Delusional Richard Dawkins thinks Elon Musk is a good guy

Dawkins said Musk was “diametrically opposed" to Donald Trump and had “the welfare of the world at heart”

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If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Elon Musk over the past few years, it’s that he’s not a tech genius. He’s a red-pilled billionaire who has used his unimaginable wealth to make one dumb decision after another, at least if the goal is to make the world a better place.

He overpaid for Twitter, then ruined the aspects of the platform that made it so useful in order to cater to his army of right-wing trolls. He’s horrible at running his own companies. He refused to let Ukraine use his Starlink internet services in its war against Russia. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get Donald Trump elected; the tax cuts may make him richer, but a second Trump term will inevitably hurt countless people in cruel ways. And he just got appointed to run the new “Department of Government Efficiency” (Get it? Doge) alongside fellow conspiracist Vivek Ramaswamy (which, as many others noted, raises the obvious question of why a department focused on efficiency needs two people to manage it).

Musk is a rich shitposter with a giant marketing budget. A guy creepy enough to say he would impregnate Taylor Swift because he can’t handle the idea of childless women. (Guys like him are obsessed with fertility rates. Taking care of his own children? Not so much. Impregnating people? Absolutely.)

As one critic put it, “Musk is an apartheid blood emerald skipping dipshit illegal alien who's never invented anything, but acquires businesses in hostile board takeovers then gets sued for racial discrimination, over and over and over.”

If you’ve followed the news at all, you know this by now.

So why the hell does Richard Dawkins think Musk is one of the smartest, most altruistic men alive?

Richard Dawkins (screenshot via YouTube)

Yesterday, Dawkins rightly called out Trump as a “mendacious, malevolent, transparently evil man” but then added that Musk was “diametrically opposed to Trump” and had “the welfare of the world at heart.” He hoped that Musk would therefore steer Trump in the right direction.

None of that praise was warranted because Musk is not “diametrically opposed to Trump” in any meaningful way. He and Trump are on the same page—and they’re both willing to destroy everyone who they think is an obstacle to acquiring more power.

You know who agrees with that judgment? Elon Musk, who corrected Dawkins on that very point:

Dawkins was trying to salvage Musk’s reputation, only to have Musk come along and say, No, I’m with Trump now.

It’s not even a good response! There’s no evidence Trump won over “hearts and minds.” As the saying goes, It’s the Economy, Stupid. Many Democrats didn’t vote and some voted for a third party as a form of protest because of Gaza, but a lot of Americans were just mad about grocery prices and blamed the incumbent president. Trump just happened to be the beneficiary of their ignorance.

But Dawkins’ sycophancy is nothing new here. He’s been at it for well over a decade now.

Some of that might have been understandable years ago. Musk fooled a lot of people into thinking he was the brains behind all of his operations rather than the guy primarily funding it all, but if you didn’t know it before, it’s damn near impossible to ignore now. Even if you revere space exploration and electric cars, Elon Musk is not the hero you’re looking for. Whatever he may have been in the past, he’s now the world’s foremost conspiracy theorist and misinformation purveyor.

And Dawkins, who fashions himself as a rational thinker able to spot delusional thinking, remains one of Musk’s biggest fans.

What an embarrassment.

It’s not just Dawkins either. His fellow science promoter Lawrence Krauss was giddy about Musk offering a one-word response to his latest article blasting DEI initiatives that offered federal funding to historically marginalized groups.

Yay…?

It’s not even a good argument. Krauss says in his article that over 10% of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s grants were for DEI initiatives rather than science. He calculated this—I shit you not—by asking ChatGPT to decide if each of the NSF’s grants in 2023 were primarily “scientific” or “DEI.” It never occurred to him that grants to underprivileged groups could also be scientific in nature or that there could be scientific value in getting input from people with different backgrounds. He acts like minorities were getting money for reasons that had no basis in what they were studying.)

But Elon loved the idea, so who cares about nuance.

These so-called science advocates are bending over backwards to celebrate someone whose biggest contribution to science may be facilitating the spread of misinformation. Musk is also a climate-denier. You would think Krauss, who wrote a whole damn book about climate change, would spend more time being critical of that, but even after Musk pushed those lies in a conversation with Trump months ago, Krauss pushed back in the mildest way, saying of Musk, “I am hoping he was just trying to be polite.” (He wasn’t. Musk’s brain really is that broken.)

All of this comes in the wake of the same New Atheist men, including Jerry Coyne, spreading lies about transgender people in the name of science. Just look at the chaos in this single tweet from yesterday: Dawkins promoted a post by Coyne promoting Sam Harris who was falsely claiming trans issues were to blame for Democrats losing the election:

The reality is that Republicans just used anti-trans bigotry to rally their base while Kamala Harris and Democratic Senate candidates almost entirely avoided the issue (or joined Republicans in trashing trans kids who want to play sports).

None of that matters to these guys. They’re so used to being treated as the smartest men in the room that they’ve now barricaded themselves from anyone willing to tell them they’re the anti-science bigots they always warned us about.

Incidentally, the Center For Inquiry, which merged with Dawkins’ foundation, just published a lengthy article from CEO Robyn Blumner condemning doctors who work with trans children. (“I hope their malpractice insurance is paid up,” Blumner writes. “They are going to need it.”) She expressed those thoughts after accepting, without question, the deeply problematic claims made in the Cass Review. (Just a few months ago, Blumner wrote that racism wasn’t really a problem anymore because, among other things, Clarence Thomas was on the Supreme Court.)

When these are the sorts of people Dawkins surrounds himself with, it’s no wonder he believes anti-trans, pro-conspiracy bigots like Musk are heroes rather than villains.

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