All lies. Here's the truth.
ELON MUSK, OUR NEW UNELECTED OVERLORD, is mad at Bill Kristol. Very, very mad. And because this is the world we live in now, his hordes of online minions are mad, too.
Let me explain. This week, Elon has been amplifying several tweets alleging (falsely) that the Defending Democracy Together Institute, a group Bill and I run, received funding from USAID. The real story is this:
USAID—the development agency that Elon is shuttering—gives grants as part of its regular operations. In the past, it gave money to a philanthropic foundation. That foundation has at some point in its history given funds to a donor-advised fund. And that fund has, at some point in its history, supported DDTI.
Got that?
Now here’s Elon’s version: The government is funding Bill Kristol!
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING is much more straightforward: A donor-advised fund granted money to DDTI for the express purpose of supporting center-right, pro-democracy organizations. Bill is on the board of DDTI.
It’s all pretty routine, unless you’re a ketamine-addled, terminally online, X-brained wackjob with a tenuous grasp on how the government you now run actually functions.
What’s really going on here is Elon thinks that by siccing an online mob on Bill, he can intimidate him—and all of us—into silence. Into just going away.
But it doesn’t just stop with online harassment. Implicit in all of this is the threat of real-world violence, which hangs over anyone on whom these goons decide to turn their ire. Today it’s Bill; tomorrow it’ll be somebody else. Here’s just some of the craziest stuff Bill has gotten thrown at him so far:
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Enjoy that big throbbing orange cock DEMOCRACY!! You earned it.
