Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Dan Pfeiffer says Democrats have both a moral and political obligation to talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia:

Over the weekend, I made the case that Democrats needed to speak up against Trump’s assault on the Constitution. Too many are leaning exclusively into economic arguments, letting Trump’s offenses against our democracy go unchallenged in the public square.

Speaking out against Trump was never more necessary, as evidenced by the absolute shitshow of an Oval Office meeting between Trump and El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. On live television, Trump and his aides declared that they wouldn’t abide by the Supreme Court ruling to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the man mistakenly sent to rot in an El Salvadoran gulag. They then openly discussed sending U.S. citizens to CECOT.

This is the moment. We are at a crossroads. It’s time to speak up. Corporations have bent the knee; law firms are submitting to Trump; Congress is ceding its authority, and corporate media is making excuses. The courts are trying to stop Trump’s worst offenses, but he ignores their dictates.

Our only weapon is immense public pressure, and no one can exert it but ourselves.

Democrats’ reticence comes from our fear that Trump is leading us into a political trap. Stephen Miller said the quiet part out loud, declaring that Abrego Garcia’s incarceration is a 90-10 issue of public opinion. After getting hammered on border security in the 2024 campaign, many Democrats are once bitten, twice shy when it comes to talking about immigration.

If Trump is laying a trap, it’s not a particularly good one. Democrats have a strong case in calling for Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return. Public opinion is on our side.

Pfeiffer goes on to suggest that Democrats tell the real story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He is not a criminal or a gang member. He was in the country legally, is married to a U.S. citizen and has American children. He was allowed to stay here when a judge found that he had a credible reason to fear the gangs in El Salvador, his reason for emigrating here in the first place. (Rendering him to that notorious prison full of MS-13 gang members is one of the cruelest actions they could have taken against this man.)

As Pfeiffer points out, while polling shows support for deporting undocumented criminals, people do not support deporting the hardworking, long term immigrants like Abrego Garcia.

He writes that a Pew Poll from last months showed that “only 15% believe that undocumented immigrants with jobs should be deported; 14% think that undocumented parents of American children should be deported, and only 5% want the spouses of U.S. citizens deported.”

If people know what Trump is doing to this man and others like him they will rebel. Even a MAGA cultist can see that this is grotesque.

Pfeiffer also suggests that people be reminded that the Trump administration has already admitted that this whole thing is a result of an “administrative error.” He points out that despite Stephen Miller’s lies that a “Democrat saboteur” is the one who did that, the Solicitor General, an ICE official and the DOJ lawyer have all testified that Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported.

And as I posted yesterday, polling shows that large majorities do not want the president ignoring the courts and right now that’s what they are doing by pretending that the court said something that it didn’t. (I’m afraid the Court is going to have to clear this up and I’m not sure they will.) Even about 20% of 2024 Trump voters don’t like the idea of continuing to deport people despite a court order telling them not to.

He concludes:

Trump and the MAGA media think they have a winning issue. They don’t. Democrats can win this fight, but we must make the case aggressively and strategically. We have to be loud, or we will be drowned out by the arrogant and insecure liars who sentenced a father and husband to die in a gulag.

Amen.

Pentagon’s “SWAT Team Of Nerds” is done with DOGE

“They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” a former Pentagon official said of Elon Musk’s DOGE team. If not stealing government information.

Daily Beast:

Nearly every staffer at the Defense Digital Service (DDS) is resigning over the coming month, according to the program’s director Jennifer Hay and three other current members of the office—effectively shutting down the program.

“The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly,” Hay said, according to Politico. She plans to leave by May 1.

Dubbed the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” the DDS was created in 2015 with the aim to modernize defense operations with fast tech fixes and digital tools for the military.

The DOGEes are instead firing swaths of employees or pressuring them to quit.

If you haven’t read NPR’s long report on DOGE’s suspicious handling of data at the NLRB, do so. Rachel Maddow spoke with an NLRB whistleblower last night. It makes us wonder if DOGE is stealing government info (including from the Pentagon) for Musk’s AI development and/or is sharing it with foreign adversaries. To be continued, I guess.

