Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

There are a lot of scary things happening in this world but I think this op-ed by Michelle Goldberg (gift link) ranks right up there. It’s about a candidate for Florida Governor who is bringing in enthusiastic crowds of young GenZ men. He happens to be a hustler who’s settled on a platform of Nick Fuentes plus populism. It’s not good.

Slight and bespectacled, Fishback has a geeky charisma and the verbal dexterity of a former competitive high school debater. His policies are a mishmash of extreme conservatism and economic progressivism; nationalism tinged with socialism, if you will. He believes that Florida’s gun laws are too strict, its abortion laws too lax and its public teacher pay too low. He’s called for a 50 percent sin tax on OnlyFans creators and $10,000 grants to high-performing high school graduates to buy homes or start businesses. Though he’s the son of an immigrant — his mother is Colombian — he wants a total immigration moratorium.

Most of all, Fishback has made contempt for Israel and its American lobby a centerpiece of his campaign, constantly reminding audiences how much America spends on Israel while its own needs are ignored. He often calls Byron Donalds, a Black Republican congressman who is the front-runner in the governor’s race, “AIPAC Shakur,” a play on Tupac Shakur. Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show in January, Fishback described the “sexual, sadistic” pleasure that pro-Israel donors get in forcing America to “bend over” for a foreign country. Carlson endorsed him and wrote, “Pretty soon, all winning Republican politicians will talk like this.”

[…]

Fuentes’s ideology is a sneering, adolescent sort of Nazism. As he said on his podcast last year: “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the [expletive] up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part.” In Fishback, Fuentes’s followers — often known as groypers — have a candidate who is serious about representing them.

He’s not going to win the governors race or even come close. But this is a growing movement:

[A]nyone concerned with the escalating extremism of the young right should be paying attention to his campaign and the enthusiastic crowds it’s drawing. More than any political candidate yet, Fishback has managed to bring the paranoid, transgressive, meme-drunk spirit of the right-wing internet into the real world. Chris Rufo, a conservative operative who played a major role in Ron DeSantis’s war on wokeness, is no fan of Fishback, but said that “he’s demonstrated a pretty sophisticated method for turning a campaign with no budget, a skeleton staff, into the most talked about campaign in Florida politics.”

Fishback is tapping into an increasingly radicalized generation of Republicans. In December, the conservative Manhattan Institute found that 31 percent of Republicans under 50 identify their own views as racist, and 25 percent say their views are antisemitic. For those over 50, it’s only 4 percent for each. The same survey showed that a majority of Republican men under 50 think that the Holocaust either didn’t happen or was exaggerated.

Maybe it’s a passing fad, I don’t know. But for about a decade now, a lot of young men in the is country have been stewing in right wing radicalism that’s slowly but surely infiltrating the mainstream. Its not that far right extremism hasn’t always existed. It has. But these folks are being welcomed into the mainstream in ways we haven’t seen before. And its particularly worrying because they’re young and don’t have any other experience. Political identity tends to stick.

Keep your eyes on this. It’s a bad sign.

I can’t even believe he’s saying this but…

President Donald Trump, more than a week into his seismic military campaign in Iran, no longer wants to talk about winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

The president often claims that his peacemaking bona fides and “peace through strength” foreign policy agenda make him a shoo-in for the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s top honor.

But in a brief phone call with the Washington Examiner on Thursday morning, Trump claimed to have “no idea” if Operation Epic Fury will “get him over the finish line” with committee members.

“I don’t know,” he told the Washington Examiner flatly. “I’m not interested in it.”

“No, I don’t talk about the Nobel Prize,” the president added when asked if the subject had been broached during any of the conversations he has had with foreign leaders since last Saturday.

He doesn’t talk about the Nobel Prize??? I guess the Alzheimer’s must really be kicking in.

I mean:

Letter from Donald Trump to Norway

President DJT

Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.

I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States.

The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.

Thank you!

He’s going for the Board Of Peace Alexander The Great Prize. It’s much bigger. And it’s sold gold.

And there are a lot of them

I’m not talking about immigrants. The administration has put out the word to tone down the mass deportation talk in the run-up to the election. Apparently, it isn’t going down well with the racists:

Top allies of President Donald Trump are furious at the White House’s new rhetorical emphasis on deporting violent criminals over all unauthorized immigrants — and they’re launching a lobbying effort to reverse that reversal.

