As a woke liberal who disagrees with Hanania on just about everything, let me just say that the intellectual honesty displayed in this essay is enough to make me more seriously consider and engage with his ideas. I'll reciprocate his admission that those of us suffering from 8 years of Trump Derangement Syndrome had a point by admitting that he was correct to warn us of the dangers of wokism and cancel culture.
The billionaires want to make Idiocracy a reality, because Musk thinks he will be the man getting rich selling Brawndo to the masses in place of water. The utter contempt for the truth is my least favorite part of the MAGA movement because the damage it does to society is incalcuable. Trump and Musk are governing based on their delusions and its a disaster because nothing they are doing aligns with reality.
Good essay, but I would take it a step further. The disturbing thing about what passes for the Conservative movement today is not that they have wrong headed ideas or moral judgments that I disagree with - it is that they have no ethical or intellectual philosophy at all. They have rejected the idea of truth or inquiry. They are not crazy, but something worse: they have replaced righteousness with degradation and falsehood. It’s not just an intellectual failure, it’s a profound abandonment of morality.
Progressives are baffled and unable to respond to this turn, as they have also abandoned liberal moral values for a sort of empathetic groupthink that relies on shame instead of reasoning from principles that provide an ethical framework for decision making and relating to each other.
It is this society wide crises of conscience that has led to my personal effort to dig deep into the foundations of Western religious and moral philosophy in an effort to avoid despair. Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, and The Sermon on The Mount are essential reading in these dark times. I have spent my entire life a rationalist - in the old sense of the term - but am drifting toward faith as a shield against evil.
And to further your point, in terms of politics, the Republican Party doesn’t even run on policy discussions. Effectively, we don’t even have a legitimate conservative movement because they have no policy agenda to revolve their politics around. There’s no actual conservative movement to balance the left since they never talk about these things.
So they’re not only lacking in terms of having intellectual or ethical philosophy to your point but they don’t even have effective policymakers to form a coherent conservative movement to counterbalance the left/Democrats, who for all their flaws, still make policy their primary voting motivation.
Agreed, and I’d go further and say that this is also indirectly corrosive to the Democratic Party. How do you engage in issue positioning in opposition to a party which believes in nothing? It’s not surprising that the Biden administration was characterized by a lack of direction and high solicitousness of various interest groups’ pet projects
They havent had a policy outside of fuck immigrants and lets give rich people tax cuts for my entire life. Aa far as I am concerned Republicans have nothing to offer any American but misery and incompetence.
Disagree. They have made a virtue out of the anti-virtues. Truth, justice, and compassion are symptoms of weakness and fecklessness. Lies, hatred, and greed are the measures of men. The more capable a man is of exhibiting these anti-virtues, the more venerated he is.
For far too long the left has used their morality and credibility as a political bludgeon in the service of indefensible ideas. This had the predictable downstream effect of discrediting every established intellectual institution of America, from science to academia to journalism to government to even the concept of morality itself.
The left burned it all down fighting an indefensible rearguard action against the truth. Now both the right and the left are left simmering in the ashes of what was once a well-functioning western civilization.
Reading Spinoza, you can tell that he is deeply haunted by the concept of 'proof' -- I mean, for one, the Ethics is quite literally laid out as a geometric proof. This seems bizarre, even by the standards of relatively rigorous analytical philosophy today. But for Spinoza, the idea of living a life that was not well-founded on reason was in some sense the very stuff of evil, and he believed this so sincerely that he was not content to think about morality in anything other than the most rigorous possible thoughtform: the mathematical proof. If the sum of Spinoza's virtue is learning to understand God/Nature, and using your knowledge to master your passions, then totally surrendering to passion and ignoring reason is the inverse. This is the state of the American soul -- as you note, either in its more abrasive and self-consciously nihilistic form on the right, or in its gentler, more empathetic form on the left, this is not a people serious about mastering themselves. The great revolt happening in our society is simply against the idea that you should ever be anything more than your affective drives will you to be. It's little surprise that a people who so fervently desire their own moral regression are entirely politically dysfunctional.
The decentralization of the flow of information has undoubtedly contributed to our shift into a post-truth world. Most people don't have the brain power to handle an endless torrent of crudely packaged slop (whether it's tiktok or twitter), and they get their brains fried by it as a result. We've regressed in terms of literacy and have gone back hundreds of years to the pre-literate world, but now it's "oh I saw it on tiktok" or "I heard about this on a podcast."
The problem is that the old gatekeepers did not prove to be trustworthy. Technology has undoubtedly contributed to the decentralization of information but the media hastened the process.
One area where this is frustrating is Trump/DOGE cutting any research relating to trans things. A major problem in that area is lack of research and it's likely that some high quality research would help show that there are a lot of circumstances where transitioning isn't helpful, but that requires actual research, not moralizing or demagoguing. Those just get you people feeling oppressed and still trying to transition, but I guess we wont get that .
And frankly, it's likely that there are people who seem to be helped by transitioning. If true, it seems cruel to prevent them from doing so or to give up on trying to figure out how to identify those people, even if you don't believe transitioning actually changes your gender or don't want to give transitioned people access to opposite-sex spaces.
