Musk Peddles Fake News on Immigration and the Media Exaggerates Biden's Decline

Shikha Dalmia sets the record straight on Elon Musk's X rants and Berny Belvedere highlights the media's misplaced priorities in the presidential contest

Dear Readers:

Berny and I wanted to share with you our recent CenterClips, which are short commentary pieces in audio form. Berny’s clip takes the media to task for not situating concerns about Biden’s cognitive state against Trump’s lifelong moral and intellectual bankruptcy. My clip is about Elon Musk’s incessant invocation of the Great Replacement conspiracy that has radicalized the right—not just against immigrants but its political opponents.

You can listen to the clips by visiting our CenterClip profiles (Shikha | Berny). Or, since we’re also presenting them in written form below, you can skip the audio and read them as you would any other piece.

Shikha Dalmia
Editor in Chief, The UnPopulist

Fact Checking Elon Musk

X—formerly Twitter—has a practice of affixing “community notes” on tweets that are factually questionable. But when it needs this feature the most—to fact check the Twitter rants of its owner Elon Musk—it goes mute.

Musk has red-pilled himself to the extreme right from where he’s been platforming antisemites and bigots. But in recent days he has turned his ire from attacking Covid lockdowns to attacking immigrants, specifically undocumented immigrants.

In December, Musk pinned a tweet to the top of his page with a graph showing that more migrants are now arriving at the southern border than babies are being born in the United States. It was a thinly veiled attempt to peddle the Great Replacement Theory popular among white supremacists that leftist elites are trying to swamp the country with pliant brown people to displace the native white population. But Musk omitted to mention two relevant facts:

1. Just because these immigrants were arriving didn’t mean they were being admitted into the country. In fact, most are turned away or detained.

2. More immigrants have long been arriving at the border than babies being born to natives. There is absolutely nothing new about this.

But the bigger issue is so what? So long as these immigrants are coming to the United States to work, live in peace, and play by the rules of its liberal democracy, why do their numbers relative to the native population matter? They’ll strengthen core American values and institutions. After all, America is a land of immigrants where today’s Americans are yesterday’s immigrants, just like Elon Musk himself who immigrated from South Africa.

Musk hates Democrats even more than he hates immigrants and so he fears that more immigrants will mean more Democratic voters. And it is true that immigrants gravitate toward Democrats after gaining citizenship. But that’s not because they are congenitally wired to do so. They don’t carry a gene that says “Democrat.” If they vote Democratic it’s because the Democratic Party hasn’t made anti-immigration hatred its main selling point. If Republicans stopped pouring hate on immigrants, maybe they’d win them too. Canadian Tories under Steven Harper were so successful in wooing the immigrant community in 2008 that Canadian liberals complained that conservatives were using more welcoming immigration policies to gain an immigrant vote bank.

But Musk is not only peddling the dangerous Great Replacement Theory to sour Americans on low-skilled immigrants. In another tweet, he also flirted with another myth, namely, that undocumented immigrants enjoy all kinds of services without “paying taxes” or doing “jury duty.”

He lumps among the freebies they receive not just “health care and in-state tuition” but, hilariously, “bank loans, mortgages, insurance, driver’s licenses,” which don’t cost taxpayers anything. But the big lie here is that the undocumented get these things for free without paying taxes.

In fact they do. Far more than they receive in services. Indeed, even before the 1996 welfare reform act banned immigrants from collecting any means-tested benefits, a National Research Council found that over their lifetimes and factoring in their children’s taxes, unskilled immigrant families paid on average $80,000 more in federal taxes than they consumed in federal benefits. About 62% of them also paid federal income taxes (via withholdings) while 66% contributed to Social Security and Medicare. Their Social Security contributions were putting $50 billion annually into something called the “earnings suspense file” that they’ll likely never see again because they use fake Social Security numbers on their returns that can’t be traced back to them.

And at the state level, they pay sales and property taxes (through rent) that help offset the cost of roads, schools, and other non–means tested services they use. Indeed, they pay taxes without being given any representation because they can’t vote. Moreover, they come here in their peak working years after another society has invested in them, bestowing a huge windfall on America.

So Musk should either retire his nativist talking points or affix fake news on them.

Biden’s Cognitive Worst Is Better Than Trump’s Cognitive Best

In an audio essay for The New York Times, Ezra Klein argues that Joe Biden is too cognitively compromised to run an effective campaign for reelection. As Klein sees it, not only is Biden routinely committing embarrassing verbal slip-ups, which is suggestive of cognitive decline, but his camp is all but confirming that something is deeply wrong by refusing primetime interview opportunities despite Biden’s low approval ratings.

