ELON MUSK IS STUPID AND SO IS HIS FAVORITE NEW CONSPIRACY THEORY

Greg Sargent reports:

For much of the last week, Elon Musk’s mighty Twitter feed—sorry, his X feed—featured as its pinned tweet a video that purports to lay bare a vast conspiracy among Democrats to “flood” the country with “illegals” to lock in a “permanent voting majority.” Many people have picked apart the video’s numerous lies. It is a strikingly crafted piece of “great replacement theory” propaganda....

Is it really "strikingly crafted" propaganda? The video looks slick, in all the most obvious, clichéd ways, but if you believe what it's saying, you're as dumb as a rock.

This is actually happening!
pic.twitter.com/qeNBu3S1mF

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2024

The video purports to describe a "Democrat" plan to achieve "single-party rule":

... flood the country with untold millions of illegals by land, sea, and air from all over the world — enough to eclipse the populations of 36 individual U.S. states, so far.

... keep them in the country at all costs, even when they commit violent crime like murder and rape. Attack the language used to describe the criminals, as opposed to the criminals themselves. Slander critics as racist.

... count the non-citizens in the census that will determine congressional apportionment in the House of Representatives — as of now, that would equal thirteen extra congressional districts; a tremendous amount of electoral power.

... wage a massive, heavily funded lawfare campaign to change state voting laws that legalize mass mail-in ballots, no signature verification, and no proof of citizenship requirements — making it nearly impossible to prove voter fraud.

... lock in the permanent voting majority with campaign promises of lavish benefits and permanent privileges, enshrining generational fealty to the Democrat party.

Okay, let's discuss this.

You know how Republican conspiratorialists say, after every mass shooting, that it's a false flag designed to allow Democrats to go door to door and take everyone's guns? Notice how they've been saying that for years and years, and yet no Democratic president has taken everyone's guns? Not Bill Clinton, who had eight years to do it, or Barack Obama, who also had eight years, or Joe Biden, who's had three years and counting? And yet the nefarious scheme is always presented as something that's about to happen -- and the idiots who believe it never ask, Why hasn't it happened already?

The conspiracy theory Musk is promoting works pretty much the same way. Counting non-citizens in the census? That's been done in literally every census since the first one in 1790.

In the nation’s early history, a substantial share of the population had migrated from other countries, and for many decades thereafter, some states actively recruited foreigners to provide labor and boost political representation. The framers of the Constitution elected to exclude some people from being counted — specifying “Indians not taxed” and, most notoriously, deciding to count someone who was enslaved as three-fifths of a person — but left noncitizens intact. The drafters of the 14th Amendment debated whether to count all immigrants for apportionment purposes, and elected in the end to do so.

Sanctuary cities? They've been around since the 1980s. Mail and early voting? That's also been on the rise since the late twentieth century, though there was a decline in 2022 after a peak in 2020.

In other words, for quite a while the elements have been in place for the evil Democrat Party to achieve single-party rule -- and yet Republicans have won half the presidential elections in this century; Republicans have controlled the House for 16 of the 24 years in this century, and the Senate for the same amount of time; Republicans control 28 of 50 state legislatures; and there are 27 Republican governors. And, of course, the Supreme Court has a 6-3 Republican supermajority.

You'll say, But this is a new evil Democrat plan. Except that it's not so new, if we believe Donald Trump. In 2017 -- after he won the presidency the previous November -- Trump claimed that he'd actually won California (a state he lost by nearly 4 million votes) because non-citizens illegally threw the election to Hillary Clinton.

And even if you think the elements of the plot weren't fully in place until 2020, why did Democrats lose the House in 2022? Specifically, why did they lose two seats in California and four seats in New York (including one to George Santos!), despite the fact that California and New York are full of immigrants? Winning those seats would have given Democrats a House majority, but the scheme to ensure permanent single-party Democratic rule diddn't even work in these two liberal states.

But Republican propagandsists will use this conspiracy theory to explain every loss they have in a competitive election (and ignore it every time they win a close one). They'll always say that the ultimate deployment of the Democrats' immigrant voter army is in the future. They'll just pretend it doesn't matter that single-party Democratic rule never arrives, just the way they ignore the fact that mass gun confiscation never arrives. And Elon Musk and millions of others who've contracted brain worms from the right-wing media won't even notice that their day of doom never arrives.