The prevailing theory about Trump's second term is that the horse now knows its way around the hospital.
I have my doubts.
Whatever practical knowledge Trump picked up in the first term is outweighed by the accelerating cognitive decline he displayed over the past year.
He was a weak president before, and maybe even a weaker one this time.
Now, I will stop and I'll reference something that I said with Dan on the Weekly Roundup two Fridays ago, which is I hope, and this is a strange statement and just stay with me because this is not in any way hope that Trump will be better or I'm going to give him a chance.
Nope, we're not doing that.
Don't email me.
Don't walk away thinking I've lost my mind.
I'm not saying that.
I do think Trump has shown signs of cognitive decline.
I do think he's a weak president for a lot of reasons.
I hope that he is not an emperor with no clothes to the point that he allows Musk to stay and be the co-president.
That's what I tried to get across before and I'm trying to get across now.
Back to what Timothy Noah wrote at The New Republic.
In saying this, I don't dispute that Trump's instincts are dangerously authoritarian, nor would I argue that a bumbling maximum leader is harmless.
Quite the opposite.
Trump's last presidency did serious damage, and he did.
And we can go through the details of that, whether it's the tax cuts, whether it's the border and separating families, whether it is the Supreme Court justices he put on the bench, whether it's the other judges he put on the federal bench, looking at you, Eileen Cannon, whether it is cutting health care, whether it is the way he handled COVID and the fact that we lost 40% more people than places like Canada or France.
All of that, awful, tragic, disgusting leadership and governance.
But Trump is not fit to be an executive leader.
And Timothy Noah references a really good paper.
It's a 2020 journal article called, Immature Leadership, Donald Trump and the American Presidency.
It was written by Daniel Dresner, who's a political scientist at Tufts University.
Dresner lists three psychological reasons that Trump is a weak leader.
He talks about his temper tantrums, his short attention span, and his poor impulse control.
Dresner says, Trump does not stand out from other presidents because he gets furious.
He stands out in how frequently his temper emerges and how frequently it has sabotaged his administration.
And Dresner then goes through the examples of John Kelly being yelled at so viciously by Trump that he said he'd never been spoken to like that in 35 years of serving the country.
Same goes for then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, H.R. McMaster, and so on and so on.
This leads, according to Dresner, to poor decision-making and pathological staff strategies for coping with it.
Anger leads to short-term impulsive decision-making that might feel good in the moment but leads to disastrous consequences soon afterwards.
The 45th president is also handicapped by a short attention span.
Trump biographers have repeatedly stressed this aspect of his behavior.
One warned that Trump doesn't have the attention span to handle the day-to-day rigors of the presidency.
Another said the reason he gets surprised by these political problems is because he's not detail-oriented.
He has a really short attention span and he's profoundly impatient.
I bring all this up today not because I want to be rosy and I want to be unnecessarily optimistic.
I bring this up because it points to something that I think we have to hold on to as we go forward and should inspire some sense of fortitude and energy to fight the fight ahead.
Don't get me wrong, there is a fight ahead and there's going to be so many bad actors, evil actors surrounding Trump and trying to get that short attention span to support whatever it is they want.
And I'm going to touch on two of those people in a minute who I think are particularly dangerous.
But when it comes to Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy, Laura Loomer, all of these people...
What I want to say is that Trump is short-tempered, he is narcissistic, and he does have poor impulse control.
And if history tells us anything, it is that there is a very small chance That Elon Musk will last four years in Donald Trump's good graces.
Now, this is a complicated one.
Elon Musk is not H.R. McMaster.
Elon Musk is not John Kelly.
Elon Musk is not even Steve Fannin or anyone else.
Elon Musk has billions of dollars in government contracts.
He is the richest person in the world.
He is somebody who talks to Vladimir Putin on the phone.
He is somebody who yields great amounts of power, whether it is in tech, whether it is through Starlink, whether it is through his enormous wealth on the global stage, and so on.
So, it will be a particularly bad breakup for Donald Trump, and it remains to be seen what Musk would do if that breakup happens or if Trump stabs him in the back.
I don't take Musk to be.
There's no reason to believe that he would simply go off into the sunset and lick his wounds and simply go away.
There would be revenge.
There would be retribution.
There would be some kind of attempt to hurt Trump and hurt others surrounding him.
So, You know, all of that is there.
I'm not going to pretend to have a crystal ball about what that looks like right now.
I haven't thought about it hard enough.
I haven't done the research.
