Our politics is usually shaped by the people we dislike

Where we stand politically can often be traced to what sort of individuals left us miffed

- MANU JOSEPH

Most people do not have strong beliefs. They arrive at them by developing the exact opposite views of those they despise. The ongoing political drama in the US gives us a chance to see this.

The legend of Elon Musk was the creation of wokes, who include people who call other people woke. Wokes are those who have to make a guess about what it means to be a decent human being. They are tremendous in building cult figures very fast because they talk a lot about what they adore with others who adore the same things. At the time, the US tech industry was not called 'techbros'; I think it was called Silicon Valley, if my memory is correct, and tech billionaires were all "good guys." Facebook was good, cryptos were good, and Apple was so good that the sort of people who would have been hippies in the previous generation stood in midnight queues every time the corporation released a new product. These cool coders were going to change the world. And Musk was an environmental warrior because he had acquired an electric car company called Tesla and was out to kill the internal combustion engine. Musk said things that wokes loved. He spoke about climate action and direct democracy, for example. He sounded like a Democrat. He worked with Barack Obama and donated to the Democratic Party too. So what happened?

It does happen commonly—men who appear to have the same politics as women are soon revealed as charlatans, or just misunderstood. Still, how did he get associated with Caucasian racism? Does an adult really change his political convictions so fast?