Protests and Parades: What do you expect from hotbeds of liberalism like Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma?

Most of the national media has, at best, a barely concealed disinterest in rural and small-town America. There are exceptions—James Fallows is superb, Marketplace does a very good job, and NPR, partially due to its reliance on member stations to help with reporting, is well above average in general. But you can usually count on places like The New York Times to miss the nuances.

Just knowing the state doesn’t tell you much. There are some reliably Democratic parts of Texas and some extremely red parts of California. You have to go more granular, and look at urban density, demographics, and particularly voting records. With all that in mind, if you look over the map of protests, the most striking thing might well be how well represented they are in unexpected places.

Big cities in red state might tend to run left of the median.

The #NoKings march in Dallas, Texas is HUGE!

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— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran.com) June 14, 2025 at 1:14 PM

Nashville. #NoKings

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— Rikard Vilhelm (@rikardvilhelm.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 8:54 AM

Shortly after the Atlanta #nokings event kicked off at 10, organizers said Liberty Plaza near the state Capitol had already reached maximum capacity of 5,000.

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— journalistross.bsky.social (@journalistross.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 7:10 AM

But we're seeing a lot of protests where you very much would not expect them.

Why protest on Saturday? www.headsupnews.org/p/no-kings-p...

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— Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News (@froomkin.bsky.social) June 12, 2025 at 7:31 AM

 

 

Photos: Protests break out across Arkansas as part of 'No Kings' movement #NoKings www.5newsonline.com/article/news...

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— Saigonbond (@ogsaigonbond.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 4:34 PM

Little Rock's #NoKings march and rally has wrapped up. A few thousand demonstrators lined up before 10 a.m. to walk across the Broadway Bridget to North Little and back for a rally in a riverside park behind the Old State House. One of 15 planned in Arkansas today. @ainsleyplatt.bsky.social

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— Arkansas Advocate (@arkansasadvocate.com) June 14, 2025 at 11:31 AM

Thousands march in Fayetteville, Arkansas, for preserving our Democratic Republic and ensuring No Kings. fayettevilleflyer.com/2025/06/14/n...

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— Lucy Burns (@lucyburns.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 5:15 PM

 

While counter protesters may have shown up where you'd expect them, their numbers have mostly been tiny.

Huge turnout at the #NoKings rally in Hattiesburg, Missisisppi today, wrapping up and down both sides of the streets around City Hall. I'd estimate that about 300 people showed up, along with 2 pro-Trump counter-protesters.

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— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 10:38 AM

Our little East Texas town had about 200 "No Kings" protestors and across the street, wrapped in their Trump flags, 2! It was fabulous!

— Marcia Thill (@marcia46.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 12:49 PM

If you're not familiar with California, you probably have no idea how red the Central Valley is (a mistake I've seen the NYT make numerous times). 

The "No Kings" protest has mostly wrapped up in Bakersfield as of Saturday afternoon, many protesters staying to march together after the event ended at around 1 p.m.

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— KGET 17 News (@kgetnews.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 2:50 PM

 

Oklahoma (where I went to graduate school) got surprisingly large crowds despite thunder storms.

As did Arizona despite triple digit temperatures. 

Some paramilitary Trump supporters tried to crash the parties but they weren't prepared for the size and enthusiasm of the crowds.

About 660 attended the No Kings rally here in Kingwood, Texas, that lasted for three hours this morning. About a dozen masked Patriot Front members held a counter protest for 15-20 minutes.

— Mike Fast (@fastballs.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 1:40 PM

Nazi's, I mean Patriot Front, showed up at Springfield's Ozarks PrideFest/No Kings Protest. Locals and security kept these cowards out of the event. Probably saved their lives by doing that because we aren't here to play games.

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— Angela Crawford (@angeloftheozarks.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 7:50 AM

The support for the BLM protests was surprisingly broad, but this takes things to another level. And no place illustrates that better than Harrison, Arkansas—often called the most racist town in America.

(Harrison was also the center of anti-Confederate sentiment in the Civil War, but that's another stor and another thread.)

In one notorious incident, a filmmaker from L.A. stood in Harrison with a Black Lives Matter sign for 10 hours, during which he received a constant stream of abuse, profanity, and threats. That should give you some context for this.

Same town. Harrison, AR, a town that has a White Power radio station, had 200 people show up for No Kings. This is town is ground zero for the Klan. More blown away by this than I ever will be by the millions turning out anywhere else.

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— Angela Crawford (@angeloftheozarks.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 11:50 AM

Same for small Harrison, Arkansas! About 250-300 “No Kings” protesters with maybe five pro-Trump! Made me so proud! Now if people would vote like their lives depended on it because it does!💚

— Kerri (@arkiemycohiker.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 2:43 PM

For the record, I'm not saying that white supremacist enclaves have suddenly rejected MAGA. What's going on here is complicated and worthy of study. I'm not going to speculate too deeply on what it is, except to say that at this point, opposition to Trump—be it on the grounds of democracy, immigration, or the slashing of the social safety net—can be found pretty much anywhere you look in the summer of 2025.

