Academic waffle at its purest

I learned, while checking in on the Bluesky home of Professor Sandy O'Sullivan [the trans/non binary light skinned aboriginal who recently celebrated getting an Irish passport (as all Australian people indigenous do 😐) and "gender affirming surgery"  - which I would assume is breast removal - at the tender age of 60] that a university in Ireland is currently hosting the European Intersectional Humanities Summer School.  

While I (like all reasonable people) am appalled at the Right turning into an anti science conspiracy cult in the US, and rabidly anti-immigration populist in most of the West, and consider its ideological extremes are much more significant that those on the Left, in the interests of balance, it's still fair that from time to time I note the nutty vacuousness of Lefty academia in identity politics that produces nothing but hot air and well paid employment for people with nothing productive to do.   (I feel a bit guilty dissing O'Sullivan, who frequently appears emotionally fragile,  but have a look at a talk like this one on video that she has given, and I just have to question the funding of this corner of academia.)     

Anyway, lets read about the summer school and be amazed at the way words can be combined to say nothing of significance:    

The European Intersectional Humanities Summer School 2026 will be held in Maynooth University Arts & Humanities Institute from Monday, 22 June to Friday, 03 July. It will offer an innovative and transformative experience at the intersection of critical theory, social justice and humanities scholarship. Convened by Professor Anna Hickey-Moody, the Summer School will bring together scholars, activists and students for an immersive exploration of how intersectionality shapes and is shaped by the human experience across various fields of inquiry. Teaching alongside Professor Hickey-Moody will be A/Prof Loïc Bourdeau. As Associate Dean for Research & Engagement at Maynooth University (MU), Loïc brings extensive interdisciplinary expertise in creative methods, gender and sexuality research, languages, and the medical humanities. 

“Remixing”offers a methodological and conceptual framework for our interdisciplinary summer school grounded in the intersectional humanities. It foregrounds creativity, criticality, and relationality: remixing as praxis invites participants to work across historical periods, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural traditions, to produce new ways of thinking, making and imagining futures. In its most expansive form, remixing is not merely a technical process: the rearrangement or recombination of source materials, but a political and philosophical gesture. It challenges inherited hierarchies of knowledge, interrogates the power structures that have shaped archives, disciplines, and canons, and opens up space for voices, methodologies, and epistemologies that have been marginalised or excluded in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
 
Approaching the humanities through remixing allows participants to revisit history, philosophy, media, music, literature, languages and cultures not as fixed or closed narratives, disciplines or practices but as dynamic sets of traces and counter-narratives that can be recomposed to reveal suppressed perspectives, alternative genealogies, original grooves. Remixing in music and media provides a lens through which to understand circulation, appropriation, hybridity, and resistance: the ways cultural forms travel, transform, and accumulate political charge. In philosophy, remixing can mean bringing together disparate traditions, from Indigenous, African, or Asian philosophical lineages to continental and analytic thought, to unsettle universalist claims and expose the colonial assumptions embedded in dominant frameworks. In English, languages, and literature, remixing offers opportunities to reimagine texts through translation, adaptation, multilingual experimentation, and decolonial reading practices that foreground intersectional identities and experiences.

As a theme and method for our summer school, remixing encourages participants to work collaboratively and experimentally, drawing connections between past and present, theory and practice, the embodied and the textual. It emphasises process over perfection, dialogue over monologue, and creative inquiry over disciplinary closure. Crucially, it makes space for the emergence of intersectional futures, asking how collaborative remixing might contribute to repairing epistemic harm, redistributing authority, and generating new forms of storytelling, pedagogy, and cultural production. The summer school becomes a site where critical humanities scholarship meets artistic practice, where remixing is an opportunity not simply to reassemble what already exists, but to imagine otherwise. 

Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in collaborative learning environments, where they can critically interrogate dominant narratives and reimagine new possibilities for a more inclusive and equitable future. Through lectures, discussions of texts, and hands-on workshops, participants are invited to engage in deep reflection on the practical applications of intersectional thinking to fields like literature, history, media and cultural studies. The Intersectional Humanities Summer School at Maynooth University marks a significant step forward in creating spaces where the humanities can more meaningfully intersect with global struggles for justice, equity, and representation. 

