First in a Series?
By James Moore
“Courage is a fire, and bullying is a smoke.” – Benjamin Disraeli.
I keep waiting for it all to collapse.
Who doesn’t? When you begin to fire staff and delete the institutional knowledge of an entire government, the repercussions, economically and culturally, will only ripple and multiply to the point where systemic damage shuts down the country. Think not? When FEMA is gutted and its budget practically zeroed out, what happens the next time a hurricane or tornado or flood or earthquake or wildfire tears up a city or town? A handful of people will show up from Washington with thoughts and prayers and advice but no money to help you rebuild. It is your damned fault, though. Take responsibility.
You voted for a man who said he was going to get rid of government waste, and he and his bastard child baby boy Elon decided FEMA was rife with waste. They had no proof, of course, but they started burning down the budget. When the next natural disaster occurs, and one is coming because they never stop, and your house is a pile of rubble, the rebuild will be paid for by your insurance company and your savings. FEMA won’t have money to help, and chances are good your insurance won’t cover much, either, because policies are being reduced and eliminated in regions prone to the impacts of climate change, and that’s just about everywhere.
You remember climate change, don’t you? It’s that Chinese hoax us libtards have been forcing down your gagging throats. No need to worry about it any more. Elonald is busily shutting down university research grants and cutting funding and staff at NOAA so no more science can be conducted on rising seas and temperatures, melting of glacial ice caps, drastic water shortages and recurrent droughts, atmospheric rivers of winds and moisture that are unprecedented. Stop the science and you stop the tragedies, right? Isn’t everything already a bit too science-y? Who the hell needs to know the barometric pressure in the eye of a hurricane, anyway? We can get all that info from an app like Accuweather. Let’s privatize weather!! Besides, everybody knows the wind blows hard in a hurricane. Doesn’t take research to reach that conclusion.
I have to admit, though, I can’t figure out why your boy-hero Elon has not been arrested. Congress has not authorized him to take his pitiless chainsaw to budgets that have proved critical to American excellence. Only the weird signature of his Fuhrer Trump has empowered punk-ass programmers to lop off the lives and services to people like our veterans. This country has never kept its promises to the people who fought our wars and defended what people used to think we were made of; silly stuff like principles and honor and trust and dignity, and just a spot of democracy, not too much, though. No dollar value on those characteristics, which means they are disposable, just like the military vets with Agent Orange cancers and missing limbs and broken minds and failing health. These are people who believed in us, believed in you, and you voted for a man who got five draft deferments for bone spurs that did not exist and is now reducing health care for the people who actually served under our flag, and he’s cutting tens of thousands of Veterans’ Administration jobs. I guess you can live with that while they die with it.
Elon-gate is just going to get worse. The only way his DOGE-ies can reach the cuts they need to pay for the gazillion dollar tax breaks for the wealthy is by destroying Social Security. Your monthly corn flakes and apples are not as important as a lessened tax burden on big pharma and defense contractors and electric car manufacturers and oil companies and airlines and billionaires. Hey, did you see Tesla didn’t pay any taxes last year? How do you reduce that tax bill? What’s less than zero? Your votes gave Elon his axe and his platform from which to swing it. One of his biggest lies, and many of his are historic in scope, is the one about 20 million illegal immigrants getting free money from social security. Never has any political actor slung a bigger load of bullshit since George W. Bush said, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” not too many years after his daddy said, “Read my lips, no new taxes.”
Let’s “unpack” this, as the NPR people like to say, and it’s easy to unpack lies; they tend to just fall out of the suitcase when it’s opened. The simple destruction of Musk’s claim comes from the fact that the Social Security Administration (SSA) requires valid work authorization and a Social Security Number (SSN) to disburse benefits, which undocumented immigrants typically do not possess, and cannot acquire. If you are in this country illegally, those documents are quite impossible to get. And here’s something very American, treating them poorly and claiming they are hurting Social Security or job markets when the exact opposite is the case.
