The fix is in.

District Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday blocked the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his investigations into President-elect Donald Trump.

It was so lucky for Trump that he got to appoint the drastically underqualified Cannon while he was drastically underqualified president.

In the filings, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira asked Cannon to block the release of the special counsel report, which is expected in the coming days before Trump is sworn in as president for the second time. The two men, who both worked for Trump and have pleaded not guilty to obstruction-related crimes, argued that Smith does not have the authority to release the report because Cannon previously deemed his appointment as special counsel unlawful. (The 11th Circuit is currently considering DOJ’s appeal of that ruling as well).

Cannon was appointed by Trump during his first term in office.

And is drastically underqualified and wholly in the can for Trump.

The fast-moving dispute comes less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, at which point his Justice Department – to be led largely by appointees drawn from his criminal defense team in the case before Cannon – will take over the handling of the investigation.

And if that’s not dirty I don’t know what “dirty” is.

Erm.

Remember that guy who hacked a bunch of people with an axe in a 7-11 because a lesbian refused to hook up with him?

He’s out of prison.

Axe attacker Evie Amati laughed as she was released from jail, eight years to the day after the horrific attempted murders of customers at a Sydney 7-Eleven outlet. 

Amati, a trans woman, smashed an axe into the head of one man at an Enmore service station on January 6, 2017 before attacking a female customer and another man. 

But at 9.30am on Monday, Amati, 32, walked out of the Bolwara Transitional Centre at Emu Plains women’s prison smiling, sporting a new look and a ghoulish jail tattoo. She emerged into daylight grinning broadly, and had so many boxes and bags of possessions that a large trolley was needed to transport them all.

Amati, wearing jeans, Vans skater shoes and a sleeveless maroon top, was swiftly escorted from custody to a waiting female friend’s car before being whisked away. With shiny pink polished nails, full make-up and bleached blonde hair with a thick black streak, Amati had the word ‘DEAD’ inked in big blue letters on the knuckles of the left hand. Other disturbing arm tattoos included a skeleton dressed in a suit, and a zombie eating a can of Campbell’s labelled ‘Brain Soup’. 

A real comedian.

Maryam remembers.

Ten years ago today.

Dominic Green at The Free Press has the details.

The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

That’s a very large claim. Is it really Europe’s biggest peacetime crime? Bigger than what Anders Breivik did for instance? Bigger than the July 7 bombings in London? These things are hard to measure.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia.

Which are, of course, two very different categories. We’re allowed to hate religions. Islam is peculiarly hateful in many ways. It’s revoltingly hostile to women. We’re allowed to say that, and it’s imperative that we remain allowed to say that.

The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

Class snobbery as in “the girls are slags so they don’t matter.”

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.

What we do know is that the epicenter was the postindustrial mill towns of England’s north and Midlands, where immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh settled in the 1960s. White locals say the grooming and rapes began soon after. In Rotherham, the rundown Yorkshire city where the scandal first broke, local police and councilors were notified about systematic grooming and sex abuse by 2001. The first convictions did not occur until 2010, when five men of Pakistani background were jailed for multiple offenses against girls as young as 12 years of age.

…

Several girls were murdered. In Manchester in 2003, Victoria Agoglia was repeatedly drugged and raped before being given a fatal dose of heroin at the age of 15. In Blackpool that same year, 14-year-old Charlene Downes disappeared—her body was never found.

In Telford, Azhar Ali Mehmood groomed Lucy Lowe from the age of 12 and impregnated her at 14. He burned her alive in her own home with her mother, her disabled sister, and her unborn second child, also fathered by Mehmood. Mehmood was jailed for life in 2001 for murder—not sex crimes.

In the age of “Say Her Name,” no one important thought it worth saying the names of these girls. The girls, their rapists told them, were “white slags,” worthless and expendable. Apart from a few whistleblowers, most of them women, and courageous journalists such as Julie Bindel, Andrew Norfolk, Douglas Murray, and Charlie Peters, the media showed no interest.

And the result is Elon Musk is showing interest, which is almost as bad as Donald Trump showing interest would be.

Well clearly this business of Musk and the grooming gangs is going to run and run, so let’s remind ourselves of the background.

The row between Mr Musk and Starmer centres around a series of high-profile cases where groups of men – mainly of Pakistani descent – were convicted of sexually abusing and raping predominantly young white girls around the UK.

In 2012 The Times newspaper investigated Rotherham grooming gangs, which led to a major inquiry. At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, according to a 2014 report written by Prof Alexis Jay. The report made headlines in the UK and around the world and led to major debates in Parliament.

