Tag Archive for: CEO Elon Musk

Liberal Pollster Warns Lefty Activist Group to Focus on Hill GOP and Gov’t Corruption, Not Trump and Musk

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Liberal activists should focus their attacks on congressional Republicans and perceptions of widespread corruption in government instead of the policies and actions of President Donald Trump and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, according to a Democratic political research firm.

The firm analyzed responses from participants in four focus groups consisting of swing voters and those who are not strongly committed to either of the major political parties. The analysis suggests the intense focus of Democrats in Congress and the mainstream media on Trump and Musk is at least somewhat out of step with the most important group of voters, especially in midterm elections.

“For these swing participants, their views on Trump and Elon are complicated and still forming. Trump retains some inoculation on corruption issues. His longstanding ‘drain the swamp’ rhetoric combined with the way he’s messaging DOGE through the framework of ridding waste and corruption gives him some credibility,” Impact Research (IR) said in a memo first made public by a liberal activist group, End Citizens United.

End Citizens United frequently commissions IR for political polling and data analysis. The firm boasts on its website that “we’ve flipped more Republican-held congressional seats over the past ten years than any other polling firm in the country.”

“Likewise, while participants had real concerns about Elon’s role, they were ill-formed, and they saw some positives from his cuts. They are not positive towards either person, but candidates should note that only utilizing corruption framing against Trump and Musk will present some barriers,” the IR memo continued.

Instead of the chief executive and the man leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the deepest-ever government-wide anti-corruption investigation, liberal activists should, according to IR, aim their energies at Capitol Hill Republicans, who have a razor-thin House majority and only a modest edge in the Senate.

“However, members of Congress are ripe targets for corruption messaging — voters view all (nameless) politicians as corrupt, focused on self-enrichment and gaining power. They attach a lot of the problems facing the country to these ills, and while they are not necessarily able to articulate specific examples of corruption, they are certain that corruption is rampant in Washington,” the memo said.

Significantly, the IR analysis says voters view Democrats and Republicans on equal terms on the corruption issue, even though traditionally GOPers devote much more time and political capital to condemning waste, fraud, and abuse than do Democrats, who in the past, while ignoring such concerns, have put far more emphasis on the alleged benefits of big federal spending programs.

“Participants view Washington’s culture as the corrupting influence — it is a disease that infects both parties equally. Even as Republicans have taken control of Washington, participants are no more likely to fault them for it than Democrats who they see as weak, ineffective, and self-interested,” the IR analysis stated.

In addition, the IR analysis pointed to the increasing irrelevance of critiques of Trump and Musk as threats to democracy.

“In past cycles, ‘threats to democracy’ was a motivator for the base and persuasive to swing voters. While all participants agreed that our democracy is under threat, there was much less clarity about what that means than in the past. Participants struggled to define what a threat to democracy is,” the analysis explained.

By contrast, the corruption issue, according to the analysis, “is both a salient issue and universally defined as politicians looking out for their own interests and against the interest[s] of the people. We should push hard on taking on corruption and should be mindful that just talking about democracy broadly without specific definition does not have the same intuitive meaning for voters.”

FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter told The Washington Stand the focus group results are no surprise, given recent history, particularly with regard to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

“There’s a reason why the Senate’s anti-insider trading bill is called the PELOSI Act — she’s the poster child of congressional insider trading and one of the most prominent congressional Democrats,” Carpenter said. He further noted that “there is no doubt the American public is cynical about the work of Congress. Many of their concerns about politicians using their influence to enrich themselves is, unfortunately, justified. This is fuel for the populist sentiment that has propelled Donald Trump to the presidency twice.”

Carpenter is skeptical that Democrats heeding the IR memo will enjoy complete success. He contends that “left-wing groups will have difficulty making the case to voters that it’s only Republicans who trade on insider information or otherwise use their positions to gain wealth for themselves.”

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘It’s Really Difficult.’: Elon Musk Reflects On Successes, Challenges Of DOGE At 100 Days

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THE WHITE HOUSE – On day 101 of the second Trump administration, Elon Musk recognized that his mission to cleanse the federal government of “waste, fraud and abuse” hasn’t been easy.

