Yasch22 wrote: Homer, you're quite right on a lot of the points you made about Musk. But I'll beg to differ on a few of them.
1. Fact: there still is a Republican party that remains separate from Trumpists. The diehard MAGA-hats constitute somewhere between 35 and 45% of the Republican base. A post in Quora says that amounts to 13 - 14% of the population.
Link. 2. There is still lots of room in the center to center-right for honourable, logical, constitution-supporting members of the Republican Party. Something like 55% of them in fact say they want anyone but Trump as their candidate in 2024.
3. No, Musk is not a fraud. You're right that he says some very hurtful and/or stupid and/or useless things, but I think everything he does comes from a place of honesty. I.e., it's one thing to deliberately con someone (like Trump), and quite another one to honestly offer a bad opinion (like Musk's peace plan for the Russia-Ukraine war).
-- Musk was bullied a lot as a kid for being unusual. He has Asperger's, and ended up in hospital a couple of times after being beaten to within an inch of his life. The stupidest things he says are almost invariably responses to bullies who say really stupid or mean-spirited things to him. A better man would just shut the f**k up, but Musk can't help himself.
4. Re: Elizabeth Warren's attacks. I used to really like her, and followed her on Twitter. Then she and other top Democrats started taking really cheap shots at Musk, in a lot of cases telling outright lies. E.g., the truly crazy repetition of the "emerald mine" foundation of Musk's success. Or the lie (amplified by Warren) that Musk owed almost everything to government handouts. Or the absolutely nonsensical fundraising krap that Warren put out on an almost weekly basis in 2021 that Musk was a tax-dodging "freeloader" by not paying taxes. Note: Everyone knew that Musk's tax bill in 2021 would be the largest -- $11 billion -- in American history. Warren continues to call him a freeloader.
So, after a lifetime of supporting the Democratic party, Warren and other left-leaning top Democrats decided to sacrifice common sense -- and basic decency -- in driving an admittedly thin-skinned guy into the arms of the other team. Even then, Musk can't move himself much farther right of the centrist position he's held most of his life. I have to insist on these points: he has NO INTEREST whatsoever in supporting the Q-Anon or MAGA-hat conspiracy theories. His tweet in support of a split between Republican House and Democrat Senate was simply his oddly geeky recognition that the American economy -- and stock market -- does best when there's a blue-red balance of power.
A case in point is the Inflation Reduction Act. It became a much much better piece of legislation after a full year of opposition from Manchin and Synema. Effectively, they did that by holding up the Senate, and behaving as if they were Republicans.