Thread by @SethAbramson

(MEGA-THREAD) Elon Musk was an illegal immigrant in the United States for years, and has lied about it for decades.

This long thread unpacks the evidence fully sourced at the PROOF report below (FREE with trial offer at link).

🔗:

Please RETWEET widely. sethabramson.substack.com/p/icymi-elon-m…

1/ First we must establish why the topic of this thread matters. Does the rank hypocrisy on immigration policy associated with the two biggest anti-illegal-immigrant crusaders in America—Elon Musk and Donald Trump—mean that they’re wrong to oppose illegal immigration? Not at all.

2/ The question under review here is not really about immigration at all. We already know that Democrats and Republicans in Congress were prepared to pass the most draconian anti-illegal-immigration bill in decades and it was (a) blocked backchannel by Trump, (b) opposed by Musk.

3/ So the question isn’t whether new laws to stem the flow of illegal immigration are necessary; both parties wholeheartedly agree that this is the case. The question is why the two most influential figures in MAGA world so violently *oppose* us doing anything about immigration.

4/ And the answer is this: because neither Musk nor Trump give a sh*t about stemming the tide of illegal immigration—it’s simply not a subject that actually moves them in any way. And we can see this in their histories. But these two historically venal men have their own motives.

5/ So, for instance, Trump’s wife Melania appears to have been an illegal immigrant for a period of time in the 1990s. Her lawyer says her first entry into America was in 1996 and she didn’t begin working here until 1997; but there are photos of her working as a model in 1995.

6/ Despite hard evidence that Melania was in the U.S. working illegally in the 1990s, she—as a rich white woman trying to get richer via modeling—has *repeatedly* and *defiantly* distinguished herself from the poor nonwhites who come here fleeing violence in their home countries.

7/ Melania Trump has said repeatedly that entering the United States and conducting oneself properly while here—which she *didn’t do*—is a matter of character. These comments brought her into the political debate on immigration in the United States and became part of a GOP theme.

8/ The theme is this: rich whites can do whatever they like to get ahead, and them doing so is a sign of ingenuity and industry. This includes committing tax crimes and fraud (D. Trump) or working in America illegally (M. Trump).

If poor nonwhites do the same, they’re criminals.

9/ But it’s actually a bit worse than this, because of course Donald Trump not only lied (as did his wife) about her immigration conduct, and not only failed to hold her to the standard he holds non-family nonwhites to, he’s also *hired illegal immigrants* so he can exploit them.

10/ This is a trend we’ll return to in this thread. Republicans who don’t actually care about immigration policy demagogue it to appeal to low-information voters while violating immigration laws themselves—then on the back end *benefit* from the illegalities they say they oppose.

11/ As substantiated at the link atop this thread, Elon Musk has *also* been accused of using foreign labor in a way that makes his laborers illegal immigrants, and doing so at great profit to himself. And he did it as someone who was a longtime crypto-illegal immigrant himself.

12/ None of this makes illegal immigration OK. It does have several instant effects:

i) Musk and Trump must be ignored on immigration matters.
ii) If they’re ignored—for being devious, deceitful immigration demagogues only looking out for themselves—immigration reform will pass.

13/

iii) Those who actually care about immigration reform and want something done about the southern border therefore have a right to know that their ostensible leaders on the issue don’t care about it, are lying about it, and are associated with illegal immigration themselves.

14/

iv) If we understand that both Trump and Musk are men with a genuine longstanding animus toward nonwhites, we begin to see that the most important thing for *anyone* who wants immigration reform is to take race *out* of the equation: as it’s *exactly* what’s blocking reform.

15/ By turning the immigration debate into a proxy race war, race hustlers like Trump and Musk—who, again, not only don’t care about immigration reform but *are associated with illegal immigration themselves*—ensure Democrats are less likely to negotiate over immigration policy.

16/ But that’s what Musk and Trump *want*. They want disparate treatment for rich whites like them associated with illegal immigration and poor nonwhites who aren’t—like Musk and Trump—mere greedy bastards but fleeing violence because it makes the border issue a permanent crisis.

17/ So this thread is ultimately a gut check for those who *say* they want the border crisis resolved.

Do you really?

Because the reason we didn’t get a bipartisan border bill is because of two rich white race hustlers who *benefit* in every way from vile immigration hypocrisy.