But Musk believes he and his team have had success — and the team will continue on its mission, according to Musk, well beyond 100 days.

“DOGE is a way of life, like Buddhism,” Musk laughed while meeting with reporters on Wednesday.

Elon Musk sat in the Roosevelt Room of the West Wing with the Daily Caller and a handful of other print reporters on Wednesday evening to reflect back on what DOGE has been able to accomplish as the Trump administration celebrated its first 100 days in office. As of Wednesday, DOGE says it has saved the American taxpayer $160 billion, which is equivalent to about $1,000 per taxpayer.

470,000 of the 4.6 million active U.S. government credit cards and accounts have been cancelled, a six page fact sheet on “DOGE wins” provided to the Caller read. The Social Security Administration has cleaned up its records at the directive of DOGE, finding 11 million number holders (all listed to be 120 years old or older) to be dead, the fact sheet claims.

“There [was] also an intense period in the beginning to try to figure out what’s going on, so just to get the lay of the land, things have to be very intense for the first three months,” Musk said.

“Just literally trying to understand what’s going on and try to map out, map out an understanding of the government in general. So, because the federal government is gigantic, very complicated and so if you’re trying to figure out how to stop racing forward, you’ve got to map the territory, understand how money’s been spent and why and where,” he continued.

Musk has said he will be stepping back from his full-time role at DOGE (he has been working in D.C. since the start of the administration about seven days a week) because the program has gotten into a rhythm and doesn’t need as much attention as some of his businesses do.

But Musk won’t completely disappear from DOGE, telling reporters that he will continue to work in D.C. on the project about two days each week.

In fact, Musk told the Caller that he thinks DOGE could be around for all four years of the second Trump administration — dependent on how long Trump wants his services. But for now, they’re still needed.

Musk and his team provided some examples of fraud they are currently working on eliminating from the federal government, which is escalating to Attorney General Pam Bondi and her team at the Department of Justice.

“There are hundreds of thousands of cases of fraud in the federal government,” Musk told reporters.

“We try to find the cases that are the most clear cut, we send that evidence to the DOJ, where they run it through their process, which takes several weeks,” Musk said, explaining that from there the DOJ has to decide whether it has the resources to pursue the case, if worthwhile.

It is a start, but DOGE is going deeper, Musk told reporters, explaining that he believes there are fraud rings being run in the federal government.

“There are definitely fraud rings operating, but in order to break up a fraud ring, it’s kind of like the mafia. You have to basically arrest one of the mafia foot soldiers, hopeful that they do a plea deal, then they tell you who their fraud manager is, and you can kind of work your way up the chain,” Musk explained.

The Federal Reserve is another potential place of interest for DOGE to inspect, as Musk seemed baffled by the report that the department is planning on spending $2.5 billion to revamp its headquarters.

“I think since at the end of the day, this is all taxpayer money, I think we would certainly look to see if indeed the  Federal Reserve is spending two and a half billion dollars on their design. But that’s an eyebrow raiser,” Musk said.

At the beginning of DOGE, Musk set a goal of saving the American people $2 trillion. Despite outside doubt, Musk still believes.

“I think it’s possible to do that, but there’s a long road to go,” Musk said.

“It’s really difficult … It’s sort of, how much pain does the cabinet and Congress want to take because it can be done, but it requires dealing with a lot of complaints,” he continued.

Musk is no stranger to complaints. Though joyful and laughing for a majority of the meeting, it was clear his task has brought some rocky waters to Musk. Just a few weeks ago, protestors lit Tesla chargers on fire across the country, vandalized Tesla cars and threw Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership.

“I’m proud of the incredible work by those teams who’ve taken a lot of flack. And these are people that can easily get high paying jobs in the private sector. In fact, came from high paying jobs in the private sector,” he said.

In February, Musk admitted that he and his team would make mistakes and that they would aim to correct them. Cutting USAID was one of the moves DOGE made in the last few months that received the most pushback, some of which caused the team to make mistakes, Musk previously told Fox News.

“I think there’s maybe another tendency to focus on the regrets … it’s sort of like focusing on balls missed, versus balls hit,” Musk told the Caller about how DOGE would avoid mistakes in the future. “Nobody bats 1.000 but nobody even bats .800.”

