Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

He’s global:

The tech entrepreneur and close adviser to Donald Trump Elon Musk has taken a stunning new public step in his support for the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), publishing a supportive guest opinion piece for the country’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper that has prompted the commentary editor to resign in protest.

The commentary piece in German was launched online on Saturday ahead of being published on Sunday in the flagship paper of the Axel Springer media group, which also owns the US politics news site Politico.

Musk uses populist and personal language to try to deny AfD’s extremist bent and the piece expands on his post on the social media platform X that he owns, on which he last week claimed that “only the AfD can save Germany”.

Translated, Musk’s piece said: “The portrayal of the AfD as rightwing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!”

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has classified the AfD at the national level as a suspected extremism case since 2021.

Shortly after the piece was published online, the editor of the opinion section, Eva Marie Kogel, used the US tech mogul’s own platform to post on X that she had submitted her resignation.

Welt am Sonntag is a very conservative paper so the opinion editor resigning is telling. She included a link to Musk’s op-ed in her post so there’s no question about the reason.

If you’re just catching up, here’s a little primer from Vox on the AfD. It’s all very familiar:

A relatively young political party, the AfD was born in 2013 after the financial crisis as a group that protested Germany’s efforts to economically bail out southern countries in the European Union.

Yet while its platform initially focused more on the economy, it seized on the issue of immigration following the 2015 refugee crisis, when Germany took in more than one million refugees from places including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This was a roughly 1.2 percent increase to Germany’s population of 81 million people at the time — but it marked a stark jump in the number of refugees than the country had welcomed before.

In recent years, the party has both driven and capitalized on rising backlash toward refugees and immigration.

[…]

As part of its answer to addressing the rise in immigration, the AfD has increasingly embraced a xenophobic and anti-Muslim platform — due to the Middle Eastern origins of many earlier refugees — with the purported goal of preserving German identity and nationalism. “Islam does not belong to Germany,” reads the party’s 2016 manifesto. “Burkas? We’re more into bikinis,” read one AfD tagline from 2017. “Unser Land zuerst,” which translates to “Our country first!” adorned AFD campaign banners in 2022.

“The party has radicalized a lot since 2013,” Jakob Guhl, a researcher focused on the far right at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in Germany, told Vox. As it did, the party grew its base in the more socially conservative regions in eastern Germany, which has typically lagged other parts of the country economically as well.

[…]

In addition to its focus on immigration, AfD has homed in on two other policy areas: climate change and Ukraine aid.

As Germany’s only political party that’s embraced climate change denial, AfD has capitalized on the discontent a fraction of voters feel toward existing environmental policies. Specifically, a law that requires many German residents to swap out their existing fossil fuel-based boilers for heat pumps that run on clean energy has raised many people’s ire due to how costly it could be for homeowners.

A May 2023 Allensbach poll found that as many as 80 percent of Germans were concerned about the decision to phase fossil fuel-based boilers out by this year — a timeline that’s now been extended.

AfD has said that it would back the ongoing use of fossil fuels for not just home boilers, but also the German economy writ large. “AFD said the government has no business in how people heat their homes. Their main message … on climate change [is] that we can just keep on living life as they have before. We have the right to pollute and the right to continue doing so,” says Endre Borbáth, a professor at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University.

AfD has also embraced a pro-Russia position, and urged Germany to abstain from sending Ukraine more aid, a stance that both taps into the country’s commitment to pacifism after World War II, and the sympathies that some in eastern Germany still have with the Kremlin after the USSR’s control of the area following the conflict.

[…]

A common thread across these policy positions and the party’s general branding is that AfD claims it’s defending some Germans’ existing way of life, and that it’s there to push back against any and all attempts to infringe on their rights, even the most mundane.

Last fall, for example, an AfD leader vehemently said she was defending people’s right to eat wienerschnitzel, a fried veal dish, as a greater proportion of the German population has embraced plant-based diets both for health and climate reasons.

“I won’t let anyone take my schnitzel away from me! No one touches my schnitzel,” said Alice Weidel, an AfD leader.

