Musk's America Party: Whatever, Dude.
The Musk version of "freedom" consists of racists screaming obscenities at you and you sitting there and taking it.
The richest man in the United States, Elon Musk, has declared his intention to start a political party in the wake of a breakup with President Trump over fiscal deficits projected to occur in the wake of passage of the Big Beautiful Budget Bill.
On Saturday, the South African billionaire used his troll-centric social media platform to make the big announcement.
Calling out the so-called Big Beautiful Bill’s projected $3.3 billion price tag, he wrote, “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.”
“Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom,” Musk went on.
Over the weekend, the President took to his failing social media platform to attack Musk’s proposal:
“The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS, and we have enough of that with the Radical Left Democrats, who have lost their confidence and their minds!” Trump wrote.
Musk's premises for starting up a “third” political party include evidence of voter dissatisfaction with the two party system (which is essentially unchanged over the past decade) and a poll run by social media platform X showing 65% support for the idea.
I’ll give him credit for admitting that he’ll not be a national force in the immediate future; he’s projecting backing candidates in House and Senate contests where he thinks a win is possible, with the goal of preventing one party or the other from dominance. Elon Musk, being foreign born, cannot run for president. And then there’s the likely problem that any big name aligning themself with him won’t make it through the election without falling out.
In reality, the party most likely to be impacted is the Republican Party. Musk’s stated interests align most closely with libertarians, who traditionally have positioned themselves adjacent to the GOP.
In making the case for the America Party, Musk claims 80% of Americans lie outside the ideological extremes represented by the traditional parties. His statements suggest that any party he launches would be based on two ideological pillars: fiscal conservatism and aggressive investment in future-oriented industries.
As is true with Donald Trump, his political alignments exclude considerations of interests not directly impacting himself. In other words, Musk is just another sociopath unsatisfied with personal gains.
Don’t Fear the Deficit
Hang on here, kids: I’m going to say some words Trump, Musk, and other narrow minded politicians refuse to hear.
Namely, that the Federal government’s budget doesn’t operate under the same principles as the so-called average American family’s. There isn’t a pool of money used to pay bills; the Office of Management and Budget uses capital raised from the selling of Treasury Bonds to supplement tax revenue.
Until quite recently, those federal obligations were considered the safest place in the world to stash money. Now there is uncertainty, as the dollar is falling in value to other currencies, and the US role as guarantor of political security is shrinking.
Our current obligations are high because both parties backed big spending during the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are times, like wars, economic transitions, and pandemics where increasing the federal debt in the short term is of more benefit than harm. This country has operated that way for most of its history.
During good times for the economy the government should be reducing indebtedness, something Republican presidents over the past half century have failed to do. What Republican presidents are good at doing is increasing the national debt and claiming that a growing economy will cover the loss of revenue.
The insane part of increasing the deficit as expected by the Big Beautiful Bill is that it denies the reality that no tax cut for the wealthy has ever stimulated economic growth sufficient to cover its costs. In fact, the 2017 tax cuts are a primary cause of our present rapidly increasing federal debt.
Musk sees reducing expenditures as the only way to avoid a government overwhelmed by interest debt. The concepts of not reducing taxes and –God forbid– increasing revenues drawing on the obscene wealth of his peers just are not in his realm of understanding.
From Hunter Lazzaro at The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places:
Musk's premise for starting a third political party is that the Republican efforts to murder everything decent in the country aren't going far enough, in that they're failing to defund the supposed "waste and graft" that his drug-soaked mind came to Washington promising to find but, surprise, didn't actually exist except in his head. His takeaway lesson from "D.O.G.E." is not that he formed an incompetent, dorky, and wildly criminal group that thudded around the government breaking windows and looting databases and which he should now be ashamed of producing.
No, he thinks the ransacking was good, and he's forming a new party that, as far as anyone can tell, will be devoted to ransacking even more than that while waving little flags around. And being racist, of course. If we've learned anything from Musk's takeover of Twitter and all that's happened since, it's that the Musk version of "freedom" consists of racists screaming obscenities at you and you sitting there and taking it.
Then again, like his techno monarchist compatriots, any consideration for the existence of others is limited to transactional actions leading to self gain.
