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Elon Musk breaks silence on new bombshell drug abuse charge, netizens react; ‘It's funny that…'

Elon Musk breaks silence on new bombshell drug abuse charge, netizens react; ‘It's funny that…'

Hindustan Times2 days ago

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has responded to a New York Times piece that claims he used narcotics 'intensely' during the November 2024 presidential campaign that assured Donald Trump's return to the White House.
According to the NY Times, which cited anonymous sources, Musk, who was a member of Trump's inner circle, had raised concerns about his alleged regular use of substances such as hallucinogenic mushrooms, ecstasy, and the anesthetic ketamine.
Amidst all the concerns, Musk reacted to the NYT's allegations on his platform, X, calling the report 'bs.'
'I'm in meetings with dozens to hundreds of people every day and am photographed constantly. If this bs from NYT were true, it would have been EXTREMELY obvious 🤣🤣,' the Tesla CEO wrote on X.
Reacting to Musk's response, one X user Pierre Ferragu wrote: 'The NYT's hit piece on Elon is pathetic—UK tabloids have more class. Dressing up shoddy reporting in fancy prose is just cheap, dishonest nonsense.'
'It funny that they quoted your so-called 'friend' Philip Low,' another commented.
'They'll now go through every photo and pieve of footage looking for funny expressions 😆,' the third user chimed in .
Also Read: Travis Hunter, Leanna Lenee's 'awkward moment' from wedding ignites backlash; 'This love looks more like…'
When Musk joined the White House as a senior adviser to Trump, who assigned him the responsibility of heading the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a position he resigned last week, it was unclear whether he was under the influence of narcotics, according to the NYT.
The drug usage, however, may account for 'erratic behavior' such as delivering what was denounced as a 'Nazi salute' during a rally and providing jumbled responses during an interview, the report suggested.
The report further claims that concerns regarding his drug usage, mood swings, and obsession with having more kids grew as he joined the political sphere.
The report mentioned how Musk had previously disclosed that he had been given ketamine for depressive symptoms, telling his biographer, 'I really don't like doing illegal drugs.'
Trump told reporters that he was 'not troubled' by Musk, but he was unaware of the billionaire's alleged drug use.

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Where the trade court's tariff decision went wrong
Where the trade court's tariff decision went wrong

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Why stricter voting laws no longer help Republicans
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Hindustan Times

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'The Republicans should pray for rain'—the title of a paper published by a trio of political scientists in 2007—has been an axiom of American elections for years. The logic was straightforward: each inch of election-day showers, the study found, dampened turnout by 1%. Lower turnout gave Republicans an edge because the party's affluent electorate had the resources to vote even when it was inconvenient. Their opponents, less so. The findings offered an empirical reason for Republicans to make voting harder for marginal or 'low propensity' voters. The party and its conservative allies had already adopted voting restrictions as an ideological plank, one previously advanced by southern Democrats courting white support in the Jim Crow era. In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance system under the Voting Rights Act that had forced most southern states to vet changes to their voting rules with the federal government. 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When an omnibus election bill that tightened voter ID rules passed in 2021 Stacey Abrams, a Democrat who had run for governor, warned that it would disenfranchise black voters. She called it 'Jim Crow in a suit and tie'. But turnout in the next year's midterms surged and a consensus grew among election wonks that the suppression effect was negligible. Analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public-policy institute, found that the turnout gap between white and black voters did widen in Georgia between 2020 and 2024. But the new rules may not have been to blame. The drop-off was mostly limited to younger black men, who were particularly unenthused by Kamala Harris. Fewer young women of both races voted for the first time, but white women slid more than black women. Democrats across the country argue that new citizenship verification policies will cause mass confusion and get citizens tangled up in bureaucracy. The hassle would be more justifiable if the new laws solved a big problem, but non-citizens rarely vote. An audit by Georgia's secretary of state from the summer of 2024 found just 20 non-citizens out of 8.2m on the voter rolls. Most were registered before Georgia checked for citizenship and had never cast a ballot. The best evidence seems to be that the impact of restrictive laws is minimal. An analysis published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics of 1.6bn voting records from every state in America found that strict voter ID rules, on average, neither significantly suppressed votes nor prevented fraud. Nor do ID laws hurt Democrats any longer, other research by Jeffrey Harden and Alejandra Campos shows. While in 2010 voter ID laws reduced Democratic vote share by 3%, by 2020 they increased it slightly. Because of the changes in party voting coalitions, the overall effect of the next phase of even tighter voting rules could now 'easily be a wash' when it comes to benefitting one party or the other, says Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who studies elections at Harvard University. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.

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