18/ They benefit because an *unresolved* border crisis drives Republicans to the polls. They benefit because an *unresolved* border crisis makes the federal government (largely run by Democrats) look incompetent. They benefit because an *unresolved* border crisis animates bigots.

19/ They benefit because an *unresolved* border crisis they can demagogue helps hide that Musk and Trump are *associated with illegal immigration and have gotten rich off it*.

It’s harder for journalists to call them out when they’re so melodramatically anti-illegal-immigration.

20/ So in this sense, writing a self-described “mega”-thread—which I haven’t done in a long long time—on Musk’s past immigration status is necessary because those who *truly* want border reform (if any in the GOP really do) need to become disenthralled from Trump *and* Elon Musk.

21/ But there’s one additional benefit to addressing border reform by debunking the lies Elon Musk has told about himself: it shines a light on the fact that many in the GOP are *sympathetic* to illegal immigration when the immigrant is coming here for economic opportunities.

22/ Or, rather, that’s *sort of* true.

Many in the GOP are *sympathetic* to illegal immigration when the immigrant is coming here for economic opportunities...

...and is white.

Like Elon Musk and Melania Trump.

Which maybe could force some MAGAs to answer some hard questions.

23/ Ever wonder why Musk and Trump repeatedly tell their low-information followers that there are hundreds or even thousands of *terrorists* among America’s illegal immigrants, even though there’s absolutely no data to back up those wild claims whatsoever? Well, wonder no longer.

24/ What Musk and Trump know—what *anyone* who studies immigration, regardless of political party, knows—is almost *all* illegal immigrants are coming here for *economic opportunities*.

They aren’t coming here to commit acts of terrorism or street crimes. They’re here to *work*.

25/ Poor nonwhite immigrants are coming to the U.S. without proper documentation—in short—for the exact same reason Elon Musk and Melania Trump were here illegally for extended periods: because they want to work. And like Elon and—to a lesser extent—Melania, they’re hard workers.

26/ And this is of course the *other* big thing poisoning bipartisan attempts to fix the southern border: lies about *who immigrants are*.

Why do these lies—spread, at the highest volume, by, you guessed it, Trump and Musk—matter? Because if we understand why immigrants come...

27/ ...it helps us figure out solutions to ensure that they come here legally. The reason the last GOP POTUS *before* Trump wanted a work-visa program for persons arriving at the southern border is because he understood that *most* immigrants can be a *legal* asset to America.

28/ This is why Trump and Musk both spread the racist, antisemitic Great Replacement Theory that says that powerful foreign Jews are working with the Democratic Party to make America less white so that there can be more Democratic voters. Because the *truth* hurts Musk and Trump.

29/ The truth is, illegal immigrants can’t vote in federal elections and Democrats have no belief they ever will. But Democrats (a) have an empathy for poor nonwhites fleeing violence and seeking work commensurate with the empathy Elon has for himself and Trump has for Melania...

30/ ...and (b) believe that a work-visa program that *doesn’t* confer citizenship or any voting rights—all of which was a *GOP* idea just a decade ago—could help fix the border crisis in conjunction with the bipartisan bill Trump just blocked. *And* it would aid the U.S. economy.

31/ But if Musk and Trump convince America that Democrats *don’t* want immigrants to come here to work but rather to *vote*—just as if they convince America that illegal immigrants are criminals or terrorists rather than hard workers—they can perpetuate a border crisis *forever*.

32/ Most MAGAs don’t know that the current border surge began early *in 2020*—under Donald Trump—confirming that there was actually *nothing* in his border policies that was intended to or was capable of stopping it. Yet Twitter has been lousy with fake graphs saying otherwise.

33/ These fake graphs—if you can believe it—actually *shift* the date of the surge’s beginning to January 2021 to try to make it look like a Biden-created issue (which of course doesn’t even make sense, as no Biden policy would have started having any real effect until mid-2021).

34/ And who has done more to spread these fake graphs—all of which hide the *deliberate fecklessness* of Donald Trump’s immigration policies—here on Twitter?

You guessed it: Elon Musk.

He spent months and months spreading this false data.

So the question becomes...well, *why*?