“I think we’re probably getting things right 70/80% of the time, something like that, which would be a ridiculous number for baseball, and so the wins far exceed the losses,” Musk said.

Musk’s time in the administration has brought about once-in-a-lifetime experiences too. The richest man in the world gave a window into what it has been like to be friends with President Donald Trump and run DOGE.

“We’ll be on Air Force One or Marine One and [Trump] will be like ‘Hey do you want to stay over?’ ‘I’m like, sure.’ But I didn’t request it, to be clear,” Musk said, sharing with reporters that sometimes when he is in D.C. he stays at the White House in the Lincoln Bedroom. “It’s just like we’ve literally arrived at a friend’s house, I guess. And then it’s like, do you want to stay here? I’m like, “‘sure.’”

Musk even attested that Trump is a very good host, explaining that one night when he stayed over, the president called him to make sure he helped himself to some dessert in the kitchen.

“Then he’ll actually call late at night and say, like, ‘Oh, why don’t we make sure you get some ice cream from the kitchen?’ And then I went to the kitchen and got the ice cream and I ate a whole tub of ice cream,” Musk said, adding that it was caramel flavored.

“Don’t tell RFK Jr,” he joked.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trump & Musk Will Restore Fiscal Responsibility To Our Republic

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President Trump and Elon Musk will do, what the do nothing Republican’s have never done – audit and dismantle all the wasteful federal government spending and departments.

WATCH: TRUMP: “At the suggestion of Elon Musk.. I will create a Government Efficiency Commission’

The Republican and Democrat Uni-Party pigs have been sucking on the taxpayers mammaries for years and years. The federal government is so fat it would qualify as a DEI hire.

Soon we will return to fiscal responsibility and sanity and fund only what is required to maintain a strong national defense.

Trump will secure our borders, and also return our constitutional republic to energy independence.

Trump will tell the Speaker of the House no more bullxxxx continuing resolutions (CR) it’s time for a fiscally conservative budget that puts American citizens first.

The weak Republican Party is also being flushed and cleansed of its fraud party members. The Communist Democrat party is imploding under its tyranny.

Trump 2024.

©2024. Geoff Ross. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: 9 States Where the Cost of Living Has Increased Most During Biden’s Presidency

Elon Musk’s X is not as dangerous as its critics want you to believe

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Late last month, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese launched a veritable tirade against X/Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

He described Musk as an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he’s above the law, but also above common decency”.

“This is an egotist,” Albanese huffed. “He is someone who’s totally out of touch with the values that Australian families have, and this is causing great distress.”

The Prime Minister labelled X a “vanity project” for Musk and claimed the billionaire is “causing damage” to his own social media site that, under its previous ownership, was much more compliant with the world’s thought police, having infamously de-platformed a sitting United States President.

Persona non grata

Albanese’s spat with X related to his government’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who recently took Musk to court in an effort to censor video footage of two Sydney knife attacks. Ironically, Musk had already hidden the footage from Australian IP addresses, but the egotistical lawsuit wanted it memory-holed from all X users on the planet.

Albanese’s screed is just the latest in a barrage of criticism against the eccentric businessman.

Since Musk’s Twitter takeover in October 2022, the media narrative about him has taken a sharp left turn. Once a heroic entrepreneur blazing the trail for electric cars, helping poor countries access the internet, revolutionising space travel, and changing the game for those suffering neurological conditions, Musk is now public enemy number two — second only to Donald Trump, the other “threat to democracy”.

“Elon Musk Spreads Election Misinformation on X Without Fact Checkers,” according to The New York Post. PolitiFact opines “How Elon Musk ditched Twitter’s safeguards and primed X to spread misinformation”. “Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Becoming a Sewer of Disinformation,” whines Foreign Policy. The pile-on of hyperventilating headlines mounts each week.

But how dangerous is X, really?

According to research just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, not very.

Though the study sits behind a paywall, Bloomberg has written a pleasantly balanced piece summarising its findings.

Openness

The researchers, from the University of California, San Diego, looked specifically into X’s new Community Notes function, implemented by Musk as an alternative to the behind-the-scenes moderation method employed by other Big Tech platforms.

