Declan Carty

Anderson Cooper: “it has been a rough week for the world's wealthiest man, elon musk, poured nearly half a billion dollars into boosting republican candidates this election, which had they won, would have probably bought him a lot of access and continued to influence. his company spacex is based in texas, and musk spent at least $215 million trying to defeat texas democratic senate candidate james talarico. after senator-elect talarico beat his republican opponent by 12 percentage points, he invoked musk and his political expenditures in his victory speech.” James Talarico: “we must get big money out of our politics so no billionaire or trillionaire can buy our elections.” Anderson Cooper: “the atlantic magazine's charlie warzell's latest piece is titled $500 million bought elon nothing. musk's unprecedented spending may even have hurt republicans, and charlie joins me now. so does musk have anything to show for that massive $500 million in campaign spending?” Charlie Warzell: “not a heck of a lot. six of his senate candidates lost, just three of the 37 republicans that musk backed for the house of representatives, one only three of 37 there. it's a lot of money for a normal person to throw at a problem and not see any results, but for elon musk, it's really not that much money to begin with. it's a very small percentage of his net worth. so he didn't win a lot, but he also kind of didn't lose a lot.” Anderson Cooper: “and i mean, can you put in perspective how much of his wealth was actually injected into the texas senate race between talarico and ken paxton?” Charlie Warzell: “it is the equivalent of somebody who is worth a million dollars donating $500 that elon musk's net worth is close to a trillion dollars. so yeah, when you put it into perspective, it's not much. if you look at the forbes net worth tracker for billionaires, elon musk loses and gains tens of billions of dollars a day just in the stock market.” Anderson Cooper: “on wednesday, musk posted on his social media platform, quote, data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now, obviously to referencing to, you know, the controversy over data centers on the ground in places like texas and elsewhere. do you think the bigger issue from us going forward is the increased level of scrutiny he's going to be facing or might be facing with businesses based in texas and with ai data centers in texas?” Charlie Warzell: “i think it's really everything. i mean, elon musk moved his companies to texas. he himself moved to texas. so there's there's that. i think a real issue he has also is congress and oversight and accountability, accountability for his own companies and, you know, the potential deals that he did or did not strike with the government while he was helping to run the department of government efficiency, doge, and also his work at doge and whether or not some of that was legal or not and how he conducted that. i mean, he's he's potentially opening himself up in a democrat controlled congress to to a lot of scrutiny. and i think it's really going to come from from all sides here. there's also, obviously, the whole starlink and his ability to influence the war in ukraine, which is remarkable for any, you know, american tech oligarch to have that power. i think one thing to remember about elon musk always, even if you if you don't like elon musk, this was probably a bit of a sweet night for you or for people who want to see his power checked. but i do think it's really important because of all the things that he stands to gain and lose that his money couldn't buy these races. but i also think we have to remember that elon musk is very, very central to the world. and starlink, as you brought up, is a very good example of that. his company is his net worth. like a way i think about it is it's this it's this chaos agent, right? we had never seen money like this and influence like this. and he can roll his companies into other companies and and use that to ipo at these great rates. so i think that elon musk is still a very central figure to our politics, our culture, to the stock market, regardless of whether or not he won or lost on tuesday.” A person: “yeah, it doesn't seem like he's going anywhere. this guy had political instincts one time, ok? so in 2024, he's like, i'm actually going to get, you know, i'm kind of democratic coded. i'm an electric car guy. i'm going to get on board with trump. we're going to do this. we're going to get in there. and then he worked for trump for a tiny bit of time, hated it, right? breaks with trump, right? and then comes back to trump for some reason. and then you had this, every single move since then has sort of been wrong. and the thing about this guy is he like he did this one thing which was back trump one time. and since that, i think that we're that we're seeing that this guy sort of doing what he wants to do with his money. it's not that helpful to the republican party because he doesn't really know what he's doing with it. we saw this in the wisconsin state supreme court race in 2025, where he was spending