Protests and Parades: just a reminder that the NYT gave more coverage than this to a literal dog-bites-man story

[First installment on our promised thread.] 

 When I was an undergrad back in Arkansas, a journalism professor who also happened to be a retired veteran newsman told the story about an incident in the northern part of the state. This would have been in the 50s or 60s, back when every decent-sized town had one or two daily papers. The sheriff and the mayor had gotten into an altercation that had led to one shooting the other in the middle of the day on the main street of town.

The following day, the paper mentioned the shooting briefly on the third page.

This was very probably the biggest thing that had ever happened in this town. Everybody knew both the killer and the victim. It was certainly discussed throughout the region for ages, but it was not something the editor wanted to talk about. It was unquestionably news; it just wasn't news the editor wanted to talk about.

I can vouch for my source here, but this is still an unverified anecdote, so you should feel free to take it with a grain of salt. Fortunately, I have a wealth of supporting evidence for an example of something very similar and quite recent.

There is no longer ONE WORD about yesterday's MASSIVE protests on the NYT home page. But a whole section about the miserable, misbegotten parade. SHAME!

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— Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News (@froomkin.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 10:49 AM

The Tea Party protests in April 2009 had about a third of a million people involved, and the political media treated it like a game changer for the Obama presidency. The No Kings rallies were AT LEAST ten times bigger than the Tea Party protests. Will the press keep pretending Trump is popular?

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 7:44 AM

Originally, even CNN made a point of stressing they were a Fox News stunt and then just absorbed their self serving stories bsky.app/profile/csha...

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 8:05 AM

I count 49 news headlines on the NYT mobile app home page right now, not including opinion, sports or cooking. None of them are about the massive protests yesterday.

— Joseph Menn (@joemenn.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 10:30 AM

 

 

 Though written days before the No Kings event, this column is remarkably relevant. 

When hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered across the US on 5 April for the “Hands Off” events protesting Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s governmental wrecking ball, much of the news media seemed to yawn.

The next day, the New York Times put a photograph, but no story, on its print front page. The Wall Street Journal’s digital homepage had it as only the 20th-most-prominent story when I checked. Fox News was dismissive; I stopped counting after I scanned 40 articles on its homepage, though there was a video with this dismissive headline: “Liberals rally against President Trump.”

The Guardian, CNN and some local news outlets paid more heed. The cable network offered live video from many American cities and a banner headline: “Millions of people protest against Trump & Musk.”

But overall, there was something of a shrug about the media coverage. It got much more attention from global news outlets than in the US.

The US media will get a chance to atone for these sins of omission this coming weekend when Americans once again get together, this time for Saturday’s “No Kings” day, which organizers describe as “a nationwide day of defiance”.

About that atonement.

Why is this piddly-ass parade a two-day story when the most massive protest of the Trump era is a one-day story? (WaPo for instance has 5 parade items on home page, 0 about NO KINGS)

— Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News (@froomkin.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 6:53 PM

 Back to Sullivan.

However, if journalists consistently look the other way, the power of peaceful citizen protests can fade.

In my American Crisis newsletter two days after the 5 April protests, I offered a few theories for why the media may seem so blasé.

First, I posited, much of the mainstream media tend to view this much as Fox News does. The protesters are just the usual suspects – “liberals” – doing the predictable thing.

Second, many large media companies are afraid that prominent protest coverage will be criticized by the political right as partisan, and they can’t bear that label.

Third, corporate media decision-makers, always focused the bottom line, are fearful of losing right-leaning readers and viewers; yes, we’ll cover this, they seem to say, but quietly, since we don’t want to antagonize anyone. In an era in which Trump has attempted to bully the press into submission, through denying access and through lawsuits, cowardice and capitulation are all too common.

 Coming up...

 

What do you expect from left-wing hotbeds like Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma?

About that 3.5% rule.

The Dog that Didn't Bark.

The Schadenfreude Parade

  

Protests and Parades: Overview of a Thread

Started working on this Saturday evening and soon realized I was going to have way more than a single post’s worth. We’ll be dividing this up into bite-sized chunks over the next few days, but to get it started, here is an overview along with a few articles, quotes, images, general points, and whatever the hell you call tweets on Bluesky.

 The 3.5% Rule

This one's been making the rounds for a little while now. It basically says that once you pass a threshold of three and a half percent of the population engaged in non-violent protest, the government in question will fall. Loads of problems with this from a statistical and poli sci standpoint. If you want to get up to speed on the research, this BBC report is recommended.

