The NY Times has a good piece today (gift link) looking at the inside workings of the Adams case at SDNY. It is truly astonishing. What this case proves is that what’s happening is truly the complete corrupt Trumpification of the DOJ that goes way beyond just seeking retribution for the Special Counsel prosecutions.
This is a remaking of the department as a full-fledged political arm of the president and this case was chosen in particular to demonstrate to the lawyers and the public that they plan to use that power. By choosing to protect a Democrat who made an appeal directly to Donald Trump, licking his boots and promising to do his bidding, they have shown that it’s not about the past, it’s about the future. By choosing the SDNY, the flagship office of the DOJ, they prove that no office has any independence.
This is the conclusion of the piece:
Across the department, dismay has set in over the standoff in the Adams case, which echoes a grim moment during the Watergate scandal known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Rather than carry out an order from President Richard M. Nixon to fire the prosecutor investigating him, several senior political appointees resigned.
The current conflict, some in the department believe, is even worse. When senior leaders resigned in 1973, they were in essence standing up to the White House, even as political appointees.
But now the department’s leaders are taking aim at their own lower ranks, in what many current and former Justice Department officials describe as a profound betrayal of the shared cause of justice.
Mr. Bove and Ms. Bacon could have signed the Adams motion at any time, without drawing other department lawyers into it, the officials said. Proceeding this way appeared to accomplish little more than forcing career prosecutors to capitulate.
It was a power play, pure and simple.
And they will find people in the department more than willing to sign on. A bunch of people resigned as you know, and the man who ultimately agreed to sign the dismissal is a long time career prosecutor considered to be a sort of hero because he took the hit to his integrity mostly because he had already been tainted with an earlier case. I’m not really sure I understand all that but I take their word for it.
But the Trump cult has infected many people you might have thought would have some integrity. Here’s an example:
Many in the group considered Mr. Sullivan’s decision to step forward an honorable act.
Along with Mr. Sullivan, another lawyer put her name on the document: Antoinette Bacon, known as Toni. Current and former Justice Department officials view her role more critically.
A longtime prosecutor in Ohio, Ms. Bacon had joined the administration to run the criminal division — an appointment that had been initially greeted with relief by career officials. But as the standoff between Mr. Bove and the career prosecutors persisted last week, many who report to Ms. Bacon came to see her as unquestioningly following Mr. Bove’s instructions, despite her years of experience as a corruption prosecutor.
Ms. Bacon’s former supervisor in Ohio, Ann Rowland, expressed disbelief at her actions.
“Toni is one of the foremost public corruption attorneys in the country, so she knows the Adams indictment is more than worthy of prosecution,” Ms. Rowland said. “One then can only conclude her decision to sign off on the motion to dismiss was purely political.”
She signed that loyalty oath so she had to sign this dismissal. That’s how things are going to work in Trump’s DOJ. The Constitution is toilet paper — you do as the king says.
In the office of the DC US attorney’s office today, another career prosecutor in charge of the criminal division resigned after being told to “claw back” grants that the Biden administration had already sent out, another violation of the Constitution. That order apparently came from the main justice department.
That’s right — Bove cited a Project Veritas video. That’s where we are.
Last night the White House submitted a filing to Judge Tanya Chutken that Elon Musk does not lead the DOGE and has no power to do anything but advise the president. Apparently, this was an attempt to head off her potential ruling that DOGE is not properly constituted to do what it’s doing, particularly under the leadership of the unaccountable Musk:
These are the people, you’ll recall, who have made a fetish out of “America First” leave the rest of the world alone. Their little white neo-con is showing only this time their reason for this bellicose bullshit is that the Prime Minister of Canada is younger and better looking than Donald Trump.
This morning I heard Dana Bash feeling the need to explain to her viewers that the Treaty of Versailles after WWI led to Adolph Hitler and WWII.
Then from Politico this morning:
He didn’t know any of this? This journalist needs to click on another Wikipedia page about the year FDR took office. The US was in the midst of the worst economic depression in its history. Unemployment In 1932 was 25% and getting worse and the banking system was near collapse.
He won in a landslide with 472 electoral votes, 42 (out of 48) states and 57.4% of the popular vote. The nation was desperate for relief and Roosevelt had a massive mandate to do what he was doing.
Trump,on the other hand, barely won the popular vote with 1.5% and didn’t even achieve a majority and only got 312 electoral votes. He has taken office in a period of full employment and economic vitality. The financial markets are booming and inflation, which was moderately high two years ago, is tamed.
