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Here’s the Elon Musk interview that got Don Lemon’s show canceled
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Technology
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No one looks good in this. Musk obviously much much worse, but Lemon was antagonistic and rather aggressive with his tones and questions. When he had multiple chances to respond somewhere down the middle and MAYBE get Elon to actually think about things differently, Lemon continued to be demeaning and dismissive. Lemon is confused why Elon is upset about this interview? Bullshit. Lemon went for multiple “gotcha” moments, brought lines of questioning that were meant to be direct attacks, purposefully “misunderstood” his answers when he had even somewhat salient points. Still trying to rectify the illegal immigrant thing in my own mind, have to chalk it up to Elon being misinformed about the data I guess, because that made an unfortunate amount of sense. Has to be that not an overwhelming majority of immigrants go to blue states, which actually it might be just that simple. “Blue states would lose blah blah seats in senate and electoral votes without illegals (yuck he kept saying it this way)” yeah but what about red states? Does Elon really think 100% of illegal immigrants go to blue states? Anyway my point is Lemon didn’t really respond to this point other than “you are wrong. Guess we will find out which of us is wrong.”
He was (awkwardly) trying to point out Elon's hypocrisy. The US has a strong existing structural political bias towards red states, who (on average) get significantly more funding and representation per person than blue states.
If Elon was truly concerned with "unfair allocation of funds" and "unfair representation in congress", you would expect him to be upset with gerrymandering, the electoral college and other things in addition to undocumented immigration. The fact that he only speaks up when it involved majority nonwhite refugees is telling.
That said, I agree it fell flat. Also letting him claim that the "great replacement theory" is actually just about census-related funding is like saying the civil war was about states' rights.
Great points. Thank you
I think it's perfectly reasonable to respond to "demeaning and dismissive" statements by being "demeaning and dismissive." We're big fans of the paradox of intolerance around here. It's not the job of the interviewer to "think about things differently". Lemon isn't Musk's therapist. Lemon isn't obligated to do the heavy lifting of emotional labor for Musk.
Yeahhhhh except that if we really want to change hearts and minds (which if you don’t, you are just doing things for the sake of the high of self righteousness, because you don’t really care about the issue if you aren’t trying to change others’ opinions), you have to be better than them. You have to answer vitriol with level headed salient points. There is no better way to show someone what a deluded, selfish asshole they are than answering shittheadedness with calm, valid counter arguments.
Eh this is a much harder topic than you make it seem. For people like you and me, this may be the best approach to change our minds on things, but we also are the type of people to look at the facts around Musk and already come to the conclusion that he's a far-right, duplicitous manchild.
The people that flock to him and others like him, however, are not the type to respond to just the facts. They're invested emotionally into some aspect of what Musk is "selling" them. I don't know what the correct response is to try and win these people over to reality, but calm, reasoned responses to the monkey throwing its shit around the interview room isn't how you win over the people on the monkey's side. They already know he throws his shit around and they like it