Similar scandals also occurred in other towns, including Oldham, Oxford, Rochdale and Telford, leading to a national inquiry into child sexual abuse, which was also led by Prof Jay.

How did Oxford get in there along with three northern industrial cities?

The CPS was criticised for a decision not to proceed with a prosecution in Rochdale on the basis that it viewed the main victim as “unreliable” following an investigation between August 2008 and August 2009. That decision was overturned later by Nazir Afzal in 2011 after [he was] appointed by Starmer as the CPS chief prosecutor for north-west England.

Speaking to BBC Verify, Mr Afzal said that the view of prosecutors not to proceed to trial at the time was “if the police aren’t happy that she will give credible evidence then we’re not happy either”. He went on to say that he had reviewed and reversed the decision as “I believed what she [the victim] was saying”.

That’s always an issue in prosecution, as far as I know – there’s always worry about how a witness will come across to a jury, worry about how a victim will come across, worry about which way to jump. It’s not easy. We on the outside can think “They just should have [etc]” but we don’t know.

The elephant in the room is the question of whether the police and prosecutors erred on the side of doing nothing because the accused men were Pakistani, aka [whispers] Muslim. Would it be “Islamophobic” to prosecute them? Would it be controversial? Would it look like whities bullying brown people? Would it look like bullying [gasp] a community? I have no idea whether or how much that influenced decision making, but some people clearly suspect it did.

On a related note, Elon Musk is absolutely the wrong person to be re-lighting this fire.

Trudeau has resigned.

Trudeau, the latest incumbent to be driven out amid rising voter dissatisfaction worldwide, said it had become clear to him that he cannot “be the leader during the next elections due to internal battles.” He planned to stay on as prime minister until a new leader of the Liberal Party is chosen.

…

The political upheaval comes at a difficult moment for Canada internationally. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on all Canadian goods if the government does not stem what Trump calls a flow of migrants and drugs in the U.S. — even though far fewer of them cross into the U.S. from Canada than from Mexico, which Trump has also threatened.

Canada is a major exporter of oil and natural gas to the U.S., which also relies on its northern neighbor for steel, aluminum and automobiles.

After Trudeau’s announcement, Trump, who for weeks has referred to Canada as the 51st state, did so again and incorrectly claimed on social media that the prime minister resigned because Canada relies on subsidies from the U.S. to stay afloat.

…

Trudeau had been planning to run for a fourth term despite his party’s displeasure. Prime ministers in Canada can stay in office as long as their government or party has the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, but no Canadian prime minister in more than a century has won four straight terms.

It seems that Labour made a slight error. It’s tricky finding an ordinary news story on it, because of the taboo on slang words for the female genitalia. Yet again social meeja has to substitute.

What was that about grooming again?

Politico on Macron on Musk:

Emmanuel Macron took a not-so-thinly veiled swipe at Elon Musk on Monday, accusing him of meddling in European politics and backing what the French president called a “reactionary movement” across the world.

While Macron did not name the controversial tech billionaire in his annual speech to French ambassadors gathered in Paris, the description was unmistakable.

“Ten years ago, who could have imagined it if we had been told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany,” Macron said in a wide-ranging foreign policy speech at the Elysée Palace.

Macron’s comments, however, did not go as far as those of Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who said Monday he found it “worrying” that Musk, “a man with enormous access to social media” would be so “directly involved” in the politics of other nations.

Musk is facing mainstream political backlash in Europe after wading into domestic politics in Germany and the United Kingdom. He came out in support of the far-right Alternative for Germany ahead of a snap legislative election in the country next month, which the government in Berlin and various political leaders argued amounted to election interference. Musk has also sparred with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and, in a surprising move, urged Nigel Farage to stand aside as leader of the right-wing Reform UK party.

There have been meddling grandiose right-wing media moguls before – William Randolph Hearst for one, Rupert Murdoch for another. They did a lot of damage.

The problem grows and grows.

When the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was asked in an interview about the barrage of insults being directed at him and other German leaders by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, his reply was: “Don’t feed the troll.”

Speaking to the German weekly Stern, Scholz described the criticisms as nothing new. “You have to stay cool,” he said in the interview. “As Social Democrats, we have long been used to the fact that there are rich media entrepreneurs who do not appreciate social democratic politics – and do not hide their opinions.”

He said he would make no efforts to engage with Musk, who has endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in next month’s federal elections and will host a live discussion on his social media platform X with its candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel. “I don’t believe in courting Mr Musk’s favour. I’m happy to leave that to others,” he said. “The rule is: don’t feed the troll.”

Meanwhile the troll is munching on all of us.

