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Politico
27-02-2025
- Politics
- Politico
The right's global techlash gains a cause celebre
Presented by Romania is suddenly commanding the attention of the tech-minded global right. No, not because of Andrew Tate's mysterious return from Romania to the States today — at least not entirely. It was the arrest and questioning on Wednesday of Calin Georgescu, the far-right presidential candidate who came out of nowhere with a TikTok-fueled campaign that powered him to first place in the first round of Romanian elections in December 2024. The first people to panic about Georgescu were European liberals, who treated his win as an alarming example of how right-wing insurgents — and potentially foreign actors like Russia — could use social media platforms to gain power. After an investigation by Romanian intelligence that claimed Georgescu was powered by social media campaigns similar to those deployed in Ukraine and Moldova, Georgescu's first-round victory was later annulled on grounds of alleged Russian interference. Now Georgescu's interrogation and indictment are sparking a mirror-image moment of outrage from politicians on the right. Across the globe, they're holding up Georgescu as the preeminent victim of a conspiracy between liberal governments and tech platforms to silence right-wing voices. 'They just arrested the person who won the most votes in the Romanian presidential election. This is messed up,' Elon Musk wrote on X. At this month's Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance unloaded on the Romanian courts that overturned the election, saying 'When we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.' In the global conversation about censorship and tech, the Georgescu case seems to be picking up right where the 'Twitter files' left off. To right-wing tech critics, his pariahdom looks like a perfect example of why the anti-disinformation efforts of the first Trump and Biden eras — whether by tech platforms, governments, or both— pose a grave threat to democracy. Writing in the socially conservative Compact magazine after last year's Romanian elections, columnist Nathan Pinkoski argued that their annulment was 'a direct application of the anti-disinformation paradigm that politicians and technocrats have promoted for years.' 'When the Romanian Constitutional Court cancelled presidential elections on the basis of a vague intelligence assessment, barely any public justification was provided for this extraordinary action,' Pinkoski told DFD today. 'Skeptics will charge that this looks like a brazen effort of lawfare to strip Romanian voters of the power to make their own electoral decisions. If this is a strategy to defeat populism, it seems doubtful it will succeed.' What distinguishes the anti-disinformation movement from previous forms of liberal information governance, Pinkoski wrote last year, 'is the claim that the advent of the internet requires a change in the rules.' Georgescu did, after all, win the election fair and square, as DFD wrote in the aftermath of the election and its annulment. Despite accusations that Georgescu's campaign was illegally powered by Russia and violated TikTok's own rules about election interference, no votes were tampered with. Nearly a quarter of Romania's voters pulled the lever for him, and even Georgescu's liberal rival criticized the government's cancelling of the election. The question Romania, and possibly the European Union and global liberal democracy, now face is whether it's even possible to fight what they see as election 'tampering' if it happens at the platform level rather than literally at the ballot box. Democracies now face a crucial test of whether they can maintain some semblance of legitimacy while attempting to clamp down on false information and conspiracy online, or whether they have no option but to let free speech reign and the chips fall where they may. For the right, the challenge is far less ambiguous. To them, the silencing of Georgescu's voters is vindication of their long-held belief that a secretive, octopus-like network of tech industry and liberal nonprofit interests are silencing conservative voices — and that now, with Trump and Musk in power, is the time to cut off its tentacles. 'To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or God forbid vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,' Vance continued in Munich. For its part, Silicon Valley has gone to great lengths to pivot away from the effort to fight 'misinformation' — not just since President Donald Trump won election, but long before it. Those moves might at least temporarily placate the Trump administration, with its transactional mindset. But longtime tech foes in Washington still say they want to keep the fight alive. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he wants to haul tech CEOs in front of Congress and interrogate them about allegedly silencing conservative voices. