Mentions Elon Musk

Musk talks about bureaucracy as being more powerful than government officials. He claims that bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast, and that DOGE has been the exception to this rule. He is seeking to gut the machinery of government, which he believes has previously restrained people like Trump, and replace it with algorithmic governance. Even as AI technology flounders in the corporate world, Musk clearly believes he is poised to use this technology to overtake the US government and replace human bureaucracy with a monarchistic apparatus. With algorithmic governance, there would be no resistance, no shame, no compassion, and no fear of prosecution to interrupt the execution of oligarchical whims.

This is Musk’s vision, and it’s why he is battling with Open AI to dominate a troubled industry. He wants the United States to be powered by Starlink and xAI. If the richest man in the world owns all of the machinery of the US government, he can fulfill anti-democratic tech blogger Curvis Yarvin’s dream of a state “CEO” — which Yarvin describes as a kind of monarchy.

Given Musk’s current level of power over the federal apparatus, that dream is clearly in the process of being realized.

The removal of human agency and emotion from governance is consistent with Musk’s views on empathy, which he recently shared with Rogan. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. Musk qualified his remarks slightly, noting that he is not wholly opposed to empathy, but nonetheless believes that empathy is destroying Western civilization. “I believe in empathy, I think you should care about people. But you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole, and not commit civilizational suicide,” he said. After repeating multiple falsehoods about immigrants, Musk claimed it was empathy that had allowed immigrants to become a threat to the United States. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit — they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response,” Musk said.

Political scientist Cas Mudde has suggested a classification I find particularly helpful, especially when it comes to determining what, exactly, we are confronted with in case of the AfD. Mudde has been at the forefront of the research on far-right parties and movement across Europe – few people can offer the kind of broad, comparative perspective he can provide. In his 2019 book The Far Right Today, Mudde concisely outlines what I believe is an extremely useful typology.

The first key distinction to draw is between the mainstream right and the far right. On the mainstream right, we find established conservative parties that are largely on board with the foundations of liberal democracy: the rule of law, universal suffrage, free and fair elections, minority rights, protection of baseline civil liberties. What defines them as parties of the right is that they are skeptical towards the idea of egalitarianism; they accept “natural” hierarchies which they contend should either be preserved or, at least, not leveled via state intervention. But they tolerate some measure of pluralism, respect democratic deliberation, and ultimately support and stabilize the democratic system.

Far-right movements and parties, by contrast, reject the system – they are fundamentally not on board with liberal democracy. Crucially, the far right is itself not a monolithic bloc but covers a range of ideologies as well as attitudes and dispositions. Cas Mudde helpfully distinguishes two main camps on the far right: the radical right and the extreme right. The distinction really comes down to a reactionary (on the radical right) vs revolutionary (on the extreme right) attitude and political project. The radical-right reactionaries disdain liberal democracy, but prefer to work mostly within the existing political and constitutional system to turn the clock back; they begrudgingly accept some level of restraint in their anti-democratic pursuit. If they got their way, they would probably erect something that is best described as an illiberal democracy: It still looks democratic on the surface, with elections and opposition parties, but the system is set up to entrench certain hierarchies, discriminate against historically marginalized groups, and consolidate power in the hands of the right. To me, Chief Justice John Roberts belongs in that bucket (and has a case to be one of their standard-bearers in the United States).

The extreme-right revolutionaries, on the other hand, will never be satisfied with just reformist reactionary measures. They desire to tear the system down. They accept no opposition, no restraint. They are not content to bend the law, they believe they stand above it. They don’t just want to make it harder for certain groups to participate in the political process, they want to purge them from the nation.

Another source warned that law enforcement and intelligence sources living in witness protection could be exposed by the data, as well as everyday Americans who could be viewed by Musk and the Trump administration as political enemies.

Some of those perceived enemies could include transgender Americans, according to Zinnia Jones, a transgender activist and researcher. Jones warned that the SSA data could be used to “identify nearly all likely transgender people in the US with 99 percent confidence.” Jones cited a 2015 U.S. Census Bureau study that utilized the same SSA data accessed by DOGE to estimate the number of trans Americans.

“For all we know, they may already know about the possibility of doing this and it’s part of why they insisted so forcefully on full access” to the data, Jones tells Rolling Stone. In her deposition, Flick noted that Bobba requested and was eventually given access to the SSA’s full dataset, “including source code.”

A former federal employee speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution agreed with Jones’ assessment, telling Rolling Stone that the Trump administration could use the SSA data — as well as agency hiring paperwork and passport applications — to identify and purge transgender employees from the government.

At the Napa Institute’s conference panel on “Practical Steps for Dealing with DEI,” Holmes sat on a panel with former Trump administration official and current Heritage Foundation fellow Roger Severino.

[…]

Holmes said on the panel that the “mainstream kind of leftist approach to DEI presents us with a lot to push back against.”

“It is really inconsistent with our faith and I also think that this presents us with an opportunity to not only say why we’re against this, why we’re opposed to mainstream DEI initiatives, but it’s important for us to be part of the conservation and to use it to say what we are for and why we have a positive vision and positive solution of DEI in a way that is consistent with our values,” she said.

She said she advises employers to “move away from defining diversity exclusively focused on employees’ race, sex, or other protected category,” and to instead focus on “bringing together employees with diverse backgrounds, viewpoints, perspectives, and beliefs to achieve common workplace goals.” She said employers need to also be “reframing the term inclusion to incorporate that in a way that’s more aligned with our faith.”

Over the years, Tesla has periodically offered cheaper vehicles with shorter ranges, and rather than building a new vehicle with a smaller battery pack, the automaker has decided to instead use the same battery packs capable of more range and software-locked the range.

Yesterday, we reported that Tesla stopped taking orders for the cheapest version of Model Y, the Standard Range RWD with 260 miles of range. Instead, Tesla started offering a new Long Range RWD with 320 miles of range.

Separately, CEO Elon Musk revealed that the previous Model Y Standard Range RWD was a software-locked vehicle – something that was suspected but never confirmed.

The CEO announced that Tesla plans to unlock the rest of the battery packs for an additional 40 to 60 miles of range:

'The “260 mile” range Model Y’s built over the past several months actually have more range that can be unlocked for $1500 to $2000 (gains 40 to 60 miles of range), depending on which battery cells you have.'

Musk said that Tesla is currently “working through regulatory approvals” to enable this” for this upgrade offer.

Yes, all of them.

Tesla is recalling all 3,878 Cybertrucks that it has shipped to date, due to a problem where the accelerator pedal can get stuck, putting drivers at risk of a crash, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The recall caps a tumultuous week for Tesla. The company laid off more than 10% of its workforce on Monday, and lost two of its highest-ranking executives. A few days later, Tesla asked shareholders to re-vote on CEO Elon Musk’s massive compensation package that was struck down by a judge earlier this year.

Four years ago, the U.S. entered the Covid-19 pandemic. Forbes published its 34th annual billionaire survey shortly after with data keyed to March 18, 2020. On that day, the U.S. had 614 billionaires who owned a combined wealth of $2.947 trillion.

Four years later, March 18, 2024, the US has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion, an 87.6 percent increase of $2.58 trillion, according to IPS calculations of Forbes Real Time Billionaire Data. (Thank you, Forbes!)