Elon Musk's Demolition Crew
projects.propublica.org
projects.propublica.org
If in doubt, I recommend checking them out because they're incredibly awful, to the extent that it makes you wonder if the payment system he pushed to had ethnic information attached to it.
Just to add clarity, "the past" in this case wasn't even that long ago, as these racist tweets that were uncovered were from June to December of 2024.
For those of you whinging about how unfair scope-broadening to force decision makers to at least consider marginalized people for opportunities is, the problem is not these initiatives, it's these people, who make it impossible to determine if someone is being rejected for merit or for some other reason.
In general, we have to get away from the idea that the highest score along a narrow measure is the be-all-end-all of merit, anyway. Set a reasonable floor of competence, and then either run a lottery or begin looking at other qualities.
Amazing since Vance has an Indian wife and children that he's throwing under the bus for someone who made a public call to normalize hating Indians.
General Lloyd Austin (Black):
- 12th Commander of United States Central Command
- 33rd Vice Chief of Staff of the Army
- 40th Director of the Joint Staff
Command:
- United States Central Command
- Vice Chief of Staff of the Army
- United States Forces – Iraq
- Multi-National Corps – Iraq
- XVIII Airborne Corps
- 10th Mountain Division
- 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division
- 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment
Awards: 31
Major Pete Hegseth (White):
- Fox News Weekend Host
Command: None
Awards: 4
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/jd-vance/bring-back-vance-s...
And they're indefensibly off-color and disgusting, and it's even more insane the VP of the USA is defending Elez.
https://x.com/JDVance/status/1887900880143343633
> We shouldn't reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.
Step 1. Discredit the media and stop the flow of information.
Step 2. Divert public funds to only your friends and allies.
Pretty straightforward.
Total nothing burgers but you still have people foaming at the mouth about whatever slanted headline they managed to cook up and do performative outrage over.
And to be clear, they all knew that going in. They're intentionally using false stories to attack and threaten people and organisations and have turned it into an industry.
If you want to destroy and sabotage a service, you place incompetent people at the helm.
Even the CIA lists this as a strategy in its sabotage manual.
Building is hard.
What do you think the federal government is doing to make you "poorer" that deserves dismantling the government.
US income tax is generally lower than other advanced economies. Housing and medical insurance is mainly a state issue.
This is what you get after years of defunding or mishandling education. The oligarchs managed to convince the general public that the government is stealing from them. The past decades have seen a huge upward wealth transfer which peaked during covid and this was repackaged and sold back to the people as 'government bad'. Sure, government bad because they didn't go after the oligarchs, but dismantling it is not a solution.
There will be no tax cuts for the plebs after the government is 'leaner', I guarantee it. At most a marginal couple hundred bucks per year - at the cost of drastically cutting down the civil services, some of that invisible stuff that makes society run. By far the biggest beneficiaries of a weak impotent government will be the existing ruling class, the so-called 'elites' the angry 'deplorables' voted against.
My worry is that it's going to backfire and at the exact wrong time, when we need to deal with climate change, pandemics, crumbling old infrastructure and ongoing wealth consolidation. Fun times ahead.
That much can be seen via both how they've weaponized abortion and anti-transgender policy. First they move to remove federal restrictions so that states can freely restrict the rights of individuals, then they add federal laws which force blue states to comply either by funding blackmail or through control of the supreme court.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42957495
Which was unfortunate as I asked for technical comments on the wisdom of moving fast and breaking things when applied to a million humans aloft at any moment.
A lot of people seem to respect a man whose family has been old money for a long time, thinking he is somehow self made.
Not so long ago somebody on a forum made a half decent case that in real life Heinlein wasn't the turned up to 11 pro gun, anti authoritarian, libertarian, et al he projected.
The claim was he kept writing for his fans, paid attention to feedback, and played up the extremes as they sold.
> You can't hook up satellites to land and you can't hook up land to satellites.
Satellite based air traffic control could be quite interesting - there have been people wanting to make a computerised system for ages but it's hard to do because firstly with existing systems the UK one has to talk to the French one which has to talk to the Tunisian one etc and it's hard to make that work and secondly your London - NY flight wants to get permission to land but there's no data signal mid atlantic.
Unilaterally taking a chainsaw to federal agencies, against their congressional establishment, in a rush in the first three weeks of the administration, is a terrible idea no matter who's running the show.
Even if that were somehow a positive thing, the goals range from ridiculously dubious to outright evil.
