German Government: Musk Trying to Influence Election With “Nonsense”

The German government has accused Elon Musk of using his platform X to influence their election.

“It is indeed the case that Elon Musk is trying to influence the federal election,” German government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann told reporters on Monday. She added that Musk is free to opine on German politics: “After all, freedom of opinion also covers the greatest nonsense.”

“Chancellor Oaf Schitz or whatever his name is will lose,” Musk said in response on X, referring to current German chancellor and center-left Social Democrat Olaf Scholz.

Musk has been making his support for Germany’s right-wing, anti-migration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party clear for weeks. Earlier this month, the billionaire wrote, “Only the AfD can save Germany.” Last week, he wrote an opinion column in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper endorsing the party, calling it the “last spark of hope.”

“The AfD, even though it is described as far-right, represents a political realism that resonates with many Germans who feel their concerns are ignored by the establishment,” Musk wrote. “Portraying the AfD as far-right is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!”

The paper’s head opinions editor resigned after this was published.

Musk was also extremely influential as an advocate for President-elect Donald Trump this election cycle, and will likely continue to be as he co-leads DOGE with Vivek Ramaswamy.

As for Germany, the results of his meddling are still unknown. Their election will be held on February 23, 2025.

In the wake of his death, hundreds of obituaries have memorialized President Jimmy Carter as a devoted and disciplined public servant. President Joe Biden, who was the first senator to endorse Carter’s bid for the White House in 1976, described the 100-year-old Democrat as a man and politician who “embodied the most fundamental human values.”

But few eulogies for the one-term Georgian have underscored his firm moral positions on U.S. foreign policy, which effusively torched both parties for transforming the United States into what he once described as “the most warlike country on earth.”

Here are some of his most powerful quotes:

1. “A superpower not only should be the top country as far as military power is concerned, which we’re going to continue to be, but I think that the American superpower goal should be to be the champion of peace, and to be the champion of human rights, and to be the champion of the environment, and to be the most generous nation on earth,” Jimmy Carter said in 2015, later highlighting that the U.S. had been at peace for just 16 of the 242 years that it had existed as a nation.

2. “There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently,” Carter told The Independent in 2004, long before most of the political class dared criticize the U.S. invasion. “That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington.”

3. “We cannot be peacemakers if American government leaders are seen as knee-jerk supporters of every action or policy of whatever Israeli government happens to be in power at the moment. That is the essential fact that must be faced.” Carter wrote those words in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, criticizing Israel for failing to end its occupation of Palestine, its apartheid system, and its pursuit of punishment of Palestinians.

Facing intense backlash from right-wing Israel pressure groups, Carter doubled down, arguing that balanced debate on the two nations was “practically non-existent” in Congress and the executive branch, and accused American leaders of being in Israel’s pocket.

Despite direct orders from President-elect Donald Trump, some House Republicans appear to be teeing up to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Trump voiced his support for Johnson Monday, just two weeks after the speaker went toe-to-toe with several House Republicans outraged that he had offered a lengthy bipartisan bill to fund the government. And despite Trump’s endorsement, not every Republican is following his lead.

Representative Andy Biggs was the latest to signal a reticence to follow the president-elect’s marching orders. During an interview on Fox News Monday, the Arizona Republican said that he wasn’t in the bag for Johnson, yet.

“I haven’t publicly or privately committed yet,” said Biggs. “I do want to speak with the speaker just to see what his plans are, because there are some issues that I think need to be worked out, specifically dealing with the budget issues.”

Representative Thomas Massie doubled down on his opposition to Johnson in a post on X Monday, reckoning back to another unpopular House speaker Trump once championed.

“I respect and support President Trump, but his endorsement of Mike Johnson is going to work out about as well as his endorsement of Speaker Paul Ryan,” Massie wrote. “We’ve seen Johnson partner with the democrats to send money to Ukraine, authorize spying on Americans, and blow the budget.”

Beneath his statement undermining Trump’s judgment, billionaire technocrat Elon Musk replied, “You might be right, but let’s see how it goes.”

Massie wasn’t the only one to bring up Ryan. Representative Victoria Spartz demanded Monday that Johnson outline how he would follow Trump’s agenda to the letter before she could deign to support him for speaker.

“I understand why President Trump is endorsing Speaker Johnson as he did Speaker Ryan, which is definitely important. However, we still need to get assurances that @SpeakerJohnson won’t sell us out to the swamp,” she wrote in a post on X Monday.

Spartz sent Johnson a list of demands, including a request for “unbiased ‘non-swamp’ professionals” to help her do her job. The two are expected to discuss the list at a meeting Monday.

Steve Bannon thinks that Americans deserve reparations for having to coexist with immigrants on H-1B visas.

“We haven’t fought these battles over years and years and years to allow American citizens of every race, ethnicity, religion, be gutted by the sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley,” Bannon opined on his War Room show Monday morning. “David Sacks, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk … there’s no reform. We want it gone.… We want reparations for the tech workers that you stole their lives.”

This is another installment in the current schism between the “America First” MAGA faithful and the tech-world MAGA plutocrats who want more high-skilled immigrants. Former presidential candidate and current DOGE co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy started the fire last week by declaring, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” asserting that it was American culture that was leading CEOs to look elsewhere for labor. This talking point was parroted by Elon Musk and other right-wing techies, inviting a MAGA backlash that even included Nikki Haley, the torchbearer of the old GOP establishment who was vanquished by Trump earlier this year.

“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” Haley wrote. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”

This anti-H-1B energy has culminated in Bannon’s calls for reparations, something usually invoked for African Americans historically disenfranchised by slavery and racism.

“We’re gonna get H-1B visas out, root and stem, and all the workers you brought in. Just like we’re deporting 15 million here, we want them deported, out,” Bannon said later in his show. “And give those jobs to American citizens today … we demand they get reparations. You stole from them.”

Donald Trump tried to stem the growing tide against House Speaker Mike Johnson Monday with a post endorsing his reelection, but whether all House Republicans are actually interested in getting back on the bandwagon is another issue entirely.

In a rambling post on Truth Social Monday, Trump urged the “Party of COMMON SENSE” to support Johnson’s bid to keep the gavel in the new year.

“LETS NOT BLOW THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY WHICH WE HAVE BEEN GIVEN. The American people need IMMEDIATE relief from all of the destructive policies of the last Administration. Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN. Mike has my Complete & Total Endorsement. MAGA!!!” he wrote. Most of the post’s word count was dedicated to his own “flawless” reelection campaign.

In voicing his support for Johnson, Trump has set up yet another loyalty test for House Republicans.

Earlier this month, Johnson came under fire after introducing a 1,547-page continuing resolution to keep the government open until March, among a slew of other bipartisan provisions, inviting the outrage of small-government types like technocrat billionaire Elon Musk, and a slate of sycophantic Republicans.

Republican Representative Thomas Massie was so distraught that he claimed he would not vote for Johnson in the upcoming House speaker election in January.

Johnson then worked with Trump on crafting another spending bill that suspended the debt ceiling, one of the president-elect’s core demands. But this time, 38 House Republicans broke with Trump and voted against the bill. In the end, Trump’s demand that Republicans find a way to raise or abolish the debt ceiling got left on the cutting room floor.

Last week, Representative Andy Harris, who chairs the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said that Republicans need to think about whether their current leadership “is what we need” and that he was “undecided” on what House leadership should look like moving forward.

More than a few other Republicans have similarly voiced their dissatisfaction with Johnson, as it seems that the GOP’s antiestablishment bent has turned against the party itself.