With a focus on fostering inclusive, interdisciplinary dialogue, this immersive event features an exceptional lineup of distinguished guest appearances. These expert voices contribute to the rich landscape of discussions and practice-based workshops that address key themes of race, gender, identity, coloniality and the socio-political dynamics influencing the humanities today....

I wonder if "re-mixing", which is given the seal of approval by intersectionality academics, extends to allowing authors of any racial or ethnic mix write fiction or make music or art in a form originally generated by other races or ethnicities?  Because some writers a few years ago were being booed at writer's festivals for saying it was indeed OK.       

Anyway, I suppose it keeps some people off the streets.  But I would be much happier if their jobs were paid for by private funding, not public. 

A takedown of Tulsi's "look at me" swansong about Fauci

Read about it here.

The Right just lives in the alternative reality world of conspiracy - and no matter how many times they fail to prove anything in court, they continue believing them. 

An excellent discussion of the second Trump term

This half hour interview with Jon Stewart is really, really good.  And what a worrying picture it paints...

 

Some ancient Chinese argument

A few years ago, I noted here that the philosophy of Zhuangzi seemed worth a look (and I hadn't hear of him before.)

I have tried reading some of him since then, but to me, he came across as a smartass teenager arguing more to get attention than to paint a well considered position, so I didn't stick with it for long.

This essay, however, talking about his position of being against the Confucian view of meritocracy, is pretty interesting.   I'm not sure that it convinces me that Zhuangzi is worth following - but it is worth reading.  Take this part, for example:

Through such theatrics Zhuangzi developed a systematic critique of Confucianism’s moral justification of inequality, and the most essential part of that critique is his insistence that moral striving alienates us from life. For Zhuangzi, the drive to become xian invites a person to live for an abstraction, whether it be for reputation, moral purity or a sagely ideal of pursuing ‘the good’. This leads one to treat their own life as raw material for that abstract identity. One’s material body becomes an instrument for something immaterial.

In the Robber’s monologue, he lists celebrated Confucian exemplars: Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who starved themselves rather than serve an unjust ruler; Bi Gan, who remonstrated with King Zhou so forcefully that his heart was cut out; Wu Zixu, whose loyalty to his state, warning his King of a threat, ended with his corpse thrown into a river. These people are praised in Confucianism as exemplars of virtue, yet Zhuangzi treats them as tragic figures ‘trapped in the net of reputation and names’, who met their grisly ends precisely because of their inflexible pursuit of virtue.

What makes these figures disturbing is that they were consumed by their convictions. A system that ranks people by virtue necessarily creates incentives for self-exploitation. Once virtue becomes something that can be measured, ranked and exchanged for authority, it turns human life into a resource to be spent. In other words, Confucian xian turns cultivation into moral capital, and moral capital demands extraction from the self. Indeed, one can see this kind of self-extraction in our modern neoliberal ‘hustle culture’ even more clearly, where it is trendy to ‘rise and grind’ and forego basic necessities. 

An irritating man

The appeal of Karl Stefanovic as a lightweight TV host always evaded me.  And freed of network restraints, he's now podcasting his way to Right wing ignomy...

A progressive religion success story?

This article in The Guardian was interesting:

 ‘I’ve finally found God without all the extras’: behind the surge in people converting to Progressive Judaism

It's talking about conversions in England, and while it's not like it's a huge number, it is a tad unusual that they are happening at all at a time Israel politically has gone more Right wing:

Arif-Fear is part of a “surge” in the number of people converting to Progressive Judaism, a movement that represents about a third of British Jews. Figures shared with the Guardian show adult conversions rose from 78 in 2020 to 183 in 2025.

“There has been a lot of antisemitism and anti-Jewish feeling in the last three or four years. So you would have thought this is the last time that people would want to identify with the Jewish community, and yet, we’ve had a surge,” says Rabbi Jonathan Romain, convener of the Reform Beit Din, the rabbinic court for Progressive Judaism, and former rabbi of Maidenhead synagogue.

