Elon Musk: Hero, Villain, or a Bit of Both?

Global elites are good at engineering panics; they do it to grab more power over us. We saw that during the COVID “crisis,” and a similar campaign is ongoing over the climate.

The new far-left British government just announced that the country’s National Health Service is ordering doctors to cut back diagnostic tests and medicine for sick people in order to combat climate change — and also to use the intimate setting of doctor/patient visits to lecture citizens on “sustainability.”

Doesn’t that sound like I’m making it up? Or like something cribbed from a discarded first draft of some Evelyn Waugh satire?

BREAKING – Royal College of Physicians launches ‘Green Physicians Toolkit’, declaring climate change ‘one of the biggest threats to human health’. NHS Doctors are told to reduce prescribing and conduct diagnostic imaging or testing only if ‘essential’ https://t.co/ACmuFHTzzb pic.twitter.com/QofOpF9bhf

— Joe Rich (@joerichlaw) July 16, 2024

But no aspect of the Climate Panic has been more lucrative and ubiquitous than the craze for electric cars. They’re marketed as environmentally friendly and sustainable, and therefore deserving of huge government subsidies to profit-making companies, tax incentives, and preferential treatment. Some states, including California, are planning to outlaw the competition, driving efficient, reliable gas-powered cars from its roads (pardon the pun).

And the top-selling electric car, by a long way, is the Tesla — the project of Elon Musk, whom many conservatives and Christians have started to see as a hero for his politically incorrect statements and his liberation of X (formerly Twitter) from far-left and Deep State censorship. If the recent attempted murder of President Trump had occurred before Musk’s takeover, the facts about the case might not even be emerging on social media now. We might indeed believe that a clumsy Trump stumbled into a passing bullet, as The Babylon Bee recast CNN’s initial coverage.

So what should we think of Elon, who recently endorsed President Trump for reelection? The picture is more complicated than you might think.

Musk Smashes Censorship … a Little Too Hard

Of course we welcome the end of stifling speech codes aimed at dissenting doctors, political figures, and ordinary citizens — conducted arbitrarily with no real right of appeal, and lifetime bans for people ranging from Trump himself to attorney Sidney Powell and the Stream’s own John Zmirak (the first two have been unbanned, but Zmirak has not).

In another welcome headline, Musk just announced that he’s moving his corporate headquarters from California to Texas to protest the Golden State’s new law saying schools don’t have to tell parents when their kids are trying to transition their genders or pronouns.

Give credit where it is due. It’s nice to have a media billionaire taking such stands.

But there’s a dark side to the story. Along with lifting the bans on conservative speech, Musk has welcomed pornographic images and videos in the name of “free expression.” In its official user policies, X clearly states:

You may now share any consensually produced adult nudity or sexual behavior, as long as it’s properly labelled. … [S]exual expression, whether visual or written, can be a legitimate form of artistic expression.

This on an app which lives on the phones of most people’s children.

Cars That Won’t Go Far and Charging Stations That Fail

If he’s welcoming the poison of porn into our young people’s worlds, Musk is also contributing to a host of other evils via Tesla. These range from inconveniences and waste all the way to genuine human rights abuses that threaten millions of kids. But we will start small, and work our way up.

Start with uncertain, unreliable transportation. Supposedly “green” electric cars (often charged with electricity produced by fossil fuels, in fact) are meant to displace gas vehicles, replacing the network of ubiquitous, affordable gas stations with electrical charging centers. But those centers are few, far between, and unreliable — especially in bad weather and natural catastrophes when reliable travel is needed most.

Last week, Hurricane Beryl knocked Tesla’s supercharging network out at many Houston locations. Stations nationwide report persistent charging problems in cold weather. Chicago-area Tesla charging stations were lined with dead cars in freezing cold during last winter, while gas-powered cars whizzed past. Would you want your local fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances to be made by Tesla?

