Musk's profoundly ignorant and dangerous intervention in #Aras25

I really, really hope this isn't the start of a whole thing.

Elon Musk has tweeted about the race for the Aras in the most profoundly ignorant and stupidly dangerous way possible.

The tweet is screenshot below; in it Musk sub-tweets another tweet claiming Simon Harris "ordered his Party to BLOCK independent candidates, including frontrunner Conor McGregor, from running for President of Ireland".

The sub-tweeted tweet (bear with me) has a screenshot from a "The Liberal" article, published Friday, with a headline about Fine Gael sending an email to their city / county councillors asking them to vote against non-FG candidates who are seeking a nomination from their council (RTE explain all of that here).

Musk's contribution is to then layer on top that Harris is "tyrannically blocking the will on the people of Ireland".

Tweet by Elon Musk sent at 7am Irish time this morning

OK lets start with the stupid

I really didn't want to spend my Monday morning pointing out the obvious, but here we are:

You can argue that the nominations system is unfair; but in what universe would a political party running a candidate in an election not ask its representatives to vote against other candidates? (Irish Times and - as mentioned above - RTE both have reporting on the letter Fine Gael HQ sent to councillors asking them to vote against other candidates)
Irish politicians (who control the nomination) do not like McGregor, with or without emails from HQ:
- A Sky survey of all TDs & Senators got 134 replies, zero said "yes"and zero said "maybe" to supporting McGregor - instead they said: "not a hope in hell", "I could not think of anyone more unfit" and "I would genuinely rather we didn't have a president at all"
- The Irish Times surveyed all 949 councillors in the country; not one replied that they would support McGregor (the 190 who did reply said no)
He is not popular with the public either
- McGregor polled at 3% in The Ipsos/ Irish Times poll in July, just above "Other" and 15 percentage points below "none of the names so far appeal to me"
- And polling by Ireland Thinks shows that two thirds of people would be less likely to vote for their local TD or councillor in the next election if they nominated him

Polling in The Irish Time by Ipsos from July, that shows McGregor at 3%

But it is also really bloody dangerous

Yesterday, Sunday, Simon Harris reportedly had to evacuate his own home due to three bomb threats being phoned to Garda stations - in what has been descried as a "major security operation".

This follows a week (which follows months/ years?) of very real threats made against Harris and his family, which includes two very young children.

To have someone with the power, reach and following of the world's richest billionaire and owner of major social media platform pointing lunatics towards Harris at this point in time, and using language like "tyrannical" is so unspeakably dangerous.

I really hope this ends here, but I fear it won't.