Romain says that, until recently, most converts did so for “romantic reasons”: they had Jewish partners and wanted to unify family life. But he believes the recent rise has been driven by three additional factors: the Covid-19 pandemic, the expansion of religious education in schools and DNA tests. ...

     

For Arif-Fear, what drew her towards Judaism was its progressive elements, and a culture in which questioning and debate were encouraged. “What really inspired me was the diversity and the pluralism in it,” she says. “I learned that you could be atheist and Jewish, and then they had Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Liberal, and that was really intriguing and inspiring for me.”

She adds: “So that inclusivity, that kind of dialogue, that questioning. It was just a really welcoming space. It’s LGBT-friendly, there are female rabbis, all of that. And people that were really proud of their faith but also felt very British at the same time.” 

So absurd...

As reported everywhere:

Fox News reported that Trump had gone further in an interview, saying he had told Iranian officials if they closed the strait, “you won’t have a country”.

“You won’t even make it back to your f---ing country ... we’ll take over the rest of the country,” he said, according to Fox News. “We may take over the strait, if we have to. I’ll blow the shit out of them.”

But, of course, a host of greedy, morally bankrupt MAGA/Right wing broadcasters will spin this as reasonable intervention in a negotiation process.

And what a weak, weak, interview Ross Douthat held with JD Vance last week.  

The only thing of interest from it was Douthat acknowledging that he was the one talking to Vance in a pub when a wine glass popped off a shelf (in poltergeist-like fashion) and smashed to the floor while they were talking Catholicism.    

But as for the rest of the content, Douthat pushed back on Vance with all the strength of a wet tissue when talking about the (obvious) immorality of the Trump administration.  As someone in comments said:

What a softball, creampuff, servile interview. 

Several times, Douthat led the conversation to points where he could have easily, quite naturally, have asked Vance tough (or even mildly awkward) questions.  Every single time, he led the conversation back to safe, anodyne, uncontroversial, near-irrelevant territory.  You'd hardly know they were talking about a war, its appalling cost and unintended consequences, at all.  

Gee, you'd think they (or their assistants) agreed beforehand what was and wasn't politically "proper" to talk about.  This is far from the first time Douthat has struck me as a diligent stenographer and publicist for MAGA Republicans.  He is quite obvious in his rhetorical intentions here.  

Air Force One retrofitted already? Call me deeply suspicious

 When the Qatari luxury aircraft was gifted to Trump (and which, I suspect, they probably now treat as a failed bribe, given that they didn't exactly relish being drawn into the Iran war), estimates varied a lot as to how long it would take to retrofit to "Air Force One" standards, given the amount of additional security and command post stuff that had to be crammed into it.   But it seemed clear it would take a long time:

 Three aviation experts told NBC News the conversion would cost over $1 billion and take years to complete, and one analyst, Richard Aboulafia, suggested it would take even longer and cost more. CNN-cited experts separately said the security and communications requirements made it unlikely the work could be finished quickly without compromising capability.

Now it has been delivered, but has to undergo commissioning flights.  So, it's taken less than a year.  I'm no aviation expert, but I'm deeply suspicious that it the work has as thorough as it should be.   

And here, in the NPR report, is this curious line:

The aircraft from Qatar will "serve as a bridge until the [long-term] VC-25B is delivered," according to earlier communications from the Air Force. The plane was delivered well before expectations. The Air Force originally estimated the plane would be delivered in 2028 but said by modifying requirements it could deliver the first aircraft in 2027. The modifications "were carefully crafted to prioritize mission over aesthetics, leaving much of the previous head of state interior layout minimally changed," the Air Force said.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach praised the delivery.

"Many thought it could not be done, but the United States Air Force was able to execute and provide a secure, reliable airborne command post on an accelerated timeline," he said.

Given the recent experience of Trumpian ordered refurbishment works done in an artificial hurry (see the reflecting pool), I strongly suspect it will later be revealed that this aircraft does not have all the features an Air Force One ideally should.