Sales keep flagging for Teslas and similar vehicles. According to new data-driven research led by a Harvard Business School fellow, this is due to owners’ deep frustration with the state of charging infrastructure, including unreliability, erratic pricing, and lack of charging locations.

The report cites both “range anxiety” and “charging anxiety.” In other words, people worry how far their cars will actually go, and whether they’ll really reach the next charging station — assuming that the weather hasn’t knocked it out.

How Much Does It Even Cost to Fill ‘er Up?

And charging your car is neither cheap nor even transparent: Unlike traditional gas stations, which often display fuel prices on lighted signs, EV stations rarely advertise what charging will cost. Drivers often arrive without any information on what to expect or how to make comparisons, because there’s no reliable way to find the most cost-effective places to charge.

It sometimes happens that people hold up gas stations and take the cash — but even when they do, the gas station still functions. What happens at EV charging points? Thieves have begun stealing the copper charging cables to sell, leaving the charging centers nonfunctional for days. Geekwire reports,

In the last 12 months alone, thieves have stolen at least 100 EV charging cables across the city (Seattle, WA) in pursuit of the small amounts of copper within that can be sold as scrap.

Because of problems like this, and despite all the government arm-twisting, EV sales are stagnant or falling. Tesla’s second-quarter sales in Europe for 2024 were down sequentially. Year-to-date sales are down 11% year-over-year. Tesla “sold only about 60,000 Shanghai-made vehicles in China in June (2024), marking a near 20% drop year-on-year.”

Are electric cars really “greener,” though? That’s the one strongest argument for them. But it doesn’t hold up.

These Cars Aren’t Green but Brown

Studies have found that particulate matter emissions (the kind that makes people cough) from electric car tires are 1,850 times higher than those from regular ICE vehicles. That’s because the cars’ massive, costly batteries make them so much heavier. But the environmental impact of EVs is far more visible in developing countries, where the poor pay the price for our “green” virtue-signaling.

As I’ve written here before, the rare earth minerals (such as cobalt) used for the manufacture of EV batteries are excavated and processed in pollution-intensive way, poisoning the environment surrounding those plants and impacting hundreds of communities.

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Tesla purchases raw materials from the natural resources-mining giants, despite those companies’ documented human rights abuses in desperately poor countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Kamoto Copper Co. is Tesla’s primary supplier of cobalt, and while it runs a large mechanized mine, it also buys additional cobalt from area “artisanal” mines, which almost certainly employ child labor, and in some cases forced labor. Former Trump advisor Peter Navarro, unjustly imprisoned for defying the January 6 committee, mentioned this scandal in his rousing speech at the Republican National Convention:

Critics charge that more than 40,000 child slaves in DRC are forced to work in cobalt mines so that companies like Tesla can produce their electric cars. Kamato’s parent company, Glencore, topped the rankings for human rights abuse in 2023. Glencore has racked up at least 70 allegations since 2010, including accusations of corruption and poor working conditions, according to the nonprofit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.

Stop Poisoning Kids, Okay?

Elon Musk has been confronted with these abuses, but he hasn’t corrected them. During a Tesla meeting in May 2023, Musk said, “We’ll put a webcam on the mine. If anybody sees any children, please let us know.” But last week Forbes reported:

Musk’s promised webcam hasn’t materialized as expected. Rather than a live camera feed, the Kamoto Copper Co. that’s Tesla’s main cobalt source instead posts a single photo of the sprawling mine complex in southern Congo every month, taken by an Airbus satellite orbiting far above the Earth. There are no children to be seen, but that’s because the resolution isn’t nearly sufficient to reveal anything smaller than processing facilities and the scarred landscape of a highly industrialized open-pit mine.

Using his massive platform, Musk promotes a less hysterical version of the Climate panic, which makes Tesla’s profit possible. 

So we should welcome Musk’s positive stances on parents’ rights in California, and free political speech. But we must ask him to please stop poisoning children’s minds in America and their bodies in places like Congo.

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.