Republicans are about to find themselves on the back foot. Keep them there.
Donald Trump is remarkably unpopular and sinking lower in public perception, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told viewers Thursday night. Polls show the freshly minted president-felon-Russophile is historically unpopular (video link below).
Elon Musk may get a rousing welcome for entering CPAC waving around a chainsaw (this is the age of WWE political theater, after all), but he’s not popular with Americans by a wide margin.
Another poll shows Americans hate the unelected weirdo being involved in their government at this high level.
And a third poll shows they are concerned about what he’s doing mucking about in their private data and their Social Security.
People also worry that Musk’s IRS layoffs may delay those tax refunds they’re looking forward to spending. It’s one thing to lay off “faceless bureaucrats.” They may not pay so much attention to Beltway politics, but don’t mess with their money.
The public does not like what either Trump or Musk are doing to their country. They absolutely hate “government of the bullies, for the billionaires” [timestamp 18:20-19:30]. Anat Shenker-Osorio presented that message on Thursday to The.Ink’s Anand Giridharadas in “An *actual* plan to beat fascism.”
Trump (and the billionaires who love him) is “coming for your life and your livelihood, ASO continues. “He is coming for your freedom. He is coming for your privacy. He is coming for your information. And he is conducting a hostile takeover of our government so he can take our money.” That’s the message we should be spreading. Ditch the Constitution and rule of law messaging.
For ordinary, non-blog-readers to get what’s happening, our message has to be personal. And hoo-boy, once people realize it’s that personal, they get hot and bothered in a big way. Yes Newsweek is crap, but this headline is a zinger. Donald Trump Called ‘Megalomaniac’ By Angry Locals at Republican Town Hall:
President Donald Trump faced intense criticism from local residents during a town hall meeting for Republican Representative Rich McCormick in his Georgia district on Thursday, with one person labeling him a “megalomaniac.”
During the town hall meeting, many constituents harshly criticized the Republican lawmaker for backing the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), particularly its plan for massive federal layoffs and budget cuts.
That was a red congressional district in Georgia. This is another in Wisconsin:
A testy town hall hosted by Wisconsin Republican Congressman Scott Fitzgerald.
The pushback came from constituents in West Bend demanding answers to the Trump administration’s effort to slash government spending and a diplomatic shift on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Mary Sylvester asked about the role and responsibility of Congress. “We need three branches of government, not one. When will you stand up and say that’s enough?”
Michael Wittig is concerned with Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration—he held a sign that read “Presidents are not kings.”
Your goal, Giridharadas summarized, is to “increase the perception of people around you about the number of people who feel this way” [timestamp 29:15]. Spread these stories around your social media feeds all weekend so everyone else wants what what these people in Georgia and Wisconsin are having.
Marc Elias tries to make clear how serious this moment is for our country. But it’s hard for an attorney, even an excellent one. It’s not their training.
Maybe a storyteller instead. Familiar stories of ordinary people, minding their own business, wanting to be left alone, but reaching a turning point:
THE BELLY OF THE WHALE. The hero completely severs their connection to the “safe” world they left behind. In this stage, the hero makes the commitment to fully engage with the journey and transformation of self.
It’s that time.
In future generations, when your children and grandchildren look back on this moment, they are not going to ask about the price of eggs. They are going to ask you what you did. Not what you felt. Not what you paid. But what you did. And I want to be able to say I did everything I possibly could.
For a man so obssessed with defending free speech that last week he scolded Munich Security Conference partners for shunning neo-Nazis and for their governments trying to curb the spread of “so-called misinformation,” JD Vance is caught censoring his own speech at CPAC this morning.
“If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you,” Vance warned the Munich conference last week about not engaging opponents.
Clearly not. Not when members of Vance’s own U.S. party are “scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff” from members of his own party. And while DOGE is busy purging political opponents from government jobs under the pretext of improving “efficiency” and eliminating “fraud” the DOGEes have yet to formally document with anything more substantive than Elon Musk tweets.
Here’s Vance being shy about what he really means this morning at CPAC while discussing immigration.
JD Vance: “We cannot rebuild western civilization, we cannot rebuild the United States or Europe, by letting millions and millions of unvetted migrants come into our country. It has to stop … you have to allow European peoples, and of course the American people too, to raise… pic.twitter.com/oH3m6QVyNN
You have to allow free speech to debate this stuff. You have to stop doing things to the populations of the world. You’ve got to give the populations of the world the opportunity to speak up and say, no more of this BS. We want borders. We want sovereignty. We want to be able to speak our own mind in our own country.