I wonder if some whistleblower will eventually confirm my suspicions....

 

Quick takes

Work is very busy lately, and it's interfering with posting.   But these things have caught my attention:

 *   What a competition it is to pick out the worst, most awful, person in the Trump administration, but Hegseth's unrelenting politicisation of the military puts him right up near the top:

A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu, defense officials said.

The outbreak at the base in San Antonio raced through an Air Force Basic Military Training wing, where new recruits sleep on bunk beds in open bays and share meals at large communal tables....

In the weeks since Mr. Hegseth’s vaccine policy took effect on April 21, only about 40 percent of Air Force trainees have opted to take the vaccine, which had long been mandatory, an Air Force official said.

In the aftermath of the outbreak, the Air Force issued an exception to the voluntary vaccine policy, requiring that all recruits at Lackland get flu shots — part of a broader effort to stem the virus’s spread.

Mr. Hegseth cast his decision to make the flu vaccine optional as a matter of religious freedom and medical autonomy.

“Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions,” he said in a video announcing his decision in April.

He described the longstanding flu vaccine requirement as an “absurd, overreaching” mandate that had served to “weaken our warfighting capabilities.” 

 I'm very curious as to what has happened to the average of political viewpoints in the military under Trump.   We would have to start on the assumption that the average member has long leaned Right/conservative, but I would also assume the average recruit under Trump is far more to the Right than historical averages.  

BUT:   I can't imagine that the Iran war has engendered much happiness amongst those who have been deployed around the region, doing nothing much to no obvious good end.   Surely their Trump allegiance would be being tested...

*  In another New York Times article, Hegseth's politicisation is further covered:

So far this year, Mr. Hegseth has blocked the promotions of at least 40 senior officers to general and admiral ranks. About half of those are women or members of minority groups. 

Read the whole thing, if you want, here. 

*  I can't access all of the review of this book at Nature News, but it sounds interesting:

The Common Good Economy: A New Compass Mariana Mazzucato Allen Lane (2026)

The 500 richest individuals on the planet added a record US$2.2 trillion to their fortunes in 2025 alone, while more than two billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity. The charity Oxfam International, based in Nairobi, estimates that the super-rich in high-income countries extract around $30 million per hour from low- and middle-income nations, where roughly 85% of people in the world live.

As ever more people struggle to keep a roof over their heads, public money is increasingly being absorbed by military spending, which reached a staggering $2.7 trillion in 2024. Government-sponsored investments into ‘high-tech solutions’ are concentrated in this industry of death, further fuelling ecological devastation through mineral extraction and fossil-fuel use.

These figures offer only a glimpse into the profound irrationality of a society in which the production of goods and services — even those most essential to life — is subordinated to an abstract and violent logic of capitalist profit.

Building on her earlier influential ideas on technological change and the role of the state in innovation, economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that today’s environmental and social crises stem from an economy that is organized around extraction and shielded from meaningful democratic accountability. The Common Good Economy presents a road map for the urgent transformation that our societies must undertake.

The book challenges the dominant narratives of power and value that many of us have internalized through the framework of neoclassical economics. Rather than treating capitalist markets as natural developments that allow for freedom and collective opportunity, Mazzucato draws on the work of economic historian Karl Polanyi to emphasize how markets are politically constructed and deeply embedded, often in ways that undermine the common good.

She shows, for instance, how the prioritization of short-term financial returns and shareholder value has driven corporations to spend trillions buying back their own shares instead of investing productively. She also highlights how the housing crisis, even in wealthy countries such as the United Kingdom, has been intensified by governments increasingly subsidizing private landlords rather than funding social housing.

Although neoclassical economics reduces climate change and social injustice to ‘externalities’ — indirect inconveniences unrelated to the broader system — Mazzucato argues that today’s challenges require centring our collective actions around the common good. In her words, it means “getting economic relationships and structures right from the start, instead of correcting and picking up the pieces afterwards”. 

 Would make Sinclair Davidson and old Judith Sloan grind their teeth, I'm sure.

