“Elon Musk’s Reddit Retard Rebellion”
The Lesson Elon Musk Could Have Learned From The Russian Civil War
Political inexperience of the good guys helps the bad guys win.
The pseudonymous writer and publisher known as “Mystery Grove” has been one of the most insightful and influential accounts on X and Substack for years. A few years ago, he republished an out-of-print account of the Russian Revolution and Civil War by the White Army general, Baron Pyotr Wrangel. He took a book few Americans had even heard of and got Tucker Carlson to talk about how relevant it was to current-year America.
Now he’s back with a post about a lesson Elon Musk and his supporters should have learned from this tragic period in world history. I suspect a lot of readers who lean libertarian aren’t going to like this post, but you would still profit from reading it.
Now on to Mystery Grove’s post.
Excerpted from a post Authored by Mystery Grove at Conundrum Cluster
Elon Musk’s Reddit Retard Rebellion illustrates the danger of political inexperience in an existential struggle
Everything’s ending, it’s time to wake up
Everyone identifies roughly the same factors that led to Bolshevik victory. They weren’t hard to identify, people noticed them at the time. The Bolsheviks were not popular, they were not particularly competent, and they made plenty of mistakes that should have been fatal. […]
However, the various White armies formed to oppose the Bolshevik coup suffered from a profound political retardation.
[Mystery Grove notes that one exception to this political retardation was Pyotr Wrangel]
It’s not like this problem was impossible to solve. Wrangel was notorious for holding field court martials for criminals, civilian or military. This strict discipline made him more, not less, popular with his men and the public. I’ve read a lot of memoirs about the Russian Civil War, and the anecdote that appears the most in these memoirs is Wrangel deciding to publicly try and hang a railroad official who accepted a bribe to transport merchants’ goods rather than civilian refugees away from an area of the front that was being evacuated. After the trial and public execution, the evacuation proceeded more quickly than expected.
[Mystery Grove gives counter examples of how other White generals failed to adapt to circumstances, before tying this in to Elon Musk]
I could go on (I had planned to talk about Denikin adopting an unnecessarily harsh view of Russian officers who had served in various anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian formations and his naïve banning of former Imperial secret police officers from his already dysfunctional government but this is running a little long), but I think Elon Musk’s recent bizarre implosion demonstrates a similar failure to adapt to unfamiliar circumstances.
Musk entered the world of conservative politics very late. He inexplicably voted for Biden in 2020, only publicly shifting his party affiliation after his child was trans-ed and it seemed clear that a victorious Kamala administration would throw him in jail and take his money. Musk was very open about not being particularly conservative, which seemed fine because he brought hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations and a great easing of censorship of conservatives on Twitter to the table. I think these contributions played a decisive role in the 2024 election and Musk deserves an enormous amount of praise for them.
Trump made good faith efforts to incorporate Musk into his administration, appointing him to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency and take an uncommonly prominent role at public events. Musk repaid Trump’s trust with a series of embarrassing and unnecessary blunders, popping a meme Roman salute at Trump’s inauguration (everyone can stop pretending that this isn’t what happened now), giving speeches where he was obviously under the influence of drugs, and allowing his bizarre paternity scandals to creep into the public eye. This is not how someone who is legitimately “in charge” is supposed to act and everyone knows it.
Musk was obviously not used to dealing with the world of politics and government, his views about both seem, frankly, stupid. He supported liberals for most of his life, even though liberals harmed his child and tried to take his money before he had even done anything to them. Musk then supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s obviously doomed primary effort to unseat President Trump. Musk dramatically underdelivered his promised cuts to government spending and fumbled badly during the public feuds he started, such as the Christmas H1B fiasco. Musk was not a good politician, bureaucrat, or administrator—roles that he had asked to take on as a reward for his contributions during the election.
Instead of trying to figure out what had gone wrong or reevaluate his position, Musk chose to lash out and behave even more erratically. Rumors (which I believe) claim that he physically attacked Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent after a heated debate in the White House and was punched in the face for his trouble. I find it very difficult to believe that Musk wasn’t on drugs when this happened.
This was all obviously not appropriate behavior for someone occupying a high position. It undermines the legitimacy of American institutions, which rely on public trust. Musk was politely shown the door. However, Musk couldn’t accept defeat quietly and embarked on a bizarre series of tirades where he claimed that Trump should be impeached and replaced with Vance, that Musk should form a new party to represent the imagined “80% in the center,” and then that Trump was a pedophile.
All of these claims demonstrate a profound lack of fluency in politics. What Musk did was not just stupid, it had no chance of success. It was a pure waste. If he wanted to have a break with Trump (a very dumb decision, but OK), there were many better ways he could have done it. Yes, Musk is likely a drug addict, but I think this traces back to his profound political inexperience. Musk has experience as a business executive. He’s never been in this situation before and just doesn’t know how to navigate it. In flailing, he makes his situation worse and worse.
