Shawn Fain Making Actual Federal Case Out Of Trump And Elon's Bullsh*t.
Shawn Fain Making Actual Federal Case Out Of Trump And Elon's Bullsh*t.
The pitfalls of not knowing when to stop running your mouth.
“Based on headlines this morning, posts on social media, and now this, 50% of people listening were just there to search for something negative and complain about it,” one Elon Musk acolyte pouted on social media this morning. He was referring to Elon Musk’s public bonding session with Donald Trump last night, and how the United Auto Workers union has now filed a federal case against both men simply for promoting the illegal firing of striking employees.
That’s probably not a good sign! Though it’s possible that those who were excited to listen to two billionaires talk about how totally anti-establishment they are found that they had something better to do after waiting for 45 minutes for the many, many technical difficulties to be solved so that the livestream could start or, perhaps even more likely, couldn’t really figure out what positive things they could say about the whole mess.
But back to that lawsuit!
During the “conversation” as Musk called it, Trump praised Musk for his anti-union stance and his firing of workers who complained about conditions or pay.
"I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in, you just say: 'You want to quit?' They go on strike — I won't mention the name of the company — but they go on strike," Trump told an Elon Musk with a case of the giggles. "And you say: 'That's okay, you're all gone.'"
Soooo … that’s illegal — you can’t fire or threaten to fire workers who are striking, as per the National Labor Relations Act. And, as a result, the United Auto Workers are filing federal labor charges against both of them. Whoops!
It’s an especially fraught “conversation” to be having right now as Tesla workers are discussing unionization and the National Labor Relations Board has already accused Musk of illegally interfering with that.
“When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” said UAW President (and my future husband) Shawn Fain. “Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected. Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
It sure is!
The UAW was not the only entity to take note of the stark classism on display.
“Donald Trump's extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com,” the Harris-Walz campaign said in an official statement. “Trump's entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
The callousness with which these two ridiculously wealthy human beings discussed throwing workers away just for exercising their legal right to strike for better wages and treatment should go over really well in Michigan, where a strike recently led to improved wages and benefits for thousands of auto workers and where Harris has started to take a slight lead in polls.
Oh, they should definitely keep running their mouths: Trump, Musk, Rowling...
Shawn Fain is BRAT