I guess the claim would be something like, the researchers are all biased anyway so any research that we fund would still be just advocacy pretending to be research, so it would be better to shut it down so we can at least not enable that stuff. Something like that.
Though seeing how this process has played out, it's hard to argue that it was all that deliberative.
I've followed Musk since I started working in public markets, and he's always been driven by narcissism with little respect for the truth in his public statements. However he's also clearly worked towards his outwardly-expressed goals of going to Mars, free speech, etc.
He's always been very good at efficiency: Teslas were the earliest viable electric cars because their extreme efficiency reduced cost and allowed more range from the battery. SpaceX is another clear example of high efficiency in everything it does.
A focus on efficiency and simplicity is a very good thing to do when managing engineers. Too often problems are solved by adding complexity (and weight, and cost).
All good reasons to have been cautiously optimistic about DOGE.
Clearly something changed. I wonder if politics gave him a way to feed his narcissism without actually having to do awesome things? He can say a thing and get instant adoration, at least from the segment of the population he pays attention to.
Politics does drive a lot of people crazy, but most politicians don't start out as extreme achievers like Musk did.
There was never a reason to be optimistic about DOGE. Government isnt business. And business acumen (or even genius, like Musk’s in manufacturing and sales) doesnt mean governance acumen. 2 different things. Musk has no idea what bureaucracy is for or what it does. Which is why he is going against mostly wrong targets and is gonna fail.
Liberals only censor. No. They ban, de-platform and demonetize. There was a time you would get banned for stating the biological fact that “men couldn’t have babies!” Also, I’m curious who you think are “reasonable” voices?
I think Hanania is put off by the easily avoidable unforced air of getting basic facts wrong, and society's tolerance of it even if things tend to shake out okay. I believe otoh that systematically and normatively poisonous ideology or high level factual incorrectness (women can be men, IQ is bogus...) is worse.
But you still see people calling him a Nazi everyday on X. Even the brightest bulb in Congress, AOC is still allowed to post. Seems like an easy fix for him if what you say is true.
The primary difference in my mind is Musk generally has more of a commitment to free speech while the regime before him was totally authoritarian in nature putting us into the dystopian world of 1984.
Musk has no commitment to free speech. He claims to support it when he was out of power but now uses his platform to silence people who he disagrees with and has called for a long prison term for reporters who disagree with him. His claimed support for free speech is a fraud.
TLDR: when a woman transitions to a man, generally they take a male-equivalent dose of testosterone, to masculinize the body. While testosterone generally interrupts the ovulation process, it doesn't permanently damage their ovaries and eggs. If a transgender man wants to have a child, they can usually discontinue testosterone for a few months in order to get ovulation started again, then conceive the child.
You’re talking about NYT fact checks, dissenting voices… and you yourself are communicating freely. This is what free speech looks like. It can take years for truth to out (remember COVID? BLM? Russian collusion) but it’s the best system on offer. If Musk makes waves of ridiculous claims his credibility will decrease. That’s how this works. I know you know this.
By the way, $9 billion doesn’t sound so bad to me.
I make that claim. Trump is complaining about Russia "pounding" Ukraine while he's trying to make a peace deal, but then Trump complains about a lot of things. But his actual foreign policy now would not suffice to prove a claim about what took place prior to Biden taking office.
So if you hired a consultant who said I will cut $33 out of your $100 of expenses and then he instead cut $0.06 (you read that right…6 cents), you would say “good job”?
If the ‘consultant’ was free, and if he’d begun tackling a major problem which had been building for decades, yes. I would find $.06 (from my enterprise, which is working with a massive $100 cash flow, somehow) encouraging. I would want him to keep going.
He’s not free. His extra-constitutional methods of cutting are creating real costs for the efficiency of government agencies and political capital over the remainder of the term, potentially undermining real cuts to what fundamentally drives federal outlays. WSJ reported that they could only find $2B in cuts for the reported $50B in savings (at the time of the article).
They should be more honest if they want to assure people like me that DOGE is a serious agency rather than cover for growth damaging tariffs and deficit growing/regressive tax cuts.
Here’s a hypothetical: suppose there’s a national government with >$ 36 trillion of debt and a brilliant engineer and his young staff use millions of dollars of operating costs, plus AI, to cut billions from the budget. They post about it online. There’s lots of silliness and mistakes but this represents a kind of inflection point from years of radically ballooning, administratively-controlled spending-on foreign media, political parties, labor unions, consultants, and other generally privileged groups. Is it a good thing that he’s begun his project, or should it be shut down post haste?
If it such an obvious good thing, even if they are producing only a fraction of the results they said they'd get, then why are they lying about it nonstop? You're proving Hanania's point. Musk and Trump and their lackeys in congress tell lie after lie about DOGE because the point isn't to actually meaningfully cut government spending. Its to force their supporters to accept whatever it is they tell them. They have to do this because the real legislative goal is to pass a deficit ballooning tax cut. They'll lie about this too.
That’s fine but in that hypothetical the brilliant engineer and his team can’t touch the true cost drivers, which are Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and interest.