What’s stopping him/them? Team MAGA has been pretty blunt on immigration in this country. And they’re teaching their children to speak their little minds as well:
Jocelynn Rojo Carranza took her life after experiencing months of relentless bullying from her sixth grade classmates over her family’s immigration status, with some students even threatening to contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
On February 3, Carranza’s single mother, Marbella Carranza, received a call notifying her that her daughter had attempted to take her life inside the family’s home in Gainesville, Texas. Her 11-year-old daughter was rushed to an intensive care unit in Dallas but died on February 8, according to a GoFundMe page.
What Vance wants for himself and MAGAstan is the freedom to express noxious beliefs, especially cruel ones. Mr. Victimhood has that freedom already, as does his dictator-curious boss. What Vance demands — not in so many words — is the freedom to express noxious beliefs without other Americans using their free speech to brand him for it as a Peter Thiel-owned, white-nationalist bigot. He wants a freedom of speech that’s more equal for some barnyard animals than others. He wants the same thing Christian nationalists want from their First Amendment freedom of religion: freedom for me but not for thee.
Vance claims western civilization is broken and needs rebuilding, but he doesn’t have the guts to explain in plain English how he thinks it’s broken, what or who broke it, and what immigration has to do with that.
Please, JD, use your threatened freedom of speech to explain it to us in detail. Don’t hold back. But don’t expect us to either.
The Lincoln Project poses, “@realDonaldTrump if you truly believe Zelensky is a dictator, then why aren’t you kissing his ass like you do all the others?”
Before we get to more ass-kissing, John Harwood states what we all know: “Trump lies about every single thing” because “he’s psychologically unable to tell the truth.”
“We are one news cycle away from Trump giving military aid to Russia,” the Lincoln Project also posted on Wednesday, presumably not in all seriousness. But who can say with the speed at which King Donald is climbing into Vladimir Putin’s pants?
Trump is selling out Ukraine, NATO, and now, not unexpectedly, the United Nations:
Every reporter today should be asking every Congressional Republican why they're OK siding with Putin and walking away from NATO and democracy.
LONDON/GENEVA/BERLIN, Feb 20 (Reuters) – The U.S. is refusing to co-sponsor a draft U.N. resolution marking three years since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine that backs Kyiv’s territorial integrity and condemns Russian aggression, three diplomatic sources told Reuters, in a potential stark shift by Ukraine’s most powerful Western ally.
The step appears to mirror a widening rift between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and U.S. President Donald Trump, who is trying to rapidly end the war in Ukraine and whose team has held talks with Russia without the involvement of Kyiv.
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Get busy saving your democratic republic while there’s still something left of it.
The news out of Washington, D.C. and Europe is so insane that let’s start with someone who’s not cowed by the Musk-Trump coup: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“Every day our job is to wake up and say what can I do today?”
“There is no act too small.”
🗣️ @AOC out fighting for the people & federal workers: “Every day our job is to wake up and say ‘what can I do today?’ — There is no act too small. Every action matters.” 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/G0qPZxEDKx
Meanwhile, Republicans in control(?) of Congress are running scared, too concerned for their political survival to dedicate any of their waking hours to saving their republic (or their European allies) from the Russian puppet sitting in the Oval Office.
“Senate and House Republicans know Trump will orchestrate the running of a primary challenger backed by Elon Musk’s unlimited resources if a member defies him.,” Gabriel Sherman writes at Vanity Fair.
“In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions,” Sherman continues:
“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me.
According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 bookSnakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. (When asked for comment for this story, a spokesperson for Tillis said it was false that the senator had recommended the book in that capacity. The FBI said it had no comment.)
“In that capacity” is a non-denial for those playing along at home.
Want a clue you are in an authoritarian situation? Politicians from the leader's party fear they will be targeted for physical harm if they displease the leader. Read #Strongmen to see how that works out. https://t.co/JTlk1cY4m5
Watch Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi speak out against Vladimir Putin’s aggressions in Ukraine while being careful, very careful, not to step on the toes of the Russian puppet in the White House who is sucking up to Putin in negotiations that exclude Ukraine.
“Putin is a war criminal who should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed,” Wicker told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday.
Wicker added: “Vladimir Putin has violated every tenant of international law and should be indicted and prosecuted and jailed, possibly executed.”
On his concerns about the strength of the NATO alliance: “I think the best way for a European war to be avoided that would eventually cause us to become involved, is to ensure that the rule of law that’s been observed for 70 years in Europe be enforced and protected. That’s why we have NATO. That’s why the European Union exists.”
On his criticism of Hegseth for taking Ukraine/NATO membership off table before talks began: “I made a statement about that. And let me just say, Secretary Hegseth and I spoke while he was in Poland and I was in Munich. I think to the extent that his subsequent statement was somewhat of a walk back, that was a favorable development. But Pete Hegseth and I are getting along fine.”
Wicker turns away as Raju asks about Donald Trump’s undercutting NATO.