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told NPR today that he's still waiting for the tech titans who lined up behind Trump to 'go out and say now that they're going to stop their censorship against conservatives.' For a once-obscure European right-winger, Georgescu's name is only beginning to echo through the politics of tech. doge's bite More Washingtonians are expressing their chagrin with Elon Musk's 'move fast and break things' approach to governance. POLITICO's Sophia Cai reported today on growing discontent with the Department of Government Efficiency's 'disruptive' reform of the bureaucracy, as 21 veterans of the U.S. Digital Service (now U.S. DOGE Service) resigned this week in an open letter that declared: 'We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans' sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services.' 'When you have a tech company, every day you're failing because you're trying to bring something that doesn't exist into existence,' one anonymous former Trump official turned tech entrepreneur told Sophia. 'In government, you're just trying to deliver legally guaranteed services to the public. You can't fail. You have to succeed slowly.' This cultural collision has been a long time in the making, and doesn't seem likely to abate anytime soon. A National Park Service ranger warned that DOGE was deactivating critical safety devices, and an anonymous senior Federal Aviation Administration official said the agency is losing critical expertise just as a slew of high-profile aviation incidents have shaken America's confidence in flying. Still, the White House is standing by Musk: 'There is no reason why a CEO's approach cannot work in the nation's capital,' White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Sophia. 'The majority of Americans would rather have CEOs running the show than career bureaucrats.' this is your brain on tiktok A California Democrat wants social media users to see unskippable pop-up ads about the apps' potential harms. POLITICO's Tyler Katzenberger reported for Pro subscribers on a plan from California Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan that would mandate people see the daily ad explaining the potential risk of social media to youth mental health. 'I wanted a warning that gave readers at all levels enough time to digest — not something that could just be skipped past,' Bauer-Kahan told POLITICO in a statement Wednesday. The bill, AB 56, was referred to the California State Assembly's Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, which Bauer-Kahan chairs, and it will likely be heard in the coming weeks. post OF THE DAY The Future in 5 links Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@ and Christine Mui (cmui@
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The family-values right takes on Musk's family
Elon Musk's unusual family, with a claimed 13th child now with four different mothers, has become the target tor a handful of conservative family-values commentators online — raising the prospect of a tech-vs.-religious right rift in 2025's powerful Republican coalition. Dropping an as yet unverified Valentine's Day bombshell, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair claimed last Friday to be the mother of Elon Musk's 13th child. Perhaps more surprising than her claim (which Musk hasn't directly commented on), however, was the opprobrium it generated — not from Musk's sworn enemies among Democrats, but from his newfound allies on the right. 'I strongly recommend having a baby daddy who lives in your house, so that you don't have to tweet him,' wrote conservative author Bethany Mandel. Jon Root, a sports announcer and former Turning Point USA employee, wrote that the episode reflected how '[m]uch of conservatism is filled with godless hypocrites who couldn't care less about conserving traditional family values.' And Matthew Schmitz, editor of Compact magazine, wrote that Musk represents 'a genetic-determinist right' opposed to 'a more culturist right that insists on the importance of marriage and monogamy.' Schmitz gets straight to the heart of an uncomfortable tension within the new Trump coalition. Musk — who hopes to make humanity an interplanetary species, whose Neuralink aspires to integrate our brains with computers, who has employed assisted fertility technologies to father most of his children — represents a 'transhumanist' strain of thought ascendent in Silicon Valley, one that sees humans and machines as equal and inevitably integrated, and in stark contrast to the religious vision that's traditionally propped up Republican politics. Politically, this highlights just how different the Trump 2.0 coalition looks from that which powered his first presidency. CEOs of Big Tech platforms, largely seen as Democratic-leaning during his first campaign and administration, lined up to support his inauguration this time. And in place of the traditional conservatism of former Vice President Mike Pence, there's Vice President JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who has publicly defended Musk. Now, the weird politics of a certain corner of Silicon Valley threaten to upend this fragile balance. This first appeared in Digital Future Daily, POLITICO's afternoon newsletter about how tech and power are shaping our world. Subscribe here. Alexander Thomas, a researcher at the University of East London and author of 'The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism,' described Musk's vision as similar to that of 'longtermist' thinkers like Nick Bostrom, who popularized the concept of artificial 'superintelligence': that from a utilitarian perspective, it's not just personally gratifying, but Musk's duty to the human race to ensure that his superior genes perpetuate throughout human history. 