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* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 19 (Details coming; scroll for local events)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Who knew?

Stella: From what I’ve seen, Paden doesn’t seem to care about money.
Cobb: Ha! Paden doesn’t seem to care about anything, except he does. You just can never tell what it’s going to be.
— dialogue from Silverado

Donald Trump cares a lot about money. He measures his manhood by it. He almost stumbled into the presidency in 2016 trying to build his brand and increase his stash. But once Trump faced the prospect of jail time while out of office, and real accountability for the first time in his life, power itself became more intoxicating. Now he’s pursuing the power to punish his enemies as greedily as he once sought riches.

Average Americans, though, are more like Kevin Kline’s character, Paden, from Silverado. You can never tell what they’ll care about. Money, sex, sports, toys, religion, guns (a substitute for real power), race. Racism, I’d argue, is not about skin color as much as it is about keeping whites atop the established hierarchy (power).

But who knew average Americans cared about esoterica like their constitutional right to due process of law guaranteed in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? Well, they do when they see it publicly denied to people as powerless as themselves. People like Kilmar Abrego García, 29. The Trump administration kidnapped the Salvadoran citizen, a Maryland resident married with kids, a union apprentice, and consigned him for life to a Salvadoran gulag in violation of a court’s protective order.

An “administrative error,” the Trump administration first told the court. Then they justified the error they refuse to correct (in defiance of another court order) by alleging Abrego García is an MS-13 gang member. A terrorist, alleged White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller without providing evidence. No hearing. No due process. Just the say-so of an administration led by a convicted felon and world-famous for lying.

It turns out that Abrego Garcia is not a faceless number like the several hundred Venezuelans Trump shipped off to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) one month ago in defiance of yet another court order. His wife held a press conference on Tuesday to plead for his return. Even Fox News covered it.

“My heart aches for my husband,” Jennifer Vasquez Sura said. “I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive.”

"My family can't be robbed from another day without seeing Kilmar. This administration has already taken so much from my children, from Kilmar's mother, brother, sisters, and me." pic.twitter.com/qwtT3qbPRh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2025

You can never tell what Americans will care about. Americans are beginning to see themselves in Abrego Garcia and to care that they might be next.

His union loudly demanded Abrego Garcia’s return.

One of the most shameful things

Sen. Chuck Grassley, Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, got an earful about due process at a meeting with Iowa constituents on Tuesday, “which frankly I wasn’t expecting,” said one ABC anchor.

The Guardian:

“I believe very strongly in my Christian faith. I preach on Sundays,” said one attendee, “Turning away people who have come here for asylum is one of the most shameful things we are doing right here.”

CNN:

“We would like to know what you, as the people, the Congress, who are supposed to rein in this dictator, what are you going to do about it?” one man asked Grassley. “These people have been sentenced to life imprisonment in a foreign country with no due process. Our government cannot do anything?”

ABC News:

“You going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?” an audience member shouted.

“That’s not a power of Congress,” Grassley responded.

“El Salvador is an independent country … The president of that country is not subject to our U.S. Supreme Court,” he added later.

You could hear a loud groan from a woman before a man yelled, “I’m pissed!”

View on Threads

You know what I always say to do when opponents are cut over the eye? The Trump administration is about to be on its back foot on Abrego García’s abduction. People are waking to the truth that our budding dictator could do the same to any of us. If I were you, I’d spread Jennifer Vasquez Sura’s Easter plea for her husband’s return everywhere.

* * * * *

Have you fought dictatorship today?

National Day of Action, Saturday, April 19 (Details coming; scroll for local events)
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

MIchelle Goldberg writes about a blogger and influencer named Alex Kaschuta whose podcast used to be “a node in the network between weird right-wing internet subcultures and mainstream conservatism” and who recently moved away from it saying that the “vibe has shifted.”

