Is X head honcho Elon Musk an honest-to-goodness conspiracy theorist?
Or does he just love to troll people to the applause of his 155 million followers?
Those two questions collided when Musk posted a meme about former President Barack Obama on Wednesday:
Dominoes Effect 🍕 pic.twitter.com/3HYrvDE1pu
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 6, 2023
The image showed someone setting up dominoes, with each domino capturing a key point in Obama’s rapid ascent to power.
It began with Obama’s 2004 Senate rival, Jack Ryan (not to be confused with the famed Tom Clancy character).
According to The New York Times, as those two were vying for an Illinois Senate seat, Ryan’s divorce proceedings became public. In those records, his then-wife claimed that he had dragged her to a variety of strange “sex clubs.”
The rest, as Musk’s meme demonstrates, is history. Ryan pulled out of the race, and Obama won the Senate seat that became his launching pad to the presidency.
But the final domino in the image stated: “Alleged Obama drug-fueled gay orgy.”
That was a reference to Tucker Carlson’s bombshell interview with Larry Sinclair, who claimed that he did cocaine and had a sexual encounter with Obama in the back of a limousine in 1999.
But even that wasn’t the most attention-grabbing part of Musk’s post.
“Dominoes Effect,” Musk posted as a caption, along with an emoji of a pizza slice.
Many observers took that as a clear reference to the “Pizzagate” scandal that took root during the 2016 election cycle.
For the unaware, Pizzagate came about after then-Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta had his email hacked.
When his emails became public, the more imaginative parts of the populace claimed that they included coded language that exposed high-ranking Democrats operating an international child sex trafficking ring.
It was also claimed that a Washington, D.C., pizzeria was being used as a front for this clandestine network — hence the name of the conspiracy theory.
The theory has been widely discredited, but that wasn’t going to stop Musk from needling the establishment.
As of Friday, his post had garnered 286,000 likes and had been reposted 35,000 times, so it appears many users enjoyed his barb.
And while Musk will certainly live to troll another day on his social media platform, it’s not nearly as clear what is next for the Obamas.
Some have actually posited that the allegations about Obama’s “drug-fueled gay orgy” have resurfaced as part of an effort to get the Obamas back in the spotlight — before a potential 2024 White House run by Michelle.