The New York Times reports on Republican dithering;
While some Republicans have expressed dismay at Mr. Trump’s moves and statements, there has been no concerted effort to challenge him from G.O.P. leaders or senators who play pivotal roles in overseeing military and foreign policy in Congress.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and others will not cross Trump on his efforts to wreck the western alliance. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa “simply shrugged her shoulders” over Trump’s hopes to meet in person with Putin.
The spineless continue to be spineless:
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, once called Mr. Putin a “thug” and a war criminal, saying he “needs to be dealt with.” But shortly after Mr. Trump announced that Mr. Putin had extended an invitation for the president to travel to Moscow, Mr. Graham changed his tune substantially.
“I don’t care if they meet Putin in Cleveland,” he said in recent days of plans to hold high-level talks between the White House and the Kremlin. “I don’t care if they talk, I don’t care if they go on vacation. It doesn’t matter to me what you do as long as you get it right.”
Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted in response to the Times article, “These cowardly puppets would’ve stayed mute if their guy had blamed Poland for Germany’s 1939 invasion — something not even Adolf Hitler dared to do”
Democrats as a party are having difficulty mounting any effective counter either to Trump’s efforts to gut NATO or to Elon Musk’s efforts to gut federal agencies and replace the Constitution with a Yarvin-inspired broligarchy.
God help us, but another billionaire is one of the few Democrats with words of encouragement.
If you are looking for elected Leaders outside the beltway who are leading with courage, resilience, and powerful messaging – look at @govpritzker.illinois.gov 🔥
The root that tears apart your foundation begins as a seed of distrust, hate, and blame.
The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe didn’t arrive overnight.
It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.
I’m watching alongside Illinoisans what’s happening in our country right now with dread.
The authoritarian playbook is laid bare: they point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.
What comes next?
My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country.
We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one.
I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.
It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.
When the fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.
Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance.
Democracy requires your courage.
So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let despair overcome us when our country needs us the most.
“We’re in trouble,” I told my mother after Trump’s reelection. I get a lot wrong. I wasn’t wrong about that.
Update: Added the Ruth Ben-Ghiat tweet. (It’s not replicated on Bluesky.)
Oligarchs are waging a war on the working class, and they are intent on winning. But this is what I know: The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few.
Bernie as a presidential candidate struck me as a one-trick pony: class struggle. But he knows that trick in his bones.
“The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats,” entrepreneur Nick Hanauer wrote over a decade ago To: My Fellow Zillionaires:
But let’s speak frankly to each other. I’m not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I’m not technical at all—I can’t write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.
Better late than never.
The Congress won’t save this republic. Nor will the courts. The press is owned by and enabling the oligarchs. We are going to have to take to the streets. It’s just a matter of when.
A friend just yesterday said you will know someone by what they’re willing to die for. He and his spouse recognize that taking to the streets under Trump 2.0 involves physical risk. Their strategy is never to both go to the same event. One has to be there for the grandkids.
Even as Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger saboteurs bleed federal agencies of skilled public servants and threaten nuclear stockpile security at the National Nuclear Security Administration, Donald Trump is selling out Ukrainian allies to Russia and again trying to shake down NATO. Trump on Tuesday blamed President Volodymyr Zelensky for presiding over a country “that has been blown to smithereens” in a war he falsely accused Ukraine of starting. Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago.
Zelensky responded, “Unfortunately, President Trump – I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us – unfortunately lives in this disinformation space.”
As do we all.
Nice country you got there
The Telegraph of London reports on the $500 billion “deal” Trump’s agents dropped on Ukraine in exchange for its strategic minerals. The Telegraph obtained a Feb. 7 draft of the offer Trump must think Ukraine can’t refuse:
The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity. It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved. The document has caused consternation and panic in Kyiv.
[…]
The agreement covers the “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine”, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”, leaving it unclear what else might be encompassed. “This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” it states.
The US will take 50pc of recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources, and 50pc of the financial value of “all new licences issued to third parties” for the future monetisation of resources. There will be “a lien on such revenues” in favour of the US. “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children’,” said one source close to the negotiations.
I don’t think we should call it a “deal.” After all, isn’t a deal something in which both sides bring something to the table? What Trump suggested was that Ukraine give the United States half of the revenue it gets from resource extraction, as far as I can tell in perpetuity. Trump suggested that this would amount to $500 billion, although this seems like a wildly exaggerated sum.
In return, Trump offered, well, zero. No additional aid, no security guarantees, no nothing.
Many of us look at Ukraine and see a nation heroically defending freedom against heavy odds, receiving arms and money from the world’s democracies but doing all the fighting and dying — a nation that deserves our deepest gratitude. Trump, however, apparently thinks that America’s past aid — which has been substantial, although Europe has given considerably more — entitles us to strip Ukraine of its wealth.