While they cannot receive SSA benefits, undocumented immigrants in 2022 paid approximately $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes through payroll contributions. These are fees that support the solvency of the Social Security system, even though the contributors are not eligible to receive benefits. Also, there are not 20 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. to receive an SSA check. The total number was estimated to be around 10.9 million as of 2022, but it doesn’t matter because none of them is likely getting a check unless they are hugely talented scam artists. More Musk bullshit. Swallow it at your peril, which, apparently, 77 million of you have. Any regrets yet?
Elon’s pissy right now, though, because his Tesla stock is falling faster than Trump’s detumescent popularity. He’s working hard at getting the White House to sentence Tesla burners to life in prison as domestic terrorists. Nobody wants to go to prison, of course, but nobody wants to have to look at another Cybertruck, either. Destroying lives with unrestricted firings from career jobs in civil service is much worse than destroying Teslas, but they probably both should be illegal. Elon, though, is the real domestic terrorist. He has no true idea what he is doing other than taking advantage of Trump’s acquiescence, which Elon bought with campaign donation money. He is a South African immigrant nepo baby who has built his businesses on massive more than $38 billion in federal and state subsidies, grants, and tax breaks and is using the government to end regulations on his dying companies while making business tougher on his competition. It is not a minor hypocrisy that a man suckling at the federal government’s teat wants to eliminate the employment of people who are actually providing services to the citizens of their country.
Musk is despised even by one of his own children, who, he claims was killed by the “woke mind virus.” His son is transsexual and lives as Vivian Jenna Wilson and has as much disdain, maybe more, for her father than most American taxpayers. Wilson has not spoken to her father in five years and called him a “pathetic man-child” in an interview that was published in Teen Vogue. Troubled soul that he is, Elon effectively accused his own daughter of attacking his Swastikars by lumping her in with a cabal that lives in his faltering mind: trans terrorists.
“What are the statistics on trans violence?” That was a question he posted on his dying social media outlet. “The probability of a trans person being violent appears to be vastly higher than non-trans. Hormone injections cause extreme emotional volatility. That is simply a fact.”
His expertise on emotional instability ought to be acknowledged given his behavior and the fourteen children he has fathered with four different women. Let us also recognize his ability to get those various governments to subsidize his failing business projects. Those two seem to be his central skills, which are only slightly more developed than his racism. When an anti-semitic message was posted on his X, he did not challenge it or restrict the poster.
“Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” the poster wrote, while also referring to “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries. This is a tenet of the Replacement Theory, a popular right wing conspiracy theme that suggests Democrats are using minorities to replace Whites with undocumented immigrants who are people of color.
Musk responded with, “You have said the actual truth.”
When the Anti Defamation League (ADL) reacted, he accused them of promoting racism, which is, well, exactly opposite of their purpose.
“At a time when antisemitism is exploding in America,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote back on X, “and surging around the world, it is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories.”
Yeah, but he works for Trump, who might be history’s biggest American racist since George Wallace, (look him up, chilluns.)
I assume there is a point beyond which most American taxpayers will not go, but I am amazed we have not reached that particular perigee of our U.S. orbit. When do millions of us arrive in Washington and surround the capital and demand accountability? Not like J6 thugs, but as reasonable, taxpaying, hard working citizens of history’s late, great democracy. Does it take the Social Security Administration missing it’s first payment in 90 years to benefit recipients? Musk thinks the fact that you paid tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars into SSA over your career is a kind of Ponzi scheme. It’s your money, of course, but he wants it to fund tax cuts for billionaires and corporations. If that’s not a bridge too far, what is? Wouldn’t it be entertaining if Social Security became the Concord Green or the Fort Sumter of the next American Revolution?
I wish I could get away from it all and jump a SpaceX super heavy rocket to Mars but they just keep blowing up.
This article was originally published on Texas to the world.
James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.
He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).
His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.
Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”
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Apparently most of Musk’s kids were by IVF! 🤷🏼♀️
My personal hope is that the western world of voters will finally wake up to the fact that you cannot run a country like it is a business.
To do so results in the practices United Healthcare have demonstrated.
Profit comes first in business. Not people.
You cannot ethically make a profit from education, policing, prisons or public healthcare.
These things cannot be run to suit a budget bottom line.
Keep up the dumping of Tesla stock and anything else that will show Musk the American public is not the public teat he chooses to benefit from sucking on.
You might imagine that skunkshit in a coal mine at midnight was putrid and dark, so horribly untouchable, offensive, that one would be repelled. Yet a huge vote went to Trump, who set up a team of incompetent, repellent, inadequate, under educated scum, the galactic shitpile of human offal, guts, offcuts, excised foreskins, removed body pustular parts, all the nightmare intouchable humanoid filth around, to ruin it all. POX. The USA is a Pustular Pit of Putridity, and that is what they want. Sigmund??
Point of order: You mean his daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson is transgender. If you can remember to call a new bride Mrs Whatever, you can remember to always use appropriate terminology for trans people. Words are your business; use them properly.
James Moore is correct in his assertion that “His son is transsexual….”
He could also have termed this person transgender, given the synonymous nature of these words. Born a boy, with X and Y chromosomes and male genitalia, ergo, a male.
Most of us are yet to go down the rabbit hole and subscribe to the falsity that words mean whatever we want them to mean, as Humpty Dumpty was wont to complain. Conventional usage matters.
Unless one is on intimate terms with Vivian Jenna Wilson, one is unlikely to have any idea of her preferred denomination vis-à-vis gender assignation.
Sex and gender are not the same thing, and sex in humans is far more complex than XX = ovaries, uterus, vagina, clitoris = female and XY = prostate, scrotum, testicles, penis = male.
Vivian is transgender. Whatever her phenotype, it has not altered from birth, because you can’t change much of the biology. Hormones and some surgical alterations are the limit. That does not change the chromosomes or genes.
It is not for cis people to tell trans people what words to use for themselves. The community uses transgender and, technically (and medically), that is the correct term.
Ummmm, you do not have to be on intimate terms with a person to know their identity when they publicly announce it.
It’s so cute when cis people start telling trans and enby people who they really are …
The mind-neutred Americans have opted to either hide-out in acquiescent anarchy, or vote as sucked-in clowns. Now they’re all being spat out by the narcissist servitor of unelected corporations and their fascist operators and investors, “it’s everybody else’s fault” – T-Rump and his flunkies, and the unelected chief charlatan, Musk.
Brutality being their specialty, c’est la vie in the USA – death and destruction via propaganda and stupidity, or failed cure by yet another obliterative revolution.
A comment on Leefe’s comment,
A person is rushed to hospital but pronounced D.O.A. The dead person failed to announce what gender the dead person had previously identified as being, so the dead person’s death certificate can not be certified because science, that is, knowledge, is incapable of determining a person’s gender unless that person announces it. According to identity politics there is no objective way that science can determine a person’s gender. Science is deemed to be entirely reliant upon a person’s subjective assessment of whatever gender that person identifies as.
That is the essence of identity politics. It is based on subjective belief and there is nothing that objective reality can do to counter subjective belief. Gender cannot be determined by genes nor genitals. No one can know what another person’s gender is until that person announces it. And then what? Does annunciation immutably fix a person’s gender, or can they still exercise the birthright of all transgender people to transition to another gender should they feel their identities demand it? Reptiles are known to change gender under certain conditions transitioning with genuine reproductive abilities. Science can verify and explain why, but when it comes to humans who can’t change gender and reproduce offspring, only personal subjectivity is permitted to explain why not.
Anyway, the dead person was well known to have previously identified as being alive, so who apart from the dead person is entitled to say that the dead person is dead in the first place? “Believe in me”, saith the identity politician, “and you will live forever!”