First off, the proposal that Vance should replace Trump was just stupid. No reasonably intelligent person would even suggest a move like that. There were no real grounds to impeach Trump and Vance’s political future depends on Trump’s support. If Vance were to betray Trump, not only would he have to contend with the future ire of the most powerful organization in conservative politics, but he would also label himself as a betrayer. This is not a good label to have if you want to forge future partnerships.
All Musk really did by proposing impeaching Trump was announce that he was trying to drive a wedge between the two most prominent and important Republican politicians, something that naturally Republicans would be hostile to because a wedge in your party probably means you’re going to start losing elections.
Musk’s proposal to form a party to represent the “80% in the center” is somehow even more moronic. Americans are more politically polarized than ever before. There is no center. One of the few things that Americans of all political persuasions are united by is dislike for Elon Musk. Liberals will never forgive him for the role he played during the election and early Trump administration. They were saying that he was Trump’s co-president. The Biden administration launched more than a dozen punitive investigations of Musk and his businesses before Musk had even attached himself to Trump. If liberals take power, it’s a certainty that they’ll resume their efforts with a vengeance.
Conservatives had been more friendly to Musk (there was remarkably little bad blood left over from Musk’s support for DeSantis) but clearly very little support for him as anything other than an eccentric sidekick to Trump. I don’t think anyone beyond the exiles Massie and Paul, the Indian subcontinent, and various paid internet shills took Musk’s side during the dispute. There was no real-world base of support for what Musk was proposing on the Left or the Right, suggesting that Musk was delusional and must have badly misjudged popular sentiment to even attempt this.
Finally, claiming Trump is a pedophile reflects very badly on Musk. First, it’s not true. Trump is perhaps the most heavily scrutinized figure in political history. If there was damning evidence against Trump in the Epstein files or anywhere else, there is no chance that it would not have been leaked or otherwise publicly used against him over the last 8 years of total war against Trump that has been waged by various domestic and international security services. Second, Musk claiming Trump is a pedophile raises the question of why Musk was an eager public supporter of Trump until he suffered the severe professional and personal embarrassment that led him to be booted from the White House.
Musk’s supposed revelation that Trump was in the Epstein files, which was obviously meant to imply that Trump engaged in sexual abuse of children, is obviously only coming from a desire for “revenge” rather than a genuine concern about punishing wrongdoers. Why would anyone knowingly work with a pedophile or conceal that someone is a pedophile? It’s obvious that Musk does not actually believe that Trump is a pedophile and is merely trying to cause problems for a former associate-turned rival. This is not productive behavior. It’s not how adults should act.
Finally, calling someone a pedophile should permanently close the door to cooperating with them on anything in the future, something that I’m not sure Musk intended to do, or at least that Musk should have known not to do if he planned to remain in the world of Trump-dominated conservative politics, which he clearly does.
Anyone conservative who Musk backs in the future must now explain their association with Musk and will be known as an opponent of the largest and most powerful faction in conservative politics. In trying to attack Trump publicly, he doomed any private effort to undermine Trump, which is a good thing because Trump is one of the few conservative politicians who is not completely worthless, but probably not what Musk intended.
What Musk did was not just dumb, it had no chance of success. That’s the worst part, I think: The coup attempt had no hope of achieving its purported goals, the most it could have done was derail a productive effort and allow liberals to win. This is not how internal disputes can be allowed to proceed in a political movement. There is nothing but vanity, ego, and stupidity behind these moves.
Certainly, heavy drug use explains Musk’s erratic behavior, but at every turn Musk just seems to be divorced from reality and lashing out blindly. He has no idea what he’s doing. He is out of his depth. In short, his political inexperience has generated all sorts of problems for himself and others.
As quickly as Musk’s attempted rebellion failed, it’s important to remember that it was harmful even in failure. Musk was an asset and now he’s a huge and permanent liability. He provided Democrats and various anti-Trump bad actors on the Right with ammunition to deploy against Trump and undermine the very necessary implementation of Trump’s agenda. Musk set a terrible example for others, who might mistakenly believe that all this is “normal” rather than a counterproductive clown show. Panic and despair and bad behavior are contagious in modern conditions, where they have become so common that there are no real social barriers to their spread anymore. We are not working with the historical American middle class and the norms that propelled it (and the country) to such success.
So, what is to be done? It’s embarrassing to have to deal with Musk because it begs the question as to why such an unstable and moronic person, who apparently is a heavy drug user, was allowed into such a high position to begin with. However, I think harsh treatment is very necessary anyway. Bad actors often try to create these hostage situations: They cause trouble because they know getting rid of them would be trouble in its own right. In these situations, people are better off shooting the hostage rather than allowing bad behavior to go unpunished forever. As I’m sure most of you have noticed, someone who behaves in this way usually only gets worse.
