tmp202502

No. To be fair, these are my guessed diagnoses.

Is Musk neurodivergent? Very obviously. He says he has autism but he clearly displays traits of ADHD (that I recognise in myself).

Is Andrew Tate autistic? Hell yes! It's so obvious.

Is Trump ADHD? I personally think so. (He also shows signs of dyslexia).

But at any rate what I was getting at is: they were odd kids, underperforming perhaps relative to their awful fathers' expectations.

Google Fred Trump Sr, Emory Tate, Errol Musk. These are parents from the dark triad.

I would feel pity for any of them at some level; I definitely do feel pity for Elon Musk, whose awful father is not gone, and who is clearly heading towards narcissistic injury that would drive anyone insane.

You do. (Though exactly what is aligned to Democratic Party values that can be "thrown" to that demographic is a challenge).

And I agree, they did not. They ran a late, modified, campaign that deep-down assumed enough people were "post-Trump" that it was inevitable.

Trump ran a campaign knowing what Trump knows personally: people can be manipulated with needful things.

As an aside it is VERY funny to me that it is Rick Grenell riding to Tate's rescue.

In the old days we'd have described Rick Grenell as "openly gay" -- a term people very justifiably think should be left in the old days that described people, usually men, who adopted any position beyond simply not lying to anyone. Nowadays this is what we expect for any gay person: they should not have to lie to anyone, or adopt any particular position of downplaying their identity.

But in Trump world I think it probably has some meaning and currency: Grenell is an openly-gay Trumpist.

It must really upset Tate that this man is being sent to save him.

Because Tate is a throwback: he is not fond of the openly gay. (Emphasis yours.)

Tate is not a hardcore convert to anything. Tate's Islam conversion is about two things:

1) putting up a flag to find somewhere comfortable without an extradition treaty where his views are normal

2) seeking narcissistic supply from an easily identified demographic: angry, wealthy young muslim men in repressive countries. He's stylised himself like that: like the wealthy son of an exiled Emirati.

He's a malignant narcissist: broken, cold, and lonely inside in a way that only adoration can fix.

As it goes, Tate shares with Musk and Trump a genuinely tragic origin story of adoring a bullying, abusive, cold, father. (With one likely additional common factor: neurodivergence. Autism in Tate's case, AuDHD in Musk's, ADHD in Trump's)

The paradox of this world is that if Trump, Musk and Tate sat down, talked and cried together about the abuse and coldness of their early years -- their utterly broken childhood -- then masculine culture and the world might get somewhere.

> Is this what folks voted for? To pressure for the release of a man who openly brags about pushing women into sex work and profiting from their labor?

Yes!!

Now, to qualify, I don't mean all Trump voters voted for this, or would align themselves with other individual things, say, stopping the development of an oral covid vaccine, or pardoning violent criminals and international dark web drug kingpins, or giving a billionaire essentially unfettered control over the federal government (and then pretending someone else is in charge when called on it).

I don't even mean that the reasons people vote for people are individual (though of course they are).

What I mean is, the promises the Trump campaign made were highly segmented and targeted, in ways that are not obvious from a national or international media perspective because that media perspective was dominated by what Trump says. And Trump voters don't listen to the words, they listen for the tone -- the shared anger and the feeling of being heard.

For example, Latinx voters were sold a very different, more nuanced picture of immigration reform through outreach than the national picture. Muslims in Dearborn will have seen voter suppression efforts if not outright claims that Trump would get a better deal in Israel. Clearly libertarians believed, with some justification, that they'd get RFK Jr (a priapic lunatic) in charge of healthcare and they'd get Ross Ulbricht (a man who is credibly accused of having purchased a murder) pardoned.

I strongly suspect that if you dig through the outreach they made to the young-manosphere on social media, on Tiktok etc., you will see ways they presented themselves as sympathetic to the Tates' plight that will make this look like acting on a hinted, if not explicitly stated, promise. Someone will have said "we're going to strongly look into that".

Now, I am not going to pretend I think Trump is good for anyone. He's not. And I am not an American.

But I think the Democrats need to understand something important: they spent all that time laughing at the hamfistedness of Elon Musk's wasteful ground game, which probably was useless and counterproductive, and they ignored how effective, organised, and segmented weird little Charlie Kirk's ground game was.

It's clearly one of the greatest successes in campaigning history: they sold a crooked, bullying, manipulated, intellectually ignorant felon to an electorate and won.

Do I think first-time-voting and angry divorced twenty-and-thirtysomething men were targeted by a campaign that spoke to them in Andrew Tate's language and suggested he was being unfairly treated? Fuck yes.

(Posting throwaway because I no longer have an account)