Apparently, she’s not the only one. An excerpt:

[S]everal people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”

Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)

Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley’s revolt against social justice ideology, though he’s never been a Trump supporter. Last week, he asked whether “edgy heterodox centrists” like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments. In an imaginary Socratic dialogue, he wrote, “We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure. Instead we got chain-saw-style firings, total devastation of state capacity in exactly the way most likely to strangle innovation more than ever, and the worst and dumbest people in the world gloating about how they solved the ‘grift’ of sending lifesaving medications to dying babies.”

This is super interesting.

I recently watched some SNL episodes from 2020 and 2021 and I was gobsmacked by how much the zeitgeist has changed. If this part of that is finally going out of fashion it can only be a good thing. The ultimate red-pilled techbro who subscribed to this nonsense is Elon Musk. (He was a late bloomer.) I have no idea if this is going to be replaced by something worse. It’s certainly possible. But this “vibe” has been spectacularly destructive and if it’s moving on it can only be a positive.

Here’s a gift link to the whole piece.

The inspiration…

Here’s the opening of the RS write-up:

On March 27, 2022, on the heels of a weekend marked by dozens of gang-related murders, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and his legislature plunged the country into a régimen de excepción — a state of exception — and declared war against the gangs. The state of exception suspended fundamental rights like freedom of assembly and association, the right to legal representation, and the right to see a judge within 72 hours of detention. The age of criminal responsibility was lowered to 12.

The crackdown that ensued saw tens of thousands of arrests of suspected gang members, who were tried en masse and disappeared into the nation’s prison system without even the illusion of due process. Allegations of torture, extrajudicial killings, and other human rights abuses abounded — and still do. Bukele is serving a second term despite a constitutional prohibition against it. The state of exception — originally a 30-day decree —  has been extended 37 times. Over the course of three years, human rights in El Salvador have crumbled under its boot.

It’s here that President Donald Trump hopes to find a workable model for his own immigration crackdown, and the potential eradication of opposition to his nativist, right-wing agenda. 

Yeah:

“An activist judge is no judge at all, just someone wearing a costume,” Musk responded to a post from rightwing commentator Matt Walsh that suggested Trump should “go to war against activist judges”.

Musk has also received support from foreign leaders who have attacked their countries’ judiciaries and challenged the rule of law. He responded with a “100” emoji to a post from Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that claimed “when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system”. Netanyahu attempted in 2023 to weaken the power of Israel’s judiciary, prompting nationwide protests and fears of a constitutional crisis.

El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele’s party ousted all supreme court judges in 2021 as human rights groups warned about a slide into authoritarianism, has become a repeated point of comparison for Musk. He retweeted a post from Bukele on Tuesday that claimed the “U.S. is facing a judicial coup” and repeated that language himself in later posts.

In another post, Musk responded “it is the only way” to a failed far-right US congressional candidate who suggested that the country should emulate El Salvador by investigating politicians and impeaching “all corrupt judges”. The former candidate, Valentina Gomez, received media attention last year for a campaign video in which she burned LGBTQ+-themed books with a flamethrower.

Musk, who has met with Bukele and praised his strongman presidency, has also previously suggested he wants to carry out a similar hollowing out of the judiciary. “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Musk tweeted on 25 February, reposting Bukele. “That is what it took to fix El Salvador. Same applies to America.”

Who needs laws when you’re a dictator?

Trump has signed fewer bills into law at this point in his presidency than any new president taking office for the last seven decades, according to government records.

Trump has signed just five bills into law so far: three Congressional Review Act resolutions overturning Biden-era regulations, the Laken Riley Act and a stopgap funding bill needed to avoid a government shutdown last month.

Congress actually passed the Laken Riley Act before Trump took office, but the GOP leadership held it so former President Joe Biden wouldn’t be able to sign it into law.

Trump has been signing Executive Orders turning the country into a dictatorial hellscape but he’s also playing a lot of golf and threatening people. And he’s doing permanent damage in dozens of different ways to the country and the individuals in it. But the only silver lining in all this is that EOs can be reversed. If we make it through the next four years and can replace him with someone sane (both tall orders) The new president will have her work cut out for her.

