On just about a every day foundation, I’m amazed that Elon Musk is among the wealthiest individuals on the planet. That’s as a result of, on just about a every day foundation, Musk says or does one thing that’s both dumb, or offensive, or insulting, or simply plain uncool — which may be probably the most derogatory factor you possibly can say about him since he fancies himself as actually cool.
A couple of days in the past, he made an awfully crude joke about Taylor Swift.
That was creepy and cringy.
However what he did Sunday night time was harmful.
Within the aftermath of what’s believed to have been an assassination try on former President Donald Trump, a person on X tweeted, “Why they wish to kill Donald Trump?”
Musk, who owns X, replied, “And nobody is even making an attempt to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” He then included a “individual considering” emoji.
According to CNBC’s Rebecca Picciotto and Lora Kolodny, “Inside an hour, Musk’s tweet had been seen by a minimum of 1.3 million customers, whereas over 3,000 customers had reposted it and a minimum of 18,000 customers had appreciated it.” Later, it had almost 30 million views. Musk has 198.7 million followers.
Musk left up the submit for 9 hours earlier than deleting it.
Then he posted at 2:58 a.m. Monday morning, “Nicely, one lesson I’ve realized is that simply because I say one thing to a gaggle and so they giggle doesn’t imply it’s going to be all that hilarious as a submit on X.”
Wait, individuals laughed at that? Who laughed at that?
Then, two minutes later, Musk tweeted, “Seems that jokes are WAY much less humorous if individuals don’t know the context and the supply is obvious textual content.”
Or possibly, Elon, assassination jokes aren’t all that humorous — particularly when the nation is totally on edge and the individuals you tweeted about — Kamala Harris and Joe Biden — have had loss of life threats.
The White Home stated Monday that Musk’s first submit was “irresponsible.”
Perhaps Musk ought to’ve simply deleted his unique tweet after which stated, “Hey, I took down my final submit as a result of it was an insensitive and extremely inconsiderate factor to say. I’m sorry.”
However solely somebody actually good would try this.
What unusual instances we dwell in. For the previous week, residents in Springfield, Ohio, have been threatened with bombings and different violence after continued false claims from the appropriate, together with Trump operating mate JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants are consuming pets there. Then Sunday, Trump seems to have been the goal of a second assassination try in two months.
The New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote, “And so it goes in 2024. Within the area of lower than every week, the as soon as and probably future commander in chief was each a seeming inspiration and an obvious goal of the political violence that has more and more come to form American politics within the fashionable period. Bomb threats and tried assassinations now have turn into a part of the panorama, surprising and horrific, but not a lot that they’ve pressured any actual nationwide reckoning.”
Baker added, “On the coronary heart of right this moment’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a determine who appears to encourage individuals to make threats or take actions each for him and towards him. He has lengthy favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal assault on the husband of the Democratic Home speaker and suggesting {that a} common he deemed disloyal be executed.”
And but Trump advised Fox Information Digital on Monday that the “rhetoric” of Harris and Biden is to be blamed for him being “shot at.”
Ryan Wesley Routh takes half in a rally in central Kyiv, Ukraine, on April 30, 2022. (AP Photograph/Efrem Lukatsky)
Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man suspected of plotting to assassinate Trump on Sunday, shouldn’t be fully unknown to the media. Actually, he has proven up a number of instances in tales relating to the struggle in Ukraine.
The New York Times’ Thomas Gibbons-Neff wrote that he had interviewed Routh final 12 months for an article about foreign fighters and volunteers in Ukraine.
Gibbons-Neff wrote, “My dialog with Mr. Routh was transient. He was in Washington, D.C., he stated, and had deliberate for a two-hour assembly with some congressmen about Ukraine. (It’s unclear if that assembly ever occurred.)”
Gibbons-Neff added, “By the point I received off the telephone with Mr. Routh some minutes later, it was clear he was in method over his head. He talked of shopping for off corrupt officers, forging passports and doing no matter it took to get his Afghan cadre to Ukraine, however he had no actual strategy to accomplish his objectives. At one level he talked about arranging a U.S. navy transport flight from Iraq to Poland with Afghan refugees prepared to battle. I shook my head. It sounded ridiculous, however the tone in Mr. Routh’s voice stated in any other case. He was going to again Ukraine’s struggle effort, it doesn’t matter what. Like most of the volunteers I interviewed, he fell off the map once more. Till Sunday.”
In the meantime, Routh additionally was in contact with CBS Information senior international correspondent Holly Williams about the identical subject — the struggle in Ukraine.
In a CBS News report, Williams stated she believes she talked to Routh as soon as by telephone and that they texted “continuously.” Williams stated Routh put her contact with these preventing in Ukraine. Williams added that he appeared “naive” about his capability to assist the Ukrainian struggle effort. She stated she had not heard from him since final November, when he advised her he was in Hawaii.
There’s extra.
Routh additionally was interviewed by Semafor in March 2023.
