Forgive Them Not, for They Know Exactly What They're Doing

Rick Wilson is just playing dumb

On Wednesday, deranged Never Trumper Rick Wilson—the man behind the Lincoln Project, which went down in flames like the Hindenburg when co-founder John Weaver was accused of grooming teenage boys with promises of sex for political work—was suspended from Twitter for 30 days. The day after, his suspension was upgraded to a full ban.

Wilson was accused of inciting violence against Elon Musk with a Substack essay entitled “Kill Tesla, Save the Country.” Wilson posted the essay on Twitter and repeated the title again—“Kill Tesla, Save the Country”—just to make sure his message was heard loud and clear on the Tesla CEO’s own social-media platform.

I’d call that a provocation if ever I saw one.

Wilson has spent the last couple of days bitching and complaining about his ban. He says he never meant to incite harm against Elon Musk. His words are being twisted. It’s all just semantics. Metaphor. “Kill” isn’t supposed to be taken literally. It means something more like, “tank Tesla sales” or “cause Tesla’s stock price to crash by boycotting their products” or “make it socially unacceptable to buy a Cybertruck,” but those phrasings don’t make for a pithy title, do they? So “kill” was just a convenient shorthand.

Right?

Here’s what I say.

Poppycock.

Balderdash.

Drivel.

Sh*te.

I could think of a dozen or more words to describe Wilson’s special pleading, each one of them more profane than the last.

Rick Wilson thinks we’re stupid. This isn’t news. He’s described Trump supporters as “part of the credulous boomer rube demo,” “childless single men who masturbate to anime.” (I may be a confirmed bachelor, Rick, but I do NOT masturbate to anime, thank you very much!)

In fact, Rick Wilson has built the entire latter part of his career off denigrating Donald Trump and his supporters. It’s what he does. The man feels no obligation to tell us the truth, since he thinks we’re among the lowliest creatures that slither and crawl across the earth on their bellies.

Wilson wants to avoid being held accountable for his own actions. That’s it. He wants to be allowed to continue using the master’s tools—Twitter—to deconstruct the master’s house. To set it on fire.

It’s not like Wilson doesn’t have form. He’s made violent threats before. Most famously, back in 2015, he urged someone to “put a bullet in Donald Trump.” He had to wait nine years for his wish to come true, but it did.

A little bit of linguistic theory. Like all forms of language, metaphors depend for their meaning on the general context of utterances in which they exist. Meaning doesn’t just exist in the head of the person making an utterance. Even the would-be solipsist’s brain is invaded by the shared symbols of the culture he was raised in. The language we think through is a common inheritance, never truly our own. When René Descartes said, “I think therefore I am”—cogito ergo sum—he wasn’t simply confirming the existence of the lone thinker’s thoughts and being, but also a whole social world that had produced, among other things, the Latin language in which those thoughts were expressed.

So here’s the context in which Wilson’s entreaty to “kill Tesla” is being made, and which gives it its full meaning. Across the length and breadth of America, Tesla dealerships, Tesla charging stations and Tesla vehicles are being attacked and destroyed deliberately, because of Elon Musk’s role in supporting Donald Trump, bankrolling his campaign and running the Department of Government Efficiency. In the absence of Molotov cocktails, disgusting fat leftists are even reaching into the chasm of their own backsides for material with which to deface Tesla vehicles when they see them (don’t watch that video with a full stomach, by the way). Musk himself is being called a Nazi, the real President (not Donald Trump), the devil’s banker, and so on.

It’s a domestic terror campaign, and the Trump admin is rightly treating it as such. Three people who’ve been arrested so far now face between five and 20 years in prison.