I wrote most of this article a month ago but decided to sit on it because it was a little unfocused (it might still be) and too harsh after Musk disappeared with his tail between his legs when the coup failed. However, it seems that Musk has elected to once again reenter the public stage to try to block the Big Beautiful Bill, an item that I don’t know much about and don’t care much about beyond the historic increase in immigration funding that the bill will provide (more than $100 billion for border security and internal enforcement, along with numerous increases in fees and taxes to discourage immigration).
There doesn’t seem to be any alternative way to secure this funding in whole or in part, and in my opinion immigration is Trump’s most important issue, so one way or another at the end of the day the bill has to pass.
Having embarrassed himself in the way he has, Musk is likely going to try to play the spoiler forever. Every anti-Trump figure follows the same pattern: They get ejected from practical politics (to which Trump provides the only access) for bad behavior and realize that their only potential path back to influence is to engineer some kind of catastrophic collapse that will get Trump and his supporters out of the way, without regard to the consequences that that collapse, which would entail total liberal victory, might have. That’s what Massie and Paul are trying to do in their attempt to block the BBB. They complain that Trump has not achieved X, Y, or Z campaign promise while simultaneously trying to take away the tools that might allow him to do so.
People assume this kind of sabotage is a natural reaction to an internal political split. It’s not. One of the biggest mistakes I think Trump made was his treatment of former Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions was an early Trump supporter and outspoken immigration restrictionist, one of the earliest senior and respected politicians to support Trump during his 2016 primary run. Trump requested Sessions resign over Session’s decision to recuse himself from the Russiagate investigation, which caused Trump all sorts of problems. Even though I think Sessions made a big mistake there, it was motivated by Sessions’ good faith understanding of the situation and the law. Trump continued to treat Sessions harshly after Sessions left the White House, supporting his primary opponent during a 2020 Alabama Senate race.
Despite the harsh treatment he received, Sessions has not staked himself out as some outspoken opponent of Trump. He has not engaged in the kind of self-indulgent counterproductive behavior that typifies people who have fallings out with the Trump camp. He hasn’t cynically changed his views to account for his turn of political fortunes. This is all because Jeff Sessions is actually a patriot who loves his country and wants good things to happen to it, even if he’s not involved, while most conservatives who have elected to be anti-Trump are ultimately just in it for themselves. I hope there’s a reconciliation between Sessions and Trumpworld at some point, because people like Sessions are rare and always have something to offer.
For people like Musk, the only way to get rid of the threat they pose is to get rid of them. I hope that Musk is run out of politics and that the Trump administration pulls every lever they can against him: Piss test him at an inconvenient moment and take away his security clearance. Charge him with assault on a federal official for attacking Bessent and throw him in jail. Sue him for defamation by implication for his tweets about the Epstein list. Support shareholder efforts to get him removed from his companies in light of the huge fluctuations in stock prices that his erratic behavior has caused.
Musk has demonstrated that he’s only going to get worse and not learn anything from his mistakes. He made a lot of real contributions, but he did not buy a license to fuck everything up forever and no one should sell him one. Similar harsh treatment should be extended to anyone who supported Musk or who used Musk’s failed moment as an opportunity to get in cheap shots at the Trump admin. These guys are going to do this forever until they’re stopped. People must learn not to interact with them without hostility.
It’s unlikely that someone as wealthy and prominent as Musk could ever be fully removed from politics. However, he can be brought down a peg or three to permanently reduce his influence. He’s broken the law and should suffer the consequences for it. It’s not like Musk can go back to the Left, they’ll set out to kill him if they ever manage to regain political control. Most importantly, harsh treatment of Musk and his associates would demonstrate that bad behavior on the Right actually has consequences, which it currently doesn’t.
There are basically zero standards on the American Right. It is incredible the kind of characters who are tolerated and excused. Someone can engage in bad behavior for years, even directly advocating for liberals to be given full control, and still be welcomed back into the fold for merely saying the right words. That’s a consequence of how most people treat this stuff, as an idea contest or game rather than a struggle for political power with very real effects on you and everyone you know.
You should not expect people to develop standards on their own in America’s basket case social conditions, they have to be re-imposed. When Wrangel hanged that railroad official, he was giving the spectators very important political experience: The stakes to what they were doing were very high, the fate of their country was on the line. When you were around Wrangel you had better act correct because there was important work to do.
Early Tuesday Update
Since the subtext of Mystery Grove’s essay was Elon’s reaction to the One Big Beautiful Bill, below are a few relevant X posts.
https://x.com/romanhelmetguy/status/1931349884755439782