35/ We *know* why Trump is demagoging an issue he doesn’t actually care about and didn’t fix when he had the chance: because he fears that if he doesn’t regain the White House he will go to prison for crimes he *definitely* committed and knows he will be found guilty of at trial.

36/ Elon Musk is a harder case—but only by a little. Musk believes that, in a second term, President Biden would strip him of his federal contracts; not use him as a White House adviser as Trump has/will; and make trade decisions as to Russia and China that hurt Tesla and SpaceX.

37/ All this is discussed in detail at PROOF—link below—so I won’t go into it much here. Suffice to say that Elon Musk doesn’t care about immigration *whatsoever*, but *does* need Trump to win.

And that means demagoging immigration.

🔗:

Let’s continue. sethabramson.substack.com

38/ When he was 14 or 15, Elon Musk came to the United States with his brother Kimbal and his father Errol, who—as Elon well knew—had been involved in the illegal transnational gem trade for many years.

Illegal Zambian emerald mines had made the family rich in the early/mid-80s.

39/ I have a book chapter on these mines coming out soon at PROOF—so stay tuned for that—but the upshot is that these several illegal, Apartheid-era Zambian mines were as grotesque as you would expect. Poor Black laborers—not just poorly treated but *cheated* to enrich the Musks.

40/ The Zambian laborers were paid *pennies* for *literal emeralds*. But there’s no reason to think Errol minded; he’s a known racist (see below).

But that’s not all; all Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk confirms, he comes from a *long line* of bigots. cnn.com/2023/09/12/tec…

41/ All of which is to say, Elon’s people were the *bad* South Africans—the ones who are understandably bogeyman in the history books because it is *exactly* what they deserve.

And while it’s one thing to be an unrepentant racist, it’s *next-level* to run *racist emerald mines*.

42/ It’s not just that Elon visited one of these mines and so knew of their existence. It’s not just that he knew the family had gotten rich off them. It’s not just that he knew his father was a smuggler and a criminal. It’s not just that he knew this smuggling was international.

43/ It’s that Elon wanted *in*.

44/ One thing to understand about Musk is that his sole motivators are a) money, b) receiving the love he never got from his dad and that his mom was often too busy to offer. *Everything* he has ever done is explained by this, *including* his high-profile save-the-world projects.

45/ Elon wants to engage in projects he thinks might save the world—or at least can be framed that way—because he believes such projects can make him rich and make him adored. The details? Like labor rights? These are trifles, because they do not make him money or bring him love.

46/ The same goes for the regulations he thinks Trump will get rid of, the responsibility to be honest in business that he bought Twitter and denigrates media so he can decimate, and the anti-media kick he’s been on for years to defuse coverage of him being... well, a bad person.

47/ But that’s adult Elon. I’m now speaking of kiddie Elon: a South African child and grandchild of racists, bullied at school, with *no idea* how he would realize his dream of feeling love and making money. As to the latter, he thought perhaps if he went into game development...

48/ ...but then, no—there was no money in that. So Elon realized that the solution was to *get rich first* and *then* figure out how to find love. (Who knows, perhaps after getting rich he could overpay by $22 billion for a social media platform and find his first friends there?)

49/ All this was in Elon’s head when he and Kimbal took emeralds from their dad’s possession as he slept during a smuggling trip to America and went to the city to sell the illegal gems themselves. It worked—and it was a blast. They made thousands. And Elon wanted to do it again.

50/ *No one* is claiming that Elon thought being an illegal gem smuggler was a longterm get-rich plan. But he *did* think America was the place to get rich; he *did* pitch his dad on going to America to sell his ill-gotten gems; and he *did* think that could bring him seed money.

51/ So if you wonder why a big Esquire profile on Elon says he came to Canada from South Africa when he was *19* and did so solely to go to college—when the truth is that he showed up at *16* and didn’t go to college for a year—now you start to understand the reason for the lies.

52/ Elon has made very, very clear—basically, watch any interview with him, but his 2013 SXSW one is a good place to start—that he *never* believed in getting a formal education if you had another way to get rich.

It’s actually anathema to his philosophy to see things otherwise.

53/ Did 16 year-old Elon show up in America with gems to sell? We don’t know. Was his plan to have his dad bring them to him once he’d settled in? We don’t know. What we know is he arrived in June of 1988 and didn’t show up to any college for study until *well over a year later*.

54/ And here’s where the lies start.