From a new interview with @chenoweth.bsky.social, who coined the "3.5% rule": "Most of the movements in our database never got to that threshold and still won with like 1.8% or something like that." podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

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— Joshua J. Friedman (@joshuajfriedman.com) June 15, 2025 at 10:04 AM

While we can go back and forth about the rule itself, Margaret Sullivan's take on the journalistic ethics of downplaying these protests is characteristically solid.

 

Sullivan wrote her piece a few days ago, before things got really embarrassing for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the rest. More posts coming on this, but TL;DR:

Genie: ok what do you want for your birthday Trump: a military parade, oh, and also millions of people on the street chanting my name Genie: okie dokie

— Pwnallthethings (@pwnallthethings.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 4:40 PM

The protests were historic. The parade was humiliating.

Elliott Morris—who was always good and seems to have gotten even better now that he doesn't have ABC executives looking over his shoulder—has been working with the No Kings numbers and has come to some striking conclusions.

Our unofficial crowdsourced estimate of yesterday’s protest turnout is rising to 4.2-7 million as we gather more data. At this point potentially the second-largest single day of protest in U.S. history! www.gelliottmorris.com/p/no-kings-d...

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— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) June 15, 2025 at 10:07 AM

 

Morris is one of the best people in the field, and I'm inclined to trust his numbers. But even if he's wrong, we can be fairly certain he did a better job than the paper of record.

(I suppose they didn’t say how many thousands.)

The coverage of the No Kings demonstrations—particularly compared to the far smaller and almost entirely astroturfed Tea Party protests of a few years ago—reveals a double standard that even I find surprising, and this is by no means my first rodeo.

There is no longer ONE WORD about yesterday's MASSIVE protests on the NYT home page. But a whole section about the miserable, misbegotten parade. SHAME!

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— Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News (@froomkin.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 10:49 AM

The Tea Party protests in April 2009 had about a third of a million people involved, and the political media treated it like a game changer for the Obama presidency. The No Kings rallies were AT LEAST ten times bigger than the Tea Party protests. Will the press keep pretending Trump is popular?

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 7:44 AM

Originally, even CNN made a point of stressing they were a Fox News stunt and then just absorbed their self serving stories bsky.app/profile/csha...

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 8:05 AM

 

 

 

 

Why is this piddly-ass parade a two-day story when the most massive protest of the Trump era is a one-day story? (WaPo for instance has 5 parade items on home page, 0 about NO KINGS)

— Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News (@froomkin.bsky.social) June 15, 2025 at 6:53 PM

 

The New York Times and The Washington Post have also been bending themselves into Gordian knots trying to avoid saying the obvious about Donald Trump's birthday party.

Our military deserves better than this empty charade. Yikes. The tank squeaking over silence is incredible.

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 5:37 PM

You can see my thread on Bluesky comparing the techniques used by The Washington Post to make the parade look well-attened to the low-budget filmmaking tricks of Roger Corman protégés trying to make a dozen extras look like a crowd of thousands.

(NPR had a huge advantage here, since they didn’t actually have to find pictures and could simply misrepresent through audio.) 

Perhaps my favorite “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” moment came when the news showed clips of soldiers making almost no effort to stay in step. While the voice-overs talked about impressive military displays, the actual visuals suggested soldiers who were either disinterested or were actively looking to show their disapproval.

 Rolling Stone, on the other hand, seems to be getting back to its anti-establishment roots.

Corporate America did its part. “Special thanks to our sponsor Lockheed Martin,” the MC said around 6:30 p.m., shouting out America’s biggest defense contractor. The MC later thanked “our special sponsor Coinbase,” the cryptocurrency exchange. President Trump sure loves crypto — he reported in his financial disclosure Friday that he made $57 million in the final months of 2024 after he and his family launched their own crypto exchange, World Liberty Financial. (That was before he launched his own $TRUMP meme coin.) 

Around 7 p.m., the big screens onstage that displayed the American flags turned to logos for UFC, the mixed martial arts business. Later, the MC thanked “special sponsor Palantir,” a contractor hired to help Trump compile data on Americans across federal agencies. 

More to talk about later, but this should keep you busy for now.

 

Giving Patrick Boyle the last word on Musk v. Trump

As always, I feel slightly guilty about posting excepts from these transcripts (they're never as good without Boyle's delivery), but here are a few highlights.

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The biggest sign that things would not last of course was the  Jim Cramer tweet.  Once Cramer said he was bullish on the friendship, you could basically set your  watch to it knowing that disaster was looming.

Now, I hate to say this – but if Musk is right in saying that he made Trump – Trump should probably be a little bit nervous – as it has become somewhat noticeable over the years that everything Elon Musk makes – burns to the ground.

Judged on sales alone, the Cybertruck has been more of a flop than the Edsel – and that is a big deal, because the Edsel has gone down in history as an enduring icon of failure in the automobile industry. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, ineffective marketing, flawed design, a high purchase price, and poor workmanship led to “consumer blowback” when the Edsel was released in 1957. While Ford had planned to sell 200,000 Edsels a year, they only managed to sell 63,000 cars and had to scrap the new brand entirely two years later.

