THE SET-UP: We may eventually look back at this week’s House melodrama as a moment of significant change. Elon Musk instantly rewrote a compromise budget bill negotiated by the two parties, and it appears he did so without the pre-approval of President Re-elect Donald Trump. In the end, Democrats bailed-out Speaker Johnson by voting en masse for a funding bill stripped of their negotiated budget priorities. That allowed 34 members of the GOP to vote “no” … thus freeing the GOP from the potential fallout of shutting down the government heading into Christmas.
Ironically, the biggest loser might be Trump because didn’t get the debt ceiling space he wanted. Musk, on the other hand, won handily. He tested Congress and came away with a “proof of concept” … and he’s going to use it. - jp
THE STORY: Musk helped kill a congressional spending bill. But much of what he spread was misinformation
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-misinformation-government-shutdown-bill-budget-trump-musk-1235b15b425856bf902d0c8133eec222
KEY EXCERPT: President-elect Donald Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk played a key role this week in killing a bipartisan funding proposal that would have prevented a government shutdown, railing against the plan in a torrent of more than 100 X posts that included multiple false claims.
The X owner, an unelected figure, not only used his outsize influence on the platform to help sway Congress, he did so without regard for the facts and gave a preview of the role he could play in government over the next four years.
THE UPSHOT: We are heading into new territory, folks. Musk can generate on-demand outrage, start culture wars and trigger immediate compliance from the political party that controls all three branches of government. Armed with the ultimate online mob, he can direct them to digitally storm the Capitol within minutes. He can use his mob to threaten non-compliant politicians with a future primary. He can run unlimited, narrative-shaping political advertisements on an ad hoc basis. And it doesn't matter if what he claims is truthful. The truth is irrelevant. Reality is his plaything.
That's real power and that's the power he can use to reshape the Federal government and all future budgets. If he doesn't like a program or a regulation or a budget allocation, he can simply call it out online and let his data-rich outrage machine work like an algorithm to overwhelm opposition. With 208 million followers, he can manufacture consent for nearly anything he wants ... he only needs 5% of them to respond to a tweet or a meme for it to "go viral" and force it into the political system. He's shown that he can essentially rewrite or tank legislation ... and DOGE only needs his tweets and memes to inflict the "pain" he predicted from the enforced, Meili-style austerity he believes we need to transform into a Tech Bro-topia of unfettered surveillance capitalism.
The coming year will determine if his application of the Tech model of “disruption” will install the ultimate surveillance capitalist in-between us and the political system. And we will find out if resistance to this disruption is futile.
We fucked around ... and not just in the 2024 election. We willingly walked into this panopticon. We gave them the keys to our psyches and our subconscious drives and biases. And we accepted the filtered, data-collecting tollbooths they methodically erected in-between us and every aspect of reality.
Now we find out.