The Patriot Post® · In Brief: The Rise of the 'Conservative' Celebrity
We’ve certainly been watching the recent career moves of billionaire eccentric Elon Musk with interest. We’ve cheered some of his moves at Twitter, exposing the speech-crushing ways of the social media giant. We do hope he corrects the company’s course. We’ve also agreed with how described the leftward shift of the Democrat Party. But beyond his love for free speech, we’ve never thought of him as an ideological brother. Neither does political analyst Steve Larkin.
The Right has a strange relationship to celebrity. To many conservatives, celebrities are bad, unless they can possibly be considered right-wing, in which case they become heroes and their flaws are ignored in the name of fighting the culture war.
Just consider the case of Elon Musk.
Yes, Musk is a businessman and an investor and fabulously wealthy. But he’s also a celebrity far more famous than your average billionaire. His purchase of Twitter was a great way of keeping himself at the center of the elite discourse that the platform helps drive, thus amplifying his celebrity. And he’s used that extra attention to needle the Left, drawing cheers from the right — even though, as recently as a couple of years ago, it would have been inconceivable for anyone to consider him a right-winger.
Musk is a Silicon Valley guy. He named two of his children X AE A-XII and Exa Dark Sideræl. He makes electric cars, and I remember when those were the exclusive province of effete liberals. … He smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He has at least nine children with several different women, some of whom were not legally married to him when they gave birth. … He frequently praises China and the CCP, either because the presence of his businesses there requires him to toe Beijing’s party line or because he actually believes what he’s saying. Before this year he had only ever voted for Democrats.
In short, Musk’s long-standing beliefs, actions, and aesthetic make him about the last person you’d expect to be associated with conservatism in the public imagination.
Nevertheless, for the feat of exposing the Left, Musk is cheered widely in conservative spheres. Larkin also points to the journalists Musk has releasing his Twitter Files — Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss — as well as figures like Dave Chappelle or Johnny Depp. “But the most obvious such parallel to Musk,” says Larkin, “is Donald Trump himself.”
Appearance has been at least as important as reality to each man’s rise to right-wing prominence: The main way Trump owned the libs was merely by existing and being the president, just as the main way Musk owns the libs is merely by existing and owning Twitter. They are talismans, and as such it hardly matters what they do or don’t do: The mere fact that they make the Left mad is enough.
Trump has a much better record of accomplishing conservative objectives, of course, whereas Musk seems perfectly content to irritate the right people. Thus, Larkin concludes:
Of course, if Musk’s real aim in purchasing Twitter was to be fêted by the right, he didn’t need a plan. He just needed to engage in a power struggle with the people previously in charge of the platform and the liberals who regard his takeover as a threat. As Trump proved, a willingness to fight the enemy with sufficient gusto is enough to make right-wingers abandon their qualms; they will happily take all the high-profile culture warriors they can get. And if many of the principles conservatives used to stand for get lost in the bargain? Well, that’s a price many on the right are now willing to pay for the sugar high of owning the libs.