It’s Germany. What could go wrong?

I have thought that this last election was a vestige of the pandemic trauma that was never fully processed. Clearly, that’s wrong. This goes back a lot farther than that. In fact, I have to wonder if the resurgence of the international far right is really just the dam bursting after the cold war held them back during the post WWII world. In historic terms this period is just a blip in time. I shudder to think what’s going to happen as climate change —which they fatuously deny is even happening — turbo charges refugee migration. Yikes.

As for Musk, he’s ignorant about most things outside his own expertise but because he’s so rich he’s a megalomaniac who thinks that he is entitled to a greater say in politics around the world than anyone else. It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t really understand economics or how all of this is interconnected in ways that could easily affect his own interests and those of the country. But his influence is huge at the moment and he’ll be a part of this conversation for some time to come. Unfortunately.

Sununu: [Musk is] so rich he’s so removed from the potential financial influence

Donald Trump sold himself as so rich that he couldn’t be bought. He would spend $600 million of his own money to win the presidency. “I mean, part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich,” he told ABC in 2011. And in the fullness of time, the man sold NFTs of himself and Trump sneakers and Trump Bibles and Trump scents.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) reassures CNN’s Dana Bash that Elon Musk is incorruptible like that. He’s got both hands in the Trump 2.0 administration, sure. But he’s not “doing it for the money.” He’s not into making money for the money but for the betterment of all mankind. Musk loves mankind from which “he’s so removed.” It’s people he can’t stand. How dare we ask him to pay more in taxes to benefit them?

Three years ago, Paul Krugman wrote (gift link):

Elon Musk doesn’t think visionaries like him should pay taxes the way little people do. After all, why hand over his money to dull bureaucrats? They’ll just squander it on pedestrian schemes like … bailing out Tesla at a crucial point in its development. Musk has his sights set on more important things, like getting humanity to Mars to “preserve the light of consciousness.”

Billionaires, you see, tend to be surrounded by people who tell them how wonderful they are and would never, ever suggest that they’re making fools of themselves.

But don’t you dare make fun of Musk. Billionaires’ money gives them a lot of political clout — enough to block Democratic plans to pay for much-needed social spending with a tax that would have affected only a few hundred people in a nation of more than 300 million. Who knows what they might do if they think people are snickering at them?

[…]

What I suspect, although I can’t prove it, is that what really drives someone like Musk is an insecure ego. He wants the world to acknowledge his unequaled greatness; taxing him like a “$400,000-a-year working Wall Street stiff” (my favorite line from the movie “Wall Street”) would suggest that he isn’t a unique treasure, that maybe he indeed doesn’t deserve everything he has.

Sununu should be embarrassed to make this argument in public. Should be.

Random notes

Before we issue a sure-to-be-ignored word of caution to MAGA, let’s set the scene. I get that, with the reelection of King D, MAGA types just might be feeling their oats about taking back America from, you know, THOSE PEOPLE.

The Daily Show‘s Ronny Chieng discourses on patriotism and education. He was born in Malaysia (like you’d care), but how would you know?

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Karen Cahn (@karencahn)

Let’s got to Politico:

A Colorado man is facing possible bias-motivated charges for allegedly attacking a television news reporter after demanding to know whether he was a citizen, saying “This is Trump’s America now,” according to court documents.

Patrick Thomas Egan, 39, was arrested Dec. 18 in Grand Junction, Colorado, after police say he followed KKCO/KJCT reporter Ja’Ronn Alex’s vehicle for around 40 miles (64 kilometers) from the Delta area. Alex told police that he believed he had been followed and attacked because he is Pacific Islander.

Forty miles.

Egan, a taxi driver, pulled up beside Alex at a Grand Junction traffic light and allegedly shouted, “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”

Egan followed the reporter to the station and chased Alex to the door, demanding to see his identification.

