Elon Musk For President (of Twitter)!

Photo by Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Long before the advent of memes and their evolution into a form of hieroglyphic metalanguage, those of us of a certain age carried on meta-conversations via quotation. The Simpsons, of course, is an all-time favorite. In an episode from season 10, an invasive species of tree lizard invades Springfield and decimates the local bird population. The town’s solution is a prime example of the masochistically cutting satire that was the hallmark of 1990s Simpsons.

Lisa: “What happens when we’re overrun by lizards?”

Principal Skinner: “Not to worry. We just unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes to wipe out the lizards.”

Lisa: “But aren’t the snakes even worse?”

Skinner: “Yes, but we’re prepared for that. We’ve lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.”

Lisa: “Then we’re stuck with gorillas!”

Skinner: “No, that’s the beautiful part. When winter rolls around the gorillas simply freeze to death.”

Which brings me to Elon Musk. The eccentric billionaire wants to buy Twitter. We’ll see how serious he really is about it, but my guess for why is because he disagrees with its attempts to limit disinformation and ban users, even prominent ones, for violations of its terms of use. Musk owning Twitter would likely bring an end to that practice, allow it to mainline disinformation into the social and political spheres, and welcome back all the trolls and goblins and nasty creatures from Tumblr/Gettr/Telegram. This would have serious, long-term negative consequences.

But our short-term lizard problem is more acute. Republicans are poised to make sweeping gains in November, likely taking both houses of Congress, and capture or hold several key governorships in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The consequence of this will be battleground states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — with Republican legislatures with new Republican governors enacting election laws that allow the legislature to meddle with presidential vote certifications, election boards, and other under-the-hood mechanisms that have the effect of shifting administration of presidential elections in those states to partisans. And since 2020, the few stalwarts who stood tall and refused to undermine elections in their states have been replaced at the local level and face serious challenges at the secretary of state level.

Republican control of Congress, aside from two years of nonstop spurious investigations and bogus impeachments that will cripple the Biden administration, opens the door for real chaos should the Republican candidate not win the 2024 presidential election. With battleground states under Republican control, their interference with popular elections there, in addition to the loud and baseless claims of voter fraud, will seed real questions about the legitimacy of outcomes, certifications, and electors in those states. Even if accurate election results are discernable at the time, the doubts Republicans themselves create will give them an excuse to throw the election to the House of Representatives if all else fails. (Recall that each state votes once in a House election for president, so even if such an election were to happen right now with a Democratic majority, the Republican would win because they hold majorities in 26 state delegations. A Republican majority will likely control more state delegations.) It promises absolute chaos. And we know that chaos is a ladder.

Limiting Republican gains this year is critical to minimizing chaos in the next presidential election, chaos that likely would destabilize our political system. So I present to you our needle snake: Let Elon Musk take over Twitter, and the sooner the better. His influence would likely lead to rearming Donald Trump with his Twitter account. Having Trump off Twitter has diminished his public profile outside the MAGA Cinematic Universe. Right now he is confined to dashing off press releases that read like Tweets by Fax, random caps and all, from Mar-a-Lago and ranting on the phone to the likes of Sean Hannity like a senile Florida retiree with nothing to do. The audible range of these missives is much more constrained than it would be on Twitter. That muffler has afforded normies and suburbanites and 2016-2020 swing voters the luxury of forgetting about him and disassociating him from the Republican party. Trump’s favorable/unfavorable ratios at both RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight are the best ever. Many of them are considering voting Republican in November, for a host of reasons.

Bringing Trump back to Twitter, to heckle Biden and praise Putin and bash NATO and Ukraine and every other kind of unimaginable twisted nightmare that could emerge from the dark recesses of his cockroach brain, would remind all these voters what they’re getting when they vote for a Republican. Again, blasting the rickety dam Twitter has erected against disinformation and demagoguery with a Falcon heavy could have serious negative consequences in the future. And it may not even work. But the lizards are at the gates, and these are desperate times.

So release the needle snakes! Elon Musk for president (of Twitter)! We’ll spend 2023 finding our fabulous gorillas. And relax, man. Winter is coming.