Fun fact: discretionary gov spending as a % of GDP is 6.5% vs the 40 yr average of 7.5%. Most spending increase have been driven by payments to seniors and those in poverty. Correcting those programs will be explosive.
If all the chaos unleashed by DOGE only ends up saving $9 billion, it's an absurd farce. One of the most ridiculous failures in governance of all time. $9 billion sounds like a lot of money in a vacuum sure. For the US federal budget, it's less than nothing, especially when the price is upending the entire thing.
"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed."
this is crazy overstatement. Musk still has tons of smart people working for him in his various companies and the doge. Anyone who tweets 100x a day about controversial stuff will inevitably have a lot of things that various people think are lies. Musk cares deeply about the truth but just has a different worldview from you and the liberal media outrage you've been marinating in.
"Liberals may in many cases want to censor certain ideas and not treat them fairly."
The pot calling the kettle black. LOL. Modern liberalism demands sex and race quotas, either formal or informal. It gorges itself on lies concerning race and sex.
Does it though? The Liberalism of Fukuyama, Pinker and Dawkins does not strike me as requiring that, but exactly the opposite. Maybe your term "modern liberalism" is "progressivism"? Living in the UK, and moderately interested in various -ism-s, I notice that in the US "liberalism" is thought to mostly overlap with "progressivism". But in the UK there seems to be much less overlap, much more difference.
I don't think liberalism itself demands any such thing. In the UK, at least, there is no universal demand for quotas, and in fact, some liberal factions explicitly oppose them. (others may tolerate them as lesser evil) Perhaps you’re referring more to US progressivism, which has taken a different trajectory—focusing heavily on race and gender equity. But this isn’t necessarily reflective of liberalism as a whole. In the UK historically there has been much more class consciousness, with race being minor consideration.
> Liberalism is in denial about human nature.
Far from it. Thinkers like Fukuyama ("The Origins of Political Order"), Pinker ("The Blank Slate"), and Dawkins ("The Selfish Gene") have emphasized human nature in ways that challenge utopian social engineering. In fact, Pinker and Dawkins have often been criticized precisely for discussing human nature too much. If anything, modern liberal thought has been much influenced by evolutionary psychology and behavioral science.
It's encouraging to hear there are no race and sex quotas in Britain although a female newsreader complained once about the "glass ceiling". Which is a kind of informal quota.
Does the UK have forced integration in schools? That's where it started in the US in 1954 with Brown vs. Board of Education. We certainly didn't have quotas until then. If you'd be kind enough to tell me about this I'd be very interested in what you have to say.
I have close relatives in London but I don't recall them mentioning quotas. But, they have money. I would be curious about middle and lower class forced integration in schools.
Afaik - UK never had forced integration in schools. But it never had forced segregation in schools either.
In the UK the money element is much stronger imo. The schools options are.
Private schools - fees 20K p.a., rising to 40K p.a. for boarding where the kid lives in the school. There are many choices, and many are sex-segregated. Same name school will have one school/building for boys, another one for girls. Sometimes even at different locations.
State schools - zero fees. But - there is implicit sorting by homes properties prices. Eligibility is determined by how close the kid lives to the school. In a school admitting 100 pupils, when 150 apply, they are sorted by geographic distance(home,school). Then top 100 are accepted, bottom 50 are rejected. There are exceptions, e.g. siblings jump top 1 in that sort, on the account of their older sibling(s) already attending. (there are few other exceptions like it)
The geographic area where there is a high chance of getting into a particular school is called the "catchment area" for the school. "High chance" as determined by historic patterns of acceptance from that area to that school. But for any new admission year, there is never a 100% guarantee of acceptance.
In expectation, the house prices in the catchment areas of schools, go up are higher, with some combination of factors of how good the school is judged to be, and the distance of the particular property from it. The measures of goodness are subjective - reputation, students life success or otherwise once they finish school historic patterns, etc. Also depends on whether the school is primary (ages 4-10) or secondary (ages 10-17). The schools catering for the two age groups (primary or secondary) are mostly completely separate, distinct.
Thank you very much. That's interesting. I would think with the rise in the number of non-British students there would be a noticeable "disparate impact" for race concerning quality, i.e., non-Brits end up in the bad schools and suffer as a result. It's like crime in the US. Blacks comprise 13% of the population but commit 59% of all robberies. Police departments are then investigated for discrimination and racisms.
Same for schools. Blacks/Muslims score lower on standarized tests than whites. Ergo, they must be bussed to white schools outside of their "cachement". It does no good of course. They just drag down the poor and middle class white students because standards must be lowered. Or they just give everyone high grades, known as grade inflation. This also applies to colleges.
I'm rather surprised this hasn't started happening in the UK.
Excellent article. You can see that Musk doesn't think there is anything to know about government by that fact that he chose 20 yo software engineers to "reform" it.
The problem is also compounded by the fact that Trump has become completely erratic. This is not the problem of goals, at least not for me. I support many of what I guess are still his goals, peace in Ukraine, more modest foreign policy etc. But his foreign policy is just zig-zagging randomly - on Ukraine/Russia, Gaza - and opening new fronts (Canada, Japan) every day. He is also pausing and unpausing tariffs every second.