hundreds of millions of dollars and it became the giant checks thing and it became actively part of the democratic campaign where it's like you want him to buy your vote. you want this idiot to try and buy your vote? absolutely not.” A person: “one of the things also did a good job of making him the villain. because he made it so easy with doge coming in. i mean, he made it very easy to put him in ads to, you know, make him the face of some of the harshest trump policies, especially when it came to purging the government.” A person: “the hats and chainsaw also might have helped in terms of branding.” A person: “exactly.” A person: “but the other thing is what's different from then, i would say, is the sheer volume of government contracts he has in the last couple of weeks. people notice the the throttling of ukraine's information on in the battlefield and him being out there talking about his involvement or not involvement. he's very, very public. the bbc news had put out this tweet talking about elon musk and putin and satellite talks with spacex. and then senator chris coons retweeted and he said, “one more thing to add to the list of questions for musk when i subpoena him.”” A person: “he is vulnerable to this, no?” A person: “just the contracts alone or? i mean, i think certainly, i mean, if you go back just a few weeks, which now seems like months ago, but just a few weeks ago, we were talking about the fact that a private citizen potentially turned off a capability for an ally as they're conducting a war that impacted their national security. and there absolutely needs to be an investigation into, again, how a trillionaire was able to do that when the whole fight around anthropic that pete hegseth launched with dario amadei was, in fact, we don't want you to be able to say how our capabilities, how we use your capabilities. so i think when it comes to investigations on elon musk, i think this is one of a long list of things that democrats, and frankly, i think there might be some republicans that are interested in understanding how close he is with the trump administration and his role and contracts with the government. so he fundamentally has had so much freedom, so much so that he was brought in to tinker and work, right, and fire people.” Anderson Cooper: “so is he more vulnerable now, even after spending half a billion dollars to try and prevent this outcome?” A person: “he is clearly more vulnerable now because you've got people who see him as the enemy. and i think there is a fine line democrats have to walk and should walk. i think it's totally appropriate to have oversight and do investigations and find out in good faith answers to questions. but you also have part of the base, and i imagine there's going to be a lot of the dsa candidates who are going to embrace some of this, just throw them in jail and just target this guy, which is not anything more than political retribution. it's obviously wrong and probably illegal as well to target him in that way. do it in good faith.” A person: “like an ilhan omar way?” A person: “or what do you mean?” A person: “well, ilhan omar is being investigated for actually committing some sort of immigration fraud. and i think that's legitimate.” A person: “but i'm saying, so you're saying if someone investigates him, it'll be bad faith?” A person: “no, i'm saying you should do good faith investigations. but if you're coming at it with the intent of sheerly demonizing this guy because you don't like him, because he didn't spend with your side, then that's obviously wrong.” A person: “and you would call that out too.” A person: “i mean, we would all call that out, it should. and i'm just saying the language that they're using specific to elon musk and targeting him is wrong in some instances. it does not negate the fact that there should be good faith investigations or oversight, not just with him, but everyone. that's what government is supposed to provide, some good faith oversight.” A person: “and it suggests republicans might also play into that.” A person: “they do that too.” A person: “i'm saying we all gotta do it consistently across the board. be good faith.”

JD Vance has no chance at being the next president of the United States and neither does Marco fucking Rubio. You realize now that they’re kind of stuck. They want to run for president in 2028. They ain’t gonna do it on a Trump agenda. In fact the sooner they can get people to forget that they even know Trump the better. I mean, he’s the fucking Vice President and the other guy is Secretary of State. Remember when you called him Hitler. JD? That was the play, dickhead. You blew it

This is a real photo sent to me from a source from outside a poll in Bucks County. @PAGOP having a normal one. Good luck winning over swing voters with that.

BIT OF A TRAITORS SPOILER ALERT 🚨 I don’t know why people are angry about tonight’s Traitors. Great bit of telly and I wonder whether the faithfuls thought about voting for someone else and keeping that person in so they knew the identity of one traitor who they could then remove them in the final 😵‍💫