***Today, as Elon Musk parroted Russian propaganda — defending convicted felon Douglass Mackey, who was sentenced to 7 months for an election interference text scheme that targeted people of color — I felt it was more urgent than ever that people understand the threat Musk poses to national security. Please share this report with your networks, and please consider becoming a Bette Dangerous member and supporting my work.***
Do you understand now that Elon is Putin’s guy?—Dave Troy, Oct. 12, 2023
On Putin’s birthday, Alexander Dugin tweeted out a sci-fi image of Elon Musk, anointing him as the Chosen One. Dugin, a fascist extremist who has repeatedly called for America’s destruction, is backed by US traitors who parrot his attacks on Western liberalism.
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“In Trump We Trust” Dugin wrote in 2016, and seven years later, you’ll find Duginism openly praised by US extremists, as such American Monsters as Bannon and Flynn deliver his neofascist messaging to their cult members.
Elon Musk, who embraces the delusional mythology of Russian cosmism, which Dugin incorporates in his conspiracy-laden writings, has been passing messages for Putin, according to Fiona Hill. I documented this in my Unmusked investigation from last year, which revealed Musk to be running the Twitter Operation to destroy objective truth and turn the social media platform into a propaganda outlet like the Russian Vkontakte, in part, to sway the outcome of the 2024 US election toward rightwing extremism.
So what makes Musk — a US citizen who has benefitted financially from our Big Government’s largess — so anti-American? Why does he appear to have “this Nazi problem,” as Jim Stewartson says. Why does his purchase of Twitter seem to be a declaration of war against the US? Against truth? Against democratic principles?
As Dr. Michael MacKay — a Ukraine expert who has a PhD in political philosophy from the London School of Economics — noted in my report Requiem for a Frenemy: Musk has profited off government-funded entities.
MacKay said:
“Musk’s project SpaceX with its Starlink communications system would not exist without money spent by the US government,” he said. “The late, great Canadian politician David Lewis would have described Elon Musk as a ‘corporate welfare bum’.He presents himself as an entrepreneur but Musk is dependent on the state like a welfare recipient.”
So we must turn to MICE to look for clues — money, ideology, compromise, ego.
On an episode of RadPod, Russia’s War On Everybody author Keir Giles, noted what unites the most ardent Russian propagandists:
Here is his quote in text form:
“The pattern unfortunately that seems to underlie a lot of the most enthusiastic Russian propagandists is that they have been dealing with severely damaged personalities and personal failure for most of their lives. In fact, the overlap between the number of Russian propagandists who also turn out to be convicted sex offenders is absolutely startling. There are some deep-seated fundamental personality flaws that actually predispose people to being available to be made use of by Russia. And if you look back at the KGB handbooks for recruiting agents of influence, agents of subversion, or indeed propagandists, then you can see very clearly that Russia understood the misfits make the good targets - the people with a grudge, the people who feel they've been treated unfairly by the world because they've been consistent failures, and therefore seek revenge. And the revenge coming through so strongly in some of the verbal attacks that you hear from the trolls, from the so-called independent journalists, the ones pushing the Russian propaganda lines, because the bile and the vitriol and the hatred that they pour out when they're talking about people who criticize Russia, it's extremely personal. And it's plainly tapping deeply into their own personality defects.”-Keir Giles on RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast, January 10, 2023
And here is the report I wrote based on our interview with Keir:
In exactly 84 seconds, author Keir Giles explained to me, Jim, and HiFi on our first episode of the new year exactly who and what we are fighting - the misfits, the sex offenders, the failures, and those seeking revenge on the world. They are agents of Russia, and they are always at war.
So how could the richest man in the world — once respected for his brilliance — be lumped in with revenge-seeking deviants?
Perhaps it’s time for me to bust some myths again, as I did in this report, The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro:
It wasn’t that long ago when Elon Musk was a deified ‘star man’.
The world thought he was really special.
Then he bought Twitter, and starting posting Hitler memes and neo-Nazi references.
Many were shocked. Those who knew him from Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, and the plethora of dewy deifying tech cover stories couldn’t believe it was the same guy.
The origin stories of Twitter and Facebook always seem to leave out its initial funding. As the Guardian reported in 2017:
“Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial stakes in Twitter and Facebook through an investor who later acquired an interest in a Jared Kushner venture, leaked documents reveal.
“The investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.”
If money is coming from a mafia state — one that is consistently and relentlessly targeting the West with information warfare, that should be well-publicized in the terms and conditions that no one reads.