What I want to say is Lord Loomer going for Musk is a sign that there are people in the MAGA world who are not happy that folks like Musk and Ramaswamy and other tech bros are seemingly the face of Trump's entourage at the moment, and that there is going to be growing dissatisfaction as that continues to take place, especially as we see the fights over immigration.
We already saw Ann Coulter tell Ramaswamy to his face That she likes everything he's saying policy-wise but she would not vote for him, quote, because he is an Indian.
The racism is disgusting in Maga Nation.
I think that goes without saying.
But we've seen it already rear its head in terms of, Musk is an immigrant from South Africa.
Ramaswamy's family has a recent immigration story from South Asia.
This is not two people who are normally the face of alt-far-right Maga Nation.
There's going to be a breakup, I think, at some point.
I don't know how and I don't know when.
I also just, as many people have said, don't think Donald Trump likes the idea that Musk would get so much attention.
Well, what does that mean in terms of his short temper and all that stuff?
What does all this mean?
What it means if we zoom out is this.
A, I do hope that breakup happens.
I do hope this is the beginning of the rift.
And I will say, friends, we haven't even gotten to inauguration yet.
And I think that's something to hold on to, is that if those kinds of rifts can start to show themselves now, and if we hold on to what Trump did in his first term, and we take what Dresner says in his research paper, if we take what Timothy Noah says at the New Republic, he's a short-tempered man with no impulse control, who throws tantrums often, and is in cognitive decline.
I have written in my book about the ways that the rise of Trump and authoritarianism in this country has resonances with what happened in Weimar Germany after World War I. And I think there are touch points there, and I've had people on to talk about them.
However, I also think that there's a fundamental difference between someone like Donald Trump and someone like Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was a vile and evil human being in the pantheon of most evil human beings perhaps to ever walk the earth.
His leadership was focused and disciplined.
He was able to be effective because he had a mission and a goal, and he was able to win people over continuously.
It all ended, as we know, at the end of the war and him alone in a bunker.
But nonetheless, there was a sense of focus, a sense of precision.
Now, there were seriously bad decisions made and seriously bad moves that were undertaken.
Please don't email me with a detailed list of Hitler's mistakes or Hitler's strategic expertise.
I'm trying to make a larger point here, is that when I think of Hitler or Putin, when I think of Orban, I think of people who have implemented strategies over the long term.
If I take Putin, Putin has been vying and planning and strategizing revenge on the West since the fall of the Soviet Union.
This is like a three-decade quest.
He is laser-focused on being Vladimir Putin, the richest, most powerful man in the world.
That's what he does every day.
Is he an egomaniac?
Yes.
Does he make every right decision?
No.
Did he underestimate the heart of the Ukrainians to fight his invasion and the West, NATO and others to provide support for that?
Yes.
Nonetheless, he's disciplined in his evil.
Orban has carried out a systematic plan and done so for decades now.
Donald Trump is not that guy, and he's seriously declined since 2016. We are not entering a phase where we have a grandmaster with a precise plan that he will carry out with ultimate rigor.
We have somebody who is short-tempered, who can't keep his mind on things, who'd rather be playing golf and waving at people than doing a lot.
Now, it does not mean he's not going to hurt a lot of people or break a lot of our system.
It does not mean that good days are ahead in terms of we don't have to worry about this.
What it means is this is not somebody who's a machine.
This is not somebody who's unassailable.
And fighting, pushing back, resisting does make a difference.
Timothy Noah points out some of the results of Trump's weak impulse control as we've already seen it play out before he has even been sworn in.
Weak impulse control prompted Trump to make four seriously outrageous cabinet nominations.
These all face serious resistance from Senate Republicans and one of them, Matt Gaetz, withdrew less than three weeks after Election Day.
Some see Gates' nomination as a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from the other three, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and Robert Kennedy Jr., or as a stalking horse for Pam Bondi, the Trump apparatchik, nominated for attorney general after Gates withdrew.
Gates was nominated to be Attorney General, and we now have an ethics report and text messages that show proof that he was paying for sex, and in at least one case was somebody who was under 18. That was...
I mean, we can sit here and say it was a grand strategy.
Maybe he was just throwing them out there.
I think Trump really wanted Matt Gates to be Attorney General, and he thought he could.
Now, it doesn't mean he's not going to appoint somebody like Pam Bondi who's going to be terrible.
It means, though, that...
Plan A already didn't happen to Trump and his supposedly very expert second administration.
It's up for debate.
We don't know yet if Hegseth or Robert Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard will get through.
And resistance and journalism and light of day on all of their indiscretions makes a difference.