More lies than I’ve ever seen in the biography of any famous person, and folks... I’m a three-time bestselling Donald Trump biographer and presidential historian.

When I say Elon’s 1990s timeline is strewn with lies, *boy* do I mean it. Wow.

55/ According to Queen’s University (Canada) records and publications, Elon was in Kingston from fall 1989 to fall 1991. In order to get credit (as it were) for partially educating him, the school calls him a “‘94”, but don’t be fooled—Elon was gone by 1991. 1994’s a red herring.

56/ This creates the first of *many* problems for Musk, as he doesn’t appear at Penn (in Philadelphia, PA, USA) until 1992—as a transfer student. So we have somewhere between a 3-month and 1-year gap in Elon’s life history, at a time (again) he saw his education as superfluous.

57/ Keep in mind, folks, that this is the *second* lengthy gap in our knowledge of Elon’s whereabouts in just a period of 48 months (from June 1988 through Summer 1992). Those gaps, in total, could amount to *two years* of no one knowing where this would-be gem smuggler was at.

58/ But if you thought things got *less* confusing once Elon arrived at Penn, you’d be wrong. Why? Because he seems to have spent his time there focusing on making money via side gigs—and we actually have *no idea* how many credits he still needed to get his undergraduate degree.

59/ But I’m *understating* the confusion. Despite claiming to have been at Penn from 1992 until purportedly moving to California in 1995, PROOF has Elon *on video* saying that in the “early 1990s” he was working in “Palo Alto” at the game development company Rocket Science. Huh?

60/ And lest you think Elon is saying he worked in Palo Alto from 1991 to 1992—his *second* “lost year” since arriving in North America—no, that’d be incorrect. Because Elon is clear in saying that he was at Rocket Science when he applied to Stanford... in 1995.

What the *hell*?

61/ So exactly *when* was Elon even *in residence* at Penn—and what the hell he was doing there—in the 1990s?

One thing he was *not* doing? Getting a degree. He left in 1995 with no degree, though presumably he’d had 3 years to do 2 years of coursework. He got his Penn degree...

62/ ...in 1997, but under dubious circumstances: it was after he’d gotten millions in investments in California; some reports suggest strings were pulled for him by rich donors; and Penn recognized him as getting degrees in *two* departments, one of which *hadn’t been his focus*.

63/ Some of you will think there’s some strange conspiracy theory being spun here, but nothing could be farther from the truth. This is all *very* basic realpolitik: in 1997, the degree-less Musk couldn’t get an H-1B visa to make good on VCs’ investments *without* a Penn degree.

64/ By 1997, Elon had 2 years’ of Queen’s credits and *some* amount of Penn credits—we’ve no idea how many, but he was there (maybe?) from 1992 to early 1995, so it wouldn’t have been so hard to cobble together an agreement to give him a degree once it seemed he’d be a big deal.

65/ What *is* clear is this: Elon didn’t care about getting a degree. He screwed around at Penn, left with no degree, and showed up to finagle one *only* when his investors required it because he couldn’t—as he has since admitted—stay in America without the degree-required H-1B.

66/ And here’s where we have to talk about Elon Musk being an illegal immigrant.

For *years*.

67/ Esquire seems to suggest that by December 1994 Elon was already working on his Penn thesis—which presumably didn’t require him being onsite at Penn. Elon himself implies he was in California for all of 1995 but *also* in the “early 1990s.” Here’s how we might square all this:

68/ If we remember that—as Elon has himself admitted—his entire Penn career was merely a ruse to retain legal immigration status in the U.S. as he sought ways to get rich that didn’t involve illegal gem-smuggling and sales, we understand that Elon could have taken many terms off.

69/ Certainly, one way to show up at Penn in 1992 needing only 4 terms of credits to graduate but then having to show up in 1997—5 years later!—to beg for special dispensation to get a degree is to repeatedly take terms off to go do other stuff elsewhere, for instance California.

70/ Without access to Elon’s Penn records, however, we can only judge from his *actions* precisely when he became terrified that he was losing (or had lost) his legal immigration status. And the *latest* date this could have happened for him was in 1994. Here’s how we know that:

71/ In his 2013 SXSW interview, Elon famously lied and said that when he applied to Stanford in 1994 he *already had* an undergraduate degree and had *already used* that undergraduate degree to get an H-1B visa.