Elon Musk predicted that he would sell 250,000 Cybertrucks in the first year – after all, he had taken a million deposits – but Tesla ended up selling just under 50,000 Cybertrucks. The failure could possibly be blamed on ineffective marketing, a flawed design, a high purchase price, poor workmanship, and general fugliness – but none of this actually mattered – as, despite the decline in sales, Tesla stock rose 62.5% and hit an all-time high in 2024.

I asked Grok – Elon Musk’s chatbot – why the stock had gone up so much despite all of the bad news and the corporate underperformance. I figured Grok would be the best person – or graphics card – or whatever it is – to ask, as Elon Musk has described it as being “scary smart.” Grok explained to me that despite a decline in Tesla's vehicle deliveries, Tesla stock surged because of Elon Musk's political influence and because of optimism about Musk's close ties to Donald Trump and his advisory role within the U.S. government.

Grok said that investors were betting that Musk’s influence in government could lead to favorable regulatory changes for his businesses.

Now, I had to ask Grok if it thought that the investors had been foolish in their optimism, and it told me that “their enthusiasm looks like it was riding more on hope than on grounded reasoning.”

I wasn’t really sure about the ethics of the whole situation either, so I asked Grok if it thought that this was an example of crony capitalism – and it replied yes…

I’ll tell you – life has gotten a lot easier now that I can outsource my morality to a graphics card.

Yes, you can also count this as a recommendation

 I recently read (and took notes and reread numerous passages from) Edmund Morris’s biography of Edison, so you will be hearing quite a lot about it here on the blog over the next few weeks.

Though it got very good reviews, one aspect of the book that threw a number of critics was the reverse chronology. The prologue to the book was a short chapter on the death of Edison. The next chapter discussed the final decade of his life, with the title Botany (every chapter was titled after the field of science that Edison was focused on at the time).

One of the things I liked about this backwards telling of Edison's story is that we are introduced to the man not through his early and spectacular successes, but through arguably the greatest failures of his career: the disastrous mining operation that cost him his fortune, the attempt to be the first to create a viable system of talking pictures, his plan to bring military research into the 20th century, and his search for a viable native alternative for rubber production.

What's notable is that, though deeply flawed, all of these ideas were good—even great—and often remarkably prescient.

His innovations in automating mining did have an effect on the industry, and the advances he made in the production of cement had a huge impact on the construction industry, including providing much of the raw materials for Yankee Stadium. The only problem was that no level of innovation could overcome the cheap and superior ore recently discovered in the West.

When it worked, his talking picture system was, if anything, superior in sound quality to what came a decade later. Unfortunately, it didn't work that often. As with Langley's steam-powered planes, the work was impressive, but it was simply the wrong approach.

While the specific technology (all defensive—that was his one rule) that he and his team came up with during World War I was clever and often anticipated major advances of the next two or three decades, it was his plans for a massive, civilian-controlled research and development lab—in many ways DARPA decades before DARPA—that are truly remarkable and represent an incredible missed opportunity. It turned out the navy wasn't all that eager to be reformed.

Edison's last great project had him move into the entirely new field of botany, throwing himself in with characteristic energy and focus despite advanced age and failing health. His research was top-notch, showing that even in an area as far removed as could be imagined from electrical or mechanical engineering, he could set up top tier R&D teams. As with mining, however, Edison ran into the hard truth that no amount of innovation can overcome competitors with a better supply of a cheaper product. In this case, it was the one-two punch of the rubber cartels never making their anticipated production cuts, followed a few years after Edison’s death by the development of synthetic rubber, that doomed the idea of American-based production. Somewhat ironically, Edison himself was on record for decades having predicted that synthetic materials and fibers would soon replace most natural materials.

"A company for laying out plans to ship 100 million AI “companions” that will become a part of everyday life, but nobody to know what they are"

From Ed Zitron's newsletter:

So, now that we've got that out the way, here's what we actually know — and that’s a very load-bearing “know” — about this device, according to the Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman gave his staff a preview Wednesday of the devices he is developing to build with the former Apple designer Jony Ive, laying out plans to ship 100 million AI “companions” that he hopes will become a part of everyday life.

...

Altman and Ive offered a few hints at the secret project they have been working on. The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

The Journal earlier reported that the device won’t be a phone, and that Ive and Altman’s intent is to help wean users from screens. Altman said that the device isn’t a pair of glasses, and that Ive had been skeptical about building something to wear on the body. laying out plans to ship 100 million AI “companions” that he hopes will become a part of everyday life.

And from the blog eight years ago.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

"A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

Another excerpt from Charles Mackay's  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I believe "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" was an initial business plan for Groupon.