Trump isn’t even trying to pass his agenda through the Congress as Roosevelt did because the GOP majority is so slim as to be almost non-existent. His policies are aimed at a phantom problem that nobody voted for or needed, all to benefit his buddies in the private sector who are no doubt going to be tapped to take up the slack that Musk has created with his indiscriminate cuts. And then, the corruption will really take off.
The only way you can compare Trump’s wrecking ball to Roosevelt’s is as the Bizarroworld version in which instead of saving the country he is destroying it.
If you don’t follow her orders she will shoot you down like a dog. You know she’ll do it, too:
Tonight, I’m announcing a nationwide and international multimillion-dollar ad campaign warning illegal aliens to leave our country NOW or face deportation with the inability to return to the US. This serves as a strong warning to criminal illegal aliens to not come to America. If… pic.twitter.com/VcVgJYfSKR
As they destroy the lives of Americans by firing half the federal workforce in the name of eliminating waste, they’re spending millions on vanity projects like that piece of work.
US President Donald Trump on Sunday attended the Daytona 500 which is a NASCAR Cup Series motor race, but more than his attendance, it was his mode of transport that gathered quite the chatter online and offline. Trump took his Air Force One to attend the sports event at the Daytona beach. NASCAR fans were thrilled to see the Air Force One flyover the area before Trump rode in the presidential limousine onto the Daytona International Speedway.
Air Force One took off from Palm Beach International Airport shortly after noon. The White House in a statement said that he was accompanied by his son Eric, grandson Luke, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum among others.
[…]
While some were relishing in their fan moment, others were not so happy about the whole show. @CalltoActivism shared the disappointment and pointed out how American taxpayers’ money was being wasted. “Since we’re on the topic of government waste, Donald Trump’s joyride around the Daytona 500 cost American taxpayers around $5,000,000,” the tweet said. Giving further breakdown, the user wrote,
The government is being run on a day to day basis by our Prime Minister Elon Musk and various henchmen. King Trump appears to be mostly doing ceremonial duties, as monarchs tend to do.
These ceremonies cost a lot of money but they are important to ensure that the public is given many moments they can relish as assurances that their president is a star. As you know, when you’re a star they let you do it.
“I’d understand a strategic reduction in force if needed,” said one USDA employee, who was fired over the weekend. “But this was a butchering of some of our best. Does the public know this?”
The termination letters hitting inboxes all struck the same note: Probationary workers were getting the ax for poor job performance. But many of those fired had just received positive reviews, or had not worked in the government long enough to receive even a single rating, according to interviews with federal employees and documents obtained by The Post.
[…]
Firing employees en masse with the same claim of poor performance is illegal, said Jim Eisenmann, a partner at the Alden Law Group, a law firm specializing in litigation by federal employees. It violates federal law covering career civil service employees, he said.
“It can’t be true,” Eisenmann said. “They’re clearly not articulating this on an individual basis, which is what makes it so suspect.”
One of those civil servants fired for “performance” is from nearby. This FB account from Jenifer Bunty popped up this morning. She’s a local employed by the U.S. Forest Service (also USDA) involved in disaster relief. Or she was:
Terminated, Effective Immediately
At the risk of exposing what a nerd I am, I’ll tell you that when I first opened my Forest Service uniform, I held my badge and cried. I was so proud to be part of the agency whose mission is “caring for the land and serving people”. I thought about how proud my dad would be. He instilled in me a sense of duty, patriotism, and a strong desire to do what’s right, especially when people need it most.
For the past 19.5 months, I’ve been working in disaster recovery for the National Forests in North Carolina. I worked on 6 hurricanes or major storms and a dozen or more wildfires during that time, including deployments to western states.
I also took a temp promotion as the District Ranger for the Grandfather Ranger District two weeks before Hurricane Helene ravaged Pisgah National Forest, western NC, and other states. While my own family didn’t have power or a way to keep food and medication cold, I went in and worked 19 days straight before someone made me take a break.
I led the District to the best of my ability through something none of us signed up for. I had to. People needed us. Our first focus was clearing a path to get to 35 kids and their teachers who were trapped in a facility behind several landslides and giant piles of debris. After that, we focused on supporting search and rescue, clearing roads for emergency access, and helping everywhere we could.