*  This is sad:

Deaths of 3 rugby players in Malaysia expose brutal side of heatwave

The incidents have raised questions about whether more precautions need to be taken in countries like Malaysia where the weather is harsh 

*  Further to the "man, we need a better class of billionaire" category, Gina Rinehart made a splash by giving her new bestie Pauline Hanson a toy bulldozer and tried to get the audience to play along, and ended up very cringe (even to Hanson, I suspect.)  

Of course she would want to gift land to Elon Musk.  He can't afford to buy any:

The mining magnate, who made a “significant investment” in Musk’s SpaceX company earlier this week reportedly worth $1.4bn, said the trillionaire could be given free land at “sparsely or non-populated islands” near Townsville for SpaceX satellite construction and launches. 

 And of course she would want to invite Israeli arms manufacturing to Australia, because, you know, that government is so internationally popular with its use of arms at the moment:

Rinehart, who spoke after being introduced by Pauline Hanson, also said the land could be provided to skilled Israelis and their families to build “advanced war drones, and or other advances in defence, and or improve upon their Israeli style domes, and manufacture them here to sell to our country to help make our people and critical infrastructure safe”. 

I wouldn't be completely surprised if she embraced again using nuclear bombs to help her mining efforts.

*  I've said for years that combining solar farms with actually farming beneath the panels seemed a sensible approach, especially in hot countries like Australia.  The Chinese are showing how it can be done with fish farming beneath.   (Sure, it doesn't look all that attractive from above, but flat salt pans are exactly an appealing landscape either.)   

 

Same day online content

An accurate take on Trump

I don't know this columnist for The Guardian, and I guess this take on Trump's psychology (and his birthday celebration):

Trump presides over spectacles of violence like a dysfunctional Roman emperor 

is not exactly new, but it's well written and accurate:

Hitler dreamed of a 1,000-year Reich; Putin is said to have baroque dreams of territorial conquest meant to restore a dubiously historical empire he calls “Greater Russia”. Sure, there are people around Donald Trump who imagine using his rise to power to establish some sort of grand, civilizational project: there are the white nationalists who dream of a country purged of those they deem racially impure; there are the Christian nationalists who imagine a future theocracy in which women wear long braids and skirts, and don’t vote; there are the techno-reactionaries who imagine a future of interplanetary colonies, techno-assisted eugenics, and polygamous harems.

But Trump himself is conspicuously small in his dreams: his are comparatively little ambitions, not extending far beyond the reach of his ego and his senses. 

He wants praise. He wants to see his name and his portrait everywhere. He wants to feel like a big man, to see those he feels have wronged him be penitent and upset. Maybe most of all, he wants to indulge in his own bad taste, repeatedly visiting the lowbrow staples of the 1980s, when he was young and at the height of his tabloid fame.

He loves the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. He loves the music of Bon Jovi and the Village People. And he loves the gaudy, clownish tokens of masculinity that appeal to very small children: big trucks, big muscles, and demonstrations of physical strength.

And so it felt fitting that on Trump’s 80th birthday, at an event nominally meant to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding but really functioning as a celebration for a very special boy, the White House hosted a cage fight for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The UFC is a competitive league for mixed martial arts – a vaguely sports-like endeavor that combines elements of kickboxing, wrestling, and traditional boxing, and seems designed to satiate a television audience’s appetite for maximum violence. 

The event, planned for months, required a diversion of Secret Service resources, use of military musicians, and the construction of a large octagonal cage and audience arena on the White House’s south lawn, all at untold taxpayer expense and in likely violation of numerous ethics rules. On Saturday, the night before the event, the combatants posed shirtless, nose to nose, at the ceremonial weigh-in – a press event that seems primarily designed to pique the interest of online gambling markets – in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Let's skip a little, and note her paragraphs on UFC itself:

Mixed martial arts is a frantic and unbeautiful spectacle, with none of the redeeming grace of boxing and little in the way of required strategies. The primary assets required seem to be physical size and a willingness to hurt someone....