Some of these schemes were plausible enough, and, had they been undertaken at a time when the public mind was unexcited, might have been pursued with advantage to all concerned. But they were established merely with the view of raising the shares in the market. The projectors took the first opportunity of a rise to sell out, and next morning the scheme was at an end. Maitland, in his History of London, gravely informs us, that one of the projects which received great encouragement, was for the establishment of a company "to make deal-boards out of saw-dust." This is, no doubt, intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to show that dozens of schemes hardly a whir more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital, one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who were so mainly interested in the latter clause, should have taken so much interest in the first, is only to be explained on the supposition that the scheme was projected by a knot of the foxhunting parsons, once so common in England. The shares of this company were rapidly subscribed for. But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which showed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one, started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98 pounds of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000 pounds. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again

 

Closing thoughts on Trump vs. Musk

This exchange with Andrew Gelman in the comment section for Friday's post is already pretty much a post. After seeing my reply, Andrew directed me to his post from earlier this year which discusses a similar dynamic. 

“They had it all but they wanted more”: Left-wing radicals in the 1960s and right-wingers now 

From Friday:

I'm not saying that Trump and Musk don't have real disagreements, but . . . is part of this just straight-up game theory, kind of like what happens when labor and management attack each other when there are contract negotiations? Strikes, lockouts, and lawsuits are not good for business--they're negative-sum actions--but sometimes the union needs to strike, management needs to lock out, and both sides need to sue, just to demonstrate their seriousness. Basic negotiation strategies.

So, Musk can unleash the social-media attacks, not because it helps him but because it demonstrates his willingness to do so, which brings Trump to the negotiating table, and then Musk can walk it all back.

Another part of this is Musk's apparent confidence that, between he and his allies, and Trump and his allies, they control the news media discourse to the extent that if Musk says X, Y, and Z, and then he later unsays them, the original saying-of-it will be politically unimportant.

I'm not saying that this behavior is entirely strategic or that Trump and Musk don't have anger issues, just that this conflict fits in just fine into a negotiation pattern. Maybe Musk really felt the need to escalate to be taken seriously. And, as is often the case, emotional and rational behavior can go together; indeed, rational strategies can be most effective when they align with emotions.

Andrew 

 _______________

Andrew, 

It's true that these steps are entirely consistent with, and might be highly effective as, negotiating strategies. The problem is, there's no negotiation here. Unless we are talking about some sort of incredibly convoluted, 11th-dimensional chess where there's no way of knowing what the true objectives are, Musk had nothing to gain and virtually everything to lose by going rogue.

Musk was already getting about as much preferential treatment as the Trump administration could manage. They were throwing him government contracts and strong-arming other countries to adopt Starlink. They were killing investigations into his companies and letting him shut down regulatory departments that were supposed to keep him in line. The promise of even bigger graft to come had pumped his companies’ market cap above the trillion-dollar mark.

The only thing they hadn't given him was the continued EV subsidies, but he had to know those were going away—and even if he didn't, by focusing on the spending in the budget, he made it next to impossible to push for even more spending on electric vehicles. He even went so far as to explicitly rule out asking for them as part of his flame war.

Musk did have complaints, probably about the way he was shown the door (though even there, he absolutely had to leave in order to convince stockholders and investors he was focused on his companies). He didn't want to stay, but he might have felt upset over being encouraged to leave.

The key concept here is insult versus injury. Virtually nothing Trump and the administration had done had hurt Musk professionally or financially, but a great deal had been done to hurt his feelings—from passing over his guy for NASA to that humiliating exposé in The New York Times. You can't negotiate away insults. All you can do is get even.

As for the ability to make statements X, Y, and Z go away, some bells are very difficult to unring. Trump is currently trying to pass arguably the most unpopular budget in living memory. This is already a heavy lift, and having Musk attack it from the right does not make it any easier. Should this legislation fail, it would be an extraordinary blow, the ramifications of which would echo for a long time.

Though not of the same magnitude, bringing up Epstein and priming his followers to expect an economic downturn due to tariffs are two more genies that will be difficult to get back in their bottles. (It's worth noting that Musk has continued to double down on the Epstein thread.)

It is essential to remember that while Musk is, by most standards, the richest man in the world, that position is extremely precarious. Unlike Bezos or Gates or Buffett or any of the other men in the top five or ten, Elon’s fortune is almost entirely based on a bubble—the belief that companies, both over 20 years old, will, sometime in the near future, suddenly become massively profitable. If Tesla and SpaceX were valued based on even the most generous rational criteria, Musk's net worth would drop by a factor of at least 20 or 30. Balloon men, as a rule, should avoid knife fights—but that's exactly what Musk is engaged in.

(I'll probably rework this into a post next week.)

Mark

ps One other point I should have emphasized was just how insanely self-destructive the choice of targets was on Elon's part. Supposedly, this all started over excessive government spending, which is a strange place to plant your flag if your entire fortune is dependent on government money. At one point, in the heat of the exchange, Musk even basically came out and said, "I don't want your stupid old subsidies."