I saw my friend Alex Lawson on Maddow Friday April 12, 2025. He said,

a missed check for some people is a death sentence, a missed check for some people is going to mean that they are out on the street. So we have to come together. And understand that when this catastrophic failure happens, and I believe it will, there’s no indication that they’re trying to fix things, just accelerate it. 73 Million people rely on Social Security. Imagine the chaos that will come when those checks don’t go out. Rachel, it is going to be a scenario that’s hard to imagine how catastrophic it will be.

Alex Lawson, ED Social Security Works on The Rachel Maddow Show, Friday April 12, 2025

I put the date of the warning in here, because it’s important. Here’s how America currently works:

Someone on the left says something bad is going to happen and we need to stop it before it happens. Nobody listens.
The thing happens. Then, the people who were warned, who also knew it would likely happen but didn’t want to stop the thing, say, “Nobody could have anticipated…”

We have an old saying over at Eschaton, Atrios’ place, “We were right, but nobody listens to the Dirty Funny Hippies.”

So while it’s great to be able to say, “I told you so.” We do need to prepare for the bad thing, and then when it happens, don’t accept the excuses, prepare for them, RUB THEM in their FACES, and make your demands.

5 Steps to Stop #DOGE and save #SocialSecurity

1) Act. Alex tells people to get their Social Security info on paper. DO it. It’s easy. Go to ssa.gov

2) Call the Constituent services person at your Representative’s office.
(I wrote about what to say to the Constituent Services person based on Alex Lawson’s advice here.) Someone who watched Maddow did! From the comments under her video.

@jeaniebop
My idiotic senator is Ted Cruz. I called and called his office and finally got in touch with a young woman who was like Karoline Leavett. She was extremely condescending and had no compassion. She just told me not to worry! ??

My response, “Thank you for making the call! You know how Rachel says that ‘push back works’? You are part of that push back. When a bunch of normal constituents people call, it’s noticed. But warnings from the normals never count enough, BUT when his constituents DIE because of missed checks, it’s HIS fault for not stopping DOGE. The deaths are on HIS hands, because HE had power to stop it, and didn’t.”

3) Demand all DOGE people be KICKED OUT, NOW.
You can talk about your concerns to the Constituent services person NOW, since DOGE has already screwed up the Social Security Administration website that you need to access to confirm your earned benefits. You might think, “What’s the point, they don’t care. They’ll never go against Musk.” However, I want people to say it politely to them NOW, so when the BIG f’up happens and you call them later to do their job to get your benefits, you have their info and a history of concern.

Also include a comment about what you want in your remedy. This is as much for YOU as for them. You should know that before DOGE, a WORKING system for Social Security payments existed with competent people in the government who knew and STILL know how to run it. So, BRING THEM BACK.

4) The people who were FIRED have to be reinstated to return the system to where it was before DOGE touched it.

Here’s the thing, in America the people Republicans listen to are CEOs of companies. Those companies will be destroyed if DOGE is not stopped. They need to demand that DOGE be KICKED OUT NOW. But those CEOs are afraid of saying it publicly. Our protests at Tesla, Hands Off rallies, calls to the Reps and requests to constituent services all give the CEOs and Republicans cover from Trump wrath. ‘It’s not me, it’s the SHAREHOLDERS and constituents who want DOGE out of Social Security computer systems.”

As my sign at the #HandsOff Rally in SF read, “DOGE Boys, HANDS OFF all computer systems.”

I say this about Social Security Administration but it applies to all the agencies where people who managed the computer systems were fired by DOGE. They have to be reinstated so they can return the system to where it was before they touched it.

This is important, because DOGE’s whole point was NOT to make the systems better, but to TAKE information FROM the systems, and then USE those computer systems to control the agencies.

(BTW, this control of the computer systems is the primary goal of Russ Vought, architect of Project 2025 and now head of the Office of Management and Budget.)