'This means the 8 billion people alive today simply don't matter — genocide and wars are mere ripples, as long as some survive, and Musk is the one that needs to survive,' Thomas told DFD. 'He's the one that needs to pass on the baton of civilization and create this superior future.' On one hand, such a grandiose belief is a convenient rationalization for whatever radical endeavor — from Mars colonization to the possibly extrajudicial deconstruction of the administrative state — a mogul like Musk decides to take up during his lifespan. But it's also a sincerely held, growing belief in Silicon Valley that powers many of its most prominent thinkers — including Sam Altman of OpenAI, who has repeatedly boasted that his company is building a civilization-shifting 'superintelligence' that can surpass human capability. When it comes to Washington politics and the Republican Party, less important here are the internecine (and often deeply bizarre) arguments over the transhumanist future than how it differs from that imagined by the rest of the conservative coalition. Compact's Schmitz, previously an editor of the religious magazine First Things, called Musk's ideology 'quasi-eugenic' and accused his supporters of hypocrisy, writing on X: 'According to this view, when Elon Musk impregnates woman after woman with no intention of giving the children a stable family, that's an expression of his great genetics. But when a lower-class man does the exact same thing, it's a patent sign of his bad genes.' This tension runs deeper than people's feelings about Musk. The same 2024 issue of The Lamp, the Catholic intellectual magazine where Vance recounted his conversion experience, featured one essay inveighing against all alteration of the human body from IVF to gender transition, and another more specifically critiquing IVF itself, which Leah Libresco Sargeant described as a 'fairy tale' where the 'cost is larger than they tell you up front.' The biohacking, utilitarian, futuristic ethos of Musk and his Silicon Valley cadre hasn't yet caused a rift with their socially conservative coalition partners. That might be simply because reproductive rights haven't yet been a salient policy issue in the second Trump administration, as it seems more preoccupied with ending wars in Gaza and Ukraine while prosecuting its own battle at home against the Washington bureaucracy. But given Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency's ever-expanding policy portfolio — and how foundational the religious right continues to be to Republican governance — it could be an unavoidable part of the administration's future.
Politico
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Politico
The family-values right takes on Musk's family
Elon Musk's unusual family, with a claimed 13th child now with four different mothers, has become the target tor a handful of conservative family-values commentators online — raising the prospect of a tech-vs.-religious right rift in 2025's powerful Republican coalition. Dropping an as yet unverified Valentine's Day bombshell, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair claimed last Friday to be the mother of Elon Musk's 13th child. Perhaps more surprising than her claim (which Musk hasn't directly commented on), however, was the opprobrium it generated — not from Musk's sworn enemies among Democrats, but from his newfound allies on the right. 'I strongly recommend having a baby daddy who lives in your house, so that you don't have to tweet him,' wrote conservative author Bethany Mandel. Jon Root, a sports announcer and former Turning Point USA employee, wrote that the episode reflected how '[m]uch of conservatism is filled with godless hypocrites who couldn't care less about conserving traditional family values.' And Matthew Schmitz, editor of Compact magazine, wrote that Musk represents 'a genetic-determinist right' opposed to 'a more culturist right that insists on the importance of marriage and monogamy.' Schmitz gets straight to the heart of an uncomfortable tension within the new Trump coalition. Musk — who hopes to make humanity an interplanetary species, whose Neuralink aspires to integrate our brains with computers, who has employed assisted fertility technologies to father most of his children — represents a 'transhumanist' strain of thought ascendent in Silicon Valley, one that sees humans and machines as equal and inevitably integrated, and in stark contrast to the religious vision that's traditionally propped up Republican politics. Politically, this highlights just how different the Trump 2.0 coalition looks from that which powered his first presidency. CEOs of Big Tech platforms, largely seen as Democratic-leaning during his first campaign and administration, lined up to support his inauguration this time. And in place of the traditional conservatism of former Vice President Mike Pence, there's Vice President JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who has publicly defended Musk. Now, the weird politics of a certain corner of Silicon Valley threaten to upend this fragile balance. This first appeared in Digital Future Daily, POLITICO's afternoon newsletter about how tech and power are shaping our world. Subscribe here. Alexander Thomas, a researcher at the University of East London and author of 'The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism,' described Musk's vision as similar to that of 'longtermist' thinkers like Nick Bostrom, who popularized the concept of artificial 'superintelligence': that from a utilitarian perspective, it's not just personally gratifying, but Musk's duty to the human race to ensure that his superior genes perpetuate throughout human history. 