Now, as we enter the hangover stage of this whole ugly but amusing affair, Musk appears to have remembered—or been reminded—that he does, in fact, want those stupid old subsidies; that it was those taxpayer-funded checks that finally tipped Tesla into profitability and have barely kept it there.

As Patrick Boyle recently put it. "If you take the crony out of crony capitalism, what's the point?"

As of Monday, Musk appears to have entirely and unilaterally backed down.

A few days ago, Musk called for Trump to be impeached and suggested he was involved in pedophilia. Then Trump threatened to terminate Musk's federal contracts. Now Musk is back to promoting Trump.

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— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) June 9, 2025 at 7:53 AM

Musk has deleted his tweet accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files: x.com/elonmusk/sta... He also deleted a follow-up that said "Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out."

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— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 8:20 AM

Exclusive: Officials at NASA and the Pentagon are urging SpaceX competitors to quickly develop alternative rockets and spacecraft after President Trump threatened to cancel Space X’s contracts and Elon Musk’s defiant response.

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— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) June 7, 2025 at 10:27 AM

The Washington Post has a good post mortem. 

WASH POST: Trump called Musk “a big time drug addict” — and Musk and Bessent came to blows after Bessent called Musk a fraud. A damn circus. 🎪 www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 9:50 AM

 

And just a reminder.

“About a third of Tesla’s $35 billion in profits since 2014 has come from selling federal and state regulatory credits to other automakers.” www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

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— Max Boot (@maxboot.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 5:57 AM

Sunday night in LA County, 6/8/2025

Both statements are from last night. Note difference between how Trump characterizes conditions in LA ("RIOTS AND LOOTERS"), vs how the LAPD does ("Peaceful Protests")

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 11:16 AM

Hello. I live in Los Angeles. The president is lying.

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— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 2:54 PM

 As always with an LA story, I need to start by reminding everyone not familiar with the area just how big LA County is (and this very much is a county-level story). There are almost 10 million Angelenos in an area covering over 4,000 square miles. Inevitably, any Los Angeles story—particularly one involving a crisis—will be wildly unrepresentative. As with the Black Lives Matter protests and the wildfires, it is easy to get the impression of an entire city devastated, particularly if you rely on the East Coast-based press.

Here, I made a helpful graph to assist with “Cities are where very, very large numbers of Americans live” discourse, with real Census data and everything.

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— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy.co) June 8, 2025 at 6:31 PM

 

As best I can tell, the protests are limited mostly to downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. There's certainly been no sign that anything unusual is going on here in the Valley, and as far as I can tell, that's the case for most of the county.

That's not to say this isn't a big deal and we aren't a little on edge. I certainly am, and have been taking precautions in case things should get crazy. I filled my car with gas last night and made sure that all of my batteries are charged up, just in case the unexpected happens. Having 2,000 National Guard troops operating under questionable orders here in town will make a fellow a bit nervous.

I'll be perfectly honest, I wish we had a Jerry Brown or even an Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I have to admit Gavin Newsom has stepped up and is striking the right tone and doing the right things. This could very well be his moment, and so far he's meeting it.

In an interview with NBC News' Jacob Soboroff, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said that Pres. Trump "has created the conditions" surrounding the Los Angeles protests & called Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard "a manufactured crisis," via @msnbc.com — www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 10:47 PM 

I wish I could say the press was also rising to the occasion, but so far the coverage has been predictably weaselly and craven. The New York Times website is terrible. The Washington Post and CNN are only a little better. The extraordinary precedent-breaking and illegality—the transparent attempt to drum up crisis—are pushed aside for countless images of the same handful of acts of vandalism. Perhaps the most representative quote came from the NYT, which talked about ICE “firing back,” despite the fact they were the only ones actually firing.

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— George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 (@gtconway.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 6:09 PM

In itself it's not the biggest thing but Congress specifically passed a law requiring ICE to allow access to members of Congress because of Trump's antics in the first term. This isn't even norms. It's violating black letter statute law.

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) June 8, 2025 at 8:11 PM

Critically important point from Juliette. The only real justification for federalizing the nat guard over a governors objection is when the civil authorities are defying the law. This is attack on the sovereign right of the people of California to self government.

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) June 7, 2025 at 11:58 PM

I'll close with a historical note. It has been 60 years since the president activated the National Guard in a state without a request from its governor. That was LBJ, and he did it to guard civil rights protesters.

I have to admit, I did not expect us to get to impeachment and deportation by Thursday.

 [Dictated to my phone late at night then proof read by ChatGPT. Apologies in advance.]

Pretty much every Musk watcher I know expected it to get ugly eventually. From the very first days of the administration, it was obvious that two vindictive narcissists with Messiah complexes would not make for a stable co-governing arrangement. We even expected things to fall apart fairly quickly when the cracks started to show, but damn...