Whatever they manage to cut will stay cut once Congress sets that as the ongoing budget and assuming a fairly balanced future, it could take decades to undo.
What is there to suggest these changes have any positive trait whatsoever? They don't even carry a plausible justification.
But it's clear the change is _ideological_. And even if you think that one ideology is better than the other, ideological purges of civil servants (who may hold personal political views but whose offices are apolitical and usually there for decades regardless of the party in power), are very dangerous -- just two steps away from fascism.
The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE
The Project 2025 people couldn't agree on tariffs. So there are two contradictory sections by different authors, "Free Trade" and "Fair Trade". Trump seems to have picked the "Fair Trade" plan.
Trump's initiatives in Canada, Panama, Greenland, and Gaza were not part of the plan.
> Concerning Greenland, the opening of a U.S. consulate in Nuuk is welcome. A formal year-round diplomatic presence is an effective way for the U.S. to better understand local political and economic dynamics. Furthermore, given Green- land’s geographic proximity and its rising potential as a commercial and tourist location, the next Administration should pursue policies that enhance economic ties between the U.S. and Greenland.
and
> Established an office in Greenland to help counter China’s claims of being “a near Arctic state” and reoriented its programming across Asia—including establishing a USAID Mission to Central Asia—in line with America’s Indo- Pacific strategy.
And seems to align with Musk's dreams.
Is America taking the hammer down on all types of spending because America is desperate to bring down debt from 120% of GDP?
The only way to balance budget is to cut taxes, but Trump wants tax cuts.
It's about power, and how much you can have. This presidency is pushing the limits well past where they are, with the intention they will be reeled back, but not all the way. "Shoot for the moon, you'll land among the stars" strategy.
Beware.
Another inspiration could be the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation of Argentina. Over there they call it "the chainsaw".
I hear loads of Feds saying to hold the line. Less have taken Musk's RAGE offer than what normally retire in a given year.
We'll have to see how brazen the trump admin really is prepared to be here. If they are all in, they'll ignore the courts and the doj will do nothing about it. Which has already been telegraphed.
From what ive seen, The feds are saying "hold the line" mostly to cope with the situation. If this admin wants to retire them, they will. Its hard to hold the line when your access is shut off and your paycheck stops coming in.
It's not a great situation. We're basically just sitting and waiting to see how much this administration is bluffing, with no reasonable answer for what to do if they are not -- in fact -- bluffing.
When they start ignoring the courts... what next? Do we hope the military intervenes?
I agree, the blitzkrieg on democracy really needs to stop. Per doge goals, doge is highly inefficient and lacking oversight.
Ironically the popularity of downvoting and algorithmic display of content is part of why people are always so surprised about such things, including trumps win.
People frequently take the most uncharitable interpretation, and suffer from attribution bias greatly.
The fact that nobody is stopping these people is the clearest evidence anyone needs that there's no such thing as "the deep state". But they're actively trying to create one.
I'm incredibly depressed and disillusioned to see fellow software engineers drinking the Kool-aid so deeply while they dismantle the US federal government.
I've learned the hard way that many people in this country do NOT actually care about democracy. At all. I used to believe that most everyone agreed that democracy was good, and we just disagreed on policy. I no longer believe that.
Please point to a single component of the US federal government in its founding document, the Constitution, that has received as much as a glance.
The last century of cruft, corruptly driven by people not standing for election is where the action is found.
$37T of debt later, we're at the end of a cycle.
Let's just make sure DOGE is not a cure worse than the disease.
What is in the constitution is that ONLY Congress has the power to control spending tax dollars. DOGE has no legal authority to stop any payments that Congress has approved.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/prot...
That's also a bit disingenuous. You can save America today by not being an ass to others, doing what you know is right and spending some of your free time helping others. Plenty of charities one can get involved with, locally as well.
The reason why they're there is because "I worked for Musk" in your CV translates to tens/hundreds of millions of dollars later in life.
Our democracy has been eroding for decades. Congress collects paychecks while gridlocking progress, even on bipartisan issues that could help ordinary citizens. Super PACs and "campaign contributions" (aka bribes) ensure the wealthy control both parties. Democrats and Republicans both spend recklessly and divide the nation. Democrats won't admit it, but their approach has driven half the country to prefer what the Republicans have become: essentially a cult.
The NYT did a couple of great podcasts about both issues: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/magazine/nafta-tarriffs-e...