Since taking the reins of X, Musk has increasingly used the social media platform’s global reach to push his own political views. After spending a quarter of a billion dollars to help secure Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Musk has used his influence to back far-right and anti-establishment parties across the continent, while attacking some of its most prominent centre-left leaders.

…

In recent days Musk has waded into UK politics, calling on King Charles to step in and dissolve parliament as he criticised the government over child grooming cases

Unelected strongman calls to unelected strongman to stamp out democracy. Good plan.

Musk sez: Declare war on the UK, or no?

Elon Musk has questioned whether the United States should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government” after hitting out [raging] at top U.K. lawmakers.

…

Musk accused the U.K. Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips of being a “rape genocide apologist” on Friday, before publishing a series of posts calling for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to be ousted and face jail time over how child grooming gangs and other criminals who targeted children have been prosecuted.

His criticisms of the U.K. government over the weekend culminated in a poll, where he posed the concept of “liberating the people of Britain” to the platform’s users.

He’s not even a little bit funny.

The Pissed Off Lawyer, aka the lawyer who claims to be a man but is a woman, has a pattern. It’s not a good pattern.

No. That’s wrong. The issue really is the ideology. Nobody wants to genocide the people who believe trans ideology, we want to get rid of the ideology. Those really are two different things.

But, the next day…

One reason trans ideology is so goddam warped is because it insists on this translation of “trans ideology is dumm” to “they wanna kill us.”

Lying, exaggerating, translating, catastrophizing are all bad, especially for the ability to think. Live long and prosper, without the ideology.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Friends in high places.

Taiwan is almost the size of Australia, population-wise. The idea that the democratic freedom of some 23 million people ought to be erased for any reason, let alone some romantic interpretation of the Maoist takeover of Beijing in 1949 or whatever, is absurd to me.

I know that “freedom” is a word that has been somewhat tainted by the Right, turned into empty jingo, but seriously: freedom versus non-freedom is not a two-way street. When people obtain freedom, they have to fight to keep it. And when they lose it, it’s often almost impossible to get it back. The Chinese Communist Party is a force for destroying individuals’ freedom, and the Taiwanese democracy is its opposite: a force for human rights. The millions of Taiwanese are not pawns and it’s not arbitrary which government they end up subjected to. Under the CCP, their lives and freedoms are immeasurably worse off, and their ability to voice their disapproval and choose for themselves a better alternative is also cut off: under China it’s a one-way street. It’s night and day. For the Taiwanese people, I choose day over night.

(In my local Chinatown, even though the grocers are all Mainland Chinese, they hawk imported green Taiwanese pomelos, which have become symbols of Taiwan’s independence. Baskets of them are kept next to the cash-out like impulse purchases, where you’d normally find packs of gum or candy bars. Tossing one of these overpriced imported sour grapefruits into your grocery bag has become an act of defiance against China’s attempts at authoritarian control over the island. It seems to have had an effect. Long live the Taiwanese pomelo! Long live Taiwan!)

Helen Lewis makes an important point in her piece in the Atlantic on male trans athletes in women’s sport.

The story of transgender women competing in female sports is frequently told as one of inclusion—creating opportunities for people to compete as their authentic selves. But for athletes such as Liilii, these rules were a matter of exclusion. Every spot taken by someone with a male athletic advantage is an opportunity closed to a female rival.

It’s obvious but it doesn’t get put that way often enough. Bro, your “inclusion” is our exclusion so shut up.

…the performance gap between men and women is estimated to vary from 10 to 50 percent, depending on the sport. Yet progressives have downplayed that sex difference—which is obvious to many casual observers—because it challenges the idea that transgender women should be treated as women in all circumstances.

And transgender women, aka men, have somehow become the most fragile, the most needy, the most neglected, the most urgent, the most tragic set of people on the planet, and the consequence of that is that women have become the most cruel, heartless, hardened, domineering, unjust set of people on the planet.

On Joe Biden’s first day in office as president, he issued an executive order opposing discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Its language did not explicitly address college athletics but declared that all “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.”

Because it’s fine for girls to be unable to learn without worrying about encountering a boy in the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.

Throughout the Biden administration, activist groups waved away tough questions, claiming that there was no evidence of “trans athletes” having advantages. But such generic phrasing is deceptive. No one is arguing that trans men have an advantage over biological males; when trans men compete in the male category, they tend to struggle. The actual question is whether natal males have an advantage over natal females. 

This is why I keep insistently pointing out that dishonest generic “trans athletes” that news outlets like the BBC are so very fond of. It’s blatant shameless manipulation and it needs to stop.

When all else fails there’s still the hilarity of Musk v Everyone.

Elon Musk has called for Nigel Farage to be replaced as leader of Reform UK, just weeks after reports the multi-billionaire was in talks to donate to the party.

