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You are here: Home / Elections 2024 / Late Night Open Thread: Completely #Musked

Late Night Open Thread: Completely #Musked

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You ask me, Musk wasn’t happy about his old running buddy Peter Thiel being lauded by Respectable Media as ‘the dark genius‘ behind TFG’s undercard, when Elon has given — or at least promised — so many more millions to the Big Guy himself, to much less notice. But showing up at a quasi-religious rally to imitate a vision of being The Coolest Dude in the Room just led to an iconic-in-its-own-way photo of a lumpy manbaby apparently popping an umbilical hernia under his ill-fitting garanimals…

Dave Roth, at Defector — “Check Out These Cool Moves!”:

… Maybe the issue is that Trump is no longer much of a showman. He doesn’t really make jokes anymore and long ago stopped talking about anything but himself or whatever bit of pogrom-incitement is currently running on the channels he watches; it might be that the little Trumps who line up and stand around to watch the big one just get bored once they realize that they’re no longer a part of any story he’s likely to tell. Trump has a performer’s instinct for when something is not working, but he can also only ever do more of the one or two things he knows how to do. If the show is going to get any better, in short, it is not going to be because of anything he does, and so it might help to bring in some charismatic guest stars. A performer who can say all the vile shit that Trump says—there is no reason to mess with what works, there—but maybe in a more unsettling way, and if possible in an unplaceable accent and with the sort of pacing that suggests someone who is about to be hospitalized with a case of the hiccups. But where would the campaign find such a performer?

There is something kind of funny about Elon Musk and his fellow members of Silicon Valley’s defective alpha cohort investing heavily in Trump at what now seems like his absolute peak, although it won’t really be easy to laugh about it for some time. But there is something extremely funny about the idea of Musk, who is undeniably very rich and famous but also a world-historically wack and charmless individual, hyping up a crowd of foot-sore and increasingly bored small-business fascists standing around in a field. It is a testament to the awful movement that Trump has built that it can enfold both the least-trusted car dealers in every American county and 53-year-old tech reactionaries who use the word “based” as an adjective, but it does not really seem like a good idea to have them hang out…

…[I]f your guest is a really rich and powerful person, you’d want to make it so that your guest’s mastery and your own seemed to mirror each other. Not in an aspirational way—the crowd is not supposed to think that they could become either of you—but in a way that creates a sort of surface in which the audience might see themselves reflected. The idea would be to give the sense that these powerful men, while they may be hard and even cruel, will take care of everything for you—kill your neighbors, cut your taxes, whatever you’re into—in exchange for your loyalty. The impression created from seeing other powerful people onstage with you should be one of unified command—a blank edifice of power behind which the crowd could safely gather, provided they are willing to pay the price of admission…

But failing that you’d at least hope that your extremely rich and powerful guest wouldn’t jump around behind you with his tummy hanging out while you’re talking. Ideally you’d want your rich and powerful guest not to act like a weird child, because it would tend to undermine the sense you were trying to convey of how powerful you both are, and how much fun the audience might have serving and serving and serving such impressive people for the rest of their seething, scrambling little lives. But the show has got to go on either way.

Click through for a master class in image placement.

Very depressing stuff man

[image or embed]

— Ed Zitron (@zitron.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 10:15 PM

Reader Interactions

78Comments

  3. 3.

    piratedan

    gotta say that this new band “They Might Be Fascists” sounds pretty fucking derivative…

    I look at the playlist track and see…

    Internet Man
    Put a Little Shithouse In Your Soul
    Johannesburg, not Houston
    They’ll Need A Cane
    She was a Hotel Defective
    My ass is a mass of incandescent gas
    Dink Car
    Laura Ng
    Me and my Fascist Friend
    Till My Balls Fall Off

  4. 4.

    NotMax

    New to me, from a member* of the Dolt 45 administration.

    He wanted to remove the U.S. Navy from Hawaii because the state did not vote for him.

    Too lazy to find an adequate link but oughtn’t be terribly hard to find.

    *One of the many publicly stating they are voting for Harris.

  5. 5.

    like a metaphor

    wait- Elon was the Beav in Leave It to Beaver?

    He oughta lay off Eddie Haskel’s ADHD meds. On account of it makes him look stupid

  9. 9.

    Chet Murthy

    is that Race Bannon tweet with the guy on the witness stand Kyle whats-his-name the Kenosha murderer?  Or has the vid been doctored with a bit of Leon’s face?  B/c it looks too …. old a face to be Kyle whats-his-name.  Just curious.