A majority of Americans have never supported either policy, but the credentialed elites in both parties have done so for decades. And both things have been accomplished largely through executive action. E.g. turning H1B from a temporary worker program into a pathway to permanent residency, or free trade agreements.
If anyone else would simply commit to severely immigration and free trade, Trump’s hold on the GOP would evaporate. We have seen it happen in other countries—in Denmark the left capitulated on immigration and everything is fine again.
The US is a country of immigrants, and has been so since it's inception.
H1Bs are not about limiting immigration at all. They are about having a workforce without basic rights and bestow corporations with the power of uprooting an employee's life and banishing them from the land if he even dares stepping out of line.
The axes hanging over the regular folk's head, such as corporate control over access to healthcare, is not enough to completely control the workforce. They still feel they need more control. That's why mechanisms like H1Bs exist, and why illegal immigrants are still widely employed and the ruling regime punishes workers but always protects the employers who insist in hiring them almost exclusively.
As JD aptly put it, that’s wrong,[1] but, regardless, so what? America is first and foremost, a democratic republic. Sentimental 20th century notions designed to assimilate the last wave of mass immigration have no binding power on the electorate. Americans are entitled to decide that they’re done with immigration, and it’s the civil service’s job to put that into effect.
[1] The US is a nation created British settlers. Once that society was created, immigrants moved into it. There’s a fundamental difference between immigrants and settlers. https://youtu.be/ZpbYtZ5La8U?si=5gdZ-MGamBwZ4djb. Italian Americans speak English and live within a system of laws and civic customs inherited from a thousand years of English tradition and history. But English Americans don’t speak Iroquois or adhere to an Iroquois legal system or traditions.
That's a mind-numbing stupid take which is rejected by the faintest cursory ancestry analysis of the US population. The 2020 census alone points out that there is as many german americans as English americans, and I'm not seeing racist anti-immigration rants targeting germans. They are the predominant ethnic group in the Northeast and Midwest regions. If not by immigration then how do you explain their presence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Americans
For a clue, check where Trump's grandfather was from and how he ended up in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Trump
The total number of european americans don't even reach 40% of the population, which is nothing new.
So if not from immigration then how do you explain that fact?
America is a country that happens to have a lot of people of immigrant ancestry. That’s an incidental feature. Because it’s a physically large country that was for a long time relatively unsettled. But that doesn’t define the country. There isn’t anything that commits the country to any particular policy re: immigration. In fact, the massive German, Irish, and Italian immigration of the 19th century led to a decades-long restriction of immigration staring in the 1920s, where the foreign born population dropped from 15% (similar to now) to under 5% by 1970.
Irrelevant. The disputed fact was that America was not a country of immigrants. The idiotic assertion raised in the parent post is a refresh of the argument that the Mayflower landed settlers and not immigrants, which is nonsense due to the fact that the bulk of the population of the US are undoubtedly immigrants.
The vast majority of Americans are immigrants.
> Is it a defining characteristic or an incidental one?
Is this even a question? Again, the vast majority of Americans are immigrants.
> I wouldn’t say that’s a defining characteristic that should define our future immigration policies.
You can try to move the goalpost as far as you'd like and blow as many ignorant and ill-informed xenophobic dog whistles as you'd care to blow. You cannot outrun the fact that the US is a nation of immigrants.
If by “nation of immigrants” you mean merely the fact that most Americans have immigrant ancestry, your original post makes no sense. Why would that incidental fact have any bearing on what America’s immigration policy should be going forward? Mere accidents of history don't compel a democratic republic to maintain any particular course.
So many policy decisions are about who to throw under the bus; flip the incidence from "mostly people without wealth" to "mostly people with wealth".
This has been a topic of research for a long time in social science. Wealth redistribution via taxation, education, and strong social safety nets. There is some deadweight loss due to taxation in a single-shot model, but allows for more stable regimes when considering the long term.
No, most of the atrocities were done to eliminate political threats by targeting everyone who had a semblance of power and did not fell in line. Academia was targeted not because of an anti-intellectual push but because they could counter the influence of the new totalitarian regime trying to establish itself. There's a good reason why the leaders of said authoritarian pushes were lauded as the brightest minds in the land, whose writings should be consumed with a religious fervor.