In fact he had neither the degree nor the visa.

So that’s telling.

72/ What it suggests is that Elon has anxiety about what his immigration status was in *1994*, so much so that he would tell easily disproven (and pretty wild) lies in public about it. Given that foreign students have 6 months to leave America after finishing a course of study...

73/ ...this could suggest that after showing up at Penn in 1992, Elon had done all the work he planned to do there by early 1994—exactly the moment he *should* have been finishing up his degree, but somehow hadn’t—such that by fall 1994 he was an illegal immigrant... and knew it.

74/ This makes some sense, as Penn would’ve brought Elon in as a Queen’s transfer (putting aside the lost year Elon had doing who knows what who knows where, though he implies he was working illegally in California from 1991 to 1992) expecting him to need 2 years to get a degree.

75/ By 1994, then, it would’ve become clear to Penn that this kid had exactly the view he has since said he had: money matters, not education. So it would be no surprise if the two parted ways then. But by late 1994 that would have left Elon in California as an illegal immigrant.

76/ The *quickest* way for Elon to resolve his illegal immigrant status in 1994—whether or not he’d previously worked illegally in California from 1991 to 1992—would have been to *regain* his student status at a school near where he was already working on getting rich.

Stanford.

77/ And this is *precisely* why Elon has told so many lies about Stanford. Specifically, he says he applied, was admitted, enrolled, and left the program after two days to go back to trying to do the only thing (besides finding love) he has ever cared about: getting filthy rich.

78/ But documents from the time show that *almost all of that sequence of events* publicly detailed by Elon is *untrue*.

Was Elon *admitted* to Stanford for graduate study? Yes, he was.

*That* part is true.

But was it under false pretenses? That’s a great question. To explain:

79/ When Elon applied to Stanford in late 1994, he didn’t have an undergraduate degree—indeed he was *years* from getting his—so it’s not clear how he could *possibly* have enrolled in the program. Did he falsely imply to Stanford that he had (or could get) a Penn degree by 1995?

80/ We don’t know this. What we *do* know is that Musk applied to Stanford in bad faith—as a ploy to paper over his illegal status in the U.S. with a gestural graduate-school application that could never be perfected *because he hadn’t met the prerequisites to go to the school*.

81/ This is why we got the 2013 SXSW lie: Musk claiming he had a Penn degree and H-1B visa in 1994. Because that’d make his Stanford application seem valid—both in terms of him having the prerequisites to matriculate at Stanford and (therefore) the application *not* being a ruse.

82/ But it *was* a ruse. It was—arguably—an immigration scam, as the man who filed the application was an illegal immigrant who knew he didn’t have the prerequisites to attend the program he was applying for, and wasn’t *going* to have them, he just needed a credible paper trail.

83/ But the question of whether Musk actually *lied* as part of this ruse is a fascinating one. Would Stanford admit to a highly competitive PhD program someone who *neither* had an undergraduate degree *nor* had represented that they *would* have one by 1995? It seems unlikely.

84/ (To be clear, I suggest that Elon Musk had no intention of getting his Penn degree by 1995 not just because he didn’t do so in the event—not just because of his statements opposing degree-seeking—but because at the time he would’ve needed to be at Penn finishing his degree...

85/ ...he was *in fact* living and working two jobs in California that meant a great deal to him, with no evidence having been provided by him—to this author’s knowledge—either in public or private about a present plan to *abandon* California for Pennsylvania in 1995. Indeed...

86/ ...by 1995 it’s clear that Elon and Kimbal had figured out that the money they wanted was to be had in California, and had begun their early work on Zip2. Anyone who knows Elon Musk’s biography knows he was *not* going to return to the Atlantic region in 1995 for any reason.)

87/ All this explains why, per published Stanford University records and communications, the school *admitted* him in 1995 but *he never enrolled*.

He never *could* have enrolled because he lacked the prerequisites to actually attend the program he applied to...and he knew that.

88/ But the lie Elon tells about Stanford—that he was enrolled for 2 days, when Stanford says he *never enrolled*—is key. And perhaps you can now see why.

*If* Elon had enrolled for 2 days, it would’ve meant he was *qualified* for the program, and it was not an immigration scam.