  11. 11.

    Anne Laurie

    @Chet Murthy: The original weeper was indeed Kyle Rittenhouse, now doing business as a right-wing performer.  I admired the technical skill required to transpose Elmo’s visage into the news clip!

  14. 14.

    Shalimar

    Poor Elon.  Always the beta no matter how much money he has to buy fawning employees with.

  15. 15.

    Chet Murthy

    @Shalimar: the man has the money to buy the best doctors, psychologists, nutritionists, cooks, personal trainers, Valets, Everything he could possibly need to make himself over.  And then of course Also Someone to supervise his philanthropic contributions So as to maximize His cachet to All the best salons In New York Los Angeles and Chicago, not to speak of London and Paris.  The man has the money to do all of that WithThe change he digs out of his couches.

    The shocking thing is he hasn’t done it.  Hell, Jeff Bezos knows to do it.

  19. 19.

    KithKanan

    @Chet Murthy: If you have that kind of money/power and you’re that defective, the people who care about your money/power are going to tell you a lot more of what you want to hear than anyone who might genuinely care about you. You would have to be a much better human being than either of them to resist that kind of temptation.

  24. 24.

    ColoradoGuy

    Man, those designer drugs must be really something. Kind of like an anti-psychedelic; instead of visions of enlightenment, they turn you into a demented demon, a real-life Gollum.

    Quite a sight to see the two of the most malignant narcissists in the world on stage together.

  27. 27.

    Dave

    @Chet Murthy: Hell Zuckerberg does it infinitely better than Musk.

    Bezos and Zuckerberg suck but man at least they seem to enjoy their massive wealth and either know how to self regulate or at least pay people to self regulate for them.

    Then there is Musk.

  29. 29.

    TBone

    Did anyone see Sally Field on with Rachel Maddow last night?  She told the story of her illegal abortion when she was 17 y.o., during which she was sexually assaulted again. It was bone chilling, and we’ve all been shoved right back down into the circumstances that lead to illegal, back alley abortions.

    Talk about courage!  Women On Fire Dept.

    Couldn’t easily find the clip, but found the story with another video:

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2024/10/07/sally-field-abortion-story-kamala-harris/75557130007/

    I don’t know why they used scare quotes around the word horrific.  🤦‍♀️

  31. 31.

    Rusty

    I think for those guys “based” is the opposite of woke.  So racist, sexist,  homophonic, self centered,  unempathetic, and so on.  Basically an asshole.  Elon and Trump are definitely based.

  33. 33.

    TBone

    HCR went full Antifa yesterday not a moment too soon.

    Sidney Blumenthal has a fascinating piece in the Guardian today about Trump’s belief in eugenics and his affinity for Naziism. He traces Trump family lineage back to Germany and even reveals some literal Nazi ties. He also explores Trump’s long held beliefs in his “good German blood” and his evocation of Hitleriam rhetoric. It’s all very interesting. I thought this was especially sharp on Trump’s beliefs in the Great Replacement Theory:
    Trump’s footsie with Nazis mingles narcissism with Nazism. But it is his belief in the far-right “replacement theory”, which is the central idea of his campaign, that provides the greatest illumination on what are more than overlapping coincidences. The historical lineage of poisonous ideas, rather than “poison in the blood”, explains Trump’s doctrine of a master race, whether Trump is aware or not of the origins of his venom.

    https://digbysblog.net/2024/10/07/yes-he-is-a-eugenicist/

    A reminder that fElon is not there with him by any accident.  Birds of Nazi feathers flock together.

  35. 35.

    SFAW

    Re: “DorkMAGA”: is that a play on “Dark MAGA”? Or on something else?

    As a certified old, I am not necessarily aware of all Intertubez traditions, thought I had better ask.

  38. 38.

    TBone

    I saw Sally Field introducing a movie with Ben Mankiewicz (The Times of Harvey Milk) last Friday night, and said that she’d left no doubt about how she’d be voting this year.  I wondered if she’d officially endorsed the Dem ticket elsewhere first.  I think the TCM spot was her harbinger.  But I don’t know because she didn’t specifically say on TCM, just left no room for doubt.

    She will always be my Norma Rae.

  40. 40.

    TBone

    @NotMax: I have other German descriptors but it’s too early for me to go there!  Flake is too mild and forgiving for me.  In certain matters, I cannot forgive and will never forget.

    I know that was an attempt to lighten my mood and believe me, I’m working on returning to my usual sunny, delicate flower, self 😆

  41. 41.