PayPal Mafia
My podcast partner, High Fidelity, often reminds our viewers about a witness statement he found in court documents regarding bruises on Amber Heard. The witness said she saw “a number of marks on Ms. Heard’s body,’’ including bruises on her neck and under her left eye as well as a bandage on her arm, in June or July 2016 — shortly after the witness — a concierge worker — spotted Elon Musk leaving the building where the witness worked and where Heard lived.
He often brought up obscure court documents, long buried or mostly ignored by media, about members of the PayPal Mafia, as he refers to PayPal’s founders, and their alleged deviant behavior. Among them, a former PayPal exec and a founder of the major data-mining company Palantir Technologies — Joseph Lonsdale, who was accused by a woman who was mentored by him at Stanford of violent sexual assaults. He countersued, and later, they both dropped all charges. The woman received an undisclosed settlement from Stanford.
As HiFi tells it, Lonsdale was business partners with deceased Russian oligarch Sergey Grishin and Israeli fintech entrepreneur Dovi Frances. Grishin, known as the Scarface Oligarch, was accused of holding a gun to his estranged wife’s head and knocking out her teeth during a campaign of intimidation, according to court documents.
In multiple reports, his then wife Anna Fedoseeva, said: “He put me through hell, with domestic violence, assaults and threats to me and all my loved ones. I am still fear for my life. I do not think it wise for anyone to surround themselves with Sergey Grishin.”
Grishin died after a month-long brain illness in March of this year, but it’s worth noting both Grishin and Lonsdale used the internet to try to discredit their accusers. Grishin hosted a website dedicated to trashing his wife’s character, and Lonsdale posted out-of-context emails online to cast shade on his accuser, according to court records.
The weaponizing of the internet also occurred during the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial, where I noted that the same group of internet terrorists who stalk Jim Stewartson and his colleagues, including me, on Twitter all day, took a break from their daily attempts to discredit Jim’s work and character during the Amber Heard trial. Their virtual fangs were dedicated to assassinating the character of Amber Heard, as if the cruel cabal was under a new contract. As always, I ask a simple question: who is the ultimate beneficiary of targeted harassment campaigns?
And of course, you know about the horse.
A SpaceX flight attendant alleged that Elon Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, court documents revealed. The company then paid a reported $250,000 for her silence. But Musk did offer to buy her a horse.
According to court records from 2018, the flight attendant for SpaceX said Musk asked her to "do more" during a massage. She said Musk exposed his penis to her and offered to buy her a horse. She reported the encounter to SpaceX, and received a $250,000 severance agreement.
The attendant worked as a member of the cabin crew on a contract basis for SpaceX's corporate jet fleet. She accused Musk of exposing his erect penis to her, rubbing her leg without consent, and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage, according to interviews and documents obtained by Insider.
The incident, which took place in 2016, is alleged in a declaration signed by a friend of the attendant and prepared in support of her claim. The details in this story are drawn from the declaration as well as other documents, including email correspondence and other records shared with Insider by the friend.
In the report, Musk responded: "If I were inclined to engage in sexual harassment, this is unlikely to be the first time in my entire 30-year career that it comes to light.”
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is suing Elon Musk over his refusal to testify in an investigation into Musk’s purchase of Twitter stock in 2022.
According to the SEC’s complaint, Musk was supposed to appear to testify on September 15th after he received a subpoena. But “two days before his scheduled testimony, Musk abruptly notified the SEC staff that he would not appear”, according to the SEC complaint.
I’m sure it surprised many who believed in the myth of the Great Entrepreneur when he tweets Nazi memes — including a meme of Hitler directed at the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I’m sure the 4chan memes he tweeted initially shocked sensibilities of those who were bamboozled by the continuous attempts to reputation wash him — even today — in tech periodicals and major newspapers, who refer to his “mismanagement” of Twitter.
(As if.)
That he re-platformed Insurrectionists and Nazis and Nazi Insurrectionists shocked absolutely no one I work with. We have known that Elon Musk is a national security risk — a “fucking problem” as HiFi says — for years.
‘Ayn Rand in Drag’
“Elon Musk thinks he’s Plato, but he’s just Ayn Rand in drag.”—Wes Clark, Jr.
As environmental activist Wes Clark Jr. tweeted:
You're scrolling down a propaganda site owned by the richest man on the planet. The traumatic videos and images pushed by the site are meant to breed extremism and push targeted populations toward authoritarian goals. Protect your eyeballs, there are some things you can't unsee.—Wes Clark Jr., Oct. 10, 2023
To his point, the EU just gave Musk a 24-hour ultimatum to deal with Israel-Hamas disinformation and violent video on X, with EU Digital Rights Chief Thierry Breton warned was a breach of EU law.
