Last updated on January 17th, 2024 at 01:05 pm
Elon Musk tried to utilize the power of his social media platform to push Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, posting that he believed the Republican would “exceed the polls” when the votes were counted. Yet, Ramaswamy suspended his campaign after winning only 7.7% of the votes and just three delegates in the Iowa caucuses.
Ramaswamy ran as a more rabid version of Donald Trump in an attempt to appeal to Trump voters, but they remain true to their Chosen One — the man indicted on 91 criminal counts, who was also found liable for both rape and fraud recently.
Ramaswamy, who defended his repetition of debunked conspiracy theories about January 6th and the great replacement theory, claimed his campaign had been about “truth” in his statement:
“This entire campaign is about speaking the TRUTH. We did not achieve our goal tonight & we need an America-First patriot in the White House. The people spoke loud & clear about who they want. Tonight I am suspending my campaign and endorsing Donald J. Trump and will do everything I can to make sure he is the next U.S. President. I am enormously proud of this team, this movement, and our country.”
Ramaswamy had promised to pardon Trump if elected president and posed with fans wearing “Save Trump, Vote Vivek” t-shirts.
Ramaswamy is said to share “values” with Elon Musk and said in August of 2023 that if elected in 2024, he would run the government like Musk runs his companies.
Elon has since been in the news being accused of doing illegal drugs and told major advertisers to “Go f*ck yourself” during The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit after they left his social media platform due to its inability to ensure brand safety due to the proliferation of neo-Nazis and other hate accounts.
Musk referred to advertisers choosing to spend money elsewhere as “blackmail.” (It’s actually capitalism in action, but given that Elon Musk’s companies take advantage of taxpayer-funded subsidies, he might not understand the concept as much as his Libertarian supporters would like to believe.)
The billionaire owner of X/Twitter, who sees himself as some kind of political pundit now, has amplified racist attacks on Black people in recent days after creating a scandal for amplifying antisemitic posts on his embattled social media platform “X” (actually known as Twitter). Musk opined in response to low poll numbers for Ramaswamy several days ago: “My guess is that Vivek will far exceed the polls when the votes are counted.”
Elon didn’t leave it there. He also wrote on Sunday “I think you’re right” to an account posting: “I truly believe this Monday @VivekGRamaswamy is going to shock the world. This is going to be a major win for the country.”
Previously, Elon Musk amplified Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, who launched his campaign on Musk’s platform, in what turned out to be an embarrassing fail tech-wise.
The fact is Vivek Ramaswamy never had a chance with Trump supporters, because of his name and the color of his skin. But his message of ruling the country like a ruthless business person who maybe does illegal drugs and gets by on taxpayer subsidies while trying to sue the labor board (NLRB) after being accused of trying to silence critical employees and paying off a flight attendant $250,000 for something Musk claims he didn’t do didn’t seem to resonate, either. To be fair, that message just sounds better to the fascist-inclined when coming from a white man who has established a history of getting away with criminal behavior.
Success in technology does not, it turns out, have any relationship to understanding voters. However, it’s instructive that Elon Musk can’t move the needle, let alone even guess how less than 100,000 of his favored White people will vote, yet thinks he can drive a diverse country made up of 330 million plus people to vote as he sees fit, all because he bought Twitter.
While the pro-fascist experiment of X pushing far Right propaganda is working to silence democratic movements and collective awareness of injustices, it is not working in terms of picking candidates.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
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