This is what it’s come to. A right wing podcaster troll is now working at the highest levels of the FBI with virtually unfettered power under a similar right wing troll as his boss.
He does have law enforcement experience as a NY police officer for four years and a secret service agent for nine. So there is that. But it’s his record as a right wing gadfly that really qualifies him for the job as Kash Patel’s deputy. As you can see above, he is uniquely suited to the job of wreaking revenge on MAGA enemies. It’s his raison d’etre.
The job doesn’t require confirmation so I assume he’ll be starting right away.
I think we knew that the feds under Trump would not zealously go after gun crimes. It was always going to be a free-for-all. But this is a little bit different.
President Donald Trump’s newly-confirmed FBI director, Kash Patel, is expected to take on another top law enforcement role in the administration as head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to a White House official and two other sources familiar with the plan.
Patel’s appointment could be made official as soon as next week with a swearing-in ceremony, the sources said.
The ATF, a law enforcement agency housed in the Department of Justice, is responsible for enforcing federal laws regarding the illegal use, sale and trafficking of firearms and explosives, as well as the illegal diversion of alcohol and tobacco products.
It has been a frequent target of Republican lawmakers who perceive the agency as infringing on the Second Amendment, particularly as former President Joe Biden empowered it to regulate the sale of “ghost guns” and close a loophole that eased the process of buying a firearm.
Trump earlier this month signed an executive order to “halt existing policies designed to curtail the clear right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.” A White House release on that order accused the ATF of unfairly targeting gun owners.
Is Trump running out of loyalists or are they just preparing to get rid of the agency altogether (which has been a fringe position for decades among the blood and guts 2nd Amendment crowd.) I would expect Kash to be perfectly willing to take that step.
I’m just a little bit surprised that ATF wasn’t among the first targeting by the DOGE wrecking ball. Wouldn’t that have made MAGA more ecstatic than anything?
Apparently, they’re taking the incremental path. I’m not sure why.
Attorney General Pam Bondi last week fired the chief counsel of ATF, Pamela Hicks, after three years of service, according to a LinkedIn post shared by Hicks. Bondi said, without evidence, that Hicks was among the leaders at the Department of Justice who were weaponizing the agency. “These people were targeting gun owners. Not gonna happen under this administration,” Bondi said in an interview with Fox News.
I assume they were targeting gun owners who broke the law but that’s obviously off the table now. Fire away gun nuts. Nobody’s going to stop you.
I wrote earlier about the reporting that Musk is threatening to shut down Starlink, his satellite service on which Ukraine depends for all its communications unless they capitulate to Trump’s demands to allow him to seize whatever natural resources he wants and hand their country to Putin. The idea that this man has such power over world events is like something out of a James Bond film. Only there’s no James Bond, just GOP cowards, feckless Democrats and a plodding judiciary.
It’s actually much worse than I realized. Josh Marshall wrote this thread on BlueSky last night, jumping off an earlier post about what historically happens when someone becomes more powerful than the sovereign (“over-mighty subjects”) which, in our American democracy, is something called “the American people.”
Musk is a quintessential “over-mighty subject” perhaps the mightiest ever:
A couple years ago the Times did a really strong package about the power of SpaceX. Not only is SpaceX. Not only is it now one if not the preemptive orbital delivery company in the world it also has a fleet of satellites so large that according to that Times article more than half the functional satellites in earth orbit today are owned by SpaceX, and thus under the control of Elon Musk. That’s the basis of Starlink.
Again, half the functioning satellites in orbit are under the control of one man. Must built SpaceX on US govt subsidies and contracts, much as he built Tesla, on the back of subsidies to grow the EV industry. But those are the rules the US government set up. He played by them. Under our system he gets the benefit of those decisions and that good fortune. However, the US government has many laws that make clear that if and when a government contractors decisions threaten the national security of the United States that things change. In the case of SpaceX, he gets the profits.
But there are limits on where the decisions are his. Just to make the obvious point, Musk couldn’t just say okay I’m only going to launch Chinese military satellites. Too bad, Pentagon, what I say goes. Private company, etc. That’s not how it works. And seldom invoked US is pretty clear on that.
Needless to say this isn’t a question most military contractors have any interest in testing. US policy, for better or worse, provides plenty of markets where they can sell their weapons. But already in the early Biden years Musk was starting to run what amounted to his own foreign policy. This came out early in the Ukraine War when it emerged that Musk was running his own arrangements with Vladimir Putin which looked very much like it was running counter to US foreign policy which at the time was Biden’s to make. It also goes without saying that no other federal contractor and no one with a highly level clearance could be having unreported discussions and bargains with an adversary foreign state. Here’s where we get back to the question of over-mighty subjects.