They are going to wreck the economy and it's scary. I think they had great first 3 days, and concluded they were invincible and needed to make dramatic changes every day.
Twitter started off as a cesspool of smug left-wing know-it-alls and since Musk took over it became a cesspool of smug, right-wing THINK-they-know-it-alls, and the former were a better revenue base.
Musk made long-form posts on X as a replacement for people going off-site for longer reading. This is no different than other platforms who try to keep the reader engaged as much as possible. This has the consequence of slowing Substack (and their Notes X clone) and other competitors, and of course depriving clicks to legacy media.
I don't use the long-form mode, but many use it well. My issue with it is that it is too brittle. If Musk deletes your account for any reason (which can happen at any time), all the writings are practically gone forever (internet archive aside). On blog platforms, it is much easier to keep backups and restore to a new platform if deleted.
"Clearly, Musk does not see long-form communication as something worth cultivating. He killed links and didn’t bother creating a serious replacement because sensationalist right-wing accounts provide all the information he thinks anyone needs."
I'm sorry, but there's a phenomenon where intelligent people go down the rabbit hole of over analysis and conspiratorial thinking and Hanania has clear fallen down it.
I have no idea why Musk killed links but an alternate explanation should present itself to anyone with even an iota of common sense: Substack is a competitor to Twitter and Musk doesn't want to boost the competition.
As a thought experiment ask yourself what the case would be if Musk owned both X and Substack. I think it's an easy bet that he would be doing everything he could to build up interdependence between the two platforms.
Substack isn’t a competitor to X, and even if it was, it would be trivial for Musk to build a copycat version. But musk doesn’t care to do that because he doesn’t read anything more than a paragraph long.
He hasn't just deprioritized links to Substack, he's deprioritized links to all external websites. This is partially because all external links are his competition for time you could spend reading Twitter instead, but in the end that's not much different from what Hanania said.
If he bought Substack he would merge it with X, the everything app, the same way all of his automotive acquisitions were merged into Tesla and all of his aerospace acquisitions were merged into SpaceX. There would be no "interdependence." We'd all just be posting on X right now.
> in many ways more sinister than liberal bias or censorship. Musk does not usually suppress knowledge or facts, but denigrates the entire idea that anyone can live in a universe where knowledge or facts matter, and seeks to reduce the prominence of anyone who would be naive enough to think they should
Come on. Musk ignoring Community Notes does not prevent you from doing anything in the way that the old regime prevented people from linking the Hunter Biden laptop story.
> Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.
He hasn't actually censored links. The rule is you're supposed to have it as your first reply to an introductory tweet. That's stupid & annoying, but doesn't actually prevent you from accessing that second tweet with the link.
> He believes you can figure out all you need to know based on first principle grounds
That bit actually is accurate in terms of what he's said about physics & engineering.
> This is a lot less horrifying than a new influencer-driven culture where no one cares to censor because truth has no hope of winning out against a constant avalanche of lies anyway.
In order for the truth to have an advantage over lies there needs to be an asymmetry in its favor, such as via public bets or prediction markets. I didn't see much of one before Musk took over Twitter and thus didn't think I had "hope of winning" against people uninterested in truth. At most one can hope to speak to "the remnant" who do care, and as long as censorship is absent that's possible. The real problem is the people https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-real-problemhtml and there is no abolishing them and electing another.
It’s possible that this is the most important piece you’ve ever written. Perfect.
As a woke liberal who disagrees with Hanania on just about everything, let me just say that the intellectual honesty displayed in this essay is enough to make me more seriously consider and engage with his ideas. I'll reciprocate his admission that those of us suffering from 8 years of Trump Derangement Syndrome had a point by admitting that he was correct to warn us of the dangers of wokism and cancel culture.
The billionaires want to make Idiocracy a reality, because Musk thinks he will be the man getting rich selling Brawndo to the masses in place of water. The utter contempt for the truth is my least favorite part of the MAGA movement because the damage it does to society is incalcuable. Trump and Musk are governing based on their delusions and its a disaster because nothing they are doing aligns with reality.
Good essay, but I would take it a step further. The disturbing thing about what passes for the Conservative movement today is not that they have wrong headed ideas or moral judgments that I disagree with - it is that they have no ethical or intellectual philosophy at all. They have rejected the idea of truth or inquiry. They are not crazy, but something worse: they have replaced righteousness with degradation and falsehood. It’s not just an intellectual failure, it’s a profound abandonment of morality.
Progressives are baffled and unable to respond to this turn, as they have also abandoned liberal moral values for a sort of empathetic groupthink that relies on shame instead of reasoning from principles that provide an ethical framework for decision making and relating to each other.
It is this society wide crises of conscience that has led to my personal effort to dig deep into the foundations of Western religious and moral philosophy in an effort to avoid despair. Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, and The Sermon on The Mount are essential reading in these dark times. I have spent my entire life a rationalist - in the old sense of the term - but am drifting toward faith as a shield against evil.
And to further your point, in terms of politics, the Republican Party doesn’t even run on policy discussions. Effectively, we don’t even have a legitimate conservative movement because they have no policy agenda to revolve their politics around. There’s no actual conservative movement to balance the left since they never talk about these things.