'This means the 8 billion people alive today simply don't matter — genocide and wars are mere ripples, as long as some survive, and Musk is the one that needs to survive,' Thomas told DFD. 'He's the one that needs to pass on the baton of civilization and create this superior future.' On one hand, such a grandiose belief is a convenient rationalization for whatever radical endeavor — from Mars colonization to the possibly extrajudicial deconstruction of the administrative state — a mogul like Musk decides to take up during his lifespan. But it's also a sincerely held, growing belief in Silicon Valley that powers many of its most prominent thinkers — including Sam Altman of OpenAI, who has repeatedly boasted that his company is building a civilization-shifting 'superintelligence' that can surpass human capability. When it comes to Washington politics and the Republican Party, less important here are the internecine (and often deeply bizarre) arguments over the transhumanist future than how it differs from that imagined by the rest of the conservative coalition. Compact's Schmitz, previously an editor of the religious magazine First Things, called Musk's ideology 'quasi-eugenic' and accused his supporters of hypocrisy, writing on X: 'According to this view, when Elon Musk impregnates woman after woman with no intention of giving the children a stable family, that's an expression of his great genetics. But when a lower-class man does the exact same thing, it's a patent sign of his bad genes.' This tension runs deeper than people's feelings about Musk. The same 2024 issue of The Lamp, the Catholic intellectual magazine where Vance recounted his conversion experience, featured one essay inveighing against all alteration of the human body from IVF to gender transition, and another more specifically critiquing IVF itself, which Leah Libresco Sargeant described as a 'fairy tale' where the 'cost is larger than they tell you up front.' The biohacking, utilitarian, futuristic ethos of Musk and his Silicon Valley cadre hasn't yet caused a rift with their socially conservative coalition partners. That might be simply because reproductive rights haven't yet been a salient policy issue in the second Trump administration, as it seems more preoccupied with ending wars in Gaza and Ukraine while prosecuting its own battle at home against the Washington bureaucracy. But given Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency's ever-expanding policy portfolio — and how foundational the religious right continues to be to Republican governance — it could be an unavoidable part of the administration's future.
Politico
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Politico
Elon Musk's techie ‘transhumanism' vs. the religious right
Presented by Spectrum for the Future Elon Musk's unusual family, with a claimed 13th child now with four different mothers, has become the target tor a handful of conservative family-values commentators online — raising the prospect of a tech-vs.-religious right rift in 2025's powerful Republican coalition. Dropping an as yet unverified Valentine's Day bombshell, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair claimed last Friday to be the mother of Elon Musk's 13th child. Perhaps more surprising than her claim (which Musk hasn't directly commented on), however, was the opprobrium it generated — not from Musk's sworn enemies among Democrats, but from his newfound allies on the right. 'I strongly recommend having a baby daddy who lives in your house, so that you don't have to tweet him,' wrote conservative author Bethany Mandel. Jon Root, a sports announcer and former Turning Point USA employee, wrote that the episode reflected how '[m]uch of conservatism is filled with godless hypocrites who couldn't care less about conserving traditional family values.' And Matthew Schmitz, editor of Compact magazine, wrote that Musk represents 'a genetic-determinist right' opposed to 'a more culturist right that insists on the importance of marriage and monogamy.' Schmitz gets straight to the heart of an uncomfortable tension within the new Trump coalition. Musk — who hopes to make humanity an interplanetary species, whose Neuralink aspires to integrate our brains with computers, who has employed assisted fertility technologies to father most of his children — represents a 'transhumanist' strain of thought ascendent in Silicon Valley, one that sees humans and machines as equal and inevitably integrated, and in stark contrast to the religious vision that's