Republicans Hate Tech’s Influence on Politics. Unless It Comes From Elon Musk.
"Elon Musk has not been at all subtle in his efforts to help Donald Trump win the presidency. Musk hasn’t just endorsed him or donated tens of millions of dollars to pro-Trump PACs or appeared at Trump rallies to jump up and down with joy. Musk is also using the full power of his ownership of X to to portray Kamala Harris as an existential threat to America while spreading many falsehoods.
The Republicans’ silence about Musk’s blatant politicking via his social media platform demonstrates their party’s deep hypocrisy when it comes to Big Tech’s power over politics.
A rule to push Musk’s posts to more people was apparently hard-coded into the platform’s software after Musk got upset that President Biden’s posts about the Super Bowl received more views than his. Musk reportedly threatened to fire his own engineers unless they made sure his posts were super amplified. Sure enough, Musk’s posts now get tens of millions of views.
Musk has posted on X, for example, that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election” (103 million views). He has described Kamala Harris as “just a puppet” (20 million views) or “the Kamala puppet” (28 million views). He also regularly claims what he describes as the “the Kamala Dem machine” or “the Dems” are out to ensure a “permanent one-party rule in America” (33 million views).
Musk also routinely makes false claims about mass electoral fraud committed to help Democrats. For example Musk posted that Arizona is “refusing to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls” and shared a post claiming that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants had registered to vote there — both of which prompted a correction attempt from the county recorder based in Phoenix, who is a Republican.
But Musk goes on, undeterred.
It’s not hard to imagine what many Republicans would be saying if a Silicon Valley C.E.O. had come out as hard for Kamala Harris as Musk has for Trump. Years ago, Republican legislators raised concerns that tech companies were secretly putting their thumbs on the algorithmic scales in favor of the Democrats. In response, Republican lawmakers held hearings in which they claimed that tech platforms were biased against conservatives, which they suggested was antithetical to free speech.
Where are they now?
If Republican legislators were actually serious about Big Tech’s influence on politics, they’d be dragging Musk to Congress to hold him accountable for shameless partisan favoritism. Instead, they’re reaping the spoils of Musk’s influence while saying nothing.
Who says Kamala Harris’s unconventional media tour won’t reveal anything of note? On Tuesday, she did an hourlong sit-down with Howard Stern, the satellite radio host, and among the juicy bits we learned is that the V.P. isn’t a napper; that she digs Doritos and jigsaw puzzles; that her favorite F1 driver is Lewis Hamilton; that she went to see U2 at the Sphere; and that a rare area of musical agreement between her and Doug, her husband, is their love of Prince.
Yes, folks hoping to find serious policy talk on the Stern show were out of luck. But honestly, any voters still undecided at this late date are unlikely to be making their decision based on the nitty-gritty of the candidates’ tax plans.
The goal of these chats is to help voters feel as if they know Harris, so the personal tidbits serve a purpose. And in terms of reaching a range of listeners, I’m guessing Stern’s audience doesn’t overlap excessively with fans of Oprah and “The View.” (I mean, when I tuned into the show a little early, it was just in time to hear Stern make an obscene crack about an octopus.)
Also, who could resist the opportunity to outsource some Trump bashing to a professional trash-talker like Stern, who famously disdains the MAGA king?
Stern got the political talk rolling by noting that he doesn’t even like to watch “Saturday Night Live” make fun of Harris because there’s just too much at stake this election. From there, the softballs he lobbed fell into a couple of big categories:
Talking up her biography, especially her early work as a prosecutor. “Were you a wreck?” he asked about her first cases. “What was that like?” He had her talk about how her decision to become a prosecutor stemmed partly from having had a high school friend who was sexually abused by her stepfather. And he invited her to revisit some of the more brutal cases she dealt with. “To me you’re the law-and-order candidate,” he said, “and yet they try to paint you as a leftist who wants people running through the streets committing crimes.”
Marveling at how horrible Donald Trump is, in so many different ways: Did you ever think you would see a Republican not embracing NATO? What about the revelation in Bob Woodward’s new book that Trump was secretly sending Covid test kits to Vladimir Putin when they were in short supply at the height of the pandemic?
The Stern stop wasn’t the stretch some people might think. For all his shock-jock nastiness, Stern has become a regular political stop, hosting heavy hitters including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
I’ve talked to campaign people about this media strategy, and they make the point that Harris needs to reach people where they are. Fair enough.