In a post on his social media site X, Musk said Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party – but did not explain his reasoning.

Farage suggested this was due to a disagreement over Musk’s support for far-right activist Tommy Robinson.

No you’re the sellout no you are no you are

The comment from the tech entrepreneur comes hours after Farage described Musk as a “friend” in an interview on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme.

Of course it does. That’s Musk’s sense of humor, as well as his sense of entitlement and his sense of spite and his sense of Musk First. “Call me a friend will you??! Like hell I am!”

In the interview broadcast earlier on Sunday, Farage told the BBC that the fact that Musk “supports me politically and supports Reform doesn’t mean I have to agree with every single statement he makes on X”.

So Musk hastened to provide him with statements on X to not agree with. Everyone wins!

Originally a comment by Arcadia on Sez who?

This one chafes, it really does. I’m a lifelong couch potato, and ParkRun has been instrumental in changing that for me, in my forties. ParkRun is inclusive, in genuine and meaningful ways. When I go, I see all elements of society, coming together to cover five kilometres on foot or in a wheelchair. There’s no judgment over being slow, old, overweight, uncool, poorly coordinated, disabled, etc. There’s hardcore fitness fanatics, gym bros, skinny young fashionable types, parents with kids, pregnant women, young keen kids dragging their parents along, young sulky kids being dragged along, middle aged walkers, older ex triathletes, a young disabled man with his carer who can keep up and his mum who has a harder time keeping up with him at her age, two wheelchair users, a young man doing Olympic style race walking, fundraisers in logo shirts, silly hats or pink tutus, people who are rehabbing back injuries and more. Gender special people too. You can’t even come last: that’s the tail walker’s job (which you can volunteer for if you like).

I’ve been to more than fifty now. My sister has done 200. It means something to me.

However, ParkRun has very few winners, and they’re all male anyway, obviously. ParkRun has no bathrooms, no separate men’s and women’s events, no pronouns required. Yes, you can Self ID when you sign up, but that only impacts the statistics pretty mildly, unless you’re actually a competitive woman (and I’m not, most women are better than me still).

I won’t stop being angry about this, but I won’t stop going either. I won’t stop advocating that they restore the women’s category, especially where the seizure of women’s wins is particularly egregious, such as by criminals.

I also suspect the vast majority of attendees have no idea, which is all the more reason to keep going and keep grumbling about it.

I’ve written about the grooming gangs many times over the years. It’s a very large and very horrible subject.

Today in the Telegraph:

How the grooming gangs scandal was covered up

Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs of men while the authorities failed to protect them.

A review of the abuse in Oldham was released in 2022, but its terms of reference only stretched from 2011-2014. Survivors from the town said that they wanted a government-led inquiry to cover a longer period, and catch what the previous review had missed. In Jess Phillips’s letter to the council, revealed by GB News, she said she understood the strength of feeling in the town, but thought it best for another local review to take place.

I take it “local review” means smaller review with smaller audience that will draw less attention and create less of a fuss. Well why do that? Why not draw more attention and more of a fuss? (This is apparently why Musk is weighing in. I still think he’s the wrong guy to do any weighing in, for a lot of reasons.)

Across the country, in towns and in cities, on our streets and in the state institutions designed to protect the most vulnerable members of our society, authorities deliberately turned a blind eye to horrific abuse of largely white children by gangs of men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

Over time, details have come to light about abuse in Rotherham, in Telford, in Rochdale and in dozens of other places. But with the stories released in dribs and drabs, and the details so horrific as to be almost unreadable, the full scale of the scandal has still to reach the public.

Those dribs and drabs are why I’ve written about it so many times. I guess dribs and drabs can be shrugged off as local aberrations.

The Telford Inquiry found particularly brutal threats. When one victim aged 12 told her mother, and the mother called the police, “there was about six or seven Asian men who came to my house. They threatened my mum saying they’ll petrol bomb my house if we don’t drop the charges.”

Yet in a pattern that would repeat itself, Telford’s authorities looked the other way. When an independent review was finally published in 2022, it found police officers described parts of the town as a “no-go area”, while witnesses set out multiple allegations of police corruption and favouritism towards the Pakistani community. Regardless of the reason, the inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”.

Sigh. This is one reason I keep pointing out the relentless tedious touchy-feely use of “communniny” to bully everyone into blind obedience. It’s such a cuddly word – but not all “communities” are cuddly. The Nazi community was a bit rough, the Ku Klux Klan community was brusque, the rapist community is a nuisance to women and girls. If you call it the “Asian community” you’re implying that all this rape is a gemütlich family affair, a little horsing around among friends.