Still, other than the speed, none of this is surprising. The first thing you have to remember is that both of these men have anger issues, but Elon's are far more extreme. Journalists who have followed him closely (setting aside those inclined to softball questions and puff pieces) have been telling stories of random rage firings and unpredictable tantrums going back for decades. I assume everyone here remembers how, in response to a mildly critical comment, Elon accused a heroic diver of pedophilia, and how, a few years later, he responded to a drop-off in advertising at his newly purchased Twitter by sitting on stage in a crowded auditorium and telling those businesses to “go f*** yourself.”

Musk is also, like Trump, notoriously thin-skinned, and the past couple of weeks have seen all sorts of insults and injuries—from the New York Times piece (with obvious WH sources) exposing his heavy drug use to the proposed budget virtually guaranteeing that Tesla will never again be a profitable car company. It was probably inevitable that he would lash out and that Trump and his allies would reply in kind, but the escalation has been something to see.

Other than the speed, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this flame war is how exhaustive it has been. I’ve been following these stories way too closely for my own mental health, and I’m having trouble thinking of any major stone left unturned. In addition to calling for his deportation, Trump and his allies have threatened to destroy Musk’s business empire and turn the investigative force of the government against him. Musk has been even more thorough—in addition to calling for impeachment, he has gone after the budget, used Trump’s own language against him, suggested that the tariffs were about to cause a recession, and even briefly threatened to sut off the space station.

The part about impeachment is particularly interesting given JD Vance's role in the White House. Vance was always the princess in the arranged marriage, there to seal the alliance between Trump and the PayPal Mafia. Though it would be extremely difficult to force him out of office, it's hard to imagine him not being frozen out of the administration for the rest of the term.

[Quick question for the audience. While there have been cases of presidents and vice presidents being rivals and having ideological differences—think Reagan-Bush or Kennedy-LBJ, going all the way back to Adams and Jefferson—I'm trying to think of a situation quite this extreme. Does anyone have any suggestions?]

We will see how this plays out and whether or not things calm down over the weekend. It's difficult to imagine them maintaining this intensity, but it's also hard to see how some of these bridges can be unburned. If Musk loses his security clearance, if we are seeing the bubble finally pop with Tesla, or if the budget talks—which are already incredibly unpopular with voters—fall apart, things will not be going back to the way they were.

 

  

 Ahem...

 

'Sore subject': White House confirms physical brawl between key Trump allies 

A physical altercation between Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent precipitated the Tesla founder's quick ouster from the Trump administration, according to a report.

The incident was previously reported as a "screaming match" between the two men, but the physical aspect has since been confirmed by The White House.

The U.K.'s Daily Mail interviewed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon about the DOGE-related scuffle.

"'Scott Bessent called [Musk] out and said, 'You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you're at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?'' Bannon recounted. "And that's when Elon got physical. It's a sore subject with him. It wasn't an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him."

The altercation was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday, the Mail reported.

Retribution: The final frontier.

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— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 10:30 AM

Big balls showing up at work tomorrow:

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— James (@gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 1:04 PM

Matt Yglesias, Ro Khanna and the Abundance Boys better start hitting the books so they can figure out how holding billionaires accountable for blatant crimes is bad, actually.

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) June 5, 2025 at 1:51 PM

You can't make it up Congressman Scott Perry voted for Trump's "disgusting abomination" bill Now he's lambasting it and calling on the Senate to stop it How do MAGA Republicans live with their rank hypocrisy

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— Adam Cohen (@axidentaliberal.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 8:21 PM

MACO? (Musk always chickens out?) The SpaceX ceo softened his stance on decommissioning Dragon after a user on X told him to basically chillax… www.cnbc.com/2025/06/05/m...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 7:50 PM

He is now calling for Trump to nationalize SpaceX lmao

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— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 3:12 PM

 

I'm sure that's all the reassurance Trump will need. 

Vance spox on Musk's tweet: “It’s insane for anyone to even remotely suggest this. America is blessed to have President Trump leading our nation. He has delivered on promise after promise to the American people, and he has no bigger supporter than Vice President Vance.”

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— Jacob Gardenswartz (@reporterjacobg.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 5:58 PM

 

If this ever happens, it will be due to Martin Eberhard, Tesla's founding CEO and inventor of core tech in Tesla EVs, raising the issue in his lawsuit after Musk ousted him from the co. iirc @plainsite.org made those legal records available + @washingtonpost.com did *outstanding* in-depth reporting.

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 2:59 PM

Tesla is a small and imploding car company, overvalued by at least a factor of 20. The only reasons to buy it, other than a stunning faith in the greater fool theory, are the belief that some combination of three things will happen: robo-taxis will largely replace driving and Tesla will dominate the market despite being far behind on the technology; people will spend trillions of dollars on humanoid robots, and once again, Tesla will dominate that market despite again being far behind on the technology; the Trump administration will dump unprecedented amounts of money into the company. Up until recently, the third possibility was the only halfway realistic one. Now there is no rational reason for buying the stock.