For those who want evidence, this has been confirmed in this new report in NPR April 15, 2025, A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data.

As Digby said
DOGE people are playing very fast and loose with all of our personal information and nobody knows exactly what they are up to except that they are intent upon getting to it and won’t take no for an answer.

And here is her question that I want to answer.

And apparently there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them.

I think that there ARE people that can stop them, but first the f’up has to destroy something so bad that Wall Street notices. Rohan Grey, was on The Majority Report explaining DOGE’s opaque takeover of the Bureau of Financial Services and what a botched system shift for the federal payment systems would look like. He also explained how systems can be modernized without the DOGE chaos THIS IS important point to make now.

5) Trump’s OTHER crony companies can NOT be allowed to “Fix” it. Because they will want to use AI and privatize, as Rep John Larson said.

Marcy Wheeler said it very clearly on the Nicole Sandler show “Elon Musk is a very easy target. The richest man in the world fked up Medicaid for everyone in the country.”

And even if Musk, “pulls back” from Washington, Lisa Graves pointed out on the Nicole Sandler show that DOGE will still be there. Also, the Silicon Valley, break-things-for-profit, approach to computer systems will remain, unless they are removed ENTIRELY.

For people with empathy, like you and I, people dying should be enough to get the DOGE boys removed, but sadly we will have to wait until a massive financial crisis–for people in power–accompanies the deaths. Only that will stop Musk & DOGE.

Later I’ll post some thoughts on how to help activists talk to the media about the financial and human costs of DOGE’s disastrous access to government computers.

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain

If this article was done by anyone but a legit news organization I’d think it was fiction. NPR reports on what happened when DOGE showed up at the National Labor Relations Board in early March. I can hardly believe it’s real:

But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It’s possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.

The employees grew concerned that the NLRB’s confidential data could be exposed, particularly after they started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia, according to the disclosure. Eventually, the disclosure continued, the IT department launched a formal review of what it deemed a serious, ongoing security breach or potentially illegal removal of personally identifiable information. The whistleblower believes that the suspicious activity warrants further investigation by agencies with more resources, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the FBI.

The labor law experts interviewed by NPR fear that if the data gets out, it could be abused, including by private companies with cases before the agency that might get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data on competitors — Musk’s SpaceX among them. It could also intimidate whistleblowers who might speak up about unfair labor practices, and it could sow distrust in the NLRB’s independence, they said.

The new revelations about DOGE’s activities at the labor agency come from a whistleblower in the IT department of the NLRB, who disclosed his concerns to Congress and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in a detailed report that was then provided to NPR. Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone “physically taping a threatening note” to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.

NPR verified all the evidence.

I think it’s pretty clear by now that the DOGE agenda is something other than what they say it is. They’re intent upon obtaining information for their own purposes. So far, they aren’t actually saving any money and their attempts to find “fraud” are absurd. Just this week they falsely labeled 6100 undocumented immigrants who are paying into social security as dead, “eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country.”

(THAT IS SO STUPID! These people are not collecting social security, they are paying into the system that supports the rest of us without any hope of getting the benefits. It’s unfair to them, of course but they do it because they are trying to work and earn money in America and it’s part of the deal. Trying to deport people like this, who are contributing much more than they are taking out is utterly braindead. )

Anyway, here’s how “efficient” this new self-deportation gambit is:

Jim Francis, a consumer law lawyer who is suing Social Security for wrongly entering a Maryland woman into the file, cast the repercussions in dire terms.

“It’s the source of that data that the whole world uses, which is why, if it’s inaccurate, it has such devastating impacts on people,” he told the Post. “Overnight, you literally become financially paralyzed.”

Tom Kind, a 90-year-old retiree in Colorado, told the Post that he had experienced being listed as dead, calling it a “nightmare.” In addition to losing benefits and health coverage, he faced a challenge convincing the agency that he was still alive. After jumping through a number of bureaucratic hoops, he had to show up to an office in person for an interview, proving he was alive.

