Should we consider a person to be wise, or knowledgeable or capable because of the position that they hold?  Or should we continue to maintain our own ability to question no matter the person/ channel of communication?

In his first term, President Donald Trump suggested that we try to cure Covid by injecting bleach – and here he is in his second term suggesting that wildfires and plane crashes are because of a hiring policy that focused on diversity and inclusion.  And yet, despite the clear evidence that this man is an intellectual pigmy, the news media continue to report on, and respond to his brain-farts as if they held value.  Not only this, but I have seen some commentators postulate that Donald Trump can show this idiotic public face whilst quietly implementing his mischievous-Zen strategy in the background…

Personally… I don’t think he has one: for me Trump is a wind-up mouse who will trundle along in the direction he is pointed (whatever lively and irrelevant issue his ‘handlers’ can conceive of that morning), dragging the public eye with him.  Whilst behind the scenes, the real power mongers implement THEIR strategy.  I consider Donald Trump to be a real-life Zaphod Beeblebrox – the galactic president in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  A President who is elected simply as a distraction, who is allowed to fool around in the public eye whilst the real business of government is handled by powerful men (and yes, sadly here I mean men) out of the spotlight.

The only plan Donald Trump had was to become president again and avoid prosecution: and this plan he has fulfilled.  Those responsible for project 2025 however… now those are men who do have an agenda, and one which the infant Donald Trump is helping to deliver upon through distraction; part of which includes the appointment of Elon Musk as… well whatever his role is supposed to be.

I see Elon Musk and Donald Trump as very similar in many regards – both are clearly bullies, and both believe that money is the way to obtain the power they desire.  (Perhaps this is why Donald Trump can defer to Elon Musk, because after all, Elon is the richer by far of the two…)

None of this however, I think willbe seen as particularly controversial, (except perhaps amongst Trump or Musk supporters), and yet the media and the institutional structures all continue to behave as if it wasn’t true – all whilst the clear facts continue to hit us in the face on a daily basis.  Instead of doing what we should do which is to laugh at these narcissistic infants, we join them in their delusional journey and react as if they were in fact clever and insightful people.

Elon Musk was interviewed recently and was challenged about his erroneous tweet which claimed that $50m of condoms had been given to Gaza by USAID – he said, “So, nobody’s going to bat a thousand“.  In that he may be correct, but surely it is possible for a ‘clever and insightful’ person (if such he be) to question the truth of his own statement…  Gaza’s population is around 2m people – of which data indicates that more than 40% are under the age of 14…  and yet Musk finds a claim of $50m in condoms for <1m people credible… Trump then doubled down on Musk’s claim by upping the amount to $100m, and changing Gaza to Hamas (see what I mean about him being a wind-up mouse?)

The United States of America government is now also trying to rehire nuclear workers who were fired in cuts by Elon Musk? The department of agriculture is also trying to rehire scientists they fired – scientists who were working on the current bird flu outbreak… clearly Musk is far from “batting a thousand”: but then what do we expect from a man who confidently claims that he can cut a third of the government’s budget without having seen the accounts?

Where Elon Musk has successfully managed to make cuts is inside the departments investigating his businesses… staff investigating the Neuralink company have been laid off, as have government staff overseeing traffic safety (Tesla) and of course Elon Musk is in the process of closing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) which is the government agency who would review the planned change of Elon Musk’s social media platform X into a payment platform.

Sadly it is not feasible (at least for me alone) to follow the volume of effluent that emanates from these two people (which according to Steve Bannon is the idea) – so maybe we should change our approach.  Can we not have a news presenter simply say “Donald Trump spouted more lies today – for more information please go here; otherwise here are the facts”.

We find ourselves in a world of irony… a world where a man with obvious conflicts of interest says he will tell you if there is a conflict of interest (which is of course itself, a conflict of interest).  We have a television presenter who is unqualified to run the defence department of the United States of America claiming he should be appointed so that he can return the concept of meritocracy to the military.  Our news outlets write articles which present these people as being better than they are – as if somehow it was Elon Musk himself who implanted the Neuralink chip into a person’s brain, or designed or piloted the rocket that flew to space.

These men are not geniuses, they are bullies… They say something – correct or incorrect it doesn’t matter, because once it is said, it will be defended with all of their power and money until it becomes right or forgotten.  Just because people don’t say ‘no’ to them doesn’t mean that they are right…

Let’s take a lesson from them and call a spade a spade – let’s cease to conflate bullying and abuse of power with perception and wisdom…

Let’s ridicule their stupidity and put it on display