Egan then tackled Alex, put him in a headlock and “began to strangle him,” the affidavit said. Coworkers who ran out to help and witnesses told police that Alex appeared to be losing his ability to breathe during the attack, which was partially captured on surveillance video, according to the document.

According to the station’s website, Alex is a native of Detroit. KKCO/KJCT reported that he was driving a news vehicle at the time.

Let’s hope that in 2025 few MAGA zealots behave like that jerk in Colorado.

Maybe do something more patriotic. Do your homework for your country. Learn math.

A friend with an Arabic name and look lives in Vermont. Someone asked him once if he ever felt threatened there. Not really, he said. Okay, now and then some a-hole will shout “Go back to where you came from!” His shrugging response is, “You want me to go back to North Dakota?”

An old friend here looks Korean. Naturally. His parents are from South Korea. My friend was born and raised here.

One would think Mr. “I’m a Marine” might have figure out during his service that not all Americans look like their parents hail from Jolly Olde England. One would think that, with all that manly Marine training, Colorado Man might not be so easily threatened by the mere presence of an AAPI-looking guy from Detroit driving alone in a marked news vehicle.

Forty miles?

There’s no indication that Mr. Egan asked to see Mr. Alex’s H1B visa.

@thejourneyofteej

♬ original sound – TheJourneyOfTeej

Update: From Rick Wilson

This is from Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former National Security adviser:

There’s a little mutual defense alliance in Europe called NATO. Denmark was one of the founding members in 1949. In the modern world that’s how we are supposed to defend ourselves against threats. We aren’t supposed to just seize territory for our own purposes. But it sounds like those are now quaint ideas and we are now in the business of territorial expansion again, to hell with our allies.

Is that what people voted for? I don’t remember it coming up during the presidential campaign and I was paying pretty close attention.

By the way, I’m sure you’ll recall that Trump always says that we should have just taken the oil in the middle east. Well:

MineralsGreenland has large reserves of minerals such as copper, gold, lead, molybdenum, rare-earth elements, titanium, zinc, iron ore, coal, and graphite. 

Oil and gasThe Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland estimates that Greenland’s west coast contains about 18 billion barrels of oil. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that there may be double that volume in crude and natural gas in the east. 

Rare earth elementsGreenland has one of the world’s largest undeveloped deposits of rare-earth elements outside of China. These elements are used in many products, including cell phones, wind turbines, and electric car

But I’m sure that has nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.

(Unless you’re an immigrant)

The Wall St Journal went to Seymour, Indiana (the “small town” John Mellencamp is from) where they can’t wait to get rid of all the immigrants they believe are polluting their lives:

[R]esidents have complained for years that a flood of unauthorized migrants under the Biden administration strained schools, hospitals and housing. Now, with President-elect Donald Trump promising to conduct mass deportations and shut down illegal border crossings, the pro-crackdown forces are feeling emboldened. They are organizing opposition to illegal immigration online and in local government meetings and pushing for new legislation and action at the state level.

“Trump brought hope,” said Dana Clark, 66, who also spoke at the city council meeting. “Day one is going to see the biggest deportation ever.”

Incorporated in the 1860s, Seymour sits at the intersection of two major railroads. Jobs are plentiful at large manufacturers such as auto-parts suppliers and agricultural businesses, including the country’s second-largest egg producer.

The hunger for labor has long drawn immigrants, who began arriving in significant numbers in the 1990s, mainly from Mexico, Guatemala and other Central American countries. For most of the period since, the flow of arrivals was manageable and generated few flashpoints, residents say.

sabel Ponce, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant and legal permanent resident, arrived in Seymour 26 years ago and began working at a printing facility. She later started a beauty salon that steadily expanded over the years, and more recently opened a cafe. She said she sympathizes with longtime residents concerned about the burdens of new arrivals, but added that migrants play an essential economic role.

“Latino labor is very important here,” Ponce said. “You tell a Latino to work from 8:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night, they will work it.”

The state had initiated a study in Seymour that led to a proposal to open an immigrant welcome center. The town’s white residents went crazy and voted it down.