Musk has vast wealth and control over core national security technologies which give him the ability, along with his wealth, to rival the power of the US on the foreign policy stage. Here’s where the acquisition of Twitter becomes a much bigger deal and a much kind of deal than many I think realize. Musk has this overmighty power but the US govt *in extremis* has laws and powers to curtail that power.
But when Musk took personal control of one of the country’s most powerful and pervasive communications mediums AND began using his limitless money in the political real he made himself essentially too big to touch. You can see it in his vast grip on US politics and now also in the UK and now Germany. Whether he’s able to shift the result of the German general election we’ll see. But he’s made it quite clear that there are vast costs to any nation-state which challenges him.
Can he turn the course of an election? I’m skeptical. But no national government wants to find out. And pretty clearly any US national government really wants to find out. This is why the combination of Twitter, plus the vast wealth, plus the critical national security technologies created something genuinely new under the sun.
Musk is truly a Bond villain, untouchable in the normal sense. Why the US Government allowed this to happen is the big question. How could they have put so much power in the hands of one eccentric billionaire? Was it just money, laziness or design? I would guess it’s all three.
Well, get ready. A huge part of the DOGE plan is to do a lot more of it:
Bessent downplays DOGE's mass government firings, saying "we're gonna re-privatize this economy like President Trump promised." pic.twitter.com/nBBQME0MX1
Bessent downplays DOGE’s mass government firings, saying “we’re gonna re-privatize this economy like President Trump promised.”
Musk and his rich buddies plan to privatise all the services and security we currently entrust to our government over which we have some control through our elected representative. Not anymore. These will be at the whim of billionaires (trillionaires!) who will be too big to fail. It’s a terrifying prospect and this may actually be our final chance to stop it.
Enrique Tarrio, a domestic terrorist is wandering around Washington getting in the faces of Capitol Police officers:
Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio—released last month after Trump pardoned him along with 1,500 other Jan. 6 rioters—confronted ex-Capitol police officer Michael Fanone, who was injured defending the Capitol from criminals like Tarrio.
Fanone responded: “You are a fucking traitor to this country.” He actually is a real life seditionist, convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Trump pardoned him. Now he’s stalking people who defended the Capitol.
That happened today at the Never Trumper Principles First confab:
Fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids began to spread the day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time. Posts on social media and Reddit claimed that ICE had already been spotted in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff, where Latino immigrants began to settle in large numbers in the 1970s and have profoundly shaped the culture of the vibrant community.
That same Tuesday morning, an X account with over 17,000 followers named GlomarResponder made an ominous post. “Yeah, I’m in a courthouse wating [sic] on warrants,” GlomarResponder wrote. “Turns out there’s a lot of bitch work to be done to make mass deportations happen.” One day prior, GlomarResponder had posted that he “Can confirm all of those,” regarding a list of cities where ICE was expected to begin deportation operations the next day. “May have a betting pool to see who can guess which one I’m at on any particular day, based on the news,” GlomarResponder wrote.
These were but the latest posts that GlomarResponder has made over the years that suggest the operator of the account is an ICE employee. GlomarResponder has also routinely expressed blatantly racist and anti-immigrant views. Through an extensive review of GlomarResponder’s X posts, publicly available documents, and other social media profiles and posts, the Texas Observer has identified the operator of GlomarResponder as James “Jim” Joseph Rodden, a 44-year-old who works as an assistant chief counsel for ICE in the Dallas area. Rodden represents the agency in immigration court hearings where judges decide whether an individual is removed from the country.
He’s a real piece of work. A self-proclaimed fascist:
Since GlomarResponder was first created in 2012, the account has posted hateful, xenophobic, and pro-fascist content. “America is a White nation, founded by Whites. … Our country should favor us,” GlomarResponder wrote last month. “All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck,” the account posted in September of last year. “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” GlomarResponder wrote four months prior, further clarifying the post was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a reply to a comment. “I’m not a commie, I’m a fascist,” GlomarResponder posted a couple weeks later. “Fascists solve communist problems. Get your insults right, retard.”
In August, GlomarResponder posted: “‘Migrants’ are all criminals.” Two months later, GlomarResponder shared an image that reads: “It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes.” Some GlomarResponder posts evoke anti-immigrant violence: “Nobody is proposing feeding migrants into tree shredders,” the account posted in March 2024. “Yet. Give it a few more weeks at this level of invasion, and that will be the moderate position.” And in January: “My WWII vet grandfather didn’t get a chance to kill asians, so he volunteered for Korea. He’d be asking for a short term job with ICE kicking doors and swinging a baton.”
