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It was like something you’d expect from a villain in a comic book: The world’s richest man leering through the television screen, wagging his finger while threatening to weaponize the government — up to and including the presidency — to quash criticism of him and his company.
And yet there was Elon Musk, during his recent sit-down interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, vowing to sic the president and others in the federal government on critics. Ahead of a weekend when protests against him and his tech company, Tesla, are scheduled in more than 200 locations, Musk accused his critics of posing a greater threat than violent vandals.
Musk told Baier:
They’re being fed propaganda by the far-left, and they believe it. It’s really unfortunate. The real problem is not, like, you know, the crazy guy that firebombs a Tesla dealership. It’s the people pushing the propaganda that caused that guy to do it. Those are the real villains here, and we’re going to go after them. And the president has made it clear we’re going to go after them. The ones providing the money, the ones pushing the lies and propaganda, we’re going after them.
While there have been reported incidents of vandalism targeting Teslas and Tesla dealerships in recent weeks, there’s no evidence those are part of some coordinated effort by liberals (or anyone else), contrary to claims from Musk and Donald Trump. In Musk’s estimation, the vandalism seems almost beside the point; he is suggesting rather that it’s people who say negative things about Tesla who are the true ne’er-do-wells.
The important context here is that Tesla stock has taken a tumble to start the year amid massive product recalls and growing anger at Trump for giving Musk the ability to withhold money from federal programs that Americans rely on. A recent NBC News poll found that 51 percent of registered voters hold a negative view of Musk, compared to 39 percent who view him positively. (Musk himself saw this coming last year when he predicted that his and Trump’s decisions would create “hardship” that could lead to anger toward him.)
When Baier noted that some have accused Musk of being “a Nazi, a white supremacist [and] a fascist,” Musk again said that opinions of that sort warrant punishment. “We need to hold people responsible for pushing these lies, because those lies almost got the president killed.”
Of course, there’s no evidence that any such accusations against Musk — even if one were citing his support for Germany’s far-right AfD party or his repeated promotion of racist pseudoscience — have anything to do with any previous attempts on Trump’s life.
But this is oligarchy in action: a rich man lording over the government that has already paid him handsomely, using the apparatus of the state as a weapon in an attempt to silence critics.