PARIS – One minute, he’s telling “subtard” online critics of his policy ideas to go “f**k yourself in the face.” The next, he’s fanboying for populist leaders at home and abroad. So what’s the problem with Elon Musk? Aside from his politics, that is. If Musk, the richest man in the world, held political views that were more establishment-friendly, he would have already received his U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. Instead, he’s on the sidelines, yelling on his X Platform (ex-Twitter), for which he paid billions to reclaim control of this online global public square from the Western establishment’s routine attempts to control narratives in its favor, and calling the awarding of the medal to meddling billionaire, George Soros, a “travesty.” “Through his network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 120 countries, Soros has focused on global initiatives that strengthen democracy, human rights, education, and social justice,” the White House said of the infamous Hungarian-American investor. Well, that’s one way to put it. Another is that his initiatives have served to covertly launder Western globalist establishment interests – many of which are far from contrary to his own, as an investor – through non-governmental charities that meddle in the affairs of foreign countries. Over the past year, having been thoroughly unmasked in Europe, not unlike a cartoon Scooby-Doo villain at the end of an episode, Soros’ foundation investments were conveniently repositioned to focus on Ukraine, Moldova and the Balkans, according to France’s Le Monde. No doubt it’s just a coincidence that these sans entities have just cut themselves off from Russian pipeline gas and are now overdependent on pricier American liquified natural gas. And that Soros holds significant investments in American LNG shipping, according to a 2011 report in the trade publication, Tradewinds. A decade later, in 2021, the same outlet noted that “Soros buys into shipping while private equity giants continue sell-off,” suggesting that he was oddly running toward a fire from which others were fleeing. Who could have known that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky would ditch his dream gig of collecting $1 billion a year in transit cash from Russia right up until Dec. 31, 2024, consisting of doing absolutely nothing beyond kicking up his feet and watching gas flow through pipelines across Ukraine and into Europe. Or that the European Union would be cool with Zelensky cutting off their Russian pipeline gas – and with their people paying even more to support Ukraine as a result. Or that the solution would be more pricey Soros-backed American LNG! Speaking of Soros’ Moldova focus, it’s no doubt just another case of happenstance that Moldova’s Ministry of Energy has been working with the Soros Moldova Foundation on the issue of “the management of third party-owned and ownerless natural gas networks under Moldovagaz management,” as a government press release explained last summer. And that Moldovagaz, majority-owned by Russia’s Gazprom, also managed to get itself cut off from its Ukrainian-transited Russian gas supply to the pro-Russian Moldovan enclave of Transnistria. All because Moldova managed to come up with the brilliant idea that it would just stop paying its bills after racking up a $700 million debt to Russia’s detriment, then try to get out of it by stealing the Russian gas company’s assets through nationalization. (Don’t try that with the gas company at home, folks.) Wonder where Moldova got that idea? Surely not from their Soros pals whose admitted focus over the past year has specifically been on them and Ukraine. Meanwhile, Musk can’t even express policy agreement with a populist party or politician on his own platform or in a German newspaper opinion piece, or propose an online chat, without the selectively blind Western establishment going berserk over his so-called foreign meddling. “Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote, prompting German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to declare, in dissolving parliament after a non-confidence vote in the governing establishment coalition, that “external influence is a threat to democracy – whether it is covert, as was evident recently in the elections in Romania, or open and blatant, as is currently being practised particularly intensively on platform X.” Incidentally, Romanians themselves are so fed up with insinuation that their vote for a populist presidential candidate was a result of foreign meddling, and used as justification for its cancellation, that 67 percent polled by a local independent think tank now say that they disagree with the do-over and 63 percent indicate that they’d have voted for the populist in the aborted final round. Former EU internal markets commissioner, Thierry Breton, has taken to tweeting directly at the German populist AfD candidate for Chancellor, Alice Weidel, warning her about taking Musk up on his offer of an X Platform interview, because Musk’s large audience would represent “a significant and valuable advantage over your competitors.” Tech “broligarch” Musk, surfing President-elect Donald Trump’s couch at Mar-a-Lago while advising on cabinet picks, flirting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni or publicly addressing the most recent former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as “Oaf Schitz,” isn’t going to earn any medals from the globalists still clinging to power across the Western world. But don’t pretend that he’s the problem. Hate the long-played game, not the player. Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. Her website can be found at http://www.rachelmarsden.com.