I returned to my normal role on the disaster recovery team in January and started working towards long-term recovery for the Forest and our local communities. On Thursday, I stood on the ruined part of I-40 with a team planning how to stick an interstate back on the side of a mountain. People probably don’t realize that portion sits on National Forest land and cannot be fixed without Forest Service employees. That afternoon we got word that 14 of our employees were indiscriminately fired. All of them were actively working on hurricane recovery.
Photo via Jenifer Bunty’s FB page.
Yesterday, I received the call that I was being fired. We’ve lost 17 in total from the National Forests in North Carolina. Every single one was working on hurricane recovery projects. The majority of them hold firefighter or incident management qualifications and actively support wildfire operations. The US Forest Service has reportedly lost more than 4000 employees at this point. More than 10% of the agency.
My termination letter said it was “based on performance”. The supervisor that called me said I was the best hire they had ever made. My performance reviews have always been excellent. I love what I do and, like so many of my colleagues, I care about getting it right to meet our mission.
In my time working for this agency, I think I’ve made a difference. Besides growing personally and professionally, I’ve tried to be an example of a strong, caring woman for my daughters. I talk with them about how we can do hard things and we should always “do what we can, with what we have, where we’re at.” When I told them that I wasn’t allowed to do my job anymore, they cried with me. We have all sacrificed for my work. I’ve taught them to believe it matters.
It still matters.
I hope I get to do it again one day.
I was planning a second post this morning about something much scarier. But Jenifer’s story needed a wider audience.
Yes, their plans are a bizarre geek wet dream. And yes, these gullible “geniuses” are high on their own supply. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an overarching plan flying below the chaos. Or perhaps competing plans.
That jerk-off dance Donald Trump does regularly is actually a fair representation of the forces behind the scenes yanking his strings. Amidst the chaos he’s created in just his first month back in office, it’s now clear just which faction of reactionaries has the figurative upper hand.
FDR’s populism built the middle class that competed with the rich for class and economic domination. Yes, the New Deal helped make the U.S. the predominant world power in the 20th century, and yes, the rich got richer. (Much richer after the Reagan revolution.) But God, man, those uppity poors in the 1960s actually wanted to share power!
Remnants of the conservative old guard, the Koch-style plutocrats behind the Powell memo and the think tanks they built in the 1970s, have longed for decades to tear down New Deal programs. (Even better, privatize them.) Movement conservatism meant to put an end to government that served people besides America’s Most Wealthy. But without killing the golden goose, naturally.
What they didn’t see coming were the techno-state monarchists who wanted to burn down all of it and opt out of society.
Liza Featherstone writes at The New Republic that the burn-it-down boys are not wreaking chaos among popular government programs simply out of hubris:
Most likely, their popularity is precisely what the Trump-Musk administration dislikes about them. For anti-government ideologues, it’s important that people not have good experiences with the government. Every clean energy investment in your community, every Social Security check, every child enrolled in Head Start, every improvement in air and water quality, is a threat to right-wing ideological dominance. They know it, and they want to stop Americans from having those positive associations.
Even Republicans who voted against the Inflation Reduction Act rushed to take credit for its investments in red-state communities. Shutting it down and laying off government employees who form the base of economies in many places over alleged “performance” is not only illegal but guaranteed to be highly unpopular. Which for the DOGEes is just the point.
The ruling class of the 1930s and ’40s would have loved to be in Elon Musk’s position. Although he and his young minions may seem merely like nihilistic psychos, they’re also conservatives doing something that makes rational sense for their political movement. By going after the most popular government programs, they are thinking long-term, planning for a world where no one defends government agencies because these agencies don’t do anything that we value. Elon Musk isn’t just trying to bypass all checks and balances, ignore popular will, plunder our public goods, and wreck the world, though he is doing all that. As we protest this vandalism, we need to remember that he aims to build a future in which we have nothing left to defend.
That is perhaps a tad more disruption than classic conservatives can tolerate. The autocrats also jerking Trump’s strings may wish to see democracy crushed. But paired with capitalism, democracy produces consumers, and consumers produce demand, and demand generates wealth for the plutocrats. And plutocrats pay off autocrats and dictators.
In the tug-of-war among the tech barons, conservative fat cats, American-style fascists, and global autocrats vying for control of the Oval Office, Elon Musk and his delusional DOGEes seem to have the upper hand just now.
As Dave Karpf summarizes in the piece Digby cited yesterday:
The tech barons think they should be allowed to opt out society. They do not know what the administrative state does. They do not care to find out. And they figure we could save a whole lot of money if we just turn the whole thing off.