The object seems to be to inflict repeated head injuries, which might help explain why so many of the fighters issued effusive praise for Trump. After his fight, one victor, a redhead with pronounced cauliflower ear named Bo Nickal, thanked the president first and God second.

Yeah well - I don't even see "the redeeming grace of boxing", to be honest - but I agree with her about UFC, which if I ruled the world would be banned.   

OK, two final paragraphs sum it up:

That the event was the UFC – cynically primitive, a celebration of violence and brute strength – similarly reaffirms his values. The US is him now, the event seems to say.

Trump wages war at will without Congress. That is already plenty imperial. Now he presides over spectacles of violence carried out for his entertainment, like some dysfunctional Roman despot eating grapes at the Colosseum. Soon, he’ll be appointing his favorite horse to the cabinet. 

Well done, Moira Donegan. 

Good art, or bad messaging?

OK, I have to admit, even though I said X was dominated by reactions against Disclosure Day, I have to admit it is allowing a genuine debate about the movie, and it's making it near impossible for me to stop thinking about it. 

I don't think enough people are making the point that it's pretty great that there is a movie engendering a lot of debate about its message and interpretation.   I know I have said this about certain movies before - that I really enjoy arguing/debating about them almost as much as viewing them.  

I tend to think that it is a sign of good art - although the cynical view could be that it can also be the result of muddled messaging, and simply failing to make the intent clear.    Even that can be debated as part of the process!

There are some more specific things I want to say about the movie, but still feel its a bit early to do so...  

 

     

Proof there is no God

C'mon!   If ever there was an easy way for God to prove his providence, it would have been for a summer storm to hit the UFC metal stadium in front of the White House with lightning at least once.  A strike setting Trump's hair alight, or a tornado blowing it all away, would have reversed decades of church attendance decline.

 But alas, it was not to be....

In which I have to discuss Disclosure Day in a somewhat meta way

*  Man, this movie seems to have attracted a huge amount of commentary on social media - and I find it hard working out the numbers between those who enjoyed it and those who hated it.

*  I predicted that those approaching from an American culture war Right point of view would find reasons to hate it - and I was very correct about that.  X is dominated by hatred/dismissal of it - so much so that I suspect Musk might have even tweaked the algorithm to highlight it.  But to be fair, there are some reviewers who I would presume are politically neutral or lean Left in their tastes who dislike it as well.  

*  Wait a minute, I guess I can check audience review numbers online.  I see that on Rottentomatoes the critic reviews are running at 80% positive, and audience at 73% positive.  Metacritic is running at 74% positive and audience at 5.2 (which seems low - but the break up is 33% negative and 38% positive and 29% mixed.)  Not bad.

*  I saw it last night with my daughter, and we both enjoyed it in somewhat trying circumstances (just about the most restless, toilet attending audience I can recall ever being in.  Has streaming caused people to think everything about watching a movie at a cinema is just like watching a movie at home, so they not only text on their phone without compunction, but don't plan so they can avoid going to the toilet for two hours?)   

I have some observations:

*  Most of the criticism, in my view, comes from people thinking it would be a different kind of movie, and not judging it for what it is.   People shouldn't take kids to it, not because it is violent or anything - it's just that it's a movie of mature themes.  

*  It is a quite "clingy" movie, in that I have continued to think about it a lot today, and not just because of social media.  I do quite like that it is causing some debate, in a way.    And I actually think I may need to see it again, with a smaller, less annoying, audience.

*  I don't think it's perfect, and to do my own bit of judgement, there are background story elements that I would have liked emphasised more.  Maybe some bits ended up on the cutting room floor, and an "extended edition" would add a bit more explanation.  

* I think it is a bit of bad luck that it would have been written before the rise of "AI video for all", which has only been a thing for a couple of years, as there probably should have been a bit more emphasis on how that issue was not a problem for the disclosure.

*  The ending did surprise me somewhat, but I thought it was fine.   

*   People might like to argue with me that I get hyper-critical about the scientific accuracy in some movies - like The Martian, Hail Mary Pass and Sunshine - but not in other movies.  But it all depends on the story, and if you are dealing with speculative advanced technology, it often just has to be accepted uncritically as part of a story.  Overall, the movie is thematically consistent with both Close Encounters and ET in that in all three, aliens have telepathic powers or technology.   This makes accepting the technology in the latest one easier. 