So they’re not only lacking in terms of having intellectual or ethical philosophy to your point but they don’t even have effective policymakers to form a coherent conservative movement to counterbalance the left/Democrats, who for all their flaws, still make policy their primary voting motivation.
Agreed, and I’d go further and say that this is also indirectly corrosive to the Democratic Party. How do you engage in issue positioning in opposition to a party which believes in nothing? It’s not surprising that the Biden administration was characterized by a lack of direction and high solicitousness of various interest groups’ pet projects
They havent had a policy outside of fuck immigrants and lets give rich people tax cuts for my entire life. Aa far as I am concerned Republicans have nothing to offer any American but misery and incompetence.
Today’s GOP is literally the sort of post modern atrocity they accused the left of being for decades.
Disagree. They have made a virtue out of the anti-virtues. Truth, justice, and compassion are symptoms of weakness and fecklessness. Lies, hatred, and greed are the measures of men. The more capable a man is of exhibiting these anti-virtues, the more venerated he is.
For far too long the left has used their morality and credibility as a political bludgeon in the service of indefensible ideas. This had the predictable downstream effect of discrediting every established intellectual institution of America, from science to academia to journalism to government to even the concept of morality itself.
The left burned it all down fighting an indefensible rearguard action against the truth. Now both the right and the left are left simmering in the ashes of what was once a well-functioning western civilization.
Perhaps, but the right does not even pretend to aspire to virtue anymore. Hypocrisy is the price vice pays to virtue
Reading Spinoza, you can tell that he is deeply haunted by the concept of 'proof' -- I mean, for one, the Ethics is quite literally laid out as a geometric proof. This seems bizarre, even by the standards of relatively rigorous analytical philosophy today. But for Spinoza, the idea of living a life that was not well-founded on reason was in some sense the very stuff of evil, and he believed this so sincerely that he was not content to think about morality in anything other than the most rigorous possible thoughtform: the mathematical proof. If the sum of Spinoza's virtue is learning to understand God/Nature, and using your knowledge to master your passions, then totally surrendering to passion and ignoring reason is the inverse. This is the state of the American soul -- as you note, either in its more abrasive and self-consciously nihilistic form on the right, or in its gentler, more empathetic form on the left, this is not a people serious about mastering themselves. The great revolt happening in our society is simply against the idea that you should ever be anything more than your affective drives will you to be. It's little surprise that a people who so fervently desire their own moral regression are entirely politically dysfunctional.
I think you are conflating online extremists on the left with those who wield power on the right.
Here's your fainting couch.
The decentralization of the flow of information has undoubtedly contributed to our shift into a post-truth world. Most people don't have the brain power to handle an endless torrent of crudely packaged slop (whether it's tiktok or twitter), and they get their brains fried by it as a result. We've regressed in terms of literacy and have gone back hundreds of years to the pre-literate world, but now it's "oh I saw it on tiktok" or "I heard about this on a podcast."
The problem is that the old gatekeepers did not prove to be trustworthy. Technology has undoubtedly contributed to the decentralization of information but the media hastened the process.
They weren’t that bad. There was money to be made for disrupters though, who could cater to the lowest common denominator.
Yes, clearly the news is a product as refined as an Eric Rohmer film.
This is it right here.
One area where this is frustrating is Trump/DOGE cutting any research relating to trans things. A major problem in that area is lack of research and it's likely that some high quality research would help show that there are a lot of circumstances where transitioning isn't helpful, but that requires actual research, not moralizing or demagoguing. Those just get you people feeling oppressed and still trying to transition, but I guess we wont get that .
And frankly, it's likely that there are people who seem to be helped by transitioning. If true, it seems cruel to prevent them from doing so or to give up on trying to figure out how to identify those people, even if you don't believe transitioning actually changes your gender or don't want to give transitioned people access to opposite-sex spaces.
I guess the claim would be something like, the researchers are all biased anyway so any research that we fund would still be just advocacy pretending to be research, so it would be better to shut it down so we can at least not enable that stuff. Something like that.
Though seeing how this process has played out, it's hard to argue that it was all that deliberative.
I've followed Musk since I started working in public markets, and he's always been driven by narcissism with little respect for the truth in his public statements. However he's also clearly worked towards his outwardly-expressed goals of going to Mars, free speech, etc.
He's always been very good at efficiency: Teslas were the earliest viable electric cars because their extreme efficiency reduced cost and allowed more range from the battery. SpaceX is another clear example of high efficiency in everything it does.
A focus on efficiency and simplicity is a very good thing to do when managing engineers. Too often problems are solved by adding complexity (and weight, and cost).
All good reasons to have been cautiously optimistic about DOGE.
Clearly something changed. I wonder if politics gave him a way to feed his narcissism without actually having to do awesome things? He can say a thing and get instant adoration, at least from the segment of the population he pays attention to.
Politics does drive a lot of people crazy, but most politicians don't start out as extreme achievers like Musk did.
Ketamine's a helluva drug, man.
There was never a reason to be optimistic about DOGE. Government isnt business. And business acumen (or even genius, like Musk’s in manufacturing and sales) doesnt mean governance acumen. 2 different things. Musk has no idea what bureaucracy is for or what it does. Which is why he is going against mostly wrong targets and is gonna fail.