A group of longtime Trump allies, immigration restrictionist groups and hawkish policy experts have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to lobby the Trump administration to refocus its efforts on deporting all eligible migrants. The group has commissioned new polling from one of Trump’s top pollsters to back its thesis that doing so will ensure GOP wins this November, and plans to share that data with White House officials, agency heads and every member of Congress.

The new poll was conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, a pollster that Trump has used in all of his presidential elections, and shared exclusively with POLITICO. It found that 66 percent of likely 2026 voters support deporting any migrants who enter the country illegally. When asked if they support deporting all deportable migrants, not just violent criminals, a majority (58 percent) say they do.

Eighty-seven percent of Trump 2024 voters surveyed, including 79 percent of Hispanic Trump voters, want the president to exceed the previous largest deportation effort in history, led in the 1950s by former President Dwight D.

I have nothing further to add except that if you see people like this coming you should probably cross the street. After watching the brutality and cruelty we’ve seen over the past year, the violence in the streets and the lawless behavior of the government, it’s clear there’s something very twisted and sick inside them if they still support this.

An alert was put out yesterday about a terrorist threat in Los Angeles. Apparently, there is some information that Iran plans to hit the city with drones which seems far-fetched but you never know. There has been a report that some drones were stolen from the military in Kentucky, so anything’ possible, I guess.

Nonetheless, it’s pretty clear that the country should be on high alert since Trump has started a war with Iran for no reason. Asymmetric warfare is most definitely on the table and I wouldn’t be surprised if LA is a target since there is a huge Iranian population here. They tend not to be pro-Ayatollah but I suppose there’s always a chance of an outlier.

In any case, there’s no need to be concerned. Recall the kind of people they’ve got dealing with terrorism in the Trump administration:

Thomas Fugate is the latest political appointee of President Donald Trump’s administration to raise some eyebrows. The 22-year-old graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio in May 2024 and quickly found himself in an important national security role after helping with Trump’s third presidential campaign and working in a government affairs position for The Heritage Foundation, according to his LinkedIn.

He was tapped to be a special assistant at the Department of Homeland Security, who will now be entrusted with preventing terrorism.

Fugate’s role includes helping to oversee the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, known as CP3, which works to combat terrorism and targeted violence. As of September 2024, CP3 is also in charge of administering 35 grants, totaling $18 million, under the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention program.

Fugate’s LinkedIn profile, which was taken down as his story went viral, noted that he was a checkout clerk at an H-E-B grocery store as recently as 2022. It also listed experience on multiple political campaigns and in Model U.N., however, there was no evidence of counterterrorism expertise or any national security experience that would immediately qualify him for a DHS role.

He’s a good Trumper and that’s all that counts.

There are now thousands of Fugates in important positions in the U.S. government now.

Donald Trump doesn’t like protesters — at least the ones who don’t carry tiki torches while chanting “blood and soil” or who storm the Capitol to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. During his first campaign for president, he was known to encourage people to “knock the hell out of” protesters at his rallies. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Trump became maniacal in his loathing for what he called the “radical left.” He wanted to unleash the military onto the streets and even tried to order his defense secretary, Mark Esper, to shoot the demonstrators. 

So it should come as no surprise that protesters have become a target in Trump’s inhumane mass deportation campaign. On Saturday the Wall Street Journal reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol’s practice of arresting American citizens who are protesting the policy is a deliberate strategy to, as they put it, “detain and demonize dissenters” who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. The cases are typically not supported by evidence, so they rarely go anywhere, but the victims are often brutalized in the process, losing jobs and spending money on lawyers and legal fees. 

Those are the lucky ones. As we know, two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed in Minneapolis — and were immediately pegged by members of the Trump administration as domestic terrorists and members of the radical left. 

In many ways, this moment was the fulfillment of Trump’s vision that stretched back to his first term. As Mother Jones’ David Corn documented, the first known instance of Trump using the phrase “radical left” came in June 2020 during a Turning Point USA event. In a speech almost certainly written by his aide Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s mass deportation campaign,  the president thundered that the “radical left” hate “our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans.” 

This became Trump’s most relentless theme throughout the 2020 campaign, and it culminated at his weird — and likely illegal — convention acceptance speech delivered in the Rose Garden at the White House. The election, he said then, would “decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.” 

Trump would go on to lose that race. But that didn’t stop him from having the chutzpah to deploy the term again during the 2024 campaign — even after the violent pro-Trump insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. He even took it up a notch, pledging that as president he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.” 

