Elon and the Deplorables

Elon Musk has jumped into the middle of the culture war with both feet you could say.  He’s spent fifty-five billion dollars buying a company that the Left thinks must belong to them and that has ticked off the powers that be.  He’s refused to disenfranchise the various deniers; COVID, climate, election, you name it.  He’s even pardoned Donald Trump.  And now he’s unbanned everyone who hasn’t broken the law getting kicked off.  He’s a heretic and must be punished!

Essentially, he’s embraced the deplorables.  Why?  I have a theory.

I think Elon Musk sees an opportunity.  The cultural divide in the United States is a powerful force.  And power, if harnessed correctly is one of the most valuable commodities there is.  The endless conflict between the Left and Right on Twitter is far from a useful activity.  Nevertheless, it is an energetic process.  It doesn’t produce much light but it does produce heat.  And heat is a kind of energy.  And it attracts attention and in some ways that was the main product that Twitter sold during the Trump presidency.  Even with the biased treatment of the two political sides there was an active interest in the antics on Twitter.

And yet Twitter never made any money.  And as the field of battle on Twitter became more and more tilted against the Right it lost more and more money.  I think Elon realized that Twitter was run by very stupid people that had no clue how to harness the tool they’d been given by the government.  After all, the big tech companies exist because the intelligence agencies subsidize their operation in order to use their data feeds as surveillance resources.

I think he realized that if someone smart were running things a profit could be extracted from the operation.  And I’m only guessing, but I suspect he would like to use the outsider status of the deplorables as a marketing mechanism.  Here is an enormous pool of people who have been demonized, mocked and whose purchase preferences have been the target of a campaign of eradication.  Think about it.  Hollywood, television and the major corporations have outlawed anything that doesn’t wholeheartedly embrace and display the woke message.  Old movies and shows have to be remade just to insert abnormal sexual lifestyles and minority characters.  In fact, Hollywood has an actual quota system for actors and production crew.  Straight white men need not apply.

Suppose Elon has decided that this large unappreciated market that is just sitting, waiting for someone to embrace it could make him a lot of money.  Wouldn’t he be the obvious person to take advantage?  And the beauty of it is he doesn’t even have to lose the other part of the market.  He doesn’t have to reject the woke.  All he needs to do is provide an option for each side.

Door Number One could be the present woke system.  It would have all the rainbow and BLM flags flying in the breeze.  There would be trans this, trans that and trans the other thing as far as the eye could see.  Basically, he just links to Disney and Amazon.  But to take advantage of the other half of the world it would require Door Number Two.

It could be a tiny button with a huge warning label that cautioned the general public that down this path are forbidden things.  Books and movies where the cowboys are the good guys and Thomas Jefferson isn’t a monster.  There would be historical dramas about Rome and Greece, Tudor England and the Age of Exploration, where all the actors were (gasp!) white.  It would have an explicit bias toward normalcy and it would be unabashedly proud of the western tradition.  Even Christopher Columbus would still have a place of honor.  Every boy meets girl plot line would feature a real boy and a real girl.  Oh, the horror.  Someone alert GLAAD.

So, Elon Musk is positioned to take advantage of almost half the population looking for someone to sponsor them and sell them things that somehow are now forbidden.  He could be the Jeff Bezos of the Right. His Lord of the Rings series wouldn’t have to have trans-hobbits and boss-girl Galadriel.  He could just follow the books.  His payment system could be PayPal or it could be his own.  And it could be a bank and a crowd funding platform too.  As he’s said he could have his own cell-phone company too.  None of this stuff is rocket science and he is a rocket scientist!  All these things could be packaged to people who currently feel left out by the woke business world.  All he has to do is take our money and get richer.

So, think about it Elon.  Currently you’re losing a billion dollars a year catering to woke snowflakes who spend all their time complaining about their feelings and are too cheap to pay eight dollars a month to be certified on your website that they spend all their time on.  Or you can sell things to people who like to pay cash, believe two plus two equals four, can tell the difference between a man and a woman and only ask for the minimum of respect.  It’s a pretty easy choice.