Date: 2024-09-27 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00026460
POWERFUL PEOPLE
ELON MUSK
Elon Musk Is Preoccupied With Something He Doesn’t Understand
Written by Jamelle Bouie. NYT Opinion Columnist
ELON MUSK
Elon Musk Is Preoccupied With Something He Doesn’t Understand
Written by Jamelle Bouie. NYT Opinion Columnist
A photo of Elon Musk, smiling as he enters a car.
Credit...Filip Singer/EPA, via Shutterstock
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/opinion/elon-musk-great-replacement.html
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
This article by Jamelle Boule was not what I was expecting.
Elon Musk has a certain brilliance ... and some terrible flaws. What Elon Musk has achieved as a business entrepreneur and technological innovator has been better than world class, and he deserves to be given a lot of credit for these accomplishments.
When it comes to his ideas about values in society, Musk may have money, but he does not have a coherent framing of social ideas. His involvement with Twitter and its renaming to 'X' has been expensive for him and very dumb. For me, the sooner he gets out of the social media business, the better ... both for his own good, as well as for society as a whole.
It is my understanding that Elon Musk had a tough life when he was growing up in South Africa. I have no idea how this has influenced his spectacular business career in the USA. I understand he acknowledges that he has some issues with the way he behaves ... but it would appear that he gets a lot of respect from the engineers with whom he works.
Hopefully Musk will focus on technical engineering where hs is brilliant and less on social engineering where he could do great damage!
Peter Burgess
Elon Musk Is Preoccupied With Something He Doesn’t Understand
Written by Jamelle Bouie ... Opinion Columnist
March 23, 2024
There is no particular mystery to unravel around the political views of Elon Musk, the billionaire technology and social media executive. He is — and for some time has been — on the far-right wing of American politics. He is an enthusiastic purveyor of far-right conspiracy theories, using his platform X to spread a worldview that is as extreme as it is untethered from reality.
Musk is especially preoccupied with the racial makeup of the country and the alleged deficiency of nonwhite people in important positions. He blames the recent problems at Boeing, for example, on its efforts to diversify its work force, despite easily accessible and widely publicized accounts of a dangerous culture of cost cutting and profit seeking at the company.
“Experts and critics say that Boeing’s woes have been years in the making,” reported CNN in January, “some pointing to the result of a shift in corporate culture that started at the top and put profits ahead of the safety and engineering prowess for which it was once praised, placing not only its future, but the passengers on its planes, at grave risk.”
Is diversity the problem at Boeing, or is it a shortsighted obsession with maximizing shareholder value at the expense of quality and safety? Musk, a wealthy shareholder in various companies — including his own, Tesla, which is being sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for allegedly allowing racist abuse of some of its Black employees — says it’s diversity.
“It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” Musk wrote in January, misspelling the acronym D.E.I., meaning diversity, equity and inclusion.
Musk’s current obsession, as Greg Sargent observes in The New Republic, is the “great replacement,” a far-right conspiracy theory that liberal elites in the United States are deliberately opening the southern border to nonwhite immigration from Mexico and South and Central America in order to replace the nation’s white majority and secure permanent control of its political institutions.
On X, Musk recently pinned a post to a slickly produced video that purports to expose a “Democrat open borders plan to entrench single-party rule,” in which Democrats shepherd millions of people into the United States and “keep them in the country at all costs.” Musk says, “This is actually happening!” The video had, at the time of this writing, well over 50 million views.
Musk is far from the first person to push the “great replacement” theory. It was featured in ads released by Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a top Republican in the House. “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” said one version of the advertisement. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
The “great replacement” was part of the centerpiece of Tucker Carlson’s message to viewers during his time on Fox News. It is touted by a number of anti-immigrant, white nationalist and white supremacist groups. It was featured prominently at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” And it has inspired at least four mass shootings, including the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (11 killed), the 2019 Christchurch shootings in New Zealand (51 killed), the El Paso shooting the same year (23 killed) and the 2022 supermarket shooting in Buffalo (10 killed).
It should go without saying that the “great replacement” is idiotic. There is no open border. There is no effort to replace the white population of the United States. Racial diversity is not a plot against the nation’s political institutions. And the underlying assumption of the “great replacement” — that, until recently, the United States was a racially and culturally homogenous nation — is nonsense.
But beyond this obvious criticism lies a more subtle problem with the “great replacement” conceit. It rests as much on a racial understanding of political identity as it does a racial understanding of national identity.
As Musk and his like-minded paranoiacs see it, nonwhite voters would necessarily be Democrats. With each new “illegal,” the Democratic Party gets a new vote. But there’s nothing about immigration status or melanin content that demands liberal politics. And in fact, there’s growing evidence of a rightward drift among nonwhite voters, particularly those of Hispanic origin. If nonwhite voters are up for grabs — if their partisan identities are more contingent than fixed — then it’s also true that Republicans and conservatives can simply compete for their allegiance the way they would for members of any other group.
There lies the rub. To compete for voters is to believe in one of the fundamental truths of democracy: that there’s no such thing as a permanent majority. Just the opposite, in fact. Majorities in a democratic country are variable and fluid for the simple reason that individuals themselves are variable and fluid. They contradict themselves. They contain multitudes. They have different and competing values and interests that fall in and out of salience, depending on the situation or political context. Your opponent might have assembled a majority to beat you, but you can — in the next election — assemble a different majority to win. The only constant is that nothing is settled or set in place.
To believe that the “great replacement” is true is to reject the dynamism of democratic society. It is to believe, instead, in a zero-sum world of immutable identities and the hierarchies that necessarily follow. There is no hope for persuasion — no hope for politics, even — if people can be only one thing.
It’s no surprise, then, that the rise of “great replacement” theory has happened in tandem with the Republican Party’s turn toward authoritarianism in the personage of Donald Trump. If there’s no persuasion, the only thing that’s left is domination and the imperative, then to dominate others before they can dominate you.