    TBone

    @NotMax: I was a little girl and grew up watching the nun (and That Girl and MTM et al.) but it was Norma Rae who really stole my heart!

  44. 44.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chet Murthy: “Based” is one of those words that I hear kids across the political spectrum use as a compliment and it raises my hackles because I first heard it used by baby fascists. But they apparently appropriated it too, so.

  45. 45.

    TBone

    @Matt McIrvin: it always makes me think they’re freebasing.  I want to yell “Put that crack pipe down!”

    *Insert meme of dirty crack pipe with Fox logo here.

  47. 47.

    Ken

    @ColoradoGuy: Quite a sight to see the two of the most malignant narcissists in the world on stage together.

    It’s hard to be sure because he always looks that way, but Trump seems irritated in the jumping-box Elmo picture. I would be too if I were the star giving my big monologue, and some extra in the background was trying to draw attention to themselves.

  52. 52.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
     

    Lord knows I’m hardly an expert on the drug culture of any era, but IIRC there was something called ‘freebasing’ that one did with cocaine. I don’t know if that was where ‘based’ originally sprung from, but if so, no irony needed.

  53. 53.

    TBone

    @Matt McIrvin: That’s funny in a really horrible way.  They’ve obviously not yet lost any loved ones/friends in that manner and it shows.

    Someone here recently explained the word “jobber” in terms of wrestling and I then injected the term jabroni.  But I thought “based” was somehow connected to “pilled” from The Matrix.

  54. 54.

    TBone

    @lowtechcyclist: freebasing popularity came right before crack – they’re literally the same thing, but freebasing is when you manufacture your own crack.

    Might be how Richard Pryor had his incident.

  56. 56.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @TBone: that’s a really beautiful evocative sentence.. return to your usual, sunny delicate flower self. Charming.
    imho, It’s actually a one sentence poem. Remember william Carlos williams, and his tiny poems, only a few lines long?

    about free basing? That’s what I thought of too. One hears of these things; I have no experience.
    They may say they are “base,” as in anti woke, but they are swaggering around without any real foundation, and I want to say they are baseless. Several meanings, including no basis in reality. I’m playing with words and layers of meaning, but really after another sleepless night, looking for an interesting way to be insulting without any tired old swear words.

  59. 59.

    lowtechcyclist

    @NotMax:

    ::cough:: Richard Pryor ::cough::

    All I coulda told you, at the remove of nearly half a century, is that Pryor was doing *something* drug-related when he accidentally set himself on fire.

  62. 62.

    Geminid

    @Ken: That picture with the insets of Trump’s and Musk’s faces was widely circulated. I saw it late that night on Turkiye-based Clash Report. They posted it amid a steam of breaking Mideast and Ukraine stories which is their usual beat.

    Musk is a somewhat of celebrity in Turkiye and the larger region, and I suspect that was the reason for posting the picture. I was glad to see it because the scene and the closeups were discreditable.

  63. 63.

    hueyplong

    @NotMax: Maybe it would drive Trump to that final apoplexy if people started referring to Kamala Harris as The Beta Blocker.

  65. 65.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @TBone: thank you.
    I enjoyed the Judy tenets clip too; I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before. Hilarious! Great jokes.

  66. 66.

    hueyplong

    @TBone: Yes, but for now I am thinking of getting rid of wannabe Hitler before dealing with wannabe Kex Luthor.

    Someone is (maybe appropriately) about to say porque no los dos

  71. 71.

    MinuteMan

    The proper adjective for the MuskRat isn’t “dark” but rather “dim” (e.g., “dim Maga”).

  72. 72.

    Kosh III

    Musk is clearly one of those “bad blood” immigrants and should be shipped back to South Africa.

  73. 73.

    A Man for All Seasonings (formerly Geeno)

    @lowtechcyclist: In his next show – some time after the event – he said. “I learned something that day. When you’re running down the street on fire, people get out of your way.”

  76. 76.

    Matt McIrvin

    @TBone: I think it started out used by the fans of some rapper who used it to mean something like “endearingly crazy”, then it sort of got a generally positive vibe and the alt-rightists started using it to mean “politically sympathetic”, and it went from there. And now leftist GenZers use it as a compliment for progressives. Whatever.

  77. 77.

    wjca

    @TBone: I’m working on returning to my usual sunny, delicate flower, self.

    I’m put in mind of a couple of ladies on my acquaintance (way back in the 70s):

    “We’re frail, fragile, flowers of femininity.  And if you don’t believe us, we’ll hit you!”

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