89/ What Elon did with the Stanford University scandal was actually a little clever: he *pretended* that the question was whether he’d been *admitted* to Stanford so that he could bat down that straw man (an argument of his own creation) via a letter from a prospective professor.

90/ In the much-ballyhooed letter, the professor states how much he *wished* he could’ve worked with Elon, but understood Elon was making a different choice. And this is consistent with Stanford saying that it *admitted* him but that he *chose* to never enroll (as he *couldn’t*).

91/ What Elon had created for himself by fall 1995 was a paper trail of kinda-sorta intending to stay in the U.S. to study—though it was an impossibility due to him having *flamed out* at Penn. It was flimsy as hell—and clearly (we now know) a running joke between him and Kimbal.

92/ So the evidence as it stands now is that Elon *may* have been an illegal worker in the U.S. in 1991-1992, and *clearly* became an illegal immigrant in the United States sometime in 1994. He created a paper-based flurry of bullshit in 1995 to make investors think he was legal.

93/ And this is where the 2013 Milken Institute interview with Elon and Kimbal comes in—in which Kimbal says that in 1995 both he and Elon were in California *well aware* that they were illegal immigrants while they were asking American investors to give them millions of dollars.

94/ To be very clear, Elon *chose* to be an illegal immigrant because he was—let’s be candid—a greedy little f*cker.

Which is fine, in a way—entrepreneurs often are—but let’s all understand that Elon *could* have tried to finish his Penn degree and thereafter enroll in Stanford.

95/ The problem is that all this makes Elon *exponentially* less empathetic an illegal immigrant than almost *anyone* coming over the southern border—people he openly detests.

Why do I say this? Well, consider the following:

1) Elon was already rich when he arrived in America.

96/

2) Elon could have finished his degree at Queen’s but chose not to out of greed.
3) Elon disappeared into the ether *twice* in his first 48 months in North America—possibly for two years—without any explanation of what he was doing (and *some* fear it could’ve been illegal).

97/

4) Elon got the enormous gift of admission to Penn and squandered it contemptuously—seeking side hustles to make money rather than finishing up his undergrad, ultimately messing his own situation up so badly and irretrievably he just ditched Penn altogether sometime in 1994.

98/

5) While at Penn, Elon was motivated solely by greed for more than he already had.
6) When he became an illegal immigrant, instead of doing anything honest to remedy his situation—like returning to Penn—he filed a frivolous application with Stanford to create a flimsy alibi.

99/

7) After leaving Penn and Stanford in the lurch—knowing he’d now been an illegal immigrant for at least a year—Elon kept not just working illegally in America but begging for millions of dollars from American investors.
8) Kimbal implies they hid their status from investors.

100/

9) Elon waited until a degree-requiring H-1B visa was a *business necessity* to get his *first* post-high school degree, with ongoing reports suggesting that strings were pulled to make it happen—meaning Elon had *really* been screwing around at/with Penn in 1992 and 1993.

101/

10) By the judgment of the average unbiased person, then—even a Republican—we would deem Elon a college dropout with no real degrees who milked his illegal immigration status to fool American investors into giving him millions and millions of dollars under false pretenses.

102/ And critically, we would add to this that all of the foregoing was a scheme orchestrated by a *greedy bigot* who was already wealthy through his family when he began it. *And* we would have to add that he has lied ruthlessly about this scheme for over three decades. *And*...

103/ ...we would have to ask—only because apparently no one has ever looked into it—whether Elon ever lied about any of this, and/or instructed anyone else (like Kimbal) to lie about any of this, on federal forms. It’s a question we must ask now that taxpayers give Elon millions.

104/ *And* we would have to ask whether these decades of very clumsy lies create an opportunity for a foreign national to *blackmail* Musk with documents proving the truth—a possibility that would turn this powerful American defense contractor into a major national security risk.

105/ *And*—to top it all off!—this greedy man who was an illegal immigrant for between 3 and 5 years before finally becoming a citizen in 2002 (and did he lie on any federal forms to get that status?) now spends his days *demonizing* poor nonwhites fleeing violence and poverty...

106/ ...and *engages* in this demagoguery—the coup de grâce of a 35-year scam!—in order to ensure that the border crisis *isn’t* solved, but so that he can (a) retain his federal contracts, (b) get even closer to power via Trump, and (c) exercise his native anti-nonwhite bigotry.