In general, Stern was a little too openly butt-smoochy for my taste, but I like a little more spice in my political interviews. So my vote for Harris’s next stop? “Hot Ones.”
In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump by three points. She’s made strategic appearances on the podcasts “Call Her Daddy” and “All the Smoke.” Her new direct-to-camera ad is strong.
But she hasn’t made her closing argument yet. And the best way for her to do that is in another debate. To persuade Donald Trump to join her, she should offer to hold that debate on Fox News.
Yes, time is running out, but the final 2020 debate was on Oct. 22 of that year. Yes, Trump would have to agree to do it — and based on his recent approach he probably wouldn’t — but Harris already knows that there’s no way he’ll accept her challenge to debate on CNN on Oct. 23. There’s only one network where Harris would have another opportunity to speak to 67 million people at once, so why not?
The argument against is basically that Fox would be hostile territory, but the upside could outweigh the downside and the degree of difficulty might not be much higher than a debate on another network.
By any objective measure, Harris beat Trump in their Sept. 10 debate. If there were another debate he’d almost certainly be better prepared, but Harris was effective in answering questions the way she wants to and not the way a moderator might expect. You can pretty much guess in advance what topics the candidates would be asked about: the Middle East, immigration, transgender rights, reproductive rights, grocery prices, tariffs.
Would Fox News moderators fact-check Harris more than she was fact-checked in the first debate? Probably. But if the fact-checking were anywhere close to being evenly applied, it would be a net benefit for her. And if her campaign thinks that CNN’s moderators would go a lot easier than Fox News’s, it’s hard to see why. In the June debate, President Biden was asked, among other things, “why should voters trust you” to solve the border crisis? And “what do you say to Black voters who are disappointed that you haven’t made more progress” addressing the racial health and wealth gaps? Whether you think the framing of those questions is useful or fair, the framing of the questions in a Fox News debate would be similar.
And Harris doesn’t need to throw Trump to the proverbial mat. Another solid debate would bolster the impression that she — running in her first, truncated general election — can go toe-to-toe with a former president running in his third election. Plus, there’s a narrow slice of voters who would probably give her credit for going on an unfriendly network.
Harris might prevail in November without another debate, and she might lose if there is one. But if it makes sense to debate on another network, it also makes sense to go on Fox News.
There’s an old joke about papal pronouncements on premarital sex: If you don’t play the game, you don’t make the rules. Something similar might be said about France’s foreign policy.
Last week, President Emmanuel Macron told a radio show that “countries should stop shipping weapons to Israel for use in Gaza.” Though he insists he’s committed to ensuring Israel’s security, what he’s really asking for is an arms embargo: You can’t deny Israel weapons for potential use in one conflict while not also denying it those weapons for use in the others.
There was a time when such a call would have mattered. In the Jewish state’s early years, France supplied it with some of its most significant weaponry, including advanced jets and, according to many accounts, vital support for its nascent nuclear weapons program.
That changed on the eve of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when President Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on the Middle East that mainly hit Israel. He also accused “the Jews” of being “at all times, an elite people, sure of itself and dominating.”
Since then, France’s contribution to Israel’s security has essentially been zero. France reportedly still sells Israel about $20 million worth of components of weapons systems, an insignificant fraction of the country’s overall military procurement budget. But the French government did supply the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with a nuclear reactor, which the Israeli Air Force destroyed in 1981. France has also been notably remiss in trying to enforce the terms of the U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, which was supposed to disarm Hezbollah and keep it away from Lebanon’s border with Israel.
One result of that nonfeasance is the war now raging in Lebanon. Another is that pronouncements on the Middle East conflict by the president of France just don’t matter, other than as feckless virtue-signaling toward segments of the French public and the Francophone world. As for Paris’s once-considerable influence on public opinion in Israel, consider that Macron’s comments came days after Iran tried to hit it with a barrage of nearly 200 ballistic missiles and on the eve of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 pogrom.
Whatever else one thinks about Israel, it remains an example of how a small country can make a big difference in world affairs, not least by confronting the threat Iran poses to the entire free world. Under Macron, France has become the opposite: a big country that makes no difference.
Over the past week, many Americans have turned their gazes toward North Carolina to behold gutting scenes of the damage and despair wrought by Hurricane Helene. They should keep looking, but for an additional reason: My state is a cautionary tale of what happens when no corner of our lives is cordoned off from partisan exploitation and we lose our tether to the truth.
