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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

“And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always close to insanity.”

I think Musk probably doesn’t believe Vox Populi, Vox Dei either but when it suits his extremely right wing agenda it’s a useful meme to wind everyone up on the left.

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> extremely right wing agenda

Matt Binder had a simpler explanation for why Elon Musk bought Twitter (thread):

> Musk is in a right wing filter bubble. he bought Twitter believing their problems were real & that others felt the same

> this is what happens when you have a lot of money & live in fantasy land

* https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1593474503996280833

Alternate theory- he bought Twitter because his life’s goal is to get humanity to populate other planets, and Twitter makes this planet look like a dumpster fire by comparison.

3D chess, indeed.

Alternate alternate hypothesis:

> Dude LOVES Twitter. As a narcissist, he can't get enough of the adulation of the right-wing mouth-breathers. But Twitter keeps banning the people he loves, so he becomes convinced that Twitter is a liberal SJW organization.

> He decides to teach them a lesson, and make an offer to buy the company. Absolutely convinced that it is a left-wing political site, he's sure they'll refuse his offer, even a ridiculously good offer. Then he can say "aha! they're so woke!" and his fans will cheer. 3/

> But Twitter is actually governed by businesspeople who see his offer as absurdly high, and they jump at it. Musk freaks out, tries to get out of the deal, but he's already locked in solidly. 4/

> Now his Dunning-Kruger kicks in to protect him from his panic, and he says, "heck, it's not that hard to run this site; I'll turn it around right quick!" He's not completely stupid, so he cons investors into going in with him. 5/

[…]

* https://twitter.com/drskyskull/status/1593465921498144769

To be clear, I think your theory is more directionally accurate than mine. I forgot to add a sarcasm tag to mine.

> extremely right wing agenda

How is he "extremely right wing"? and what does that make the guys with tiki torches and guns? super extremely right wing?

If he was extremely right wing he'd unban that Alex Jones nutjob too but he's already said no to that.[1]

Elon is a crazy dumb moron but I wouldn't call him extremely right wing

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593681389937102851

I'd say he's more opportunistically right wing. Not that I can read his mind, but his actions seem to suggest he would un-ban Trump to increase 'engagement'. He won't un-ban Jones because that guy is stacking up some big losses in court and Elon doesn't want anywhere near a chance at getting pulled in to that. Ideologically Elon is a classic narcissist and will move left to right and all points in between depending on how advantageous it is to him to do so.

Alex Jones is so far off in unexplored territory that I don't think he can be defined in terms of political alignment. I doubt even the tiki torch people want anything to do with him.

He’s weird but he self-describes as a conservative and his major actions have been in line with increasingly mainstream Republican positions (e.g. attacking the credibility of Sandy Hook parents to limit their attempts to get gun control legislation, attacks on LGBTQ people).

If anyone leading that party wanted to distance themselves from him, they could easily do so but they don’t because he’s useful for keeping a certain group of people riled up.

Right wing is a wide set, with anarchist capitalists and stateist capitalists all sitting somewhere on it. He's right wing, just not the most visible type.

I agree that he's right wing, but extreme?

He is okay siding with the Republican party, which is extreme right wing. US politics has a right wing party (the Democrat) and an extreme right wing party (the Republicans). Both of them incorporate a version of (neo)liberalism; they differ mostly on their social policies.

Regardless of his political affiliations, the guy's fortune is built on family wealth from south African emerald mines, and he's a billionaire. It's about as far from the left as you can go, which places him in the extreme right.

I did write a message giving examples but it's pointless you've already made up your mind.

Simple. If you stay on the same position, and the party you're talking to moves far to the left, you automatically become far right without doing anything.

The tiki torch guys, well, they're the original far-right guys, and are still far right because they were already past the threshold since the beginning.

The president of the United States and leader of the right wing party attempted a months-long coordinated multi-level effort to overthrow the election, and he’s still the de facto leader of that party. It is utter nonsense to suggest that party hasn’t gotten more radical.

> If you stay on the same position, and the party you're talking to moves far to the left, you automatically become far right without doing anything.

That’s not how that works in general any more than Hawaii getting hotter means Alaska gets colder, and it’s not an accurate description of what’s happened in the GOP ideological purges since the turn of the century. In the 90s, Republican leaders were vocally against torture, in favor of immigration, supportive of gun control, and when David Duke tried to run for Senate he was condemned and prominent Republicans steered votes to the Democratic candidate rather than risk a white supremacist getting elected. Those fringe right groups showed no signs of believing that the Republican establishment welcomed them, unlike now.

That’s not to say that there weren’t problems but after watching moderate, and especially small-d democratic, voices be purged from the party for being insufficiently right-wing it’s really hard to support the claim that the GOP hasn’t moved much further to the right.

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