In his essay, Visionaries Without Vision, Hamilton Nolan goes in to the (mostly non-existent) policy concerns that Musk brings to his latest venture:
According to his Tweets, this new party’s foundational purpose will be to cut government spending in order to avoid “bankrupting” America. A slightly longer policy list retweeted by Musk suggests the new party will “reduce debt,” “modernize [the] military,” be “pro tech,” have “less regulation,” be “free speech” and “pro natalist,” and, most tellingly, have “centrist policies everywhere else.”
What you may notice (besides the fact that this is the sort of policy list that an ill-informed child would draw up) is that Musk’s entire grand political vision—one that he is presumably ready to spend billions of dollars to fight for—consists of an explicitly pro-billionaire economic platform, a handful of vapid personal affinities (legalize jokes! have more babies!), and then… nothing. Nothing else! He explicitly outsources all of the other political issues in the world to conventional wisdom with the dismissive phrase “centrist policies everywhere else.”
The totality of This Great and Powerful Man’s political ideas can be condensed to the sentence, “Protect my fortune, indulge my hobbies, and whatever.” Not even any creative fascist ideas like some of his peers. What a sad showing, from Mr. Mars.
How much will the America Party change domestic politics? Mr Mars shouldn’t have bothered. His money (I don’t think he’ll get much in the way of grassroots donations) may support a candidate or three, who’ll swear personal allegiance to a different billionaire than MAGA’s dolts do.
Finally, would you trust a future-focused economy by Elon Musk to do anything other than enrich himself?
Numbers are in and NYC congestion pricing is a big 'success,’ Hochul says by Mike Hayes at the Gothamist
The dip in vehicle volume – 10 million all told – has led to substantial drops in traffic delays, the governor’s office said. At the Holland Tunnel, rush hour delays are down 65%. And drivers coming into the city are getting back 7 minutes for every hour spent commuting, according to the governor’s data.
Traffic accidents are down as well. Last week, the city’s transportation department published data showing 87 people were killed by motorists during the first six months of 2025 – down significantly from the 128 deaths reported over the same period last year.
At the same time, public transportation ridership is up. Subway riders are up 7%; bus ridership is up 12%; LIRR ridership is up 8%; Metro-North ridership is up 6%, and Access-A-Ride ridership is up, 21%.
***
Monopoly Round-Up: Ohio, Kentucky Go FULL COMMUNISM on Pharma Prices by Matt Stoller at BIG
These programs are a big deal, but I don’t want to overstate the scale of the achievement. Medicaid isn’t all of health care, it’s just the part for low-income residents. But it’s clear there’s no logistical reason why we couldn’t replace corporate PBMs for commercial insurance or Medicare, and see similar savings and better service. And that’s likely what will happen.
So why focus on these successful nationalization attempts? I’m writing about this trend of state socialization of PBMs because of the fall-out from the New York mayoral election, where Democratic socialist Zohran Mandami is being attacked as a Communist for seeking to offer free buses, sparking a debate over the role of the state. There’s a lot of hot air around what the state should and shouldn’t do, but mostly that’s borne of people being familiar with the grooves of a conversation with well-understood insults, instead of the details of government. It’s far easier to throw around the term “Communism!” than to actually learn that Ohio and Kentucky just nationalized their Medicaid PBMs. “That’s boring! That requires homework!”
Communism or socialism or capitalism are words that mean a lot less than they seem. The state does a bunch of stuff, private entities chartered by the state do a bunch of stuff, and it’s often arbitrary and path dependent who does what.
***
Russia’s ‘anti-woke’ visa lures those fearing a moral decline in the West by Mary Ilyushina at The Washington Post
Butina insists that Russia is not actively recruiting disillusioned Westerners. “The Russian state views it as a humanitarian mission. Our job is not to attract people. Let’s be honest, it is quite difficult,” she said. “You need to adapt these people, help them with work, find a school for their children. This is a very difficult process.”
“It would probably be more correct to call it as a spiritual asylum visa,” she added. “People are moving because they are looking for Noah’s ark, not that Russia is seeking them.”
But the effort to attract disenchanted Westerns is a calculated one. A recent investigation by the Russian-language outlet Important Stories revealed that the RT network — which is under both U.S. and E.U. sanctions — funds a network of bloggers who produce videos featuring relocated foreigners lavishing praise on Russia while criticizing the West.
