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Well, I see — thanks to Elon Musk’s X platform — that Musk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize once again this year. 

A European Parliament member and uberfan from Slovenia, Branko Grims, submitted the nomination citing Musk’s advocacy for free speech on X (formerly Twitter). It’s worth noting that Grims constantly parrots Donald Trump and Musk on right-wing issues, especially immigration, calling for many of his fellow citizens to return to their original country: 

I propose that Elon Musk receives the Nobel Peace Prize for the next year because he did much more for the freedom of speech, which is a basic human right, much more than anybody else in the third millennium.

Nothing about Musk or his swinging chainsaw says “peace advocate.” Certainly not his apparently cozy relationship with Vladimir the Invader. But his commitment to “free speech” is also worth a closer look.  

Here’s what I know about it.

Musk took over Twitter, then began covertly changing it because, he said, it was keeping some voices out. 

What voices? We soon found out. And today, those “left out” voices dominate. My daily feed is swamped with lunatics. I am constantly reminded that I can tune in to “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani holding forth live on X to wallow in his corruption, meanness, and general insanity. 

Others Musk helpfully waves in front of me are a plethora of suddenly famous random “influencers,” mostly self-proclaimed “fathers” or “mothers” and mostly “Christians,” who slander others, including entire populations, gloat over their own good fortune and supposedly handsome families, and wish others ill. 

Musk’s social media platform constantly erupts, pumping acidic, accusatory, dishonest, and inflammatory lava — not to mention flat-out lies — into one’s feed. And not only in one’s feed. Daily, he jams them into your “notifications” — a feature that is intended to show how people reacted to your own posts — with reposts, comments, likes. 

In the past week, my “notifications” included: 

TRUMP JUST NAMED THE LEADERS OF THE “ELECTION RIGGING OPERATION” …publicly accusing former leaders of what he calls “treason….criminal at the highest level.” 

This came from a man in Barnsley, England, I have never heard of called Jim Ferguson, who says he is “building a worldwide network of patriots resisting the globalist agenda.” Ferguson has 413.9k followers on X. How did he get that many? 

Juanita Broaddrick, the former BIll Clinton accuser, is constantly in my “notifications.” This week, she claimed without proof that “260,000 dead people and illegals registered to vote…It [sic] massive FRAUD!!”

Also cluttering my notifications are posts highlighting crimes committed by people of color or immigrants — but never white people — and advocating the end of “white guilt.”

Another theme is intemperately phrased support for anti-vaccine sentiment, even in the face of rising cases of measles and other maladies caused by people’s failure to inoculate.

And, oh yes, endless promotion of old, dubious memes like Joe-Biden-and-the-ubiquitous-autopen. 

Recently, we’ve learned that much of this garbage is not even made in America. X’s own new feature has revealed that many of these purported fired-up Kentucky Moms and Proud Texans are actually posting from places like Israel, Russia, and China, homes to disinformation operations and “content farms.” 

Besides diverting manufactured hate and drivel into a popular app component with an entirely different advertised function, Musk also uses his platform as a PR vehicle for his businesses, his crusades, and his prosecutions of enemies. 

One recent example was his announcement that the EU ought to be abolished. This struck a nerve with me because it showcases the world’s richest person seeking to dismantle the one institution that dares challenge tech companies regularly. 

This happened two days after the EU fined Musk €120M ($139.7M) for breaching transparency rules — for instance, X’s perversion and mockery of Twitter’s original “blue checkmark,” which allows anyone to pay for a “verified” status, exposing users to scams by all kinds of malicious actors — and the way X hides its advertisers, commercial and political.

Musk didn’t say out loud that Europe has some of the most stringent and comprehensive technology regulations in the world, or that the EU is one of the few global entities seriously standing up to him and to the idea that the world should be controlled by a handful of its richest individuals.  

Of course, Musk claimed that his huge fine was based on the EU’s censorship of free speech. An  especially pungent response to this came from Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski:

Go to Mars. There’s no censorship of Nazi salutes there.

Writing in Quicksand

When Musk bought Twitter, I had around 40,000 followers, and — as I was encouraged to do — was actively working to build that audience. I thought I could get to 100,000 or more within the year and, from there, the sky was the limit. 

But… while posting my usual frank remarks in abbreviated form, I noticed that my following had stopped growing. 

Not only that, it began shrinking, as if we were suddenly in hyperdeflation. 

Since then, my X following has dropped by one-third. Where in the past I might attract dozens of new followers in a single day, in the Musk Gulag I went entire weeks with not a single new follower.  

And the ones I got under Musk often turned out to be bots. 

And there’s more. My posts used to get many thousands of impressions — meaning that Twitter was showing my comments to a reasonably large audience. But under Musk, many of my posts are shown to mere dozens. 

That, I believe, is called throttling. 