And what power did most of these professors have if not their minds? This does not go against my assertion, it sounds like a "no" just to say "no"
Read what it was actually like:
You're completely missing the point. Their academic careers put them in a position where their role was literally to shape and influence the next generation. As they were not fervent supporters, their role posed a threat to the regime. They could be profoundly dumb or grossly incompetent professors for what its worth. It's just that they didn't lockstep with the regime and the regime didn't wanted to risk it.
But that analogy is even more apt for today - these young, energetic, just-out-of-school people want to tear down "elitist" institutions, just like students in the Red Guard did the same. One of the founders of the Red Guard who kicked off the Cultural Revolution was Nie Yuanzi, a Vice Chair of the Department of Economics at Peking University. I hope her Wikipedia page clarifies the analogy I was making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nie_Yuanzi
The rubes who blindly join someone else's revolution are neither the smartest nor the most high-achieving; they're just... useful.
What do you mean? I see plenty of people trying to stop DOGE. Not very successful so far, considering the President does have significant powers over the Executive function.
And the "deep state" is nothing special. It's simply the unelected government employees. It's the same thing you see in big private corporations and the reason why CEOs tend to fire all the VPs and each org "cleans house" - people who don't agree with your mission will work to oppose it.
What Trump is doing is a reversion to how the federal government was run after the founding and during the 18th century (what’s derisively called the “spoils system”). Trump campaigned with a bunch of people with specific ideas (RFK, Musk, Gabbard, etc.) and then when elected put those people in positions of authority. Here, taking an axe to the civil service was Item #9 on Trump’s platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. He sent Musk as his surrogate to camp out in the key swing state of Pennsylvania the week before the election. For many Trump voters, this is what they voted for. For others, maybe DOGE wasn’t their thing, but they were content with it to get RFK Jr. or Gabbard or Tom Homan. And from all those people you got a winning coalition.
What you’re talking about sounds more like Wilsonian managerialism. Where elections are more like an input signal to a credentialed civil service service that applies its expertise to the problems of governance: https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/woodrow-wilson-s-c....
You can make a fair case that governance by detached civil servants is better, but how can you possibly say that it’s more democratic?
There is a reason the President was not initially elected by the people. The spoils system and the current systems failings are precisely that foresight.
When Congress is weak, the Executive is unchecked. Go read the Old Whig 4
That's still happening.
But if we aren’t relitigating all that: we have an administrative state, to which Congress has delegated vast authority. Given that, how is it possible to argue that we should then further insulate that administrative state from accountability to the only elected official who can effectively hold it accountable—the President? What’s left?
That view reduces the elected government to a meta-government. Congress’s job is to make largely jurisdictional and procedural rules for the civil service to follow, and the president’s job is to mind adherence to those rules. But actual policymaking is delegated to the civil service, which is insulated from elections.
The spoils system is good, actually, and I’m persuaded that’s how the constitution was meant to work. People who voted for Trump loved that he put up a slate of people he was going to appoint with concrete visions of how they were going to run the government. That seems democratic to me.
I keep hearing on HN about how the US is being "taken over", that there is a "coup in place" and Musk is a "fascist" and so on (I'm not making these up, these are genuine HN comments in this thread and elsewhere).
I'd like someone to clearly explain to me, an outsider about why such hostility has been ushered in this community ? Please point me to specifics so that I can understand what law(s) are being broken? Why are we seeing blog posts like this "listing names".. like it's September 1, 1939 ?
I've been a member of HN for many years and have never seen this level of panic bubbling up, I've been trying to follow it but it's hard to follow a balanced discussion when I see half the comments downvoted and only one sided conversations are happening, which is quite upsetting for me, since one of the reasons I cherish this community, is because of its ability to provide nuanced discussions.
So if I may, I'd invite you (and others) to please engage in thoughtful discourse, so that I can genuinely be informed and make my own conclusions on the matter.
Most Americans, by contrast, are populists, either left-populists or right-populists. The breach of orderly practices doesn’t get them worked up. Look at how AOC frames what’s going on. She doesn’t talk about paperwork violations—her supporters wouldn’t care. She accuses Musk of robbing the Treasury, threatening to stop social security payments, etc. I don’t think those things are true, but it’s the kind of thing that would move her populist supporters to action.
People are worried because Musk is doing whatever the hell he wants, dismantling power structures that could oppose him, and installing lackeys that are loyal to him. He won't face consequences for doing anything illegal because he has a puppet in the White House that the Supreme Court says has absolutely authority to pardon him for anything.
This is a naked power grab, and must be treated as such.