Liberals only censor. No. They ban, de-platform and demonetize. There was a time you would get banned for stating the biological fact that “men couldn’t have babies!” Also, I’m curious who you think are “reasonable” voices?
I think Hanania is put off by the easily avoidable unforced air of getting basic facts wrong, and society's tolerance of it even if things tend to shake out okay. I believe otoh that systematically and normatively poisonous ideology or high level factual incorrectness (women can be men, IQ is bogus...) is worse.
They are different kinds of bads.
IQ IS bogus 👍🏼
that's a subclass of censorship you egg
But you still see people calling him a Nazi everyday on X. Even the brightest bulb in Congress, AOC is still allowed to post. Seems like an easy fix for him if what you say is true.
The primary difference in my mind is Musk generally has more of a commitment to free speech while the regime before him was totally authoritarian in nature putting us into the dystopian world of 1984.
Musk has no commitment to free speech. He claims to support it when he was out of power but now uses his platform to silence people who he disagrees with and has called for a long prison term for reporters who disagree with him. His claimed support for free speech is a fraud.
At the very least he's allowing X to apply Community Notes to his own posts.
All you have to do is visit X to know it's the same old Pier Six brawl.
What? Just look at what he has said about China since he opened a factory there. Free speech commitment my ass
Transgender men can have babies. Transgender men have had babies.
Yeah? Explain this to me with science.
When a woman transitions to a man, the reproductive system is often still viable, even though the rest of the body has masculinized.
Ummm. I said use science. Not language.
Here's a case study.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9259284/
TLDR: when a woman transitions to a man, generally they take a male-equivalent dose of testosterone, to masculinize the body. While testosterone generally interrupts the ovulation process, it doesn't permanently damage their ovaries and eggs. If a transgender man wants to have a child, they can usually discontinue testosterone for a few months in order to get ovulation started again, then conceive the child.
So technically they are still a woman. Or at least they still have female body parts. What part of them is male?
Oh. There are subclasses? Enlightened me oh wise one.
You’re talking about NYT fact checks, dissenting voices… and you yourself are communicating freely. This is what free speech looks like. It can take years for truth to out (remember COVID? BLM? Russian collusion) but it’s the best system on offer. If Musk makes waves of ridiculous claims his credibility will decrease. That’s how this works. I know you know this.
By the way, $9 billion doesn’t sound so bad to me.
How can anyone still seriously try to claim „Russian Collusion“ was a hoax? Trump is now openly allied with Putin.
I make that claim. Trump is complaining about Russia "pounding" Ukraine while he's trying to make a peace deal, but then Trump complains about a lot of things. But his actual foreign policy now would not suffice to prove a claim about what took place prior to Biden taking office.
So if you hired a consultant who said I will cut $33 out of your $100 of expenses and then he instead cut $0.06 (you read that right…6 cents), you would say “good job”?
If the ‘consultant’ was free, and if he’d begun tackling a major problem which had been building for decades, yes. I would find $.06 (from my enterprise, which is working with a massive $100 cash flow, somehow) encouraging. I would want him to keep going.
He’s not free. His extra-constitutional methods of cutting are creating real costs for the efficiency of government agencies and political capital over the remainder of the term, potentially undermining real cuts to what fundamentally drives federal outlays. WSJ reported that they could only find $2B in cuts for the reported $50B in savings (at the time of the article).
They should be more honest if they want to assure people like me that DOGE is a serious agency rather than cover for growth damaging tariffs and deficit growing/regressive tax cuts.
It is free if the only drawback you can point to are intangibles.
Not how drawbacks work. Not how "free" works.
Also not how intangibles work.
Oh yes it is.
That doesn’t appear to be the case:
https://fortune.com/2025/03/05/doge-employees-earning-six-figure-taxpayer-funded-salaries/
In your analogy these salaries would represent like $.000001, total. I’d be okay with that.
Here’s a hypothetical: suppose there’s a national government with >$ 36 trillion of debt and a brilliant engineer and his young staff use millions of dollars of operating costs, plus AI, to cut billions from the budget. They post about it online. There’s lots of silliness and mistakes but this represents a kind of inflection point from years of radically ballooning, administratively-controlled spending-on foreign media, political parties, labor unions, consultants, and other generally privileged groups. Is it a good thing that he’s begun his project, or should it be shut down post haste?
If it such an obvious good thing, even if they are producing only a fraction of the results they said they'd get, then why are they lying about it nonstop? You're proving Hanania's point. Musk and Trump and their lackeys in congress tell lie after lie about DOGE because the point isn't to actually meaningfully cut government spending. Its to force their supporters to accept whatever it is they tell them. They have to do this because the real legislative goal is to pass a deficit ballooning tax cut. They'll lie about this too.
That’s fine but in that hypothetical the brilliant engineer and his team can’t touch the true cost drivers, which are Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and interest.
Fun fact: discretionary gov spending as a % of GDP is 6.5% vs the 40 yr average of 7.5%. Most spending increase have been driven by payments to seniors and those in poverty. Correcting those programs will be explosive.
