On Wednesday afternoon, the Department of Justice (DOJ) warned Elon Musk that he might be in violation of federal laws as regards his extraordinary recent interventions into the election process.

The backstory: In mid-October, shortly after Elon Musk had made a joint appearance with Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where the world’s richest man jumped up and down like a peculiarly malign Energizer bunny, Musk started running a daily million-dollar lottery, which will continue until Election Day. The only people eligible are registered voters in the seven swing states upon which the election result will hinge who have signed Musk’s petition ostensibly calling for the defense of First and Second Amendment rights. Further pushing up against the legal limits that prevent the purchasing of voter registration or actual votes, Musk offered to pay individuals $47 for each swing state signature they gather.

All of this is the bizarre apogee of Elon Musk’s pandemic-era rightward transformation into a dyed-in-the-wool purveyor of “alt-right” conspiracy theories.

Musk’s politics are, these days, defined by hostility to public health mandates and opposition to government regulation, by his funding of anti-immigrant initiatives — and nationalist figures such as Stephen Miller — and his fierce opposition to trans rights. As the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), he has been on a crusade for a vision of “free speech” that consists of little more than providing a platform to one bilious racist and fascist after the next. (At the same time, thin-skinned as he is, he has used his power to shut down the voices of those who oppose his politics.) He has become a pro-gun fundamentalist and a purveyor of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which baselessly posits that liberals in the West are involved in an act of cultural and racial suicide by supporting mass migration into wealthy countries as a way to dilute these nations’ racial, religious and cultural purity.

After the anti-immigrant riots in the U.K. this summer, Musk retweeted ludicrous claims that the British government is setting up concentration camps in the remote Falkland Islands for right-wing, nationalist rioters; announced that “civil war is inevitable”; and spent weeks baiting the new Labour government and its prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, accusing it of a double standard when it came to policing, alleging that white, right-wing protesters are being dealt with more harshly than nonwhite, nonright-wing activists.

But it is in the United States that Musk’s political footprint is most pronounced. Immediately after Donald Trump was shot at during a rally in July, Musk took to his social media platform to issue a........

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