He’s saying it right out loud. But we are admonished not to use the work because it offends Republicans. Sorry. You run with fascists, expect to be called one.
Now watch this video from last night at a public meeting in Idaho. Unidentified men dressed in black, with no official authority, physically removed a woman from the meeting. Nobody knew who they were and some people in the crowd were appalled. (Not enough, but it’s Coeur d’Alene so I’m surprised there were any.) It turns out that their leader was the sheriff, who was dressed just as they were in some kind of unofficial uniform. He claimed he wasn’t acting in his official capacity.
Remember when Trump ordered that nursing babies be yanked away from their mothers during the first term? Yeah, that was really popular. Now they’re going after the unaccompanied minors who are in the U.S. usually living with relatives:
The Trump administration is directing immigration agents to track down hundreds of thousands of migrant children who entered the United States without their parents, expanding the president’s mass deportation effort, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo outlines an unprecedented push to target migrant children who crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors. It lays out four phases of implementation, beginning with a planning phase on January 27, though it did not provide a start date for enforcement operations.
More than 600,000 immigrant children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian since 2019, according to government data, as the number of migrants caught crossing illegally reached record levels.
Tens of thousands have been ordered deported over the same time frame, including more than 31,000 for missing court hearings, immigration court data show.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to a request for comment about the memo and the Trump administration’s plans.
The Washington Post poll already shows this stuff isn’t popular and it’s going to get worse:
Americans strongly oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who aren’t criminals (57-39), who arrived as children (70-26) and who have U.S. citizen children (66-30).
70% do not want undocumented kids deported. This is going to be very ugly.
The psycho Trump has tapped as his immigration czar, Tom Homan, appeared at CPAC this weekend and I don’t think he got the memo:
I have faith that the immigration advocates in the country are preparing to document these atrocities and ensure that the American people can see it. Unfortunately they have a lot of practice.
Oh, and by the way, they know this is a dicey policy. Last week Trump’s wrecking crew eliminated legal aid for unaccompanied minors. As NBC news reported, “federal funds allow nonprofit groups to provide lawyers for children, some of whom are too young to speak and are making their way through the immigration system without parents or guardians.” These kids are often described as having” feet that don’t touch the floor,” meaning when they are sitting at the defendant’s table in a courtroom before a judge.
The good news is that the administration rescinded the order on Friday. I haven’t seen any explanation as to why they backed off but I think it’s fair to assume that somebody knows this deportation plan and withdrawal of legal representation for minor kids is a hot potato.
FOX: But fair to say Russia attacked unprovoked into Ukraine?
PETE HEGSETH: Fair to say it’s a very complicated situation.
Witkoff: "The war didn't need to happen. It was provoked. It doesn't necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians. There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining NATO. That didn't need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians." pic.twitter.com/ZimoQk7wbV
Trump’s special envoy to hell Steve Witkoff, real estate developer. He says:
“The war didn’t need to happen. It was provoked. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians. There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining NATO. That didn’t need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians.
Witkoff can't name a single specific concession Russia will have to make as part of a peace deal pic.twitter.com/jHCVYlSYyc
Witkoff can’t name a single specific concession Russia will have to make as part of a peace deal
BARTIROMO: Can you acknowledge that Russia is the aggressor here?
WALTZ: Well, you know what? Who would you rather have going toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi or anyone else — Joe Biden or Donald Trump? He's the deal maker in chief. pic.twitter.com/YYKyLudDvO
That’s Trump national Security Adviser sounding like a bootlicking submissive:
BARTIROMO: Can you acknowledge that Russia is the aggressor here?
WALTZ: Well, you know what? Who would you rather have going toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi or anyone else — Joe Biden or Donald Trump? He’s the deal maker in chief.
Give me a break. Trump says he’s in love with those dictators! Literally!
These people say that Ukraine provoked the war by saying they wanted to join NATO, an idea which has not been seriously contemplated since 2008. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, saying that it was a Russian speaking province that should be part of Russia — nothing about NATO. (Echoes of some earlier unpleasantness with Sudetenland back in the 1930s.) The world watched. Then he invaded in 2022 to take the whole country. We all saw it. They can try to gaslight us into believing that Russia was under some sort of threat that required them to invade but those of us who aren’t brainwashed by the glorious essense of Mar-a-Lago bronzer, know it isn’t true.