DOGE is involved in pressuring people to self-deport and is using social security data to do it. They have no clue what they’re doing and 90 year olds are being financially paralyzed. What the hell?

I think a lot of this is because their actual agenda is something else entirely and this stuff is a cover. DOGE people are playing very fast and loose with all of our personal information and nobody knows exactly what they are up to except that they are intent upon getting to it and won’t take no for an answer. And apparently there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them.

I’ve been somewhat depressed by the idea that a majority of Americans support Trump immigration policy, as reflected in nearly all the polling. In fact, the way it appears, they like it so much that it’s what’s keeping his approval rating from completely cratering. Well, G. Elliot Morris, former polling analyst from the Economist and 538 says it’s just not true. When asked the vague question “do you support Trump’s immigration policy” people may say yes, but they do not like the specifics:

[T]he details of the policy Trump is carrying out are even more removed from the polling — even more unpopular, reflecting deep reservations among the public about what the president is doing.

For example, when various pollsters asked if they would support deporting immigrants who have been here more than 10 years (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), U.S. adults said “no” by a 37 percentage point margin; Americans disapprove of deporting immigrants who have broken no laws other than laws governing entry; they oppose deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails, such as CECOT, and they oppose housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay while they are processed. All of these are policies the Trump administration has now floated or is actively carrying out.

Morris writes:

Donald Trump has made a series of missteps over the last couple of weeks. Voters are now souring on him on the economy and inflation, for example, and his tariffs are deeply unpopular, too. You can add Monday’s Oval Office meeting to this list.

The media narrative is that “Trump is popular on immigration.” But as we can see, that is not really true. On the specifics of his policy, and especially on the on-the-ground implementation, Americans are mostly opposed to what his administration is doing. (And the data above should probably be considered an overestimate, since the polls I’ve used are old and conducted before the Abrego Garcia news.)

This has to penetrate the national consciousness enough that people stop giving Trump any benefit of the doubt on immigration. He’s a monster and apparently it’s actually a minority that wants him to ignore court orders and send people to gulags in foreign countries after all. They need to know that’s exactly what he’s doing and his overall approval rating must reflect that. He probably doesn’t care — he’ll lie and say he’s actually got a 70% approval rating “in the good polls” —but other Republicans do.

I noted the other day that Scott Bessent was basically promoting a sort of MAGA Cultural Revolution by forcing white collar workers into manual labor and apparently, this is a common theme among our MAGA overlords. Paul Waldman looked at this in his newsletter today, pointing out that even their promise of good paying factory jobs is a bait and switch:

They have been quite explicit in their hope that the hundreds of thousands of workers being purged from the federal government can be sent to do more “productive” work in factories and mines, as Musk recently tweeted:

“We are shedding excess labor in the federal government,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and “that will give us the labor we need for the new manufacturing.” The idea that a weather forecaster at NOAA or a cancer researcher at NIH or a clerk at the Social Security Administration or a therapist at the VA will only be “productive” if they’re mining copper or making pan-head screws is preposterous. That’s not because we don’t need copper and pan-head screws; we do. But the big mistake would be to assume that what our current rulers want is to create a manufacturing economy in order to produce widely-shared prosperity of the kind we were creating in the 50s and 60s. In fact, they would see that kind of economy as not a triumph but an abomination, one that would have to be crushed.

So what do they actually want? For that you have to keep your eye on the contempt with which they talk about (and treat) federal workers, their commitment to destroying labor unions, their hatred for universities, and their fantastical vision of the possibilities of artificial intelligence. The labor market they want to create is one with a tiny class of tech ubermenschen at the top, a gutted middle class whose jobs will largely be done by AI, a disempowered class of service workers whose wages are kept low, and a similarly disempowered class of manual laborers who can be told that because they are working with their hands they have recovered their lost masculinity.

No unions, no safety regulations, no workers rights. Basically a nightmare.

Do these people truly believe this is what Americans want? Or is it that they just don’t give a damn?