Elon Wins: Just 2 Days After Musk Declared War on Them, GARM Goes Out of Business
When megabillionaire Elon Musk drove a global advertising activist group out of business this week, he was putting Donald Trump’s tactics into practice.
And both men are teaching a lesson to conservatives everywhere: When the right goes on the offensive, the left flees the field.
In the Musk case, the owner of the social media platform X declared open war on an outfit most Americans had never heard of but was wielding pernicious influence over their lives — The Global Alliance for Responsible Media.
In a post on X to his over 193 million followers, Musk publicized an announcement that X had filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertising, GARM’s parent organization, charging it with organizing “illegal” boycotts of businesses based on political biases.
“We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” Musk wrote.
We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war https://t.co/elgT62uDtF
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2024
And what was the immediate result? The WFA folded faster than the French getting run over by Germans in 1940.
Only two days after X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s announcement, the group advised members it is “discontinuing” GARM’s activities, according to Business Insider.
The announcement was in an email from the WFA’s chief executive officer, Business Insider reported.
Stephan Loerke, the CEO, wrote that GARM was a not-for-profit group that had limited resources.
Really? The X lawsuit names as defendants the World Federation of Advertising, as well as members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted and Unilever.
According to the New York Post, other WFA members include “Disney, Coca-Cola and Adidas.”
As an arm of an organization that includes some of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful corporations, it’s hard to take seriously any claim about “not-for-profit” GARM’s “limited resources.” The fact that it’s been carrying out its pernicious work for five years now, since its formation in 2019, says something about the financial backing behind it.
There’s a much more likely explanation — and that’s that the lawsuit from X is the kind of scorched-earth warfare its members have no desire to engage in because they know how devastating a loss would be.
It was a legal version of the kind of always-battling politics Donald Trump has engaged in since he came down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his run for the presidency.
Trump’s bare-knuckled, pugilistic approach to politics is what distinguished him from the go-along-to-get-along conservatism of the Jeb Bushes of the right when Trump bested the crowded 2016 GOP primary field.
Americans got a daily dose of it for the four years of his presidency, when he was attacked by Democrats and the establishment media during the thoroughly debunked “Russia collusion” hoax, the tissue-flimsy impeachment effort of 2019-20, and the coronavirus pandemic.
They’ve been watching it play out during the Biden presidency, as Trump has battled a series of ludicrous legal cases brought against him by dishonestly ambitious district attorneys and a Democratic hatchetman of a “special counsel.”
And most of all, they saw it embodied in the unforgettable moments after Trump miraculously survived an assassin’s bullet less than a month ago. He rose, bleeding, on that stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, exhorting his followers with one word, repeated over and over: “Fight, fight, fight.”
Elon Musk’s X put that exhortation into practice when X filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
The immediate result was the opposition putting its own operation out of business. That doesn’t mean the lawsuit is a dead letter. In fact, Loerke’s email claimed the WFA would contest the suit in court and “demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities.”
Considering his group has already folded, that sounds a lot like whistles outside a graveyard.
Trump is not the first or only fighter on the conservative side of politics, of course. But he took the strategy to a whole new level in the political realm — and the result was a successful presidential campaign, a successful presidency in the face of deep state opposition, and a poisonous atmosphere created by the establishment media.
It’s that strategy that’s responsible for Trump’s resurgence into a more-than-viable candidate to return to the White House in the November election.
And it was the strategy that went on display this week when X filed its antitrust lawsuit, and Musk published his declaration of war — and destroyed in two days a group that has been bedeviling the right for half a decade.
And it’s a lesson for conservatives everywhere.
The only way to win is to “fight, fight, fight.”
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