traditionally propped up Republican politics. Politically, this highlights just how different the Trump 2.0 coalition looks from that which powered his first presidency. CEOs of Big Tech platforms, largely seen as Democratic-leaning during his first campaign and administration, lined up to support his inauguration this time. And in place of the traditional conservatism of former Vice President Mike Pence, there's Vice President JD Vance, a former venture capitalist who has publicly defended Musk. Now, the weird politics of a certain corner of Silicon Valley threaten to upend this fragile balance. Alexander Thomas, a researcher at the University of East London and author of 'The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism,' described Musk's vision as similar to that of 'longtermist' thinkers like Nick Bostrom, who popularized the concept of artificial 'superintelligence': That from a utilitarian perspective, it's not just personally gratifying, but Musk's duty to the human race to ensure that his superior genes perpetuate throughout human history. 'This means the 8 billion people alive today simply don't matter — genocide and wars are mere ripples, as long as some survive, and Musk is the one that needs to survive,' Thomas told DFD. 'He's the one that needs to pass on the baton of civilization and create this superior future.' On one hand, such a grandiose belief is a convenient rationalization for whatever radical endeavor — from Mars colonization to the possibly extrajudicial deconstruction of the administrative state — a mogul like Musk decides to take up during his lifespan. But it's also a sincerely held, growing belief in Silicon Valley that powers many of its most prominent thinkers — including Sam Altman of OpenAI, who has repeatedly boasted that his company is building a civilization-shifting 'superintelligence' that can surpass human capability. When it comes to Washington politics and the Republican Party, less important here are the internecine (and often deeply bizarre) arguments over the transhumanist future than how it differs from that imagined by the rest of the conservative coalition. Compact's Schmitz, previously an editor of the religious magazine First Things, called Musk's ideology 'quasi-eugenic' and accused his supporters of hypocrisy, writing on X: 'According to this view, when Elon Musk impregnates woman after woman with no intention of giving the children a stable family, that's an expression of his great genetics. But when a lower-class man does the exact same thing, it's a patent sign of his bad genes.' This tension runs deeper than people's feelings about Musk. The same 2024 issue of The Lamp, the Catholic intellectual magazine where Vance recounted his conversion experience, featured one essay inveighing against all alteration of the human body from IVF to gender transition, and another more specifically critiquing IVF itself, which Leah Libresco Sargent described as a 'fairy tale' where the 'cost is larger than they tell you up front.' The biohacking, utilitarian, futuristic ethos of Musk and his Silicon Valley cadre hasn't yet caused a rift with their socially conservative coalition partners. That might be simply because reproductive rights haven't yet been a salient policy issue in the second Trump administration, as it seems more preoccupied with ending wars in Gaza and Ukraine while prosecuting its own battle at home against the Washington bureaucracy. But given Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency's ever-expanding policy portfolio — and how foundational the religious right continues to be to Republican governance — it could be an unavoidable part of the administration's future. DOGE OMNIBUS Who's really in charge at DOGE? POLITICO's Kyle Cheney reported Monday evening that in court papers filed by the White House, a top personnel official revealed that Elon Musk's official title is 'senior adviser to the president' and that he is not, in fact, the leader of DOGE, contradicting Trump's own remarks that he was 'going to tell' Musk personally to carry out DOGE's investigations at various federal agencies. And there, they have been busy: POLITICO's Toby Eckert and Megan Messerly reported Monday that Democrats and tax experts are alarmed as DOGE tries to get access to sensitive data at the Internal Revenue Service's Integrated Data Retrieval System, as first reported by The Washington Post. Later that evening, POLITICO's Declan Harty reported for Pro subscribers that the DOGE is poised to arrive at the Securities and Exchange Commission in the coming days, which Musk has repeatedly tussled with over his business practices. For more context on the Silicon Valley sledgehammer DOGE is taking to Washington, see your DFD author's interview published over the weekend in POLITICO Magazine with tech-world veteran Rohit Krishnan, who said: 'This is a similar playbook to the way Elon took over Twitter. Many things will break, but at the other end there's a leaner, meaner, smarter, more efficient government that stands the test of time. At the same time, the government is not a business, and that has its own implications.' post OF THE DAY The Future in 5 Links Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@ and Christine Mui (cmui@