So now we ask, who is Elon Musk, really?
The South African born “corporate welfare bum” has extraordinary influence on the minds of millions of people.
High Fidelity said when Musk bought Twitter, it was a $44 billion psyop cannon to our minds, and he wasn’t wrong.
On RadPod, we called his Saudi-backed purchase a land grab in an information war, and that has proven to be prescient.
As investigative reporter Dave Troy, who reports on threats to democracy, wrote:
If anyone wants to get a better idea of how Elon became a Putin shill, I suggest going back to this moment and mapping networks going both backwards and forwards. I believe the key to the story is revealed here, in 2004, with Putin’s favorite Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher.—Dave Troy, 10/23/2022
Da.
So let’s delve deeper into the Twitter Operation. Musk once promised to make it “the most accurate source of information about the world” but instead, he turned it into a dumpster fire filled with Nazis, conspiracy theorists, and he himself denied the white supremacist background of a mass shooter, while spreading Covid disinformation — a Russian op — and parroting lies about Ukraine and thwarting Ukraine reporting.
He is also user friendly to foreign enemy states around their election time, as I documented in my Frenemy report.
“I’ve tended to characterize late-stage Twitter as staying too late at a party; when the smart, fun people have left, and those remaining are drunk, showing their dark side, and plotting dark, destructive late-night plans. And some, inexplicably, are wearing arm-bands.”
Those who point out threats to democracy by this self-declared “free speech absolutist” can be hunted — as I was on Twitter, when I was “permanently banned” from Twitter for suggesting we launch him into space.
Musk is also using lawfare, further evidence that we are likely in fascism’s legal phase, as Jason Stanley cautions.
In between tweeting and deleting Nazi accounts, Musk found time to sue the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an important organization born out of the UK murder of labour politician Jo Cox, who was hunted — shot and stabbed multiple times — by a white supremacist who possessed Nazi paraphernalia , and whose internet history revealed an obsession with far-right, anti-immigrant, violent extremism.
When Musk’s not promoting Russian propagandist Tucker Carlson, who has his own show on Twitter which also airs in Russia, he’s being championed by Russian state TV, even garnering his own special report by Russian spy Maria Butina.
“By now it should be obvious to the entire world that Russia’s ham-handed attempts to foment chaos and coups in liberal democracies across the globe are derived specifically from the network of corrupt businessmen and politicians, and transnational organized criminals — the Iron Triangle that Robert Mueller warned about over a decade ago,” said my podcast partner Joshua C Fidel, aka High Fidelity.
Mueller did indeed warn us.
Monsters are bleeding our empathy.
Myths of these so-called Great Men crumble under even the slightest scrutiny.
Great Men do exist, as Dr. MacKay noted in my report on The Myth of the Genius Tech Bro:
MacKay points out the hubris of those who pose as geniuses but have invented nothing, instead simply profit from and exploit the vision of others: “Real geniuses, not the tech bros, gave their ideas to the world to hopefully make it a better place”, he told Byline Supplement. “Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a genius who humbly acknowledges that none of his work would have been possible were it not for the great work of his colleagues and predecessors. I think the world would be a better place if we celebrated real inventors and creators like him.”
He reminds us that the internet “has the promise of being an online, global community in which all people participate freely, openly and without barriers like wealth. It should be like being able to speak a language and talk to other people – as simple as that.”
“The way we get to a better place with our technology,” Dr MacKay believes, “is to recognize how we got here. Let's celebrate the real geniuses who freely gave us the enormous benefit of their talents. Let's put the tech bros in their proper place and recognize they are merely commodities brokers who package and sell other people's ideas."
When we will stop “sorting the sociopaths to the top”, as Jim Stewartson says.
In my summary of The Myth of the Genius Tech Bro, I wrote:
We must combat this hateful darkness in a sweeping new deal that ensures the cult of the tech bro genius no longer has the power to sabotage our world — it’s well past time for a tech troll reckoning.
The why of it no longer matters to me, it’s what we do tomorrow.
⚖️ 🇺🇸
****
To read all the previous American Monster reports, please go here:
***The American Monster series and accompanying podcasts are for paid members. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.*** And then there were nine… Below is a compilation of the first nine American Monsters, and it’s truly an American horror story.
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