At the meeting, speakers fumed about migrants allegedly failing to assimilate, committing crimes and crowding multiple families into small homes. Republican state Rep. Jim Lucas, who is from Seymour, said a downtown health clinic was overwhelmingly used by immigrants. He said data showed the school system’s English-learner population had soared in recent years—a complaint echoed by some residents who said the newcomers were absorbing teachers’ attention and slowing classroom learning.

Nicholson said later that of 21 metrics tracked by the police department, such as disorderly conduct and sex offenses, 17 were down over the past year. Seymour Police Chief Greg O’Brien said the overall crime rate is flat or down, but traffic-related cases, like driving without a license, are up. The schools superintendent didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Just like in Springfield Ohio the residents got incensed by an immigrant who was involved in a fatal car accident and they have organized to ensure their representatives know they don’t want any immigrants left in their town.

One recent day at Larrison’s Diner, a popular restaurant downtown, Tim Smallwood, 63, said he was all for mass deportations. He thinks the Trump administration should first target unauthorized migrants with criminal records and then pressure other migrants to “self-deport.” 

“It’s the only way they’ll solve this problem,” Smallwood said. “You’ve got to make it hard enough on them that they don’t want to come here in the first place.”

Do you ever notice how they say this stuff like it’s totally normal — as if they’re talking about getting rid of animals, not human beings? It’s stomach churning to hear it discussed in those terms especially when they seem to think they’re being “humane.”

The unemployment rate is only 3.3% in that area, quite a bit lower than the national average. And wages are lower too. Who’s going to do all those jobs?

JV Last made an excellent observation about this Musk vs MAGA flap. This is from his Bluesky account.

These guys are super into H1B precisely because they’re also into corporate tax cuts. They want to offload the expense of creating an educated workforce and just conjure labor out of thin air.

This worldview makes sense if “efficiency” is your highest goal. You can outsource expenditures for human infrastructure to other countries and then import that fully formed human capital.

It’s also a worldview in which the government’s primary function is to support corporations and all policies are downstream from that goal.

Anyway, it’s absolutely impossible to reconcile “forgotten man” MAGA with the Elon/Vivek corporate ubermensch MAGA. The only thing that united them was that they hate trans people and NYT columnists.

That works if you’re in the outside. But once you have power you have to make choices on how to apply it. And the zero-sum game pits the two factions against one another.

Corporate MAGA is betting that the rubes won’t really know what’s going on. That’s probably right. If Trump can make enough noise and trigger the libs hard enough, the avg forgotten man voter will be happy. But at the MAGA elite level there’s going to be a death struggle for dominance.

Here’s a little taste of the incoherent rage on Twitter over the last couple of days. it’s really something:

Charlie Kirk fires back at Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

"It's what the American people want. The American people overwhelmingly voted for less immigration and the prioritization of the American children and the American worker— not the American oligarch."

We're witnessing… pic.twitter.com/UyumUMTQxJ

— Ron Smith (@Ronxyz00) December 28, 2024

Basically, the MAGA folks are saying that they don’t like any dark skinned foreigners while the Tech bros insist they need to import skilled dark skinned foreigners they can exploit for low wages as indentured servants. (They all seem to agree that white immigrants like Musk and Melania are a-ok, of course.)

The bigger picture is that this argument has exposed the essential incoherence of the MAGA coalition between the billionaires, the CEOs and the professional Trump cultists. As Last argues, this battle for dominance is very real. The corporate people control the money and the professional Trump cultists control the rubes. Trump has come down on the side of the money on this one. It will be very interesting to see where this goes.

Who among us hasn’t accidentally texted the wrong person? But I don’t think any of us have accidentally posted on social media instead of texting. Then there’s Donald Trump… Trump posted a private message meant for Elon Musk on Truth Social by mistake.

Trump-Musk Bromance Alive and Well?

Who among us hasn’t accidentally texted the wrong person? But I don’t think any of us have accidentally posted on social media instead of texting. Then there’s Donald Trump…

Trump posted a private message meant for Elon Musk on Truth Social… pic.twitter.com/lHLdeB8daZ

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) December 28, 2024

Haha. Was he trying to make him jealous with Bill Gates? Too funny.