Musk was supposed to be "focused" on Tesla after his DOGE special government employee period ended. Today, the company shed $152 billion in market cap (its worst single day hit ever) after Musk feuded with Trump. www.cnbc.com/2025/06/05/t...

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— Lora Kolodny (@lorak.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 2:17 PM

I think I’ve recognized that I don’t like Matt Yglesias because it makes me anxious when I can’t tell whether someone is mocking themselves or not

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— Uncovered The Human Hat (@kenwhite.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 3:43 

Musk vs. Trump is class Godzilla vs. Rodan

You can't really root for either, but it's still fun to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

1. We have two erratic vindictive narcissists with messiahs complex. Don't count on rational self-interest. 2. LBJ on Hoover "I'd rather have that son of a bitch inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in"

— markpalko.bsky.social (@markpalko.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 6:36 PM

3. Money's always nice, especially during midterms. 4. A rift between Trump and Thiel/Andreessen et al could cause problems, particularly given that JDV is Thiel's hand puppet. (and if things get ugly I guarantee "25th amendment" will start showing up in their Signal chats)

— markpalko.bsky.social (@markpalko.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 6:43 PM

One aspect that everyone seems to be missing is the timing. Musk went after Trump's bill shortly after someone in the White House fed The New York Times damaging details about his drug use.

The Trump White House has always been a snake pit with various factions battling for the limited attention of the addled president. Musk made more than his share of enemies, all of whom have the private numbers of various NYT reporters.

Musk is every bit as vindictive, erratic, prone to anger, and narcissistic as Trump, and with Musk, all of those things are amplified by heavy drug use. He has a long history of viciously and recklessly going after people who cross or insult him. What we're seeing is absolutely in character.

@lawrenceodonnell.msnbc.com: Musk vs. Trump. Trump's silence on Musk's budget bill attacks proves who’s afraid of whom youtu.be/HpYM6z5GXys?...

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— The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell (@lastword.msnbc.com) June 4, 2025 at 8:42 PM

It turns out Trump is secretly working with Elon Musk to tank his own bill. They’re so stupid, it hurts.

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— Hoodlum 🇺🇸 (@nothoodlum.bsky.social) June 4, 2025 at 7:34 PM

NEW: GOP rage with Musk spills out privately after break with Trump

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— Axios (@axios.com) June 4, 2025 at 3:40 PM

"40+ years there's been no Dem-disarray remotely comparable to Trump/Musk/Leo/etc fratricide." -- James Fallows

Prometheus Unbound and the Great Pumpkin Theory of Technological Innovation

[I wrote this back in 2023 and only came across it recently, but it still feels relevant, particularly now that Klein is on the talk show circuit hawking Abundance.]

The following is a bit of an unfair oversimplification of the techno-optimist philosophy, but not that unfair. Stripped down to its basics, the pitch we see again and again from Mark Andreessen, Noah Smith, and even to a degree from as Ezra Klein is that we are on the verge of an age of unimagined prosperity where all of our problems will be solved and all we have to do is set free Great Men and destined forces and then simply keep the faith. Think Ayn Rand by way of Silicon Valley with the added requirement that we all need to clap our hands to show that we really and truly believe in the Übermensch (or, as they are known in the valley, founders).

We've previously hit on the apparent contradiction of having a class of visionaries/innovators/entrepreneurs/ technologists who are capable of solving all of the major problems that face us, from global warming to colonizing the planets and yet who can be brought to their knees by almost any obstacle we put in their way, be it regulation or progressive taxation or even mild criticism. 
 
The weirder part is the theory that technological innovation has ground to a halt because we have lost the capacity to dream big. This is the hypothesis that has launched a thousand TED Talks and made untold fortunes for various motivational speakers. From Klein:

We have lost the habit of imagining what we could have; we are too timid in deploying the coordinated genius and muscle of society to pull possibilities from the far future into the near present.

This has been a fundamental part of  the basic pitch for every credulously reported the-future-is-now story of the 21st century. Mars One, hyperloops, Theranos, the end of aging, and countless other promises that we were about to "pull possibilities from the far future into the near present," all of which turned out to be costly frauds and failures. 

These "we need to dream again" talks and think pieces take as a given the less-than-shocking observation that people were more excited by technology when technology was doing more exciting things, and flip the arrow of causality in the counterintuitive direction.

Despite not making a lot of sense and lacking historical support, this theory has continued to gain popularity over the past few years until it is more or less conventional wisdom by this point. We are all sitting in the pumpkin patch with Linus being told that if we show any sign of doubt the great venture capitalist will not bring us fusion reactors and space elevators.