How Illegal Was the Election?

How many crimes did Elon Musk commit to steal the 2024 election from American voters?

There's a coup happening in what was once America.

As Gil Duran explains, it's following a playbook that was written long before Project 2025:

In 2012, Curtis Yarvin — Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher”—called for something he dubbed RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. The idea: Take over the United States government and gut the federal bureaucracy. Then, replace civil servants with political loyalists who would answer to a CEO-type leader Yarvin likened to a dictator.

And the lawlessness is the point.

As Lawrence O'Donnell noted after Musk's RAGE/DOGE goons were granted access to America's Medicare and Medicaid systems:

Elon Musk has seized the most valuable marketable data that exists in the world and every bit of that seizure is illegal. It violates privacy laws and other laws. Law professor David Super told the Washington Post, 'So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they're playing a quantity game and assuming the system can't react to all this illegality at once.' Empowered by the United States Supreme Court telling him that that it is impossible for the president to commit a crime, Donald Trump is now violating the law at a faster pace than he has ever violated the law in his life. Donald Trump is finding new ways to break the law in Washington every day.

America, for all its "guardrails" and "norms" and "institutions," did, of course, simply allow these thugs to walk in and take over.

Given the brazen and overwhelming illegality we're now witnessing, maybe it's worth revisiting a question that many tried to raise back in November: "How illegal was the 2024 election?"

Let's just start with the standard dirty tricks and shenanigans that we now accept as part of the "democratic process," aka...

"The illegal and immoral deprivation of constitutional rights."

In May 2023, Marc Elias explained in an article headlined "We Cannot Out-Organize Voter Suppression":

Intentional voter suppression is happening, and it is weakening our democracy. Our elections are becoming steadily less free and fair. Addressing systematic voter suppression by simply “organizing” is like giving a shot of cortisone to fix a damaged joint. It may temporarily relieve the pain, but the joint will weaken in the long run

According to Elias, the odds were—illegally and imorally—stacked against Democrats even before voting began:

Suggesting that citizens can use organizing to defeat voter suppression also fuels a false narrative too many are inclined to adopt. It turns voter suppression and the fight against it into a question of campaign tactics rather than the illegal and immoral deprivation of constitutional rights.

After the election, Greg Palast dug into the effects of all that voter suppression—much of it specifically targeting Black voters—to conclude: "TRUMP LOST. Vote Suppression Won."

Elon's "legal" election interference

Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase and ruination of Twitter makes no sense as a business decision.

But as a campaign donation it paid off bigly, for Musk and the Saudis.

In March 2024, Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University’s Stern School of Business, wrote, in an article headlined "The Threat to the Election Posed by Elon Musk’s X":

The influence of Musk’s social media platform... has soared in right-wing circles... Musk has increasingly made the platform hospitable to antisemites, misogynists, and other hateful characters... The shift in where red America goes to rant is indeed an important stage in the evolution of the Republican Party. But the centrality of X is also a threat to the fall elections in which everyone—left, right, and center—has a stake.... Since acquiring X in 2022, Musk has slashed its workforce, decimating the ranks of content moderators and others charged with policing what stays and goes on the platform. He has invited back many of the white nationalists and other unsavory types whom prior management had muted or banned altogether... the rise of X’s influence on the right ought to be cause for great concern regardless of one’s political leanings.

Musk threw his full support behind Trump after the Butler shooting, using his personal account to tell election-related lies that were "viewed more than 2 billion times" and deploying X's integrated Grok AI chatbot to "spread false election information."

In the midst of the campaign, Musk released an unregulated AI image generator that allowed X users to create and share offensive and violent "anti-woke" pictures.

Musk also ran the sickest, most cynical, most deceptive ads America has ever seen, depicting Kamala Harris as a puppet of Israel to Arab voters while telling American Jews she was a "two-faced" puppet of Palestine.

Elon's shady—and illegal—election interference

While we don't know all the details, it's clear that—right now—Musk is committing extraordinary data crimes in America.

While we may never know the full extent of the data-driven crimes Musk committed during the election, it's worth reviewing the crimes we know about—and consider how much more he could have done in secret.

In July 2024, Musk's America PAC began running "Register to Vote" ads on Google that gathered data including address, birthday, and phone number from voters in swing states without actually registering them to vote.

As Jason Sattler wrote this week, Musk's "phishing scam-type campaigning... helped turn out precisely the voters he and the Trump campaign targeted."

Having gotten away with that, Musk moved onto even more audacious and public election crimes, including a fully criminal $1-million-a-day lottery that he continued even after being told by the DOJ how illegal it was.

It was later revealed that not only was the lottery illegal, it was also "an ugly fraud" that had claimed to pick winners randomly but didn't.

Musk knew he was breaking the law

The fact that Musk openly committed crimes—and refused to stop when told they were crimes—should be no surprise to anyone paying attention to his increasingly unhinged public statements.

In June 2023, Musk first voiced support for a violent coup to end US democracy. And he kept doing it after that.

As Musk became more vocal in his support for white minority rule—and for "Alpha Male" (and Aspie) supremacy over all inferior life forms—his madness became more apparent.

In October 2024, Musk told Tucker Carlson:

"If (Trump) loses, I'm fucked... How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Do you think? Will I see my children? I don't know."

And Musk's crime spree was foreign as well as domestic.

Musk's regular, secret conversations with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, his first deputy chief of staff Sergei Kiriyenko, and others raise significant legal and ethical questions. Has Musk acted on behalf of Russian interests or communicated with foreign officials to influence U.S. policy or public opinion? Has he registered as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)? Has he violated his top-secret security clearances in any undisclosed communications with foreign adversaries?

Democrats asked for answers in November and apparently got none.

Trump certainly thinks Elon tipped the scales

Musk supported Trump with a combination of "phishing" scams, vote buying, relentless propaganda, and a massively funded GOTV effort.

But—in an election where the Presidency was ultimately decided by a sliver of the electorate in the three Blue Wall states (Michigan, Wisconsin and Philadelphia)—did the uncontrollably criminal Musk also do anything, as a mentally feeble Grandpa might wonder, to "the computers"?

On Sunday, January 19, 2025, at Trump's final pre-inauguration rally in Washington, D.C., Trump told approximately 20,000 supporters:

He journeyed to Pennsylvania where he spent like a month and a half campaigning for me in Pennsylvania and he's a popular guy and he was very effective and he knows those computers better than anybody all those computers—those vote-counting computers—and we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide so it was pretty good it was pretty good so thank you to Elon.

In summary: Republicans start any election cycle with a built-in advantage thanks to the Electoral College. They use voter suppression techniques to limit turnout among demographic groups that traditionally vote Democratic. And in 2024, it's clear that Elon Musk used a combination of techniques—both legal and illegal—to tip the scales in favor of Donald Trump.

Like the illegal activities Musk and his DOGE crew are currently engaging in behind closed doors, it may be impossible to fully comprehend how many crimes Musk committed to steal the election from American voters.

One thing's certain: There will be no accountability.

Worse, there may be no going back.

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P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.