Summary
Elon Musk called for the firing of Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Long after she exposed racist tweets from Marko Elez, a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee who later resigned.
Long’s report revealed Elez had posted remarks promoting racism and eugenics.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez posted in July, according to the Journal’s review of archived posts.
Musk, who claims to support free speech, labeled Long “disgusting and cruel” and demanded that she should be fired.
Critics noted the hypocrisy of Musk advocating for a journalist’s removal over accurate reporting on a public official’s misconduct.
In this scenario, it’s not that he would disagree, it’s that he’d want the appearance of “fixing” things that he would blame on Musk, even as he fails to materially undo the main part of his work. It’s not about reality, it’s about the story he’d want.
Trump is the once great man undone by his advanced age and resulting diminished mental capacity, but we don’t accuse the great MAGA Trump of deliberate misbehavior. Things need to be blamed, and Trump is the face of everything and as such makes a terrible target for blame. Musk is the malicious manipulator that took advantage of that to advance whatever things PJ2025 needs to blame away. Musk is some obnoxious person with more money than anyone, a foreigner, advancing these leftist electric cars and solar, and is someone no MAGA fanatics asked for. Just the perfect person to throw under the bus to fit the narrative to take Vance from some background character in the minds of the MAGA fanatics to a worthy hero successor to what Trump was “supposed” to be for them.
Maybe they do some token unwinding of low priority stuff, or just some theater to make it look like they did.
Of course, I’m not sure if Vance actually wants the spotlight or prefers to lead from behind the curtain. So not sure if he’d advance himself or advance some other convenient face of the movement so he can keep eyes off of him.