“Efficiency” is a DOGE smokescreen that plays well in focus groups not told it means they’ll lose their incomes and safety net. By the time they figure it out, the damage is done.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) of Maryland lays out the game in a recent interview with Brian Tyler Cohen that Gil Duran transcribes:
We’re dealing with a band of incorrigible, lawless plutocrats who think that they can just control the whole US government. And I keep thinking about what Steve Bannon said about Elon Musk. He said he’s a truly evil individual … But, you know, in the Silicon Valley that network of right-wing billionaire libertarian-turned-authoritarians, they are very open about the fact that they think that democracy is obsolete and we’re living in a post-Constitutional America, the Constitution no longer fits, and they are trying to get everybody ready for a techno-state monarchy.
And in their writings about it they suggest that seizure of the control of technology and computers and financial payments is the essence to moving from one form of government to another. So we’re really talking about people who would like to abolish American constitutional institutions and representative democracy, and the rights and freedoms of the people. Their guy Yarvin, who’s, you know, their big intellectual hero, has said people have got to overcome their fear of the word dictator. He says a dictator is basically just like a corporate CEO. They’re all “dictators” in their businesses and so we need a dictator [for] the corporation that’s the United States of America and obviously they have Elon Musk in mind…
Here’s news on just one of the plans Musk-as-dictator has in mind:
Food and Drug Administration employees reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink were fired over the weekend as part of a broader purge of the federal workforce, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.
The cuts included about 20 people in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices, several of whom worked on Neuralink, according to the two sources, who asked not to be identified because of fear of professional repercussions. That division includes reviewers overseeing clinical-trial applications by Neuralink and other companies making so-called brain-computer interface devices, the sources said.
Both sources said they did not believe the employees were specifically targeted because of their work on Neuralink’s applications.
Neuralink had its application for human trials denied several years ago after his company “founded in 2016, didn’t seek permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) until early 2022 – and the agency rejected the application, seven current and former employees told Reuters.”
The looney thing is that Musk’s efforts are foreshadowed in a 1960s satire, The President’s Analyst (1967). Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn) is pursued across the country by alphabet-agency spies from across the planet eager to know what he knows of the president’s mind. Schaefer eventually is captured by the shadowy TPC. They want his help in legislating that everyone have microchips implanted in their brains prenatally. The joke in 1967 was that TPC is The Phone Company. Their goal is efficiency too, to save billions by scrapping all their costly hardware, maintenance, and workforce.
“Can you imagine the ease, the fun, with which you can place a call?” asks Arlington Hewes (Pat Harrington Jr.), the genial president of TPC.
“You’re a megalomaniac,” Schaefer tells Hewes.
We find out later that Hewes is also a Disneyesque animatron. Musk is just the former for now.
Americans are alarmed at the idea of Musk being inside their private data. He wants to be inside their heads as well.
I did a walkthrough, here’s a timelapse. This is probably the biggest demo in D.C. so far post-inauguration, brought together by the 50501 Movement which originated on Reddit.Everyone was chanting “fire Elon!” while I was filming this.
Gathered with perhaps 400 friends and neighbors in front of Frederick city hall to register our protest at recent happenings. Many good signs and this was one of my favorites.
I was unhappy earlier today about all the media attention to some Arizona voters who told a focus group that they think Donald Trump is just dreamy. It’s the same old same old form the media who are once again working feverishly to pump up Trump’s popularity. But Philip Bump at the Washington Post had some interesting information that indicates that an Arizona focus group may not have its finger on the pulse:
YouGov measures the popularity of past presidents among all Americans. And a pair of professors conducts a survey asking members of the American Political Science Association to evaluate presidential “greatness.”
At the upper end of the spectrum, there’s general agreement. Abraham Lincoln is the most positively viewed president among both groups. George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt are near the top as well.
There’s some deviation on John F. Kennedy, who’s third on YouGov’s list and 10th among the presidential scholars. But that deviation is nothing compared with what happens at the other end of the spectrum.
The worst-performing past president among the general public is James K. Polk, to a significant extent because so few Americans have an opinion of him (quite justifiably). Historians, meanwhile, think the worst president on that measure of greatness was … Donald J. Trump.
No president has a larger gap between his rankings by the public and by the experts. He’s 20th on the public’s list (one place behind Biden) and 45th on the scholars’.
[…]
The average for Trump’s first term and Biden’s was under 50 percent, thanks to Trump. Trump’s second term has started a bit better — but his approval rating average at this point is still below everyone except himself, eight years ago.