And above all, there was the concern over community relations: senior council staff were terrified that the abuse of children “had the potential to start a ‘race riot’”.

So a few more children thrown into the fire every week to keep the dragon pacified.

Even now, discussing primarily Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs as primarily Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs causes problems; IPSO waded in to censure Home Secretary Suella Braverman for this claim last year, citing deeply flawed Home Office research in its ruling. Yet if we can’t be honest about the problems we’re facing, we won’t be able to address them.

In the words of Guy Dampier, a researcher at The Legatum Institute think tank: “The rape gangs scandal was a product of multiculturalism, which in practice meant the authorities turning a blind eye because victims were mostly white and their abusers largely ethnically Pakistani.”

It’s not evil to want to avoid being racist. It’s not evil to worry about prosecuting underdogs. On the other hand it’s pretty clueless to see men as underdogs and the young girls they rape as overdogs.

As shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick recently wrote in these pages, “a national inquiry is just the start: we need justice for the victims”. In his words, “this appalling scandal continues today because perpetrators still walk free and the officials who covered it up have been let off. The individuals who turned a blind eye to these crimes – and fed the most vulnerable women to the wolves – should be in jail.”

I expect this story is going to run and run…

Besties fall out already.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has distanced himself from Elon Musk’s support for jailed far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson. The tech multi-billionaire added his voice to calls to release Yaxley-Lennon, who was jailed in October after admitting contempt of court by repeating false claims against a Syrian refugee.

Farage has been proud to show off the support of Musk, flying to Florida to meet the owner of social media site X, who helped President-elect Donald Trump win the US election. But Musk’s support for Yaxley-Lennon is uncomfortable for Farage, who has made it clear over a number of years that he does not want him in his political party.

Welp, thieves fall out, as the saying goes.

On Friday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting hit out at [criticized] Musk’s attack on the government’s handling of grooming gangs, calling it “misjudged and certainly misinformed”.

Musk had posted a series of messages on X, accusing Sir Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute gangs that systematically groomed and raped young girls, and calling for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to be jailed.

I hereby call for Musk to be jailed. This is a fun game, and very useful.

A puberty blockers resignation:

A councillor has quit the Labour Party in a row over its transgender policies. Zoe Hughes, Exeter City Council member, said the party’s support of a ban on puberty blockers for under-18s questioning their gender identity was “a policy I refuse to stand by and accept”.

So she’s confident it’s a good thing to tamper with teenagers’ puberties? She’s that sure it’s better to stop normal physical maturation than it is to let it proceed without interference? It’s an odd thing to be that confident about. It’s not as if being frozen physically at age 12 or 13 has no consequences.

The Labour Party said it was putting the welfare of children first and its decision had been based on all of the available evidence.

Because puberty isn’t a disease. It’s right to try to block cancer and other progressive diseases, but puberty isn’t a disease. Blocking it is a very young fad, and it’s entirely possible that it’s a mistake.

Hughes said: “As a queer person, I have often felt alone and marginalised within society. However, I historically have felt that at least the Labour Party had my back.”

Hughes, who uses “they” and “them” as personal pronouns, said they were “nervous” when the Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he wanted to meet the author JK Rowling, who has expressed concerns about how trans issues affect women’s rights. Hughes said there would be “increasing self-harm” as a result of the decision on puberty blockers in “an already vulnerable and marginalised group”.

They added: “We have let the LGBT+ community down and I want no part of it – there is no LGB without the T for me, it is that simple.”

It may be that simple for her [them] but it’s not that simple in reality. It’s not just self-evidently true that tampering with children’s maturation is the pro-LGB thing to do.

Not surprisingly, Musk’s insults and interventions aren’t all that popular in Germany.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is polling in second place at 20% and has seen prominent support by multibillionaire Elon Musk.

The South African-born entrepreneur, 53, is seen as having intervened directly in the election campaign, as well as making provocative attacks on the leaders of Germany’s highest democratic institutions: first the chancellor and then the head of state, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. 

“Steinmeier is an anti-democratic tyrant!” Musk wrote on his social media platform X. “Shame on him.”

In sharp contrast to Donald Trump, yeah? Nothing tyrannical or anti-democratic about him, right?

Musk’s latest remarks came after he published an opinion piece in a German daily supporting the far-right AfD. A German government spokesperson later referred to the op-ed as evidence that Musk was seeking to sway the election.

…

The US billionaire’s next show of support for the AfD is expected to come soon: According to an AfD spokesperson, concrete plans are being made for a meeting between Musk and AfD leader Alice Weidel on the X-Space chat feature.

He’s not the boss of us.