If all the chaos unleashed by DOGE only ends up saving $9 billion, it's an absurd farce. One of the most ridiculous failures in governance of all time. $9 billion sounds like a lot of money in a vacuum sure. For the US federal budget, it's less than nothing, especially when the price is upending the entire thing.
Yes, but *other people* hearing things that are such bald-faced misinformation is simply too much to abide for some.
Because they hold such a dim view of humanity that other people can't be trusted to figure it out on their own?
"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed."
Hannah Arendt
this is crazy overstatement. Musk still has tons of smart people working for him in his various companies and the doge. Anyone who tweets 100x a day about controversial stuff will inevitably have a lot of things that various people think are lies. Musk cares deeply about the truth but just has a different worldview from you and the liberal media outrage you've been marinating in.
I literally don't think he's tweeted the truth once in the last 6 months lol
This is far beyond "world view". He's constantly tweeting things that are flat out wrong.
My worldview identifies as an attack helicopter
Sure, but let's stop confusing progressives for liberals. They ain't.
"Liberals may in many cases want to censor certain ideas and not treat them fairly."
The pot calling the kettle black. LOL. Modern liberalism demands sex and race quotas, either formal or informal. It gorges itself on lies concerning race and sex.
Does it though? The Liberalism of Fukuyama, Pinker and Dawkins does not strike me as requiring that, but exactly the opposite. Maybe your term "modern liberalism" is "progressivism"? Living in the UK, and moderately interested in various -ism-s, I notice that in the US "liberalism" is thought to mostly overlap with "progressivism". But in the UK there seems to be much less overlap, much more difference.
It looks to me that people like Fukuyama, Pinker and Dawkins are in some kind of denial about human nature. I read some of Fukuyama'a writings at https://www.persuasion.community/p/making-the-world-safe-for-criminals?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
He's splitting hairs about the terms "authoritarian and patrimonial" and brings up the idea of fascism and kings owning people and so forth.
He doesn't mention race and sex at all. He sounds quite mad to me.
Thank you for your comment.
Thanks for your reply.
> Modern liberalism demands sex and race quotas.
I don't think liberalism itself demands any such thing. In the UK, at least, there is no universal demand for quotas, and in fact, some liberal factions explicitly oppose them. (others may tolerate them as lesser evil) Perhaps you’re referring more to US progressivism, which has taken a different trajectory—focusing heavily on race and gender equity. But this isn’t necessarily reflective of liberalism as a whole. In the UK historically there has been much more class consciousness, with race being minor consideration.
> Liberalism is in denial about human nature.
Far from it. Thinkers like Fukuyama ("The Origins of Political Order"), Pinker ("The Blank Slate"), and Dawkins ("The Selfish Gene") have emphasized human nature in ways that challenge utopian social engineering. In fact, Pinker and Dawkins have often been criticized precisely for discussing human nature too much. If anything, modern liberal thought has been much influenced by evolutionary psychology and behavioral science.
All the best.
It's encouraging to hear there are no race and sex quotas in Britain although a female newsreader complained once about the "glass ceiling". Which is a kind of informal quota.
Does the UK have forced integration in schools? That's where it started in the US in 1954 with Brown vs. Board of Education. We certainly didn't have quotas until then. If you'd be kind enough to tell me about this I'd be very interested in what you have to say.
I have close relatives in London but I don't recall them mentioning quotas. But, they have money. I would be curious about middle and lower class forced integration in schools.
Thanks for your reply.
Afaik - UK never had forced integration in schools. But it never had forced segregation in schools either.
In the UK the money element is much stronger imo. The schools options are.
Private schools - fees 20K p.a., rising to 40K p.a. for boarding where the kid lives in the school. There are many choices, and many are sex-segregated. Same name school will have one school/building for boys, another one for girls. Sometimes even at different locations.
State schools - zero fees. But - there is implicit sorting by homes properties prices. Eligibility is determined by how close the kid lives to the school. In a school admitting 100 pupils, when 150 apply, they are sorted by geographic distance(home,school). Then top 100 are accepted, bottom 50 are rejected. There are exceptions, e.g. siblings jump top 1 in that sort, on the account of their older sibling(s) already attending. (there are few other exceptions like it)
The geographic area where there is a high chance of getting into a particular school is called the "catchment area" for the school. "High chance" as determined by historic patterns of acceptance from that area to that school. But for any new admission year, there is never a 100% guarantee of acceptance.
In expectation, the house prices in the catchment areas of schools, go up are higher, with some combination of factors of how good the school is judged to be, and the distance of the particular property from it. The measures of goodness are subjective - reputation, students life success or otherwise once they finish school historic patterns, etc. Also depends on whether the school is primary (ages 4-10) or secondary (ages 10-17). The schools catering for the two age groups (primary or secondary) are mostly completely separate, distinct.
Hope that helps.
Thank you very much. That's interesting. I would think with the rise in the number of non-British students there would be a noticeable "disparate impact" for race concerning quality, i.e., non-Brits end up in the bad schools and suffer as a result. It's like crime in the US. Blacks comprise 13% of the population but commit 59% of all robberies. Police departments are then investigated for discrimination and racisms.
