Native-born Americans could take a lesson from Elon Musk.
One of the wealthiest men in the world, a billionaire many, many times over, leader of the pioneering aerospace firm SpaceX and CEO of Tesla, Musk has been dominating news cycles for most of 2022 as the purchaser of the social media giant Twitter.
But the giant of the internet age and naturalized American citizen still looks to the foundation of American democracy for inspiration.
That was the message of a tweet posted Monday in which Musk included an image of “the most treasured item” on his bedside table: a collection of America’s founding documents.
The set includes the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and “Washington’s Rules of Civility.”
May it always be so. It is the most treasured item on my bedside table. pic.twitter.com/rJ1pWlUfLs
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 27, 2022
Musk’s tweet was in reply to a quote he posted in the wake of a controversy surrounding the overhyped accusation that former President Donald Trump had called for trashing the Constitution over revelations about Big Tech’s meddling in the 2020 presidential election.
“The Constitution is greater than any President. End of story,” Musk wrote in the November tweet.
“May it always be so,” he wrote in the post published Monday.
But there’s something more fundamental at work here that all Americans should be paying attention to.
For the left, the foundational documents of the United States are irredeemably tainted by the slavery that existed in the South at the time.
The Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson, a man leftists despise because he had slaves and allegedly sired children with a woman he “owned.”
The Constitution, which permitted and codified the institution of slavery with its “Three-fifths Clause” regarding how “free persons” and “all other persons” should be counted, is considered an abomination by the left.
As for George Washington’s famous “Rules of Civility”? Washington was a slave owner too, so he’s automatically a villain for the left. And recent years have shown — with their “mostly peaceful” riots and violent hostility toward the nation’s past — the contempt the left actually has for civility.
But Musk, who was born in South Africa and became an American of his own volition in 2002, apparently thinks enough of all three that he’s declaring that devotion for all the world to see.
It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t the first time Musk has posted an image of the texts.
In November, he tweeted a picture of what appears to be the same bedside table littered with empty Diet Coke cans. The set of books can be seen in the background behind the lampstand.
My bedside table pic.twitter.com/sIdRYJcLTK
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
The important thing to remember here is that Musk wasn’t born a United States citizen. He grew up in a nation literally founded on the separation of human beings by race. That’s a far cry from being saturated in the American atmosphere of respect for the individual (however much identity politics-obsessed liberals try to deride that respect now).
He’s an American citizen because he understands that the wealth of the wealthiest country the world has ever known is built on a foundation of liberty.
Was the United States flawed at its founding? Of course it was. Is it flawed today? Of course it is. Any work of flawed human beings is going to be imperfect.
But from its birth, the United States has been unlike every other country, a nation, as Lincoln wrote, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In the present day, it remains unlike every other country, a force for good in the world unrivaled by its peers, thanks in large part to the Constitution that progressives pretend to revere but in reality despise and have despised at least since Woodrow Wilson’s days.
Elon Musk, a foreign-born citizen, apparently understands this.
Native-born Americans should take that lesson to heart.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.