But it doesn’t end there. I’ve noticed that when I try to post some things, I get a message saying, more or less, “something went wrong” in red, and I’m told I can try again. X keeps rejecting it. 

Then I start changing the words, and when it seems like something of which Musk would approve — it finally posts. I kid you not. This is not some random one-off — I’ve played around with the algorithm many times: same result.

A few days ago, I tried posting a funny meme I’d seen circulating. It showed MAGA star Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s ex, in a before-and-after photo suggesting horrifically bad plastic surgery, with my added joke about “Before and after MAGA.”

That attempt generated a “something went wrong” message. I removed the word MAGA, and it still wouldn’t post. I changed a few other words, including the reference to Guilfoyle’s appearance, and it still wouldn’t post. Was it the photo? To test that, and to amuse myself, I paired the photo with “Trump is wonderful.”

And you know what? It posted. Here it is (I would add the transformation is worthy of Peter Jackon’s famous zombie classic Dead Alive): 

I tell you this long-winded tale simply to underline the absurdity that this man is nominated for a Nobel prize for his “commitment to free speech.” 

Meanwhile, consider how Musk promotes the most dishonest and manipulative people, and helps them attain a large audience and riches. You can go here to read about one example. 

***  

Here’s a story that, in normal times, would consume us for days on end and lead to investigations and hearings. Now, eh. 

Dominion Voting Systems Sold to Company Run by Former Republican Election Official

Over the years, most of the companies given the highly sensitive job of providing the voting systems we use have been owned by known and sometimes outspoken Republicans. This goes all the way back to 2003, when equipment vendor Diebold’s chairman, Wally O’Dell, promised in a fundraising letter that he was committed “to helping deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to the President.” Which, if you remember, he did. 

Turning over such vital infrastructure without safeguards to those with a known interest in a particular outcome is obviously a serious risk to democracy. 

But, OMG, Dominion? The very company falsely accused by the Trump people and Fox News of partisanship against the GOP, now taken over by an avowed Republican? And not a peep from most of the legacy media, with just a tiny group of tireless advocates even bothering to try to shed light on the structure and operations of the new company, Liberty Vote.

*** 

As we get further into Trump’s term, we also see a growing series of spectacles where his administration’s officials are made to admit they don’t really understand what he has ordered them to do. 

In congressional hearing after hearing, they stumble around, trying to explain and justify initiatives and claims that seem utterly gaga. 

A recent example is a senior FBI official asserting that targeting Antifa is a top priority — while being unable to even define what Antifa is or whether it actually exists as an organized entity. Below is an exchange between that official, Michael Glasheen, operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS).

Glasheen: Antifa is the most immediate violent threat we’re facing on the domestic side.

Thompson: So where is antifa headquartered?

Glasheen: What we’re doing right now with the organization—

Thompson: Where in the United States does antifa exist, if it’s a terrorist organization and you’ve identified it as number one? 

Glasheen: We’re building out the infrastructure right now,

Thompson: So what does that mean? You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us as a committee, how did you come to that? Where do they exist? How many members do they have in the United States as of right now?

Glasheen: [Could not answer except to say it was “very fluid” and “investigations are active.”]

Thompson: Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee to say something that you can’t prove. I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did.

***

Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) questioned Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on the claim that the DHS deports only violent criminals, bringing up the cases of Purple Heart veteran Sae Joon Park, who self-deported to South Korea after being threatened by ICE, and Navy combat veteran Jim Brown, whose wife, Donna — an Irish immigrant who had lived in the US for 48 years — has been detained for the past four months because she wrote bad checks for a total of $80 a decade ago.

He told Noem, “The biggest problem is this: You don’t seem to know how to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.” 

Either Noem perjured herself or she has no idea what is happening in the agency she is supposed to be running; either way she should be dismissed. 

Watch this breathtaking exchange between Magaziner and Noem. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so clearly embarrassed at being called out:

*** 

Against a backdrop of rapidly growing doubts, Trump still insists on sloganeering that “America is back.” I’m not sure in what way America is back, but I do know that certain other things are back — like measles. 

Hundreds in South Carolina have been quarantined for the potentially fatal disease during a new outbreak. The reason: Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have worked full-time to gin up doubts and fears about vaccines, and more and more people are opting not to protect their children. 

*** 

The media is finally getting semi-serious about Trump’s health (physical in particular, though more hesitant to question his mental wellbeing). Trump has particularly been upset about The New York Times’s work on the subject, posting a long tirade claiming that anyone who questions his health is guilty of sedition(!). 

Colby Hall of the site Mediaite submitted Trump’s posting to three leading AI chatbots for their analysis. Here’s what came back: 

ChatGPT: Grandiosity so intense it bends nearby furniture. 

Claude: This is someone who experiences any challenge to his self-image as an existential threat.

Musk’s Grok: Classic high-dominance narcissistic personality organization.