I’ve seen politicking off human tragedy before, but seldom on this scale or with this stench. Donald Trump and many of his MAGA minions have used the historic flooding to drown their followers in self-serving lies:
About a profoundly incompetent and wholly uncaring federal government that used up all its disaster-relief money on migrants who entered the country illegally. About emergency vehicles left idling and emergency supplies blocked by Democratic politicians who don’t want to help Republican voters. About unidentified bureaucrats who somehow control the weather and wield it as a weapon.
That last fantasy? Its purveyors include a Republican member of Congress, one Marjorie Taylor Greene. But it’s not just the likes of Trump and Greene peddling such paranoia. As the fake claims and faked pictures spreading across social media make clear, many thousands if not millions of Americans have chosen fiction over fact — because it serves their political goals, profits them financially or validates their tribal fury.
They seem not to realize or care that they’re complicating honest-to-goodness efforts to assist actual victims, as government officials’ duties expand from assisting people devastated by the storm to battling opportunists whose accusations invite distrust and meddling.
The website of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a section devoted to “Hurricane Helene: Rumor Response,” and “Hurricane Helene: Fact vs. Rumor” is the title of a similar page on the North Carolina Department of Public Safety’s site.
Those agencies are run by Democrats, but a North Carolina Republican, State Senator Kevin Corbin, beseeched his Facebook followers to “help STOP this conspiracy theory junk” about government inaction. He assured them that both federal and state officials were on the scene and on the job. “PLEASE help stop this junk,” he repeated. He seemed desperate.
Aptly so. The need in North Carolina is real. Gaudy falsehoods aren’t going to meet it. And none of our problems will be solved if we forgive or reward merchants of grievance for whom nothing — not even suffering like my state’s — is off-limits.
Every Monday morning on The Point, we start the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
With four weeks until Election Day, a vivid contrast in the presidential race is how Kamala Harris is trying to grow her vote while Donald Trump is trying to shrink his. Well, if not purposely shrinking it, Trump is going narrow by saying the same kinds of things at the same sorts of rallies with the same types of voters (i.e., his MAGA base), while ceding broader audiences to Harris on “The Howard Stern Show,” “The View,” Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, the podcast “Call Her Daddy” and “60 Minutes.”
Harris is appearing on all five this week, and these shows have reach: “Call Her Daddy” is one of the most popular podcasts on Spotify, drawing millions of listeners — many of them young women who don’t live and breathe politics.
In the podcast episode released Sunday, Harris was relaxed and engaging, introducing herself as a former prosecutor who fought for women, girls and others who faced injustice, and as a champion of abortion rights. She was by turns tough — calling Trump a liar several times and urging the audience to never accept “no” — and reflective about the challenge ahead. “I’m feeling great, and I’m feeling nervous,” she said about the presidential race. I’ve rarely heard a candidate admit to feeling nervous; it was refreshing.
Harris is mixing these appearances with campaign events later in the week in Arizona and Nevada, two swing states that some Democrats see as less fertile than the other five, including Pennsylvania and North Carolina. But I still think Harris is wise to play out west: Union members, younger voters, Latinas and other women and registered Democrats are helping make the race a dead heat in Nevada and tight in Arizona, according to polls, and abortion rights measures and competitive Senate races are on the ballot in both states in November.
Trump is zeroing in on Pennsylvania: He returned this past weekend to Butler, where the July assassination attempt occurred, and he is scheduled to campaign on Thursday in Scranton, President Biden’s birthplace, and Reading. (Trump lost the Scranton area in 2020 but won Berks County, which includes Reading.) I see Pennsylvania as a must-win state for Harris, but the polls there are tight, and the Trump campaign is surely seeing something in its internals to devote this much time there.
To win, Trump is betting that energizing and turning out his base in the swing states is more important than growing his vote. His base isn’t the “60 Minutes” crowd, but some of them listen to Stern and “The View” — as do some of the undecided and late-breaking voters who are just getting around to sizing up Harris and giving Trump another look. Is Trump trying to blow it? All I can tell you is that Trump said at a Wisconsin rally Sunday that he wants to win a “mandate” from voters in November. A “mandate” usually implies a landslide victory, and I don’t see that happening with just his MAGA base."
