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David Brooks Likens Musk to Pol Pot and Stalin: Being Responsible For The Deaths Of Millions Of People Will Be His Legacy

DAVID BROOKS, NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, I'm not sure it was wreckage. There was wreckage if you're at NIH. There are wreckage at certain agencies, but the guy only saved $65 billion out of a multitrillion-dollar budget.

So, as a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven't gotten over. And so there's folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That's true.

But according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That's just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that's 300,000 dead, and we're four months in.

Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Tung, Stalin. We don't have anybody on the list from America. And I don't think it's the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably by the end of this hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that's Elon Musk's legacy.

And the people who work at Tesla and SpaceX may want to think about that.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/05/31/david_brooks_likens_musk_to_pol_pot_and_stalin_being_responsible_for_the_deaths_of_millions_of_people_will_be_his_legacy.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world

No shit right.

If it weren't for the decades of sane washing liberal and conservative talking heads have offered the mind of bullshit narratives they push, none of this would have ever been able to be come established.

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lemm.ee

Did anyone think that wasn't the plan? Survival Of The Fittest is basically bullshit, but it's also the main driver of Conservative philosophy.

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Survival of the fittest doesn't meant the individual. I cannot build a barn by myself nearly as well as I can in a group. I cannot farm as easily alone as with a commune. The fittest are communal.

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We don't have anyone from America on that list because we only started counting after they massacred the native nations. It's also harder to point to an individual who specifically was responsible as no one has absolute power there.

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lemmy.world

To what extent can the results be attributed to Musk vs Trump?

Sure, Musk’s DOGE was particularly incompetent, but was there any way of implementing Trump’s intended policies that wouldn’t have been similarly disastrous?

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lemmy.world

Trump vs Musk damages is a distinction without a difference. It's like asking if either Hitler vs Himmler were more responsible for the Holocaust. At the end of the day they were the ones in power, they made the decisions, either had the power to stop, and they didn't.

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There’s a difference if Trump and his supporters use Musk as a scapegoat to distance themselves from the fallout.

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lemmy.world

HA! If anyone doesn’t know who David Brooks is, a quick search will tell you.

And just in case, don’t follow the guy.

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lemmy.world

Well, it was posted earlier by someone else but with a fox news link. So I wanted a different link, and thought others may appreciate it.

I’m enjoying his thrashing the republiQans fwiw, but I have no illusions about David Brooks. Certainly I have less illusions about David Brooks than David Brooks has.

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lemmy.world

Are you one of those purity test lefties who can't bring themselves to vote for Harris because the primaries were a sham?

David Brooks sucks major league ass but if he's shitting on Elon, bigly, and if it's getting spread across the Foxiverse then all the better, I say.

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