This time, voters rewarded him for using such rhetoric, and returned him to the White House.

Since then, Trump has tied his words to actions, targeting organizations, institutions, universities and law firms he perceives as being his enemies. He and his administration have attacked the press, limiting access to the president and the White House briefing room. In April 2025, he signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to investigate the Democratic small donor platform Act Blue. Following TPUSA’s founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025, the administration all-but declared war, with Vice President JD Vance invoking the last message he received from Kirk, which said “we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence, and we are going to do that.” Within days, Trump issued a presidential memorandum directing the FBI’s joint terrorism task force to pursue various “domestic terrorists” who allegedly believe in “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”

Reuters reported shortly after that Miller, as White House deputy chief of staff, was heading a multi-agency task force that included the FBI, IRS, Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department to crack down on Democratic groups like Indivisible, which they falsely accused of funding violence and terrorism.

The right was in high dudgeon. Individuals all over the country were fired from their jobs, shunned, ostracized and run out of town for insufficient reverence for Kirk on social media. People were refused entry into the country for “making light” of Kirk’s death. Cancel culture had never been so successful. 

Miller’s use of the power of the state to take down the left was an escalation. Influential conservative activist Christopher Rufo inadvertently drew the proper parallel when he wrote on X, “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos

“Within the confines of the law” is a convenient disclaimer. But what they were and are doing is pretty much exactly what Hoover did, they’re just not hiding it. Since Trump returned to office, his administration’s get-out-of-jail-free card has been “it isn’t wrong if it’s out in the open.” Regardless, as was the case with Hoover, using the power of the government to punish your political enemies is a textbook abuse of power. 

Hoover was caught at this by chance when people who burglarized a suburban FBI office in 1971 found documents that showed the bureau had been engaged in a long-standing program going back to the 1950s to harass and “neutralize” organizations and individuals they deemed political enemies. COINTELPRO, or the Counter Intelligence Program, targeted all the usual suspects — communists, socialists, civil rights organizations and yes, the left, with a particular focus on protest organizers. Tactics they used ran the gamut from misinformation, wiretapping, bugging, burglary, blackmail and infiltration of groups by provocateurs and instigators.

The revelations led to congressional investigations. Along with all the other abuses uncovered during the Watergate era, new rules governing the FBI were put in place to preclude such abuses from happening again. Those haven’t held — and all it took was the election of a man who has no respect for the rule of law or the Constitution, and is completely unrestrained by his party to show how inadequate those reforms really are. 

The rhetorical tarring of Alex Pretti and Renee Good following their killings by federal agents in Minneapolis showed that the administration isn’t giving up. As recently as Feb. 27, Trump used the term “radical left,” this time to describe a corporation — Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company involved in a running dispute with the Pentagon and is now suing the federal government for allegedly being “punished on ideological grounds.” 

Trump considers any person or entity who voices dissent to be his personal enemy, and he’s determined to make them pay.

Salon

The world isn’t laughing at us. It’s marginalizing us.

Donald J. Trump promised to make America great again, whatever that means and for whatever that’s worth. (The “peace president” also promised not to involve the U.S. in any more foreign wars, after all.) A driving motivator for this undereducated, amoral dolt for decades has been to relieve the nepo baby’s nagging sense that the world is laughing at us (him).

Well, no, the world is not laughing now. It’s horrified. Trump shot the United States’ reputation in the middle of Fifth Avenue and killed its trust in us. Now the world is working at shunning the United States like it would a sex offender or murderer in the neighborhood.

Dean Blundell reported on Wednesday that in the wake of his stunning speech at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is building “a 40-nation alliance totalling 1.5 billion consumers across 40 countries, representing almost half of the world’s GDP.” The object? To render reliance on U.S. trade irrelevant:

The combined EU-CPTPP bloc would represent about 40% of global GDP and 1.5 billion people. The U.S. economy is about 25% of global GDP. China is about 18-20%.

Read that again. This alliance is bigger than the American economy. It’s bigger than China. It is, by raw economic mass, the largest trading bloc ever assembled. Trump’s tariff threat — “buy from us or else” — loses its teeth when these 40 nations can buy from each other instead, at zero tariffs, with harmonized supply chains that don’t need American ports, American consumers, or American approval.

According to the World Bank, the two blocs together account for almost a third of all world trade. That’s trade that can now flow between them — without touching the United States.