Thanks to Community Notes, rather than flagging a post for review by anonymous “experts”, X users can contribute directly to crowdsourced fact-checking, either by writing the correction themselves or upvoting and downvoting the fact-checking of other users. The entire enterprise takes place in full view of the public, rather than in the dimly-lit cubicles of Silicon Valley.

Bloomberg reports that the study “showed the notes were almost always accurate and usually cited high-quality sources”.

“The old system relied on fact-checkers whose identity and scientific credentials were unknown,” Bloomberg notes. “They could take down posts they deemed to be misinformation, ban users, or use the more underhanded technique of ‘shadow bans’ by which users’ posts were hidden without their knowledge.”

By contrast, Musk’s Community Notes feature “has the benefit of transparency,” allows for “corrective commentary complete with links to scientific papers or media sources,” and makes use of “the power of collective intelligence, which has proven surprisingly good for forecasting and assessing information”. The article continues:

The new system isn’t perfect, but it does appear to be pretty accurate. In the JAMA study, the researchers looked at a sample of 205 Community Notes about Covid-19 vaccines. They agreed the user-generated information was accurate 96 percent of the time, and that the sources cited were of high quality 87 percent of the time. While only a small fraction of misleading posts were flagged, those that did get notes attached were among the most viral, said lead author Ayers.

This is far superior to Twitter 1.0, Bloomberg contends:

During the pandemic, fact checkers and moderators labeled lots of subjective statements as misinformation, especially those judging various activities to be “safe.” But there’s no scientific definition of safe — which is why people could talk past each other for months about whether it was safe to let kids back into school or gather without masks. Much of what was labeled as misinformation was just minority opinion.

Twitter’s old censorship system was based on the assumption that people skip vaccines or otherwise make bad choices because they are exposed to misinformation. But another possibility is that lack of trust is the real problem — people lose trust in health authorities or can’t find the information they want, and that causes them to seek out fringe sources. If that’s the case, censorship could create more distrust by stifling open discussion about important topics.

The best disinfectant is sunlight, in other words. The solution to bad speech is better speech, not censored speech. Once assumed true, these nuggets of wisdom have somehow been lost in the mad rush to demonise Musk.

Granted, the JAMA study only looked at information surrounding Covid-19 vaccines as their test case. More research will help further assess the efficacy of Community Notes, which remains a relatively new approach to social media moderation.

However, there are plenty of anecdotes to suggest it is working.

Balanced

Just last week, lefty rag Jacobin wrote a naked hit piece on American retail giant Walmart, with the following spicy caption:

Users quickly got to work, setting the record straight via Community Notes in a correction that read:

“Walmart non-corporate Associates’ average hourly wage is $17.50/hour with full-time benefits. Jacobin pays writers $0.07/word, so a Jacobin writer would have to write 250 words an hour continuously to make the same wage as a Walmart Associate, but without benefits.”

The feisty fact check provided a list of sources — and great amusement to all who read it. (Have a glance through the comments if you want a good chuckle).

Community Notes is also proving helpful (or unhelpful, depending on who you’re rooting for) in the lead-up to the November presidential election.

Accounts linked to the White House have been fact-checked on many occasions for misleading claims about job creation under Biden, how easing inflation impacts consumer prices, wage increases for American workers, and the Biden administration’s progress on “clean energy”.

In fact, even Elon Musk himself has been fact-checked via the Community Notes feature for questions he raised about abuses under Vladimir Zelensky in Ukraine.

Clearly, the feature is working if it’s allowed to critique the platform’s billionaire owner.

It’s the other powerful people being held to account on X that appear to be fuelling the ongoing outrage against Elon Musk.

It’s easy enough to see how a social media website prizing the wisdom of crowds over the brute force of powerful governments and the propaganda of the legacy press might be seen as a threat.

It’s also refreshing. And I’m quite enjoying the spectacle.

Is X a superior iteration to Twitter? Leave your comment below.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg is a husband, father, freelance writer, and a familiar Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He is the Senior Editor at Australia’s largest Christian news site The Daily Declaration and a Contributing Editor at Mercator. His writings can also be found at Intellectual Takeout, The American Spectator and the Spectator Australia. He has authored or co-authored five books, including his breakout title Cross and Culture: Can Jesus Save the West?

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.