This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
Recently, Elon Musk gave a talk detailing the government attacks on his companies since he came out as pro-free speech and, especially, since he came out as pro-Donald Trump.
These include endless made-up environmental rules—including a study to see if falling rockets hit sharks. It includes curbs on SpaceX launches specifically because Elon tweets pro-Trump things. And it includes a $600,000 fine for spilling … drinking water in a desert.
Not a joke.
Attacking dissident companies, of course, is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. As Mussolini put it, “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
For a true authoritarian no citizen is allowed to dissent—and certainly no companies, which are sitting ducks.
Of course, in theory, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in America.
In theory, we jail bureaucrats who conduct Mussolini-style lawfare. Alas, it has been going on ever since the progressives imposed the administrative state about a hundred years ago.
Saddling now every industry in America with a regime Big Brother, a library worth of regulations, mandates, licensing boards—a bureaucratic army that, like everything government does, is thoroughly corrupt.
Still, before Donald Trump there was some independence. CEOs could still criticize regime shibboleths like mandatory racism—er, affirmative action—or transvestites in girls’ locker rooms if anybody had been dumb enough to propose that in 2015.
Sadly, that all changed as authoritarian Borg went to war with Trump, culminating in the reign of terror during COVID-19 that snuffed out the slightest hint of disloyalty with an enthusiasm that would make North Korea blush.
We saw it in living color during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. Historically, about 70% of Fortune 500 CEOs vote Republican. Meaning that, statistically, at least 70% of them were probably horrified by BLM’s orgy of city-burning and murder.
And yet not one Fortune 500 CEO spoke up. Now, you might say that’s because most are spineless cowards, and that’s true.
But look at it from their perspective: You’re entrusted with tens of thousands of employees, and if you speak up, rioters will come beat them, burn their workplaces, and put them out of a job and your shareholders out of a retirement account.
You could, like Elon, be targeted by hundreds of regulators—even prosecutors in blue cities—hunting with a fine-tooth comb for some way, any excuse, to destroy the entire company.
For a CEO with a legal duty to protect the company—and a moral duty to protect employees—it’s simply too risky.
So, they shut up. To be sure, many indulged, enthusiastically jumping on the institutionalized racism of DEI or cutting checks to the very rioters burning cities—in fact, BLM cashed more than $50 billion in corporate donations.
Not since Genghis Khan has burning a city been quite so profitable.
But others never drank the Kool-Aid. They may have opposed the Left with every fiber of their being. But they were held hostage by rioters, prosecutors, regulators, even financiers like BlackRock.
So, what’s next?
The solution is very easy: Get rid of the administrative state. Lay off the hundreds or thousands of little Mussolinis populating every regulatory agency from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Supreme Court laid the groundwork earlier this year with its Loper Bright decision clipping bureaucrats’ wings. And Musk himself has been floated by Trump for a blue-ribbon panel slashing government waste and corruption.
The final step is Congress sitting down and actually defunding these agencies. Zero them out. Return the money to the people. Return the bureaucrats to jobs that don’t involve extortion.
And let Americans get back to exercising our rights without being destroyed.
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