I cannot recall that leftists had much to say about Elon Musk until he outed himself as an opponent of their censorship regime by purchasing Twitter and exposing the government’s manipulation to have it silence stories that were inconvenient for Biden. Now, he’s reviled.
In his latest post, Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds offers some thoughts on that, tying in with Columbus Day and our space program.
He writes:
It was Democrat JFK who kicked off the moon race. I spoke years ago to Kennedy’s science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, when Wiesner was president of MIT and I was writing a book on space. Wiesner told me that Kennedy was very deliberately looking for a way to divert Cold War energies into something peaceful and productive. Kennedy was not so much a true believer in the von Braun space colonization vision as a user of that vision, but von Braun was smart enough not to complain.
But JFK’s Democrats were nothing like today’s. Today’s Democrats revel in grievances small and large, not in projects that accomplish great things. The New Left Democrats started dismantling NASA in the 1970s — not their kind of thing.
Reynolds continues:
Worse yet, a space program was expansionary. If Western Civilization in general, and the United States of America in particular, was evil, then anything that led to the expansion of either must be evil too. The only acceptable product of the Apollo program was the photo of Earth from the Moon, an inward-looking image used to justify environmental programs that, along the lines of the Club Of Rome, were aimed at shrinking civilizational horizons, not expanding them.
I love this paragraph:
And worse still, socialist politicians and their — to borrow a phrase from the lefty lexicon — “running dogs” of academia, the media, NGOs, etc., are jealous of people who expand horizons, because at heart they’re small people with small minds. Large horizons make them feel small and inferior. They thrive in committee meetings where they get to feel big by deciding the fates of lesser beings. Elon has little to offer them.
Read and savor the whole thing.