“By the rules of the complicated pretense which all those people played for one another’s benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.”
These words are from a scene in Atlas Shrugged in which beleaguered industrialist Hank Rearden rejects “this court’s right to try me” and refuses to put on a defense. Thereby giving the best defense of all.
Elon Musk didn’t give a speech.
Instead, when an EU muck-a-muck, Thierry Breton, sent him a letter on the eve of Musk’s Twitter interview with presidential candidate Donald Trump, a letter babbling about dire consequences for Twitter if it were to “amplify potentially harmful content [i.e., any deviation from current government dogma] in connection with events with major audience around the world,” Musk responded with a quote and a clip from the movie Tropic Thunder.
Other EU officials are now rushing to disavow Breton’s letter, widely castigated as an attempt to interfere with the U.S. election.
I can’t repeat the line Musk quoted, because we don’t use cuss words here. If you don’t like to hear such words, don’t click into the video clip. Just don’t go there.
Mega-magnate Elon Musk is often badly wrong about China. But when he’s right, he’s right. Even super right.
And we need a million more CEOs to be thus willing to stand up to regulators foreign and domestic.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Elon Musk’s Right Answer”
The disavowal is rubbish if higher officials in the EU don’t solve the fifteen-minute problem, removing Thierry Breton from his position.
Various officials of the states and superstate of Europe have engaged in the war-like act of attempting to curtail liberty of expression in America. The US should respond by offering a guaranteed safe-haven for foreigners who engage in violent acts against those specific officials, so long as they are not plausibly charged with other offenses.
Is this any worse than the London cop who wants to extradite Americans for trial in the UK if he doesn’t like what we post online?
A bit. Most Americans have little exposure to the threat of that British officer; we cannot be extradited from the jurisdiction of the US for actions that are not analogous to what are crimes within the US, and if we have assets outside of America, these are not readily identifiable by the UK.
Still, his declaration was indeed likewise war-like.