The Right Hates It When Billionaires Use Their Fortunes to Impact Public Discourse Unless of Course It's Elon Musk

Considering what a hard-on Conservatives have for capitalism, that kindest and most egalitarian of social structures, you’d think they’d love billionaires.

That is true to some extent but the right’s bogeymen have often been billionaires. The way the right hyperventilates about George Soros you’d think he was at every Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump rally personally handing out hundred dollar bills in order to create the despicable illusion that people somehow disliked Trump’s personality and thought he did a bad job as president.

Obviously that can’t be the case. After all, Trump rallies average six or seven million attendees and the only time Biden ever held a rally the only person who showed up was a hobo and that was only to ask the president for money to buy a sandwich.

At the same time the right sees Soros as an all-powerful puppet master sinisterly controlling a country the billionaire despises out of deference to his Communist masters.

Also, he’s a Nazi. Soros is inconveniently Jewish but that has not kept his conspiracy-minded detractors from continually depicting him as a proud supporter of the racial views of Adolf Hitler.

The right-wing suspicion of billionaires is frequently anti-Semitic in nature. They see wealthy Jews as parasitic monsters obsessed with power who buy politicians and the media so that they can control them.

The right is also deeply skeptical of billionaires who devote their lives and their fortunes to charity, to fighting poverty and sickness and hunger. Look at the way they talk about Bill Gates.

I will be the first to concede that Gates’ association with Jeffrey Epstein is unsavory to say the least but he also seems like someone who genuinely wants to make the world a better place and is committed to using his vast fortune to make that happen.

In the paranoid minds of the right, the only reason ANYONE would possibly do nice things for society is because they’re secretly baby-eating monsters obsessed with perpetrating a fake image as humanitarians.

Conservatives don’t just seem skeptical, if not outright contemptuous of civic-minded billionaires like Soros and Gates: they’re contemptuous of the concept of charity as a whole.

The perfect billionaire Conservative looks at someone starving in the streets and thinks that it’s not the government’s job to help them or the job of the wealthy either, and that dying in poverty teaches important life lessons for the next generation.

That’s Donald Trump. He took pride in not paying taxes but he also donates a shockingly tiny amount of his fortune to charity. Oh, and also his “charity” was shut down for misconduct and Trump was ordered to pay two million dollars in damages to eight different charities he ripped off.

That’s how the right thinks billionaires should behave. They should not have to pay taxes but it’s also wrong to expect them to give back in any other way either.

Conservatives think it is a terrible thing for billionaires to use their money and power to influence politics unless of course the billionaires in question are also Conservatives.

Look at the Koch brothers. Seemingly no one on the right had a problem with them wielding enormous secret power.

Or look at Elon Musk. Conservatives, particularly Donald Trump, have long railed against big tech for their supposedly biased ways. Twitter mogul Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are nearly as reviled among the MAGA crowd as Soros and Gates.

But when the richest man in the world proposed buying Twitter for the sake of having more power, control and influence than he already has as, you know, the richest man in the world, the right was overjoyed.

They saw Musk as a liberating figure who would un-ban all their heroes, particularly Trump. He would strike a crucial blow in favor of free speech and finally make it possible for his beloved The Babylon Bee to deadname whoever they want without consequences, particularly trans whistleblower Chelsea Manning, reportedly his ex-girlfriend Grimes’ new partner.

Musk has been tough to nail down politically. To me his politics are less conventionally left or right than the petty politics of personal resentment. Democrats and unions threatened his bottom line so suddenly they were radicals intent on pushing away reasonable people like himself.

The trans community criticizes The Babylon Bee for literally having one joke, and that joke being transphobic and terrible, and now Musk wants to buy Twitter in order to protect their sacred ability to be openly, explicitly transphobic.

Musk has the politics of an emotionally stunted 19 year old shit-poster out to piss off their solidly Democratic mom and dad rather than a 50 year old father of eight with more money than anyone else in the world. The bogus “freedom” that Musk may or may not be buying in the very near future is ultimately nothing more than the freedom to be as obnoxious and hateful as you want without suffering negative consequences for your actions.

That, friends, is no real freedom at all.

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