You know, Trump is not simply the king who's going to be able to do everything he wants, in part because he's Trump.
This is not a guy who, like Vladimir Putin, has been planning the takeover of this country in some kind of detailed manner for three decades.
This is a guy that feeds off of attention, who feeds off of power, and he does so in these short bursts of attention to things.
This week, he wants to take over the Panama Canal and buy Greenland.
What will it be next week?
What will he follow through on?
How many infrastructure weeks will we have in the second Trump term?
Now, what this does lead me to think about are two people who I think are laser-focused and do have an agenda that they want to carry out with rigor and discipline.
Timothy Noah mentions Stephen Miller in this article, and Miller was on my mind even before I finished the article.
Miller is the person, not Hegseth, Not RFK. Miller is the person who I think about as already cementing his place in Trump's orbit of power who has a very clear mission.
He wants to deport millions and millions of people.
He is a xenophobe, hate-filled person who for years and years and decades has been on this kick.
This is why he gets up in the morning.
So, Stephen Miller is somebody who I think is, in fact, the kind of disciplined hate monger that could enact some of the worst ideas that have been floated for the second Trump term.
Here's what Noah says at The New Republic.
Miller's ambitions for Trump's second term are more sweeping.
He's the mastermind behind the mass deportation plan that will damage the economy if enacted on the scale he hopes.
Miller is likely to be given free reign, this time acting in concert with incoming boarders R. Tom Homan and, if she's concerned, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Tom Homan is the other one who I think is really on my mind.
If you listen to Homan talk, he is zoned in on one thing and one thing only, deporting as many people as possible.
And he says, clearly, that means deporting children who are American citizens with their families, then so be it.
We'll send them all back together.
We've already, at least I have already seen what I take to be some of the effects of these policies and this kind of power being at the top of our government.
SoCal Extremism Watch, led by some great folks who I was able to meet at one of our events recently.
Put out a call on Blue Sky for tips and evidence that there have been discussions of vigilante justice in Southern California, basically people taking it upon themselves to attack immigrants and identify them to the government and so on and so forth.
The grand takeaways I have today are that I think we should, in some strange way, take hope in the fact that Trump, the man who I take to be a grave threat to American democracy, is in some ways not fit for that job.
He is an antagonist with serious character flaws that can be exploited and can be attacked to great effect.
There is reason to hope because this is not an unassailable obstacle that stands in the way of what we take to be the American experiment.
This is somebody who's weak.
This is somebody who is shown decline.
This is somebody who is not a mastermind, who is not a precision, skilled, disciplined strategist.
Does not mean he cannot do great harm and he already has.
With that said, I do think that Miller and Homan are the ones who do have those characteristics, and their approach to immigration is already having effect.
What scares me about 2025 is thinking about people being assaulted on the street, people being approached as they try to eat lunch or walk through a Walmart because they have brown skin, because they're speaking Spanish, because they're speaking Chinese, because they're speaking Hindi.
I worry about vigilantes who will go unpunished, who will be in concert with law enforcement.
So as we head to 2025, I want to say, now is the time for us to gather our energy, the standing community, and to find the ways, however you're going to do it, to resist and to become the opposition.
Some of you do that through education, PTAs, school boards.
Others of you do that through local elections.
Others of you are just wonderful at writing your representatives, calling them, making sure your voice is heard.
Others of you volunteer in various parts of our civic square.
However you're going to do it, the time is now for us to say, we're not going to just give in to somebody who thinks he's king because he can barely pay attention enough.
To know where he is, and it's time for us to realize his weakness, his decline, and that this is not necessarily our destiny.
With that said, the thing that I'm looking out for as we enter 2025 are these cultures and climates where immigrants are going to become targets of vigilante justice.
And don't get me wrong, I know that's already happening.
I know that there's already widespread fear.
I know that fear.
I've had those fears as I've driven with my father through rural America and myself being mixed race and in many ways white passing, my father definitely not.
I've had those fears when people have sent me videos from my home region of Asian Americans being told to go back to China, of Karen's attacking them in the parking lot of Costco or outside of In-N-Out.
Those climates of fear are there.
They were there during the pandemic.
They are there for many already.
But how will we react as people, as a country, when children who are citizens of this country are put into internment camps, when hundreds of thousands of people are put in barracks throughout the country?
How will we react then?
To me, that's an open question.
Alright y'all, I want to switch tracks here for the last part of today and talk about Charlie Kirk and what he said about Jesus and Christmas.
So here is Charlie Kirk talking about Jesus and why he is not a refugee.
Here you go.
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