Note to Musk: further algorithm tweaking clearly required! 

*** 

I’m amazed that, after botching coverage of so many previous wars, legacy media still can’t quite get it together to identify a deliberate “wag the dog” attempt to start another illegal war which is clearly designed to boost low presidential approval rates. In my book, Family of Secrets, I shared a quotation from a Bush adviser, who heard it directly from George W. Bush himself: 

One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief… My father [President Herbert G.W. Bush] had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade… if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it.

Bush also described how thrilling it was to see British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher launching a war with Argentina over the remote Falkland Islands. 

Yet somehow, we forget again and again why we should be aggressively skeptical of manufactured conflicts.  

Example: I just read a really shocking (plus confusing and badly written) op-ed The New York Times published, implicitly supporting an invasion of Venezuela. 

I couldn’t believe this sentence justifying it: 

The entrenchment of an autocratic and repressive regime that has welcomed the worst international forces into our hemisphere and abused the human rights of its own people.

And they’re not talking about Putin or any of Trump’s other favorites. Nor are they talking about Trump himself who largely fits that bill. They’re upset that President Nicolas Maduro harasses and jails opponents and fixes elections. Absolutely no sense of irony here. 

***

Have you noticed how many of Trump’s ballyhooed international deals sort of peter out or disappear altogether? Martin Peers at The Information toted up some examples, like Trump’s announcement in August that he’d let Nvidia sell its H20 AI chips to China, in exchange for a 15 percent cut for the US government. 

All we’ve heard of that deal since then is Nvidia’s repeated statements in securities filings that the government “has not published a regulation codifying such [a] requirement,” and so it hasn’t sold any of the chips.

And now there’s yet another announcement that will undoubtedly sound impressive to Trump’s fans: the sale of another chip, the H200, with America now taking an impressive 25 percent. 

It all sounds like Trump, the famous hard-nosed negotiator, making deals that bring big bucks into federal coffers. With the implication of more jobs and fewer taxes. Except if these don’t actually happen. (Seems to me he’s looking for campaign-trail talking points. Fifteen percent failed to impress? Go to 25 percent. One can imagine his indiscriminate online boosters shouting all this to the rooftops — look what a great deal the prez is getting you! — and the more of a cut he gets, the more of a tax cut you get.)

The Chinese, who are rapidly developing their own chip industry, may very well block their own companies from buying this stuff. 

And then, of course, as Peers notes, there’s TikTok. Remember when Trump considered TikTok a national threat? Of course, he came around on that once he realized the app was actually helping his campaign. He keeps talking about deals for US ownership of the platform, and, meantime, keeps giving the company an “extension.” On September 25, Trump announced a US ownership deal, and said details on the investor consortium would be released… “in the days to come.” Peers:

Since then, despite a flood of reports suggesting the deal is essentially just a dressed-up version of the same data security arrangement TikTok already uses to protect U.S. customer data, we’ve heard nothing at all from the government — no new details of investors, nothing. In late October, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Trump and China’s president, Xi Jinping, would finalize the TikTok deal at a meeting they had scheduled. Given that Trump had said in September he had finalized the deal with Xi, Bessent’s statement was puzzling. More puzzling is that we’ve heard nothing else since then! 

*** 

What keeps working for the likes of Trump, Musk, and Palantir’s Alex Karp (whom I wrote about last week and who has since astounded people with highly bizarre behavior in a recent public appearance) — is that our ADHD society loves and rewards anyone who is highly performative, confident, even belligerent, no matter how nutty they also seem. Here Karp is squirming in his chair, courtesy of a posting by his own company, trying to get out ahead for damage control by announcing a “neurodivergence fellowship”:

While cross-country skiing this morning, Dr. Karp decided to launch a new program: The Neurodivergent Fellowship.

If you find yourself relating to him in this video — unable to sit still, or thinking faster than you can speak — we encourage you to apply.

The final round of… pic.twitter.com/2Xdrc13uj5

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) December 7, 2025

I have nothing against neurodivergent individuals, but doesn’t this sort of fly in the face of the general hostility to “DEI” initiatives — including at Palantir itself, which has rolled them back? 

Today we see almost the polar opposite: Far less respect and attention go to those who are calm, measured, thoughtful, reasonable, who admit the world is complicated and that they don’t have all the answers. This is, apparently, so “old school.” 

*** 

As usual, after covering some of the outrages we all need to be aware of, I look to end on something  that is… dare I say… hopeful. 

There’s actually some good news from the scientific community (even as evidence-based research is being aggressively defunded by Musk, RFK Jr., and MAGA): the truly thrilling discovery of a way to recharge aging and damaged cells, treating things like muscular dystrophy, fatty liver disease, and even Alzheimer’s. 

Now, if only there were a way to treat malignant narcissism and greed.