The 39 nations of this coalition, for the record: the EU’s 27 member states, plus the 12 CPTPP members — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam. Canada holds memberships in both. Which means Mark Carney isn’t just a participant in this alliance. He’s the architect sitting at the intersection of both blocs, holding the blueprints that he laid out in Ausralia [sic] last week if you were paying attention.

Global supply chains would avoid Trump’s tariffs by routing component parts and finished products around the U.S. Politico reported last month on this effort to bypass the mercurial (or do I mean insane?) U.S. president (Politico):

The middle powers are taking action. The EU and CPTPP are starting talks this year to strike an agreement to intertwine the supply chains of members like Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Australia with Europe.

It would bring nearly 40 nations on opposite sides of the globe closer together with the aim of reaching a deal on so-called rules of origin.

These rules determine the economic nationality of a product. A deal would allow manufacturers throughout the two blocs to trade goods and their parts more seamlessly in a low-tariff process known as cumulation.

“The work is definitely coming along,” a Canadian government official granted anonymity told Politico.

Blundell explains:

Here’s the piece that doesn’t get enough attention: this alliance won’t just trade differently. It will set the rules for how global trade works going forward. Digital trade standards. AI governance. Supply chain transparency. Green technology. Environmental rules. Labor standards. Investment protections.

When 40 nations representing 40% of global GDP agree on standards, those become the de facto global standards — whether Washington likes it or not. American companies that want to sell into this bloc will have to meet those rules. Not Trump’s rules. Not the rules of whichever MAGA donor wants a carve-out this week. The coalition’s rules. “Governor” Carney’s rules. And there’s nothing the Pedophile rapist felon in the Oval Office can do about it.

This is the point at which Trump declares victory and (with Stephen Miller and Russ Vought) turns back to dismantling our democratic republic and replacing it with a white, Christian-nationalist homeland ruled by tech oligarchs.

U.S. trading partners are looking to marginalize Trump and the U.S.:

This is the long game, and Carney knows it. The country that sets the rules for digital trade, for supply chain accountability, for AI — that country shapes the world economy for a generation. Trump abdicated that seat at the table. Carney walked in and sat down.

“In a world of great power rivalry, middle powers have a choice: compete for favor or combine for strength,” Carney told leaders gathered in Davos. He meant it like the labor union slogan, “United we bargain, divided we beg.”

Trump’s entire leverage model requires countries to come to him one at a time, hat in hand, desperate for access to American consumers. Carney just gave those countries a different market — bigger, rules-based, and explicitly engineered to function without American participation.

The tariff is only a weapon if you need what the person threatening you has to offer.

Canada’s Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is floating his own proposal for marginalizing Washington. The handwriting is on the wall for Trump. But he can’t read it.

(h/t SR)

DOGE let ChatGPT do the thinking

A friend once complained about the fruitlessness of raising her son not to play with guns. He didn’t get them as toys. she said. It didn’t matter. Everything became a gun: a stick is a gun, a banana is a gun, etc. It’s like that with Republicans. Points for imagination. Even the bluntest object becomes a weapon against Republicans’ adversaries: “death panels,” Christmas, “the great replacement,” critical race theory, “woke,” clean energy, etc. Or DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

It’s not just that Republicans latch onto these as rhetorical bludgeons. Give them the opportunity and they become legal bludgeons that do real harm. For example, how Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and his DOGE goons, in coordination with a supine Republican congressional delegation — and with the help of ChatGPT — set out to rid the United States of all things DEI.

The American Historical Association and others filed suit over the capricious and illegal cancelling of grant programs last year. They provided an update last week after plaintiffs filed for summary judgment in the case. Among what came out in discovery was the fact that National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) acting chair Michael McDonald ceded his authority over grants to Musk’s Doge programming geeks. The DOGE kids let ChatGPT do their thinking for them:

• McDonald and key members of the DOGE team bypassed authorized record preservation requirements and violated the Federal Records Act by conducting official government business regarding the cuts using Signal, a messaging application unauthorized for federal employees, and intentionally set to automatically delete messages.
• DOGE fed grant descriptions into OpenAI’s ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence chatbot, asking it to decide if grants were “DEI.” They then entered ChatGPT’s responses into a spreadsheet compiling all NEH grants, including its “DEI rationale” and “Yes / No DEI?” replies. This ChatGPT-generated list was used in place of the list created by NEH staffers to identify which grants to cut. Projects Grants that were flagged as “DEI” and then terminated included a documentary sharing the story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust; an archival project on the lives of Italian Americans; a project to digitize photograph collections of Appalachian residents; and multiple projects to preserve endangered Native American languages and cultures.
• DOGE staffers violated the Federal Equal Protection Clause of the 5th Amendment by flagging grant descriptions as “DEI” solely because they included “BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color),” “homosexual,” “LGBTQ,” and “Tribal,” among other terms.
• DOGE staffers also flagged grants that NEH leaders concede had no connection to DEI, including grants that had been awarded for collections management after a natural disaster, preservation training, and improving HVAC systems.

