The Bad, Bad Things Elon Musk Has Done

A weird thing happened when I published last Friday's blog post on the dire need to hold Elon Musk accountable for his coup agains the U.S. government: Readers asked how Musk could possibly be held accountable if he had not been elected to office, but rather operated as a sort of shadow president during the Trump regime's first four months in power.

First, and perhaps the good Bad Faith Times readers know this, but a person in the United States can be prosecuted and jailed even if they were never elected to public office. Lots of unelected people go to prison every day in the most jail-happy nation on earth. So I don't really understand the premise of the question.

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Follow-up replies to the blog post asked what, exactly, Musk has done as head of the DOGE team that has sought to replace representative democracy with an AI system programmed to pump out answers and results that coincidentally mesh well with the wishes of right-wing operators. There was a strange through-line in the reaction to the call to hold Musk accountable: What has he done wrong? What laws could he possibly have broken as the head of DOGE?

The answer, it turns out, is quite a few. The below outline of federal laws Musk may have broken over the past few months is not comprehensive, and has not been put together by someone who actually has the power to use the force of law against the lawless fascist billionaire, scrambling to undo the popular image of him as a merciless, loveless, hateful, drug-addled monster of a man who used his power against the planet's most vulnerable human beings.

So there's that. Elected Democrats have made noise over the past couple weeks about taking notes about what exactly Musk and DOGE have done in their highly illegal raid of the American government. I have a tough time believing Musk's enemies inside and outside government are not dutifully making records of laws he has blatantly violated during his 100-day bender as the de facto head of the international fascist movement. That Musk is indebted to various powerful foreign entities will probably play a role in how he's brought to heel in the coming years.

Until then, can we please stop with this doomer nonsense about there being no chance Musk will ever truly pay for his sins? It's that mindset among those who oppose his hideous agenda that makes it more likely he'll get off without any consequences. Musk will be held accountable if we want him to be accountable. Throwing up our collective hands and saying Democrats don't have the spine to do what needs to be done guarantees they won't have the spine to do what needs to be done. Let's just stop with that shit right now.

Musk has done bad, bad things. And he will pay for those bad, bad things if there is a collective push to make it so. Your dooming is what he wants more than anything.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social