Stepping back quite a bit, the US constitution divides up responsibilities between the Legislator (Congress), the Executive (President), and the courts (Supreme Court).
The Legislator is given rights over declaring war, applying tariffs and levying taxes, federal budget, approving international treaties, and of course writing laws. Over the past 250 years, the legislative branch has slowly given the executive branch more discretion. In times of emergency, the legislative branch moves too slowly, so the executive branch is better suited to make snap decisions.
Trump, as soon as he's taken office, immediately used these powers to declare an emergency at the border (https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-pr...) and redirected the military to intervene. It's an abuse of the power, as the situation has been relatively stable (enough so that congress should have had time to meet and decide on next steps), but it's something he did in his last term as well (https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/pr...) so was expected. What wasn't expected was the repurposing of Guantanamo Bay (a military prison with a dark history outside the jurisdiction of most US courts) now being used for migrants (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0p1ykxyzjo). It's a worrying trend of moving undesirables somewhere out of sight of the general public. In his last term, there were detention centers inside of the US (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tornillo-texas-tent-camp-hou...) with poor conditions -- most notably, Trump pardoned one such sheriff (https://www.npr.org/2017/08/25/545282459/president-trump-par...) who was remarkably cruel and called the tent cities personal concentration camps. This shift to move migrants to more restricted areas is seen as a way to avoid oversight.
Trump likewise invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to levy tariffs against Canada (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/prog...), Mexico (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...), and China (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...). Again, these powers are usually invoked in response to war, so it's considered an abuse of power. Canada and Mexico are also close allies and a part of USMCA, which is a treaty promoting free trade between the three countries; Trump negotiated & signed the USMCA treaty when he was last in office, and has since called it a bad deal and these tariffs directly conflict with it. It's put the US in a situation where allies are being alienated. Trump has also threatened tariffs against the EU and Taiwan, both of which currently count on US military intervention in case of war, which is straining those relationships as well.
Republicans, hopefully more as a show of solidarity than an act they'd follow through with, have also introduced legislation (https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-propo...) to allow Trump (and only Trump) to run a 3rd term as president. This kind of twisting of the laws is something you'd expect more in Russia or other puppet governments and leaves a bad taste. Similarly, legislation to add Trump to our national landmarks (https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/792) have been floated while Trump has had historically low approval ratings when compared to past presidents (https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ra...).
In Trump's previous term, he appointed several Supreme Court justices. The court is idealistically an unbiased and independent branch, and are given lifetime appointments as such, but the political leanings of the court have shifted with these new appointments. Abortion, a controversial topic in the US, was recently made illegal in several states after the court re-ruled, on party lines, a 50-year standing (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf). More recently, and relevantly, though, the supreme court ruled again on party lines that the president cannot be taken to court over illegal acts while in office (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf) and that only congress's power of impeachment can be used. With a republican majority in both houses of congress (and impeachment requiring 2/3rds approval to convict), there seem to be little to no recourse to anything Trump has done or plans to do regardless of legality. It's democratic in a sense -- the US population voted for a majority in the house and senate and so we're getting what we voted for -- but there's 2 years until the next election, so there's a prevailing sense of helplessness.
Getting into powers of the purse, as mentioned before, the executive branch is expected to dutifully carry out the budget and laws set by the legislative branch. This includes the creation and running of departments, as well as getting senate approval for department heads. Notably, Elon Musk is not a senate-approved department head, but he's been given dangerous amounts of access to the treasury (https://www.wired.com/story/treasury-department-doge-marko-e...) and other departments. This is without going through the normal vetting process (although, as President, Trump does have the power to bypass such requirements. It's simply against norms, and raises concerns about the possibility of blackmail, espionage, and hacking). Elon has also declared several departments as 'criminal organizations' (https://www.npr.org/2025/02/03/nx-s1-5285539/doge-musk-usaid...), Trump has fired anyone who has pushed back against Elon's requests, and funding for most departments has been paused pending review. Trump has also offered almost federal employees a Voluntary Exit Program (VEP) (https://www.opm.gov/fork/), although the legality of such a VEP is debated since past court cases (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1989/88-1943) have ruled that congressional approval is necessary. If that's the case, anyone who resigns may not end up being paid. This is seen as a wider purge (eg. https://apnews.com/article/trump-fbi-firing-a7b19a5f414ce82c..., https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-federal-inspectors-genera...) of the government to replace federal employees with loyalists to the president (instead of to the constitution).