107/ Compare all this to a mother and child fleeing likely death or injury in a war-torn country who escape north from Central America at enormous and prolonged danger in order to enter America and work hard to create a good life for themselves.

Who would *you* rather deport?

108/ If these were the only lies Musk had told or laws he’d allegedly broken, it’d be enough: I’d want Elon Musk permanently deported to South Africa—for cause—over any one of the poor nonwhites seeking a better life who he now spends each day demonizing.

But his lies continued.

109/ It’s a story for another thread: how many have *died or been injured* because of safety problems in Musk workplaces, misleading statements issued by Musk about FSD, a turning off of Starlink in Ukraine after multiple clandestine contacts with the Kremlin. *Those* accounts...

110/ ...wouldn’t argue for immediate deportation, but rather—if proven—the treatment Russian spy Maria Butina received: imprisonment in the United States and *then* deportation. And of course I’m not even touching his scheme to help Trump win the 2024 election via disinformation.

111/ There’ll be readers of this thread who say, you know what? I *like* Elon’s bigotry. I *like* people who lie to get ahead (if they’re white). I *like* scofflaws if the scofflaw “owns the libs.” Or even, I *retroactively* forgive people if they end up doing some things I like.

112/ If that’s your view, just say it. Own it—don’t be a coward hiding behind supposed virtue, supposed intellectual consistency, or supposed patriotism.

Just say: I’m a nihilist. Anyone who does anything that makes me feel good can do whatever they want. Hurt whoever they want.

113/ But if you’re among the 2% of MAGAs who *actually* care about the southern border—for whatever reason; it almost certainly has no effect on you and yours unless you live in a border town—what has been relayed to you here is a story of you being conned out of your principles.

114/ Men who *do not care about immigration*; who have *been involved with illegal immigration themselves*; who have *profited wildly from illegal immigration*; and who have *every intention of making the border crisis permanent*, have conned you into thinking they’re otherwise.

115/ That should make you angry as hell.

It should make you turn off the TV whenever Trump or Musk is speaking, block these men on social media, and call your representative(s) to get them to pass the bipartisan border bill Trump and Musk effectively worked together to sh*t-can.

116/ But I don’t think that’s going to happen.

117/ Because if—*out of all the issues in the fucking world you could’ve chosen to obsess over, many of which affect you and your family infinitely more or implicate your supposed core values infinitely more—you’ve chosen *the border* to fixate on, it’s for reasons you won’t say.

118/ If you lost your job to an illegal immigrant—very few have—I’m not speaking to you. Or if you lost a loved one to a crime committed by an illegal immigrant—a class of people that commits far fewer crimes than U.S. citizens—I’m not speaking to you. But if you can’t explain...

119/ ...in great detail why you chose *the border* as your pet issue over the *many hundreds of things* that affect you and implicate your values more, I’ll assume—and many Americans will assume—you just feel superior to poor nonwhites (home *and* abroad) and *love* hating them.

120/ Because otherwise, none of your vitriol makes any goddamned sense. You’d be concerned about labor-busting, tax cuts for billionaires, corporate tax loopholes, off-shore tax havens, foreign out-sourcing, or the over-policing of drug addicts (many of whom are poor white kids).

121/ So what I think is that MAGAs who call themselves immigration voters know *exactly* what Musk and Trump are up to—and don’t care. Because your values align with theirs: bigotry, lawlessness (white people only), special privileges (rich people only) and hatred’s dopamine hit.

122/ I can’t do anything about any of those things.

People raised wrong are going to do wrong, often times.

123/ But what I *can* say is this: as you claim that Democrats are acting irrationally over the border because of values they’re hiding from the rest of us (a crime you say is akin to *Treason*), you damn well better understand that you’re describing—and indicting—*yourselves*.

124/ *You* oppose border reform—and *support* rich white former illegal immigrants who demagogue on immigration—because of things that you won’t admit: your preference for whites; your belief the rich are better than the rest of us; and how goddamned good *hating* makes you feel.

125/ It’s not my job to *save you* from being conned by men like Musk and Trump. It’s an impossible job, anyway, given that you clearly *want* and *need* to be conned to feed your hatred of nonwhites and your self-loathing as a not-rich person.

But I at least told you the truth.