*  There is something of an irony, isn't there, that there is a strong element of Right wing Christian commentary against the film (and Spielberg) on X in particular, when one theme in the film is whether disclosure of alien reality would hurt people's faith.  Seems that if a mere movie speculating about that upsets them, they would have issues with alien reality!

I may come back to add more to this later... 

The appalling Musk

Axios says what I reckon every decent media outlet and politician should be highlighting - and not just leaving it up to people who watch Twitter X to understand how appalling Musk is:

Elon Musk is on the verge of financial immortality: The world's richest man — and potentially its first trillionaire — has built a sovereign corporate kingdom that is too systemic to fail.

• And yet, on the eve of SpaceX's monster IPO, its CEO was hunkered down in his digital fiefdom stoking far-right culture wars with an impunity unmatched in modern corporate history.

Why it matters: Musk's years in the public eye, marked by serial controversy and an accelerating embrace of white identitarian politics, have inured investors to conduct that would be disqualifying for almost any other CEO.

• Nothing Musk says or does can dent Wall Street's appetite for a stake in his future-forging empire.
• Look no further than SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO, where demand for shares has already vastly outstripped the available supply ahead of Friday's historic market debut.

Zoom in: Anti-immigration riots erupted in Belfast on Tuesday night after graphic footage of a brutal street stabbing, allegedly by a Sudanese migrant, ricocheted across X.

• Masked mobs set fire to vehicles, a city bus, and several homes, marching through neighborhoods while chanting "foreigners out" and forcing minority families to flee under police protection.
• Musk, who posts near-daily about violence committed by migrants, shared British far-right activist Tommy Robinson's list of locations to protest against "another invader attack on our people."
• "Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!" Musk declared to his 240 million followers, drawing allegations of incitement from British leaders.

Zoom out: Musk's intervention in Belfast followed weeks of fixation on Henry Nowak, the white British teenager whose murder by a British Sikh man ignited a far-right backlash over claims of "anti-white" policing.

• Musk's anti-migrant activism extends across Western countries, where he suggests elites are intentionally engineering the demographic erasure of white populations — also known as the "Great Replacement" theory.
• In the U.S., Musk has been relentlessly focused on non-citizen voter fraud, claiming that Democrats are harvesting illegal immigrant votes to create a permanent, one-party state.
• That includes in California, where he joined MAGA allies this week in alleging, without evidence, that Democrats committed massive fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral primary.

Between the lines: Musk's worldview relies on a singular, apocalyptic thesis: that Western civilization — which he frequently equates with white culture — is being systematically dismantled by mass migration, demographic change and "woke" institutions.

• He has clashed with world leaders like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has accused the tech billionaire of using his platform to "whip up division" and interfere in foreign democracies.

• "Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what's making people angry, not "social media!" Musk posted Wednesday in response to allegations of incitement.
• Musk rejects characterizations of his rhetoric as racist or xenophobic, arguing that those accusations have been weaponized to shut down debate on migration and crime.

The big picture: As Musk's personal net worth rockets toward the thirteen-figure mark, he has achieved escape velocity from the traditional rules of corporate governance.

• A decade ago, a CEO amplifying white-identitarian panic at home and overseas would have triggered a board crisis, investor revolt and days of corporate cleanup.
• Musk does it daily, in public, in real time, on the platform he owns. His companies have become critical infrastructure, and Trump-era politics have shifted the Overton window on the rhetoric of racial grievance.
• If SpaceX's massive valuation secures it an eventual spot in the S&P 500, ordinary Americans with standard index funds or retirement accounts will soon own a stake in Musk's empire — whether they like it or not.

The bottom line: Asked Wednesday why the world's richest man spends his days in a bitter online culture war instead of enjoying his billions on a beach, Musk posted: "Nothing else matters if civilization falls."

Being strapped onto a Starship and shot into the sun would be an improvement for the whole solar system