There’s been reporting that Trump is pleased that a recent CBS News-YouGov poll showed his approval at 53 percent. His average is still below 50 percent, though, and that 53 percent is lower than Biden’s average approval rating at the same point in 2021. But one finds solace where one can. For Trump, it’s outperforming 2017 counts.
YouGov has also tracked Trump’s favorability (that is, views of Trump himself) and approval (views of his presidency when he’s been in office) since early 2016. You can see that his favorability ticked upward after the 2016 and 2024 elections and that his initial approval rating now is higher than his initial approval rating eight years ago. You can also see that his approval rating is already starting to slip downward.
Basically, Republicans like him but nobody else does. That does not translate to a ;public groundswell for DOGE, the Gaza resort, abandoning Ukraine, deportation to Gitmo and everything else. He is not popular, he just isn’t. The fact that he’s slightly more popular at this stage than he was in his first term is not indicative of a popular mandate. He won by 1.4% and a couple hundred thousand votes in swing states out of about 150 million.
I’m struggling to keep that in mind and keep the faith that the people aren’t going to stand for this. There were quite a few out in the streets today with grassroots protests. It’s just getting started.
The Great replacement in the United States is the American version of a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that racial minorities are displacing the traditional white American population and taking control of the nation. Versions of the theory “have become commonplace” in the Republican Party of the United States, and have become a major issue of political debate. It also has stimulated violent responses including mass murders. It resembles the Great Replacement theory promoted in Europe, but has its origins in American nativism around 1900. According to Erika Lee, in 1894 the old stock Yankee upper-class founders of the Immigration Restriction League were, “convinced that Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe.”
A May 2022 poll by Yahoo! News and YouGov found that 61% of people who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election believe that “a group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views.”
They claim that the Democrats are enticing immigrants to come to America for all the entitlement goodies (as if we actually have a generous welfare state) and they will be so grateful they will always vote for them. Illegal immigrants do not get social security, Medicare or Medicaid. If they become citizens, they will be entitled to them but there is no guarantee that they will vote Democratic. In fact, the last I heard, Latinos were voting in large numbers for Republicans these days, many of them immigrants.
This theory is just a way for the anti-entitlement wingnuts to push the same ideology they’ve had for decades and for the anti-immigrant haters to make the racists agree to give up their benefits.
It’s not surprising that Musk would be a promoter of this racist fringe conspiracy theory. But now that he has the keys to the government, he’s in a great position to destroy social security in ways that will impact all of us. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed to happen if the little DOGE-bags get their hands on it. Like most wealthy people, Musk believes that the government safety net is for losers and that people who depend on it are parasites on the backs of the real producers like Musk himself.
Trump has promised not to cut Social Security and Medicare but he’s a liar. And even if he’s sincere in that desire he’s so easily manipulated by Musk et al that they can easily convince him that the cuts are merely curbing fraud and that real people will not be hurt by it. And frankly, I don’t think he cares anymore if he’s fulfilling his promises because he’s driven by his lust for power and revenge and believes that MAGA (indeed, the vast majority of the world) loves him no matter what he does. Just look at how he’s admitting that his vow to bring prices down immediately was bs and that Americans are just going to have to contend with higher prices as a result of his tariffs. His promises are worth nothing.
I heard an interesting anecdote over the weekend from some people who had attended a rally last week. They noted that it was attended by quite a few people with gray hair and they were protesting Musk’s assault on social security, Medicare and Medicaid. (Something like one quarter of Medicaid payments go to pay for people in nursing homes.) If you want to see some people get angry who have a lot at stake and a lot of time on their hands go after the seniors. They aren’t going to buy this Great Replacement excuse.
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration left her job this weekend after a clash with billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service over their attempts to access sensitive government records, three people familiar with her departure said Monday.
Michelle King, who spent several decades at the agency before being named its acting commissioner last month, has now left her position after the disagreement, the people said.
President Donald Trump appointed Leland Dudek, a manager in charge of Social Security’s anti-fraud office, as acting commissioner while Frank Bisignano, the president’s nominee for permanent commissioner, is vetted by the Senate, according to three individuals who spoke on the condition anonymity to speak candidly. A public announcement is expected this week. Dudek had posted positive remarks on social media about DOGE’s efforts to cut costs and search for fraud in federal agencies, according to two of the individuals.