Even if we accept Klein’s contention that Biden is mentally impaired to a degree that is significantly complicating his bid for reelection, what I’ve found more worrisome is what the media has uncritically accepted about Biden, and what it hasn’t been saying about Trump, in the context of presidential fitness. A post on X from Slow Boring’s Matthew Yglesias helps bring out my complaints here.

A week and a half ago, President Biden delivered remarks after news broke of Navalny’s death. The whole thing lasted 10 minutes. Yglesias posted the video and asked: “Has Trump ever been this cogent on any topic?”

Yglesias’ excellent rhetorical question succinctly captures my two frustrations with the wider discourse surrounding Biden’s age and cognitive state.

The first is that the media has largely abdicated its responsibility to cover Biden’s cognitive state in a judicious way. There’s little indication that Biden’s remarks on this occasion—which were lucid, thoughtful, and, as Yglesias noted, cogent—or that any of the countless hours of footage from this past year alone of Biden being oratorically and rhetorically compelling, have meaningfully factored into the media’s appraisal of Biden’s cognitive state. Instead, the media has run headlong toward a narrative constructed by the very people politically incentivized to paint Biden in as unflattering a light as possible. When news organizations uncritically accept, rather than journalistically evaluate, the assumption that Biden is severely cognitively compromised in the first place, they effectively grant the right-wing influencers who spend their days curating Biden gaffe supercuts the opportunity to set the terms of the debate. Why does the media take at face value that the viral posts showcasing Biden’s gaffes and slip-ups are truly representative of his current state? 

Because right-wing commentators aren’t the only ones who think Biden’s mind is basically gone—lots of voters think so too. Of course, a major reason why the public thinks this is because the entirety of the right-wing information superstructure is devoted, on a daily basis, to depicting Biden as severely cognitively compromised. By contrast, most of the news sources the right sees as hyperpartisan Biden spin machines actually strain at being fair-minded and objective, which disinclines them toward producing any sort of muscular pushback against the right’s relentless mischaracterizations. This is the problem of asymmetric media polarization, and here’s how it hurts society.

Biden’s cognitive decline, objectively speaking, is probably a solid 4 or 5 out of 10 on the concern scale. Current voter sentiment, however, significantly though not exclusively due to a daily torrential downpour of right-wing messaging, is artificially juiced into seeing it as something closer to a 9 or 10 on the concern scale. Since mainstream media venues by and large epistemically rely on the views of the masses to supply journalists with their coverage frames, news operations end up treating popular concerns about Biden’s age as a kind of sacrosanct window into reality rather than as a hype cycle perpetually fed into the ambient collective consciousness by anti-Biden voices intending to sink his reelection chances. If you don’t think this is what’s happening, ask yourself when’s the last time something like Biden’s lucid and thoughtful Navalny remarks filtered into the wider discourse about his age and current cognitive powers. That stuff just doesn’t factor in.

I’m not dismissing voter concerns over Biden’s age. I, myself, harbor real worries about the president’s cognitive state. But because I register it as something closer to a 5 out of 10 on the concern scale, rather than a 10 out of 10, and because Trump is world-historically awful, himself a 20 out of 10 on the concern scale, I’m frustrated at the media’s unwillingness to treat this all-important topic with greater evaluative care. 

My second frustration with the broader discourse on Biden’s age—and one that Yglesias’ post targets more directly—is that even if we grant every single concern that Klein and others have voiced, it is indisputably true that Joe Biden remains an intellectual giant next to Donald Trump. Even if we grant that Biden’s cognitive faculties have suffered a precipitous drop from where they were decades ago, he’s still worlds ahead of where Trump is today—and, in fact, worlds ahead of Trump in his prime. That’s because Trump’s cognitive ceiling is lower than most people’s cognitive floors.

Let’s define a gaffe as a verbal mistake that the speaker didn’t intend to make. Under this definition, sure, Biden commits more gaffes than Trump. But what matters more is that most of Trump’s mistakes are intentional—he’s not even aware they’re mistakes. When we expand our scope and consider incoherence and confusion more broadly, Trump is the most cognitively compromised candidate in history.

In the end, the knock on Trump was never that he was prone to senile gaffes—it was that his very consciousness is infected by a lifelong moral and intellectual senility that is untreatable. In many respects, the “cognitive decline” talk doesn’t even apply to Trump, since his cognitive incapacities pre-date his aging. In essence, Trump has outflanked senility by being pre-loaded with unfixable buffoonery as his default mode forever ago. Biden may be declining, but he’s still preferable to the guy who never had moral or intellectual powers to begin with.

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