I previously posted about how the Trump campaign doesn’t understand the music it blasts at his Nürnberger Parteitage events and hinted that I was working on another piece about how this cluelessness extends to conservatives and popular culture in general.

Then Elon Musk, possibly with his malfunctioning brain chip tuned to my inner monologue, decided to jump the gun. He posted the deranged hot take above in response to the nationwide “No Kings” rallies on Saturday … events that were explicitly invoking the revolutionary spirit of 1776 and 1789, not a billionaire’s libertarian fever dream.

When Musk tweeted the iconic image from BioShock … a golden statue of Andrew Ryan under the banner “No Gods or Kings. Only Man” … he was presumably trying to channel the revolutionary spirit of the June 14, 2025 “No Kings” rallies. He likely intended to invoke man’s triumph over tyranny, rejecting divine right and inherited power. Think Enlightenment ideals, Founding Fathers, Bastille Day vibes.

He accidentally aligned himself with one of video gaming’s most notorious dystopian villains. Andrew Ryan, whose name is a thinly veiled anagram of Ayn Rand, is a hypercapitalist zealot who builds a LibertAryan underwater hellscape called Rapture. It is free from government regulation, religion, or social responsibility. Spoiler alert: it goes terribly. The place collapses under the weight of greed, ego, eugenics, and unregulated biotech. Sound familiar?

Musk invoking Ryan is like a Wall Street bro posting a picture of Gordon Gekko and earnestly quoting “Greed is good,” unaware it’s satire. Or someone wearing a “Vote for Pedro” shirt because they think he’s a real candidate. The kind of facepalm that is so on brand it loops back around to performance art.

The “No Kings” rallies were a populist rejection of authoritarianism and would-be monarchs. That includes billionaires trying to buy social control through 卐itter, AI, and rockets. These rallies draw from the American and French revolutions, where the rallying cries were about liberty, equality, and not licking the boots of technocrats or divine-right kings.

Meanwhile, BioShock is literally a critique of the ideology Musk and his fellow techno-libertAryan influencers (like Thiel and Yarvin) have been pushing for years: deregulate everything, let the smartest and richest run the show, and treat labor like a rounding error. I wrote about that months ago:

Elon Musk tweeting Andrew Ryan as a nod to anti-monarchy protests is like quoting Palpatine at a democracy rally. If irony were a power source, this post could light up Rapture for decades.

I woke up planning to write something snarky about how Star Wars, X-Men, and Les Misérables are basically the same story told in different universes. Instead, I got blindsided by a fascist cosplay billionaire who inherited apartheid emerald money, misread BioShock, and reminded the world that some incels never grow out of their “Atlas Shrugged” phase … they just fail upward until they can ruin culture from a national platform.

Oh well, there’s always tomorrow…