And for Elon specifically, during Trump's inauguration he did his infamous "My heart goes out to you" salute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw) which is seen as a poor attempt to signal to the far right and neo-nazi parties, that typically have supported the republican party, that they are welcome and in positions of power now. Elon also spoke at far-right rallies in Germany (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/elon-musk-appears-video...) championing lines of nationalist empowerment. At face value, it's innocent enough, but these terms are also seen as a dogwhistle for neo-nazis and so it's seen together as another vocalization of support for them.
Trump also pardoned everyone involved in the insurrection on January 6th, who had invaded the capital and attempted to abduct the congressmen and vice president to stop them from ratifying the peaceful transfer of power in 2020. This is seen as a nod from Trump that if you support him, you will have immunity for your actions.
---
The US populace voted for this, so if it's a coup it's a bloodless one. But everything Trump has done in the few weeks he's been in office is very extreme by the standards of the US. The transfer is power is usually peaceful, and builds upon the work of past presidents. This is a very abrupt departure from that, and no concern is given to impressions of corruption and nepotism.
The role of Trump's normalization of political violence cannot be understated. It's well known that going against Trump results in death threat and spawns acts of stochastic terrorism.
Quick primer: he was one of only two people who reports to Elon Musk at Doge who had access to the treasury department payment system. There is suspicion (to my knowledge not yet proven) that he had write access to the system, but there’s no debate that he had read access because an actual judge stated he could continue to have access today (judge’s decision was before the WSJ reported on the social media commentary and he resigned).
If I may, when you’ve had a chance to dig into this, would you reply here and give your take? Would you call it a major red flag? And given the contents of the social media commentary, do you see any parallels to 1939? And if you do see the parallels can you at all, I mean in the slightest, understand where the “panic” is coming from? You don’t have to be at your keyboard or phone crying “fascist!” Just wondering if you can see it, even a little bit. I can, even though I think the fascist language has lost most of its punch from overuse.
Note this is just one example of several over the last few weeks. It’s just a very clear one given there is little debate about the facts.
If we weren't easily slaughtered meat sacks, I'd say democracy rather sucks.
Implementing new government-wide email systems (Riccardo Biasini)
Arrogant Silicon Valley CEOs think the world belongs to them. They want liberal democracy to fail and transition to a "tech monarchy".
Quite frankly, I don't think the 2026 and 2028 elections will happen.
Look up Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Steve Bannon, Marc Andreessen, and other figures involved with the "Neo-Reactionary accelerationist" Dark Enlightenment movement. One of Elon's little DOGE lackeys (Edward Coristine) has "there are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see" as his twitter bio. "Cathedral" is Curtis Yarvin's word for the "cultural hegemony" of universities and the government, hence why he wants to destroy the federal Department of Education especially as well as any federal agency and the federal government from the inside.
It turned out that the whole American experiment of tech-capitalism out of Silicon Valley was a huge failure and a existential threat to decency, stability, and order in the Western world.
Even Paul Graham will lightly chastise Elon Musk on twitter, but is largely fine with what Musk is doing.
This presidency so far has some real “First They Came…” vibes.
So yeah, Trump was lying about Project 2025 (but what else is new?)
Given the rhetoric against China, the consolidation of power and rise of nationalistic fervor. I suppose we’re just a few years from war with China. Presumably under a false flag operation ala Gulf of Tonkin style.
Fascism is capitalisms iron fist.
I’ll admit I’m wrong if and when it turns out that I am. Until then, I’m cheering it on.
Social security isn't waste, but it is on the chopping block.
It blows my mind that people are so hungry to hurt so many others and themselves in the process.
I’ll be lucky if my generation will even be able to pull anything out of social security.
But just because I’ve been contributing my whole life doesn’t mean we should double down of a failing program.
If you want to be taken seriously, don't make false claims. It weakens your other arguments. Social Security is 6.2% (12.4% if self-employed since the employer takes care of half) on the first $176,100 of your net income (which for the median US taxpayer is on all their income). Medicare is 1.45% (2.9% if self-employed, same as Social Security).
So if you are self-employed, you pay at most 15.3% of your income below $176,100 in combined Social Security and Medicare. That's a lot, but it's not 25%. If you are not self-employed, you're paying 7.65% on income below $176,100 to both Social Security and Medicare which is very far from 25%.
If you're earning over $176,100 your effective Social Security tax rate will drop.
https://www.semafor.com/article/02/06/2025/inside-doges-marc...