Same for schools. Blacks/Muslims score lower on standarized tests than whites. Ergo, they must be bussed to white schools outside of their "cachement". It does no good of course. They just drag down the poor and middle class white students because standards must be lowered. Or they just give everyone high grades, known as grade inflation. This also applies to colleges.
I'm rather surprised this hasn't started happening in the UK.
Excellent article. You can see that Musk doesn't think there is anything to know about government by that fact that he chose 20 yo software engineers to "reform" it.
The problem is also compounded by the fact that Trump has become completely erratic. This is not the problem of goals, at least not for me. I support many of what I guess are still his goals, peace in Ukraine, more modest foreign policy etc. But his foreign policy is just zig-zagging randomly - on Ukraine/Russia, Gaza - and opening new fronts (Canada, Japan) every day. He is also pausing and unpausing tariffs every second.
They are going to wreck the economy and it's scary. I think they had great first 3 days, and concluded they were invincible and needed to make dramatic changes every day.
Twitter started off as a cesspool of smug left-wing know-it-alls and since Musk took over it became a cesspool of smug, right-wing THINK-they-know-it-alls, and the former were a better revenue base.
Musk made long-form posts on X as a replacement for people going off-site for longer reading. This is no different than other platforms who try to keep the reader engaged as much as possible. This has the consequence of slowing Substack (and their Notes X clone) and other competitors, and of course depriving clicks to legacy media.
I don't use the long-form mode, but many use it well. My issue with it is that it is too brittle. If Musk deletes your account for any reason (which can happen at any time), all the writings are practically gone forever (internet archive aside). On blog platforms, it is much easier to keep backups and restore to a new platform if deleted.
"Clearly, Musk does not see long-form communication as something worth cultivating. He killed links and didn’t bother creating a serious replacement because sensationalist right-wing accounts provide all the information he thinks anyone needs."
I'm sorry, but there's a phenomenon where intelligent people go down the rabbit hole of over analysis and conspiratorial thinking and Hanania has clear fallen down it.
I have no idea why Musk killed links but an alternate explanation should present itself to anyone with even an iota of common sense: Substack is a competitor to Twitter and Musk doesn't want to boost the competition.
As a thought experiment ask yourself what the case would be if Musk owned both X and Substack. I think it's an easy bet that he would be doing everything he could to build up interdependence between the two platforms.
Substack isn’t a competitor to X, and even if it was, it would be trivial for Musk to build a copycat version. But musk doesn’t care to do that because he doesn’t read anything more than a paragraph long.
It's a social media platform. It's a competitor. And it was first to the space, so even if Musk built a competitor he'd be starting from behind.
Substack is a competitor in the online attention economy.
He hasn't just deprioritized links to Substack, he's deprioritized links to all external websites. This is partially because all external links are his competition for time you could spend reading Twitter instead, but in the end that's not much different from what Hanania said.
Again, in an alternate universe where Musk owned Substack does anybody really think he wouldn't carve out a giant exception?
If he bought Substack he would merge it with X, the everything app, the same way all of his automotive acquisitions were merged into Tesla and all of his aerospace acquisitions were merged into SpaceX. There would be no "interdependence." We'd all just be posting on X right now.
So do you think Musk would kill off the Substack component and force everyone to abide by the 256 character limit? Of course not.
X premium users have a 25,000 character limit. It would eventually just become one of the new Twitter tabs.
Musk can hardly be called an enemy of long form writing if he's willing to monetize it.
> the question of whether rational thinking about political, social, and economic issues is even possible in the world he is trying to create
Do you think you're engaged in rational thinking? Do you think you'll be unable to think rationally?
> Musk’s rule of X, in contrast, stands in opposition to the idea that anyone should read any news in the first place
In keeping with Thomas Jefferson https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/03/jefferson_again.html and Bryan Caplan https://www.betonit.ai/p/mainstream-media-is-worse-than-silence
> in many ways more sinister than liberal bias or censorship. Musk does not usually suppress knowledge or facts, but denigrates the entire idea that anyone can live in a universe where knowledge or facts matter, and seeks to reduce the prominence of anyone who would be naive enough to think they should
Come on. Musk ignoring Community Notes does not prevent you from doing anything in the way that the old regime prevented people from linking the Hunter Biden laptop story.
> Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.
He hasn't actually censored links. The rule is you're supposed to have it as your first reply to an introductory tweet. That's stupid & annoying, but doesn't actually prevent you from accessing that second tweet with the link.
> He believes you can figure out all you need to know based on first principle grounds
That bit actually is accurate in terms of what he's said about physics & engineering.
> This is a lot less horrifying than a new influencer-driven culture where no one cares to censor because truth has no hope of winning out against a constant avalanche of lies anyway.
In order for the truth to have an advantage over lies there needs to be an asymmetry in its favor, such as via public bets or prediction markets. I didn't see much of one before Musk took over Twitter and thus didn't think I had "hope of winning" against people uninterested in truth. At most one can hope to speak to "the remnant" who do care, and as long as censorship is absent that's possible. The real problem is the people https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-real-problemhtml and there is no abolishing them and electing another.