Elon Musk's Mom Gleefully Encourages Trump Supporters To Do Voter Fraud
What could possibly go wrong or result in people going to prison for up to five years?
Maye Musk — the mother of Elon Musk — took to the site formerly known as Twitter this weekend to encourage Republican users of the site to go out and commit a fuckton of voter fraud this November, assuring them that it was 100 percent legal.
Quoting a post from her sweet baby boy, Maye Musk wrote, “The Democrats have given us another option. You don’t have to register to vote. On Election Day, have 10 fake names, go to 10 polling booths and vote 10 times. That’s 100 votes, and it’s not illegal. Maybe we should work the system too.”
“This is, in fact, illegal,” Community Notes pointed out.
You also very much have to register to vote, though why interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake?
For years, Republicans have soothed their voters’ egos with the fiction that Democrats regularly commit voter fraud and steal elections. It’s a story that serves multiple purposes. It allows them to attack the undocumented immigrants they claim are a part of this, it establishes Democrats as evildoers, and, perhaps most importantly, it allows them to preserve their belief that they are the Real Americans and the “silent majority.” If Democrats can’t win without cheating, it means they’re the real winners.
It’s also a demonstration of how very little Republican politicians and pundits actually care about their constituency. Multiple Republicans have been convicted of voter fraud, often because they thought it was easy to do without getting caught and because they thought they were doing some sort of “turnabout is fair play” with Democrats and “beating them at their own game.” Just like Maye Musk suggested.
Many have also been charged and some have even been convicted and sentenced for their part in trying to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election, which they truly believed he only lost because of “widespread voter fraud.” Just last week, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison for her (very illegal) attempts to stop the non-existent steal.
In-person voter fraud, as Maye Musk describes, is extremely rare, unlikely to make any kind of dent in a national election, and the penalties for getting caught are extremely high. If people were to believe Maye Musk and get caught, they could be sent to prison for five years and also on the hook for up to $10,000. And no, “I just wanted to beat Democrats at their own game, your honor!” is not considered a valid excuse.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
OT, you guys are not going to believe this shit!
The dual credit government professor that teaches online classes to our students is assigning a book by Mark Levin. She's a wingnut who teacher her political opinions as fact, instead of, say, talking about how bills become laws and all that.
I'm filing a grievance against her today.
I harp on this a lot, but it seems to me that it matters that Maye is not only the mother of Elon Musk, but is also the daughter of JN Haldeman, a dementedly racist, antisemitic, white supremacist pamphleteer and promoter of howlingly insane conspiracy theories on the topic of racial purity and the right of a tiny elite to govern. The old man moved his family from Saskatchewan to apartheid South Africa in 1950, so they could bask in the glories of white authoritarian rule. Jill Lepore wrote for the New Yorker,
"Elon Musk is not responsible for the political opinions of his grandfather, who died when Musk was three years old. But Haldeman’s legacy casts light on what social media does: the reason that most people don’t know about Musk’s grandfather’s political writings is that in his lifetime social media did not exist, and the writings of people like him were not, therefore, amplified by it. Indeed, they were very unlikely to circulate widely, and are now quite rare....
Musk has said that he bought Twitter to halt the advance of a “woke mind virus” spreading online. His grandfather wrote his tracts to raise an alarm about what he called “mind control,” on the radio and television, where “an unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the White man.”
Haldeman was born in Minnesota in 1902 but grew up mostly in Saskatchewan, Canada. A daredevil aviator and sometime cowboy, he also trained and worked as a chiropractor. In the nineteen-thirties, he joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.
Before the age of the Internet, the writings of political extremists tended to be privately published, in quite small numbers. An angry man typing out memos about an invisible world government might make a few mimeographs or carbon copies, but the chance that any ended up in a library, catalogued and preserved, is slight. Presumably, most of Haldeman’s papers remain in family hands, if they have not been destroyed. But some of his writing survives, including in the Michigan State University library’s extraordinary Radicalism Collection.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-world-according-to-elon-musks-grandfather