I personally hope that it is more of the second
Patience has expired.
There was lots of time to use the scalpel. The doctor never showed up, so the pre med dropout showed up with a sledgehammer, dumb and self serving as he may be. Trump is the symptom of the disease not the main cause.
To this, we agree. To better understand a why so many are resisting, I encourage you to read up on Yarvin's Dark Enlightenment, then who has associated themselves with that movement. The overlap in the Executive branch and Trump's more outlandish ideas are substantial. Technofascism and neofeudalism are not acceptable solutions.
I’m open minded but so far all I’ve heard is Musk/Trump haters clanging the alarm that somehow they’re going to take over the government or ruin America or whatever. With no explanation and no facts to back it up.
Historically-speaking American presidents are using more and more executive orders to push things through.
That doesn’t inherently make them bad.
I’d be curious which orders you personally find to be “batshit insane?”
That's the only one I'm aware of at this time, but there's in the high 10's of lawsuits in progress, so there's time for others to be found similarly.
I suspect the Christian only faith department would also count as illegal eventually.
And DOGE. You know they are going in and changing safety systems at the FAA, right? Insane.
Or maybe it's just too avoid having to worry about sexually harassing his employees[2].
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flig...
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-enemy-usaid-was-investigating...
His attack on USAID was not "rooting out waste", it was to settle a personal vendetta against the agency.
DOGE found that USAID has actually spent taxpayer dollars to funding terrorists.
I have no idea how we try to connect these dots to be “personal”. USAID was a sham and it’s been exposed.
And they alleged terrorism. They did not show it, FISA and other courts aren't engaged, and they have Flynn, a foreign agent, making those claims and boosting them.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant and we should be ensuring it's shining everywhere.
Get us a real candidate from the Democratic Party and we could have a discussion but Kamala was even less qualified than trump and what many non-Americans seem to miss is that Americans care about policy A LOT. We generally don’t give a shit if our president is a meanie head or says not nice things. In general we care a LOT about what they say they’re going to do.
Trump’s plans for the nation sounded pretty good to myself and a whole heck of a lot of other Americans winning the popular vote, the electoral college, and (my memory is fuzzy) every swing state except 1?
I don't care if Trump has amazing plans or is Mother Teresa and Henry Ford and Benjamin Franklin rolled into one, he is anti-democracy and that automatically disqualifies him, and those who support him should be ashamed of themselves for not caring. (and that's before we get into his character; I kind of liked Trump way back at the beginning, thought he might be a Ross Perot type of guy; but once that recording of him talking about women came out (before the 2016 elections), I lost all respect for him. And all of his actions since then have been completely self-serving. There is no way someone like that should have so much power, not just over the country but as commander in chief of the military.)
So when you have someone who is such a poor character, and who is anti-democracy, policy doesn't really matter.
But everything is going great, right?
A Democratic DOJ could very well arrest and charge Musk for what he is doing.
Sure, there's waste as in any large organization, and streamlining is great. But to say that all US foreign aid is "rampant waste" and USAID should be shut down? Because it's not being shut down because it was "wasteful" but because it's full of "radical leftists" (supposedly).
None of the purges at any of these agencies so far have had anything to go with "government waste". They are based on ideology.
Come on, open your eyes -- they're being pretty open about what this is about.
The system is most definitely not working as designed, primarily because Congress has completely abdicated their congressional duty as a co-equal branch of government. Their are good congressional reasons why high-level advisors to the president need to be approved by the Senate. The fact that Musk and his cabal are doing an end run around this congressional requirement by posing as some sort of "special government employee" or whatever is laughable.
Never mind that funding can't just be cancelled because the executive branch doesn't want to spend it, and that is completely contrary to the "power of the purse" that is the purview of Congress.
The voters also elected people to Congress that are aligned with his agenda, so they are allowing him to do what he wants.
> The fact that Musk and his cabal are doing an end run around this congressional requirement by posing as some sort of "special government employee" or whatever is laughable.
A judge just signed off on it so it seems to be legal.
> that is completely contrary to the "power of the purse" that is the purview of Congress.
They are choosing not to exercise that power.
If you're from anywhere else ... well, then it's really not surprising.
49.8% is less than half.
None of this is legal anyways, Trump is bypassing congress and the judiciary branch. It's not really "allowed", more like forced onto them right now.
It's whataboutism to the max, literally making up a scenario to compare it to in outrage.