Semafor’s Tanya Lukyanova and Ben Smith wrote Sunday night, “When Semafor talked to him, Routh was considered one of a wave of American volunteers in Ukraine, the self-appointed director of a gaggle he’d began referred to as the Worldwide Volunteer Heart. He was, even by the requirements of that frantic second, a bit excessive, a Ukrainian concerned within the effort advised us on the time. However he was additionally, they stated, authentically concerned within the efforts to usher in international troops, and we quoted him in a story about the Afghan fighters.”
Lukyanova and Smith wrote, “Routh was not the main target of our 2023 story, and we spoke with him for lower than half an hour.”
(Semafor famous that Lukyanova interviewed Routh whereas she was a journalist at Semafor. She’s now a reporter for The Free Press.)
What’s curious is how Routh saved exhibiting up as a supply for numerous information shops.
Over the previous 4 years, candidates operating for workplace all around the nation have solid doubt on the integrity of elections. Many have taken their cues from former President Donald Trump, who continues to place forth baseless and false claims about rigged elections.
One newspaper’s editorial board had sufficient.
The Solar Sentinel in South Florida just lately refused to endorse a candidate for workplace, partly, due to that candidate’s claims of fraudulent elections. Not solely did the editorial board endorse the opposite candidate, it printed a prolonged rationalization, which included why it refused to even run a questionnaire despatched in by the candidate, which it stated was stuffed with “myths and falsehoods.”
And get this, the workplace in query was supervisor of elections in Palm Seashore County!
In a scathing piece, the Solar Sentinel editorial board wrote:
For the primary time, the Solar Sentinel Editorial Board is not going to publish on-line a questionnaire submitted by a candidate. It was submitted by Jeff Buongiorno, an elections conspiracy theorist and the Republican candidate for supervisor of elections in Palm Seashore County.
Buongiorno’s questionnaire is replete with myths and falsehoods. He doubts the reliability of Florida election outcomes as a result of, he stated, they can’t be “manually verified.” Voting tabulation machines are examined continuously and outcomes are audited, then licensed by a canvassing board often chaired by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Buongiorno claims with out proof that “public belief in our elections has eroded to new lows,” when any distrust is essentially as a consequence of Donald Trump’s continued lie that he received the 2020 election. Election leads to Florida are extraordinarily dependable.
Buongiorno actively works to undermine public religion in voting by mail. Citing a gaggle referred to as Defend Florida, he claimed in his questionnaire that 20% of Florida’s mail ballots in 2020 have been solid by “phantom” voters who have been lifeless or who voted from phony addresses.
Actually? Greater than 11 million Floridians voted in 2020, so 20% of that may be greater than 2.2 million individuals. Such claims are recklessly irresponsible and search solely to undermine religion in sincere elections. We want to publish all candidate questionnaires, however as a trusted media supply, we can’t knowingly publish these falsehoods. We’re endorsing Wendy Sartory Hyperlink for Palm Seashore County supervisor of elections.
A gutsy and fully applicable stance by the Solar Sentinel editorial board.
Steve Bousquet, the opinion editor and columnist for the Solar Sentinel who helped make the choice to not run Buongiorno’s questionnaire, advised me in an electronic mail, “We acquired two letters to the editor from readers on our resolution, one strongly supportive and one extremely vital. One reader stated that the media has a accountability to not perpetuate disinformation, and the opposite stated our resolution was ‘insane’ and readers could make up their very own minds.”
Later, by telephone, Bousquet advised me that in its endorsement of Buongiorno’s opponent, the Solar Sentinel web site did embrace a 40-minute or so video interview with Buongiorno by which he repeats most of the false or deceptive claims from his questionnaire. Bousquet stated that he was conscious the information group can be accused of censorship for not printing Buongiorno’s feedback.
“However,” Bousquet stated, “we will’t be a transmission belt for blatant misinformation.”
Be sure you take a while to take a look at this necessary however disturbing story. From NBC Information’ Mike Hixenbaugh, Jon Schuppe and Susan Carroll: “Cut up and leased out, the bodies of the poor suffer a final indignity in Texas.”
The story says, “Within the title of scientific development, medical training and monetary expediency, the our bodies of the destitute within the Dallas-Fort Value area have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing properties and homeless encampments and used for coaching or analysis with out their consent — and infrequently with out the approval of any survivors, an NBC Information investigation discovered.”
The story provides, “… about 2,350 … unclaimed our bodies have been given to the Fort Value-based College of North Texas Well being Science Heart since 2019 underneath agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. Amongst these, greater than 830 our bodies have been chosen by the middle for dissection and research. After the medical faculty and different teams have been completed, the our bodies have been cremated and, usually, interred at space cemeteries or scattered at sea. Some had households who have been in search of them.”
As well as, listed here are “5 things to know about NBC News’ investigation into unclaimed bodies used for research in Texas.”
The NBC story got here after a 10-month investigation. The story was initially pitched and developed by Carroll, whose byline is on the story. Carroll, who was NBC Information’ senior enterprise editor, died all of the sudden earlier this 12 months.
Schuppe tweeted, “Susy developed the concept, and did a number of the work on it. When she died earlier this 12 months, we saved going, decided to honor her legacy.”
Schuppe and Hixenbaugh additionally labored on NBC’s “Lost Rites” mission, which investigated America’s failed loss of life notification system.
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