Asked in deposition how DOGE went about its work, DOGE staffer Justin Fox explained as if caught in a programming loop. Behold your DOGE overlords:

@404.media

This is Justin Fox, a former DOGE staffer assigned to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) who said his job was to review and flag grants for “DEI” which would then go to superiors for termination under Trump’s Executive Order. This deposition is part of a lawsuit filed by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American History Association and the Modern Language Association. They say Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) used ChatGPT to process to identify DEI programs to inform decisions to terminate grants awarded by the NEH. Here is Fox attempting to answer questions about what DEI is.

♬ original sound – 404 Media

The entire 28-minute Fox deposition is here.

The Ink picks out another exchange between Authors Guild/AHA counsel Yinka Onayemi and Fox that is just as weird:

Onayemi (reads from the DOGE spreadsheet of grants recommended for termination by ChatGPT): “The documentary tells the story of the Colfax massacre, the single greatest incident of anti-Black violence during Reconstruction, and its historical legacy for black civil rights in Louisiana, the South, and the nation as a whole. Did I read that correctly?

Fox: “Yes.”

Onayemi: “Okay. And then in column B, right next to that, it says ‘The documentary explores a historical event that significantly impacted Black civil rights, making it relevant to the topic of DEI.” Did I read that correctly?

Fox: “Yes.”

Onayemi: “Is it fair to say that what I just read is the ChatGPT output of the prompt in the first column?

Fox: “Yes.”

Onayemi: Do you agree with ChatGPT’s assessment here, that the documentary is DEI if it explores historical events that heavily impacted Black civil rights?

Fox: “Yes.”

Onayemi: “Why would that be DEI?”

Fox: “It’s focused on a singular race. It is not for the benefit of humankind, it is focused on a specific group or a specific race, here being Black.”

Onayemi: Why would learning about anti-Black violence not be to the benefit of humankind?

Fox’s counsel (cutting off this line of questioning): “Objection.”

This isn’t a matter of a keyword-search snafu or poor A.I. training — though plenty of that comes up in the conversations with Fox and his colleague Nathan Cavanaugh — things like the cancellation of an upgrade to an HVAC system at a North Carolina museum because of a mission statement that includes serving “diverse audiences” — and those are bad enough.

What these exchanges reveal, The Ink suggests, is that “DOGE’s vision of humankind (at least the part of it that’s worthy of benefiting from public investment) is necessarily white and male.”

And that’s the vision being encoded into the tools of the future, being charged with the education of future generations. That’s a cautionary tale, unfolding in real time, as widespread anxiety boils over about the degree to which America is turning over higher education to A.I. — often in partnership with OpenAI, and in tandem with the Trump administration’s plan to remake universities in its own image. And the fact that academics are fighting back, with historical understanding, is about the best case for the power of actual, tangible, critical historical understanding — the kind of thing the humanities exist to instill in human beings and their institutions.

But it’s more than just A.I. developers encoding it as a tool of white supremacy. Not only have DOGE idiots allowed A.I. to strip government oversight from Congress, they’ve clearly settled their brains into WALL·E -style hover chairs and let A.I. do their thinking for them. Allegedly, they were hired for being boy geniuses. Except they didn’t question ChatGPT’s output. It came out of a computer, right?

That’s been the bane of my struggles with Democrats to think outside the VoteBuilder box (their national targeting tool) and begin seeing the voter forest, not just the trees. What the programming gods coded into the algorithm must be right, right? (If average users even think that hard about it.) And what the computer spits out must be right.

I was a consulting engineer for 35 years. I knew better than to let the tool do my thinking. Half the time I log into the Democrats’ database, I hear in my head a very familiar voice issuing this classic warning.

Republicans, Trump, Musk, and DOGE (and Democrats) put too much faith in the technological terrors they’ve constructed. All of us suffer for it.

He’s fine. No need to worry.