The CNN reporter says that this suggests that Trump isn’t unhappy with Musk but who knows? If he isn’t I’d guess it’s because Trump is hoping for that rumored merger of Truth Social and X which will bring him a huge payday. But there is serious trouble in MAGA land with Elon and Vivek threatening his loyal followers like this:

I doubt Trump cares at all about this visa issue. He’s happy to give Elon what he wants. But it will be interesting to see how he deals with the conflict which is getting very hot among the MAGA activists. So far, he hasn’t said a word.

Update —

He’s with Elon and Vivek:

President-elect Trump told The Post Saturday he supports immigration visas for highly skilled workers, appearing to side with Elon Musk in the roiling intra-MAGA debate on the issue.

“I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said by phone, referring to the H-1B program, which permits companies to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations.  

“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” added Trump, who restricted access to foreign worker visas in his first administration and has been critical of the program in the past.

Musk and other tech barons argued this week that the H-1B visa program is critical to ensuring American companies can find highly skilled labor which may not be easily available in the U.S. labor force and must be expanded.

MAGA hardliners want Trump to follow through with his promise to promote US workers and impose tougher restrictions on immigration.

Hmm. That’s not what he said before. I guess the puppet master pulled his strings:

I had heard that this hustle was making headway in the Latino community and it explains a lot:

 The Lehigh Valley Barbershop was bustling with the next generation of American strivers. The mood among the young men, mostly first- or second-generation migrants from the Caribbean, was hopeful. Their candidate, Donald Trump, had just won the presidential election.

Sitting in high-end silver chairs, the young men talked about the businesses they had built, or would build. That would be more possible, they hoped, with the return of Trump, someone to whom they could relate — a businessman who has made mistakes, they said, but still keeps striving.

“Kamala said, ‘Trump is for the rich, I fight for the poor.’ But I don’t want to be low-class — I hope that’s not a bad way to say it. But I don’t want to be there,” said Christian Pion, 31, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He became a U.S. citizen last year, a decade after coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic,and cast his first presidential ballot for Trump. “God doesn’t want you to be poor.”

Next to him, his best friend, Willy J. Castillo, 39, who owns the shop and others, worked the register as he talked about Trump’s drive to succeed, overcome and survive. Castillo, who also voted for Trump, identifies with that: “The Bible says ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ right?”

The mix of hope, drive for success and belief in a God who rewards faith, sometimes with financial accomplishments,has become dominant across the United States and Latin America, experts on Latino religion say. The belief system is sometimes called “seed faith,” “health and wealth gospel,” or “prosperity gospel.”

What a con game. Trump and Musk were both born into wealthy families and yet they are used as examples of being rewarded for their faith In God which neither of them have. What a crock.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch

Make America Grouse Again (Axios):

Elon Musk pledged Friday night to go to “war” to defend the H-1B visa program for foreign tech workers, branding some Republican opponents as “hateful, unrepentant racists.”

Why it matters: The MAGA-DOGE civil war that erupted over the last 48 hours has now come to a tipping point, with President-elect Trump’s new techno-libertarian coalition of billionaires taking full aim at his traditional base.

• Trump, who has remained silent thus far on the schism, faces a quickly deepening conflict between his richest and most powerful advisors on one hand, and the people who swept him to office on the other.

This will not end well:

Zoom in: Just before midnight Friday, Musk once again defended the H-1B program in vulgar, all-caps terms, saying the program was the key to the success of his (and other big American) companies.

• “Take a big step back and F–K YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” Musk wrote.
• In a separate post, he pledged to “fight to my last drop of blood” to keep America a meritocracy.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters are engaged in as much wishcasting about whose benefits Trump sill slash (not theirs, just those low-caste Irresponsibles) as lefties who believed after the Berlin Wall fell that the “peace dividend” would be a boone for social safety net programs.