Bizarre billionaire behavior; Impending election wars -- another warning;

We all recall Elon merrily telling Disney CEO Bob Iger to not advertise on X and go f**k yourself for pulling Disney ads from the toxic X media platform:

The video without the bleeps for the bad word

In a court filing dated yesterday, Elon is suing advertisers for not advertising on X. The lawsuit is framed as an antitrust case. Some advertisers do not want to advertise on X because the reputation of their products can get smeared by appearing on posts by actual Nazis, raging racists, crackpot conspiracy theorists and other assorted creeps, freaks, sleazebags, etc.

Musk states his grievance like this at pages 1-2 of his court filing: 

2. Acting with and through a World Federation of Advertisers (“WFA”) initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (“GARM”), the Defendants conspired, along with dozens of non-defendant co-conspirators, to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue from Twitter, Inc. (“Twitter,” now X Corp.). Concerned that Twitter might deviate from certain brand safety standards for advertising on social media platforms set through GARM, the conspirators collectively acted to enforce Twitter’s adherence to those standards through the boycott.

3. As a condition of GARM membership, GARM’s members agree to adopt, implement, and enforce GARM’s brand safety standards, including by withholding advertising from social media platforms deemed by GARM to be non-compliant with the brand safety standards. When Elon Musk and other investors acquired Twitter in November 2022, GARM members reached out to GARM to learn “[GARM’s] perspectives about the Twitter situation and a possible boycott from many companies[,]” and GARM conveyed to its members its concerns about Twitter’s compliance with GARM’s standards, triggering the massive advertiser boycott that followed.

So on the one hand, Musk tells advertisers who want to protect their name brands to not advertise on X and go eff themselves, but on the other, he now sues them for not advertising on X. Musk filed his lawsuit in the radical, pro-Trump 5th Circuit to get a crackpot Trump judge on the case. 

5th Circuit = TX, LA, MS

Maybe all that Musk has to do is donate enough to DJT and he will get his judge to decide against the absent advertisers. Otherwise, this lawsuit makes no sense to me. However, I no longer understand anything about the law in Trumplandia.

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Rachael Maddow did another segment on the radical right authoritarian Republican Party intention to contest election results nationwide in Nov. 2024:

The plan has two goals. First, subvert election results where a Republican and if DJT loses. Second, normalize election subversion to undermine trust in democracy and elections. Salon also commented about the authoritarian Republican Party election subversion plan:

GOP plans to win this election — in court, if not at the ballot box

Republicans learned from their 2020 mistakes — and have good reason to believe the Supreme Court is on their side

The fact that Republicans greeted Harris’ entry into the race with the threat of litigation provides a sobering reminder that the GOP has little intention of conceding an electoral loss on Nov. 5. That’s simply when a second contest will begin — one aimed not at swing-state voters but a battalion of right-wing Federalist Society-approved judges installed on federal courts and the deeply conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Look closely and that second battle is already underway. While the usual rituals of an election play out nationwide — rallies, TV ads, conventions, sofa memes — a shadow fight is already unfolding in battleground-state courts. They include lawsuits in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada that seek to knock voters off the rolls in the weeks before the election, as well as litigation in Nevada and elsewhere hoping to void absentee ballots received after Election Day.

These lawsuits rely heavily on unsubstantiated Republican fantasies about dead people and non-citizens casting ballots. Even if these cases go nowhere, they could redound to the GOP’s benefit simply because they seed the groundwork for claims that the election has been stolen and cast doubt among the party’s base about the process and the legitimacy of the results.