This week, Elton John publicly renounced the Rocket Man — no, not the 1972 song, but Elon Musk, whom he called an “a**hole” in an awards ceremony.
Sir Elton, 77, is only the latest among celebrities and pundits to denounce Musk for his support of former president Donald Trump and his opposition to censorship. Musk-mania is so overwhelming that some are calling for his arrest, deportation and debarment from federal contracts.
This week, the California Coastal Commission rejected a request from the Air Force for additional launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base. It is not because the military agency did not need the launches. It was not because the nation and the community would not benefit from them. Rather, it was reportedly because , according to one commissioner, Musk has “aggressively injected himself into the presidential race.”
By a 6-4 vote, the California Coastal Commission rejected the military’s plan to let SpaceX launch up to 50 rockets per year from the base in Santa Barbara County.
Musk’s SpaceX is becoming a critical part of national security programs. It will even be launching a rescue mission for two astronauts stranded in space. The advances of SpaceX under Musk are legendary. The Air Force wanted to waive the requirement for separate permits for SpaceX in carrying out these critical missions.
To the disappointment of many, SpaceX is now valued at over $200 billion and just signed a new $1 billion contract with NASA. Yet neither the national security value nor the demands for SpaceX services appear to hold much interest for officials like Commissioner Gretchen Newsom (no relation to California’s governor, Gavin Newsom): “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet.”
Newsom is the former political director for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 569. It did not seem to matter to her that increased launches meant more work for electrical workers and others. Rather, it’s all about politics.
Commission Chair Caryl Hart added “here we’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race and he’s managed a company in a way that was just described by Commissioner Newsom that I find to be very disturbing.”
In my book “ The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage ,” I discuss how Musk became persona non grata when he bought Twitter and announced that he was dismantling the company’s massive censorship apparatus.
He then outraged many on the left by releasing the Twitter Files, showing the extensive coordination of the company with the government in a censorship system described by a federal court as “Orwellian.”
After the purchase, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called upon Europeans to force Musk to censor her fellow Americans under the notorious Digital Services Act. Clinton has even suggested the arrest of those responsible for views that she considers disinformation.
Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee called for Musk’s arrest and said that, as a condition of getting government contracts, officials should “require him to moderate his speech in the interest of national security.”
Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wants Musk arrested for simply refusing to censor other people.
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called for Musk to be deported and all federal contracts cancelled with this company. As with many in the “Save Democracy” movement, Olbermann was unconcerned with the denial of free speech or constitutional protections. “If we can’t do that by conventional means, President Biden, you have presidential immunity. Get Elon Musk the F out of our country and do it now.”
Of course, none of these figures are even slightly bothered about other business leaders with political opinions, so long as, like McNamee, they are supporting Harris or at least denouncing Trump. Musk has failed to yield to a movement infamous for cancel campaigns and coercion. The usual alliance of media, academia, government and corporate forces hit Musk, his companies and even advertisers on X.
Other corporate officials collapsed like a house of cards to demands for censorship — see, for example, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Musk, in contrast, responded by courageously releasing the Twitter Files and exposing the largest censorship system in our history.
That is why I describe Musk as arguably the single most important figure in this generation in defense of free speech. The intense hatred for Musk is due to the fact that he was the immovable object in the path of their formerly unstoppable force.
The left will now kill jobs, cancel national security programs and gut the Constitution in its unrelenting campaign to get Musk. His very existence undermines the power of the anti-free speech movement. In a culture of groupthink, Musk is viewed as a type of free-thought contagion that must be eliminated.
Their frustration became anger, which became rage. As Elton John put it in “Rocket Man,” he was supposed to be “burning out his fuse up here alone.”
Yet, here he remains.
George Bernard Shaw once said “a reasonable man adjusts himself to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adjust itself to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable people.”
With all of his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, Elon Musk just might be that brilliantly unreasonable person.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “ The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage .”
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