Trump is stealing Ukraine natural resources for himself and his billionaire buddies and allowing Putin to dissolve Ukraine as a sovereign country (which is what will happen.) Putin has to do nothing but give Trump a big, wet, sloppy kiss and call him a genius on television.
Many Americans reacted pointedly to Elon Musk’s “5 bullets” email ultimatum to 2.3 million federal employees on Saturday. Targets included “at least one judge and some law clerks.” * But Sen. Tina Smith (D) of Minnesota spoke for all of them, telling it like it is, just the way Trumpophiles like it: “This is the ultimate dick boss move from Musk – except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a dick.” **
This is the ultimate dick boss move from Musk – except he isn’t even the boss, he’s just a dick.
Smith wasn’t done commenting on the Musk-Trump hostile takeover of the U.S. government:
I bet a lot of people have had an experience like this with a bad boss – there’s an email in your inbox on Saturday night saying, “Prove to me your worthiness by Monday or else.” I’m on the side of the workers, not the billionaire asshole bosses.
“It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, Musk is relying on” for this action, Politico notes:
Michael Fallings, an attorney specializing in federal employment law, told POLITICO the actions Musk described in the post would be illegal.
“I don’t believe it would be legal, and I don’t think he really understands right now how he will even do what he’s threatened to do,” Fallings said.
Beyond Musk’s illegal attempt to amuse himself by seeing how high he can get 2.3 million public servants to jump, other Donald Trump administration dysfunctionaries flatly told their people to ignore Musk’s directive.
Over the course of the evening top leadership at the FBI, the State Department, the VA, the Department of the Navy (to its civilian employees) and other parts of the government have explicitly instructed employees in their departments and agencies to ignore the email. Meanwhile the DOJ seems to be instructing its employees to follow it. (And yes, FBI is sort of under DOJ and that’s kind of weird but that’s where we are.)
It’s important to note that these emails are authorized or allowed if not directed by the President of the United States. And yet whole wings of the government are saying to ignore it. I mentioned to someone this evening that they’re treating a presidentially authorized email as some kind of insider threat. And this person says, we’re surprised that Trump is an insider threat? To which I said, yes, I’m surprised that his own appointees are doing so.
We are watching state disintegration in real time, Marshall observes both wryly and with some trepidation. As one might treat fantastic statements from a parent in the throes of dementia, it seems to me.
Fascinating watching this. Seeing similar "ignore this shit" directives at State & Dept of the Navy (for civilian employees). Wild that DOJ seems odd man out. Mind boggling seeing department countermand instructions being allowed if not directed by POTUS and treating almost like insider threat.
Similarly disturbing is watching the press treat Musk’s antics seriously rather than comically disruptive for a supposed superpower that’s invested decades on preparedness for its military and for natural and manmade disasters.
People have a basic need to believe everything is going to be okay, and tomorrow will be like today, Anat Shenker-Osorio noted last week [timestamp 13:55]. To acknowledge the badness, she suggests, “requires a level of upset and … a level of awareness that is understandably difficult for most people.” (See system justification theory.) Our republic isn’t slowly boiling. We’re enjoying a cozy hot tub, right?
Just Security treats Musk’s trolling over two million federal employees far more seriously than some of Trump’s department heads, but notes his email follows the contours of “running government like a business,” as Smith observed:
The email follows a pattern of Musk borrowing tactics from the private sector in his efforts to shrink the federal workforce. Following his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, Musk instructed Twitter’s engineers to “email [him] a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.”
Brian Klaas describes Musk’s slash-and-burn tactics as shortsighted, and a “perfect illustration of the ‘penny wise, pound foolish’ principle.” Whereas Musk’s Silicon Valley brethren celebrate risk-taking and strive to cut waste to maximize profit, governments need to build in resilience:
As I’ve written previously, there is an inherent tradeoff in complex systems between resilience and optimization. Similarly, a system that is constantly taut with tension is more likely to catastrophically snap than one that stabilizes with some protective slack.
In the United States, the federal government is routinely tasked with tackling the unexpected. It is not always a nimble system, and it certainly does contain some waste, fraud, and abuse embedded in mismanagement of the public purse. But what Musk is touting as “waste” is too often simply the inevitable byproduct of a governance strategy that can respond effectively to crises that will crop up in such an uncertain world.
Furthermore, applying a private-sector mindset to public- sector operations is a profound category error, Klaas suggests. Something like assuming “dishwashers and washing machines are the same thing because they both use detergent to wash things.”