Dave Karpf wrote about the Silicon Valley Edgelords’ plan for world domination and it’s important:
Balaji Srinivasan’s 2022 book, The Network Stateis a blueprint of sorts. It is the wild fever-dream of Silicon Valley’s libertarian investor-class. It imagines a near future in which online communities use the blockchain to opt out of government and form their own competing “network states.”
It’s essentially just Galt’s Gulch, plus blockchain.
If you want to know what the Tech Barons are attempting to replace democracy with, then it is important to take Srinivasan seriously.
But Balaji is not a serious person. The book is manifestly ridiculous. It is a blueprint drawn in crayon. Balaji’s ideas are stunningly undercooked, offered with such conspiratorial self-certainty that you have to wonder whether anyone has bothered to ask him if he’s alright.
That’s the lesson I drew last week, while reading this pitiful excuse for a book (you can read the 135-post bluesky reaction thread here): The tech barons do have a blueprint. But they have not thought any of their plans through.
We ought to take them seriously; we ought to laugh in their faces.
I would laugh if it didn’t make me want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head — forever. But they are ridiculous:
(1) Start by launching an online community, organized around “One Commandment” or shared belief.
(2) Build a capacity for collective action and resource acquisition.
(3) Buy property, distributed across the globe, connected through the blockchain and Artificial/Virtual Reality.
(4) get “diplomatic recognition” from existing nation-states. Boom, congratulations, the future has arrived.
This is all delivered in painfully stilted startup-speak. To Balaji, governments are just like startups. Social movements are just like startups. There is a real “Boss Baby tweet” motif throughout the book. Srinivasan simply can’t think beyond his own proximate life experience.
Read the whole thing. It’s not the first time I’ve read something about this bizarre geek wet dream. A bunch of them have actually been buying up land in California to build their Disney-style “City of Yesterday”:
Tens of thousands of acres later, a group backed by Silicon Valley’s wealthiest says it’s done buying up land in northern California for its walkable, utopian city.
Flannery Associates has been grabbing plots of land in Solano County, about 60 miles from San Francisco, for the past five years. The company has spent about $800 million to purchase tens of thousands of acres of farmland with the support of tech billionaires, including Marc Andreessen and Laurene Powell Jobs.
Renderings of the company’s plan show two- to three-story rowhouses, children biking in the middle of the streets, and parents taking a stroll — all without a car in sight. Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader, said the company wants to build a “city of yesterday.” The project has been named California Forever.
Now, the company says it has all the land it needs to carry out its vision.
There have been many science fiction stories based on this idea. None of them turn out well.
I urge you to read Karpf’s entire piece because we desperately need insight into what’s going on beneath the surface of this chaos. The Bitcoin nonsense, the silly vision of utopia informed by movies and TV, it’s all nonsense. But they have a lot of money and it’s giving them power to actually act on this lunacy.
Trump is an idiot who just wants revenge and has been convinced he’s an emperor. His narcissism and ignorance are being used by these cyber-barons to see their puerile visions come to fruition (and they are very, very stupid visions.) But we have to pay attention because it’s all so dangerous.
Karpf concludes:
The reason we have to take Balaji’s musings seriously at all is that they provide a window into what Elon Musk and the DOGEkiddies are trying to accomplish.
The tech barons think they should be allowed to opt out society. They do not know what the administrative state does. They do not care to find out. And they figure we could save a whole lot of money if we just turn the whole thing off.
Gil Duran has an excellent newsletter, The Nerd Reich, that covers all their activities.
They have tried to establish their own private tech-utopia cities. Multi-billionaires have invested millions into these schemes — which is either proof that they are serious or proof that they have such absurd wealth that they throw away millions on unserious larks (or, more likely, both).
They have spent hundreds of millions, bankrolling political candidates and trying to take over existing governments. At the national level, in the United States, it seems they have succeeded.
They have taken control of the U.S. financial system and begun to weaponize it (please read Henry Farrell’s latest, if you haven’t already).
Balaji provided the blueprint in 2022. His self-published diatribe was taken very seriously by very rich people who are entirely convinced of their own self-importance.
It would be a mistake to dismiss this out of hand. It is a serious threat.
But also, it is so very, very foolish.
Vast wealth in the hands of a bunch of emotionally infantile, intellectually stunted nerds (with the help of a bunch of Wall Street pirates) has brought us to a major crisis. We need to understand it.
They aren’t omnipotent, they’re just rich. Their ideas are inane. They can be defeated.