Not to mention, Krugman adds, that if Vladimir Putin conquers Ukraine, there is no way he’d honor Trump-the-Dealmaker’s deal. That would be the deeply stupid part.
Trump’s vision isn’t even the old-fashioned imperialism of Weimar Germany, but more like “the Belgian Congo in the late 19th century, a personal possession of King Leopold which he brutally exploited for its rubber and ivory.”
And the price of this depravity would be to mark America irrevocably as a rogue nation, one nobody will want to deal with and nobody will trust to honor its promises.
Donald Trump is taking America out of NATO to join the Warsaw Pact.
Well done, my Republican friends. You have no character, no conviction, and your legacy will be the betrayal of the Greatest Generation's sacrifice.
You are a disgrace and will be remembered for who you are.
Trump is not simply operating in a disinformation space, or in a 19th century space, or in a depraved and deeply stupid one. He and his broligarch accomplices are operating in a fundamentally un-American one. Over the last century, American troops rode into Europe (twice) and the Pacific in white hats to save the world from the very imperialism and fascism Trump and his red-hatted goons now embrace like Trump’s friends in the Autocrats Club.
Trump has twice sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” and to uphold its laws, then set about finding ways to subvert them. His effort to elide the unambiguous language of the 14th Amendment and strip birthright citizenship from a class of Americans he dislikes is indefensible. Not that conservatives in his thrall won’t try.
The only thing American about Donald Trump is his birth certificate. You can’t even say that much about Elon Musk or J.D. Vance sponsor Peter Thiel.
If Trump wants to revoke birthright citizenship, let’s start with his.
“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.
The only thing American about supporters of Donald Trump’s rolling coup is their birth certificates. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (and others) excluded, of course. *
Resistance isn’t futile, The Ink reminds readers this morning. Trump 2.0’s revival last week of NIxon’s Saturday Night Massacre, and its rejection of the rule of law nowadays is “just what happens on a Thursday.”
The Ink begins:
JD Vance claimed last week that mere judges had no place restraining the president’s “legitimate power.” Bad enough. But over the weekend, his boss went further. A lot further.
New York Timescolumnist Jamelle Bouie called it “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.” And it’s hard to think of one that outdoes it.
the single most un-american and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an american president
But the refusal of acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle R. Sassoon, last week to carry out AG Pam Bondi’s demand to dismiss corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams demonstrated that the rule of law is not dead yet. Other DOJ prosecutors from the public integrity who survived Bondi’s escape room last week may yet receive their pink slips or resign unless they can find ways to defend the ramparts from the Project 2025 barbarians.
Six more U.S. attorneys would quit in turn, each refusing to carry out the order. Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, who resigned after Sassoon and attorneys Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, filed a downright heroic letter to Bove that will surely find its way into the history books (assuming such things are still legal) as a testament to the lawlessness of this age, and — hopefully — to the beginnings of real opposition to that lawlessness.
[…]
Sassoon, Scotten, and the other U.S. attorneys in the Adams case have given everyone in America an example of how to respond. They’ve decided that the Trump administration’s actions — undeniably the acts of an aspiring king looking to rule by decree rather than a government representing the will of the people — are so intolerable they cannot be endorsed. Will Congress take that to heart? It’s hard to say. But ultimately, it falls to the rest of us.
But there is more afoot than some U.S.-based tech plutocrats in thrall to Curtis Yarvin’s monarchist fantasies. Darker ideologies underlie them. At the Munich security conference, J.D. Vance promoted tolerance for far-right hate groups like Alternative for Germany (AfD) under the rubric of free speech. Vance later met with AfD president, Alice Weidel, reportedly to discuss “the war in Ukraine, German domestic politics and the so-called brandmauer, or ‘firewall against the right’, that prevents ultra-nationalist parties like AfD from joining ruling coalitions in Germany.” The group’s leaders, the Anti-Defamation League claims, are associated with “Nazi slogans, Holocaust trivialization and more.”
Bouie posted this regarding one of Musk’s DOGE team:
seems like it is a big deal that the unifying ideology of the doge team is neo nazism
Several outlets, most notably Wired, have published the identities of some of Musk’s henchmen. Many are men in their early twenties who work for Musk or Peter Thiel; one, Gavin Kriger, has an apparent social media history filled with neo-Nazi posts. Such information is of extreme public relevance: What these people are doing is not just illegal, it is an attempted coup in progress. Federal agencies are set up and funded by Congress, not the president, and Musk has not been elected to anything. Americans would easily understand the implications of an unelected billionaire sending goons in to take control of government ministries if it were happening in, say, Venezuela.
Just as in autogolpes, just as in Germany’s in 1933, they are using our democratic insitutions to undermine those very institutions.