It’s one thing if Musk slashes his new Twitter workforce until the platform breaks down. It’s another thing to break government:
By contrast, if the United States federal government breaks—even just a bit—people will die. People have died, as a result of the chaos unleashed on USAID, and as reporting continues to flow in during the coming weeks, the unacceptable and needless scale of deaths will become apparent. Many more will inevitably follow—and that’s without any Black Swans walloping us from out of the blue.
Moreover, we are often saved from such needless disasters from an under-appreciated feature of public governance: that it has lower levels of risk tolerance than the private sector. Risk tolerance is a measure of how much you’re willing to experiment and try risky things—even if doing so might lead to failure.
“DOGE is on track to turn America’s public sector strength into a dangerous weakness,” Klaas concludes.
Others across the internet responded to Musk’s ultimatum with the ridicule it richly deserves. They suggested fucking with the fucker, so to speak, by sending their own mocking bullet lists of accomplishments to HR@opm.gov.
The reply email inbox for this “what did you do last week” email is HR@opm.gov, so, you know, definitely don’t send them any unrelated messages that would interfere with their ability to carry out Elon’s dumbass bullshit
Nothin’ but Blue Skies from now on was happy to oblige (at top). Allison Gill compiled a short list of others.
If I were conspiracy minded, I’d view Musk-Trump’s attacks on government servants over the last few weeks not as reform, or even incompetence, but deliberate sabotage.
(h/t DJ)
* I was busy all day on the other side of the state reelecting Anderson Clayton for two more years as NC Democrats’ state party chair.
Congratulations to our friend and fellow Young Democrat @abreezeclayton.bsky.social on being re-elected as Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party! Let’s keep building a New South, together. 💪
** I tried to send Tina Smith a Scoobie Snack only to find she’d announced ten days ago she would not seek reelection in 2026, thus freeing herself to let billionaire Musk know what she really thinks of him. Minnesotans, brace for impact.
Despite a slow-burning start, once I got pulled into writer-director Maura Velpero’s intimate World War 2 family drama Vermiglio (winner of the Silver Lion at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and Italy’s Official Selection for the 2025 Academy Awards), I didn’t want it to end.
Imbued with shades of The Leopard, The Last Valley, and Little Women, this tale (set in 1944) takes place in an Alpine hamlet in Italy. Save the occasional sound of a passing aircraft, the war doesn’t intrude directly into the villagers’ daily life. However, the effects of war are palpable; food is scarce (money even more so), infant mortality is high, and most of the young men are serving at the front.
Valpero frames her narrative around a year or so in the life of the populous Graziadei family. The patriarch is Caesare (Tommaso Ragno). Caesar is the village’s resident schoolteacher, conducting general ed classes for children and reading classes for illiterate adults.
His visibly life-tired wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli) is pregnant with their 11th child (two of their children died as infants), and is chagrined that Caesare continues to take money out of their meager finances to purchase classical records (he haughtily defends the purchases as necessary tools to teach the arts).
He counts a number of his own children among the students in the one-room school; he is hardest on his eldest son Dino (Patrick Gardner), who he cruelly browbeats in front of his classmates. He shows a soft spot for his daughters, particularly precocious Flavia (Anna Thaler), who is one of his brightest students.
The heart of the tale is parlayed via the tight relationship between three of the sisters: the aforementioned Flavia and her older siblings Ada (Rachele Potrich) and the enigmatic Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), who all share a bed (and their secrets).
One day, a Sicilian army deserter (Giuseppe De Domenico) takes refuge in the village. Lucia is instantly smitten; the feeling appears to be mutual. Once nature takes its inevitable course, a seismic shift ensues within the family’s dynamics.
This is a simple, yet universal tale that transcends the era it is set in (which is captured with great verisimilitude). I think the story also works as both an elegy to the final vestiges of Old World traditionalism and as a harbinger of post-war mores (I gleaned a nascent feminism in Lucia’s character, a la “Linda” in David Leland’s Wish You Were Here).
Naturalistic performances all around; particularly from first-time actor Scrinzi. Lovely cinematography by Mikhail Krichman (that lush Alpine scenery paints itself). An honest, raw, and emotionally resonant film.
(Opens in Seattle February 28; check for theaters near you here)
We were told last week that Musk has no authority and is simply a presidential adviser. So is Trump telling him to be more aggressive in how he advises him?
No, of course not. Everyone knows that Trump’s delegated the torture and destruction of the federal workforce to Musk and he wants him to really stick it to those workers. Really cause them some pain. Musk saluted smartly and followed those orders:
BREAKING: As Elon Musk said on X would be happening, I can now report that all federal employees are receiving an email directing them to provide “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week.” It directs them not to send any classified information and is due by 11:59p Monday.
