Trump

11. We Owe a Tremendous Debt to Elon

If for nothing else, his investment of $44 billion of his own money to turn Twitter into X and thus save online free speech in America was one of the most demonstrative acts of civic philanthropy in American history, and for that alone we should be building statues to Elon Musk.

He’s become an extraordinary figure in our history. And his efforts to elect Trump may well have saved America.

Thank you, Elon.

We can’t just say ‘Oh well we’re all Americans in the end’ and pretend that everything is okay. Everything is not okay.

Back in July after the first Trump assassination attempt, I wrote that there can be no national unity, no burying the hatchet or cooling the rhetoric with people who have been encouraging political violence and pushing assassination prep for years. You can’t smack someone in the face with a hammer and then insist everyone calm down.

Trump’s election victory doesn’t change that. Those in the news media who spent years calling Trump a fascist and comparing him to Hitler, claiming he represents a threat to democracy and that he’ll use his presidential powers to go after his enemies, should not be forgiven. Their lies and nonstop propaganda should not be forgotten. No one should ever take them seriously again. When they try to engage the public square, they should either be ignored entirely or met with a wall of mockery and derision. They are enemies of the American people, whom they openly despise, and there can be no real unity with them no matter what they might say in the future.

For the government officials and institutions who tried to bankrupt and jail Trump, there should be more severe and formal consequences. On Wednesday it was reported that the Justice Department will be dismissing Special Counsel Jack Smith and dropping his cases against Trump before Trump takes office. That’s great, but Smith should not be allowed to simply walk away. He and everyone else at Biden’s DOJ who was involved in these lawfare cases against Trump needs to be investigated and held accountable for their actions.

And of course the problem goes far beyond Smith. What the Justice Department and the FBI did to Trump was one of the most egregious abuses of power in American history, and we shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders at it because Trump won. These agencies need to be dismantled entirely and re-built from scratch. The FBI in particular has shown itself to be an enemy of the American people and a danger to the republic. Its director, Christopher Wray, should not simply be allowed to resign. He should be removed and placed under criminal investigation.

The idea that we should just forget all that now for the sake of unity is deeply misguided and naïve. If those responsible aren’t held accountable, they will never stop trying to destroy their enemies by any means they can. Before we ever achieve anything like unity in America again, there must be a reckoning and there must be justice. Without those things, the divisions in our country won’t be able to heal.

Even with a reckoning, unity will be difficult. We can’t just say “Oh well we’re all Americans in the end.” That won’t cut it. The stark reality is that there are a large number of our countrymen who are no longer Americans in any meaningful sense. As Glenn Ellmers has written, they “do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

After those who broke the law are held accountable, and those who lied are ostracized and ignored, we will still face the problem of disunity and division among our people. We will still be two nations occupying the same territory, with two irreconcilable visions of what the country should be. We can’t paper over those differences, and we shouldn’t.

The dismal cabal of hysterical adult children that makes up the alleged American cultural “mainstream,” the responsible people you see on television and in the op-ed pages — Anne Applebaum, Tom Nichols, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Joe Scarborough and his idiot wife, Jonathan Capehart, Max Boot, Jen Rubin, David French, Bill Kristol, Ruth Marcus, Nicolle Wallace, Dana Bash, and on and on, all of them completely interchangeable, one set of asinine talking points with a series of different faces sewn on the front — have spent the last year or 10 descending into a urine-soaked psychotic tantrum. They don’t know anything, they don’t understand anything, they don’t say anything of value, they don’t contribute anything, ever, and their voices are ubiquitous. Living in this media environment is like living in a place where the air is made of manure.

Tattoos and nose rings. What's not to like?