The DOGE goons are getting deposed for a lawsuit on behalf of the American History Association and others and holy shit this hurts to watch pic.twitter.com/Oe6MUrYxTz

— Lydia Kauppi (@lydiakauppi) March 11, 2026

That truly is painful but it’s also bracing. This is the level of competency and knowledge we are dealing with throughout the U.S. government now that the Trumpers have fired tens of thousands of experienced employees and replaced them with deluded incels like this.

Or this one:

The Social Security Administration’s internal watchdog isinvestigating a complaint that alleges a former U.S. DOGE Service employee claimed he had access to two highly sensitive agency databases and planned to share the information with his private employer — a claim that, if true, would constitute an unprecedented breach of security protocols at an agency that serves more than 70 million Americans.

The agency’s inspector general is investigating the disclosure and has alerted members of Congress of its existence, according to a letter by the acting inspector general to top members of four congressional committees reviewed by The Washington Post andtwo people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive deliberations. The inspector general’s office has also shared the disclosure with the Government Accountability Office, which has been conducting its own audit of DOGE’s access to data, according to one of the people.The Post has reviewed the complaint and spoken with the whistleblower, who issued the complaint anonymouslyfor fear of retaliation.

We already knew that one DOGE dude shared personal data with a right wing activist group. I’m sure he wasn’t alone. And it’s pretty clear that Musk wanted access to it all for his LLM and probably got it.

I think that DOGE boy is probably a good example of the mindset of the young, male Musk and MAGA acolytes. Yikes…

pic.twitter.com/Q1XHFbQaUA

— Frank Peeters ☄️ (@peetersfrank2) March 11, 2026

Very Serious People:

The Defense Department has barred press photographers from briefings on the ongoing U.S.-Israeli military conflict with Iran after they published photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that his staff deemed “unflattering,” according to two people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

The March 2 briefing came days after a joint military strike on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28. It was also the first time the defense secretary had appeared from the briefing room podium since June 26

Several outlets including the Associated Press, Reuters and Getty Images sent photographers to the briefing from Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But after they published photos — which have broad reach because they are licensed by publications globally — members of Hegseth’s staff told colleaguesthat they did not like the way that the secretary looked. Hegseth’s aidesdecided to shut out photographers from the two subsequent briefings at the Pentagon, on March 4 and March 10, according to the two people familiar with the decision.

Right. It was the staffers who complained.

No, it was him. Recall this:

Meanwihle, we’re at war, the government is violating everyone’s civil rights and the economy is in the dumper but:

NEWS — Trump coercing staff to wear the same black pair of shoes that he wears.

“Everybody’s afraid not to wear them,” a staffer said, as some reportedly ditch their own footwear to comply with Trump’s wishes.

We’re officially in the dumbest timeline. pic.twitter.com/qwxUOtMlyv

— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) March 10, 2026

Yep, yep:

I saw an article yesterday in The Telegraph about Trump coercing his staff to wear the same shoes as him. At first, I thought it had to be a joke. This is such a classic dictator trope — forcing subordinates to copy your style — that it couldn’t possibly be real. For instance, look at Mao Zedong and the “Mao Suit,” Saddam Hussein and “The Mustache”, or Joseph Stalin and the “Generalissimo Uniform.” I dropped photos below. The phenomenon is so well documented that I assumed this was a parody.

But apparently… it is not. Donald Trump reportedly has a footwear fetish. He’s testing the loyalty of his lieutenants by whether they’ll lace up in the same black shoes he wears. And yes, it’s creepy.

Just take a look at the names of the folks who are now dutifully wearing Donald Trump’s preferred footwear. JD Vance. Marco Rubio. Pete Hegseth. Sean Duffy. Howard Lutnick. Sean Hannity. Lindsey Graham. These people are now allegedly sporting $145 Florsheim oxfords at Trump’s behest. One unnamed cabinet secretary shelved his Louis Vuittons, according to The Telegraph, lest he offend Trump by donning shoes the president didn’t want him to wear.

“All the boys have them,” one female White House official told the Wall Street Journal, and another added that “everybody’s afraid not to wear them

📸 Marco Rubio wearing oversized shoes that Trump ordered for him by just guessing his size.

Trump has been buying $145 Florsheim dress shoes for allies, using the gifts as a lighthearted way to encourage loyalty and unity within his circle.

Source: The Times pic.twitter.com/1EuyKSRYqy

— Clash Report (@clashreport) March 11, 2026

I need a drink.