The Richest Man in the World Is Taking Over the US Government

Details on a soft coup in progress

The Trump administration is busy trying to shift the Overton Window, namely the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population. We’re being conditioned to be accepting of the insane shit they’re doing now so you’ll accept the more insane shit later on.

Don’t buy it. This is not normal. Trust your senses over the weak-sauce headlines being served up to the public by legacy media. The big picture is that a posse organized by tech-bros is tasked with destroying both the premises and mechanics of governance.

Via Jill Filipovic’s Substack essay entitled Believe Your Eyes: This Is Exactly What It Looks Like exposes the underlying premises under attack:

• What most strikes me about this moment is the realizing that nearly everything we consider real is simply made up. As in: Society itself is a series of agreements, upon which many other things are built. Democracy is an idea; a dollar has value because we collectively agree it does. That is a radical oversimplification of how democratic nations functions and economies work, but in truth, most of what props up our day-to-day is laid on invisible ground. We collectively agree to walk on that invisible ground because it helps (among many other things) to keep us safe and prosperous and nominally functional. And we have various guardrails up: Courts that are supposed to follow written-down laws and the Constitution, for one.

• But right now we’re watching a handful of people simply decide that they no longer want to walk on the ground we’ve all agreed is below our feet.

The mechanics of this deliberate government breakdown involve erasing history and taking control of key infrastructure. Don’t get lost here; there’s a lot to report.

Via Heather Cox Richardson:

• Vittoria Elliott of Wired has identified those associated with Musk’s takeover as six “engineers who are barely out of—and in at least one case, purportedly still in—college.” They are connected either to Musk or to his long-time associate Peter Thiel, who backed J.D. Vance’s Senate run eighteen months before he became Trump’s vice presidential running mate. Their names are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran, and they have little to no experience in government.

• Public policy expert Dan Moynihan told reporter Elliott that the fact these people “are not really public officials” makes it hard for Congress to intervene. “So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world,” he said. Law professor Nick Bednar noted that “it is very unlikely” that the engineers “have the expertise to understand either the law or the administration needs that surround these agencies.”

Elon Musk’s PayPal Mafia has taken over the computer systems in the Treasury Department that send out payments to retired/disabled Americans and contractors working on government projects. Over the weekend, the associate president said he would use his access to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars worth of federal grants.

The Musk team at the Office of Personnel Management has the ability to extract information from databases containing medical histories, personally identifiable information, workplace evaluations, and other private data. A new server being used to control these databases is in a conference room being used as a command center.

Ripping out “safety culture” is one of Musk’s central management strategies which is why human resources-related institutions are taking the brunt of this initial assault. In the never-never land of tech-bros, companies just don’t follow the law and maybe pay a fine later.

Profits and wins are private gains. Failures and losses are socialized.

Remember that both Musk and the current president are famous for refusing to pay for services performed unless threatened with legal action, which often end with “settlements” for less than monies owed.

Outsiders now in charge of the Office of Personnel Management have banned long-time civil servants from getting into computer systems that hold the private information of millions of federal workers and revoking other forms of access for senior employees.

Via Mark Sumner at the Journal of Uncharted Blue Places:

• As Wired reports, Musk has attempted to not only access the personal information of millions of Americans, he has also attempted to alter systems vital to the operation of agencies and replace them with "a suite of new AI software ... recreating the [GSA] in X's image."

And don’t you dare oppose the Muskovian hordes. Federal agents were sent to physically remove the Inspector General of the USDA when she refused to follow an the illegal order on firing.

Employees at USAID have been suspended for questioning the right of the billionaire’s beastie boys to take over their computers.

Via ABC News:

• "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die," Musk wrote in one post.

• When shown Musk’s posts on X targeting USAID, a senior official for the agency told ABC News, “The warp-speed of this mafia-like takeover has shaken USAID staff to the core.”

Make sure your vaccinations are up to date as soon as possible. Vaccine information -like benefits, risks, age appropriateness & booster requirements – has been removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. (You can find a pdf of the original document here.)

Nearly all public information about HIV and the health of teens, transgender and LGBTQ+ people has been removed, replaced with a promise of restoration after “gender ideology and extremism” had been edited out.

While too many politicians are doing too little, there are archive activists who are doing the work to save deleted data. The entire archive of CDC datasets can be found here.

Trump’s censors are also reaching into the future. Inside Medicine reports the CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal. The aim is to ensure that no “forbidden terms” appear in the work, including “Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female,”

Employees at the Veterans Administration are reporting they’ve been locked out of VATAS - meaning work schedules, overtime pay recorded and requests for administrative leave are now blocked.

Look what Musk did with the National Transportation and Safety Board to fatten his coffers:

How are things going? On Saturday, FAA and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed an outage of “the primary NOTAM system.” The NOTAM system is the Notice to Air Mission system - which is set to alert flight crews about potential safety issues. (A back up system was activated)

Via CNN:

• “This is the system where pilots download their information; their flight details before they fly. So, if the NOTAM system doesn’t work, planes don’t fly,” Duffy said. “But there was minimal disruption.”

• By shortly before noon ET Sunday, there were 1,313 delays and 80 cancellations to flights within, into or out of the US, according to flight tracker FlightAware.

Oh, and did I mention that air flight controllers were among the employees contacted by the Trump administration offering buyouts to leave their jobs?

The Environmental Protection Agency has scrubbed references to climate change from its online materials. 1,100 employees at the EPA have been notified of imminent termination.

The Department of Agriculture has ordered the US Forest Service to remove all references connecting climate change to wildfires.

Though the Justice Dept has deleted information about its Jan 6 prosecutions from its website, a federal judge has issued an order listing and chronicling all of the cases and prison terms.

A notice has been sent out informing FBI employees that thousands of agents will be investigated for obeying orders to investigate allegations of criminal activity by the then-former President.

SpyTalk reports that senior officers at CIA are being told they have to audition for their jobs to determine their loyalty to Trump. I wonder if dance steps can be worked into those trials…

Those federal employees not currently in the sights of Musk’s minions are in the line of fire from Trump, Via an executive order that nullifies any collective bargaining agreement reached in the final days of the Biden administration.

In the name of destroying DEI, the U.S. military has just ended its fraternization policy which is intended to prevent higher ranking members from preying on lower ranking members.

The Department of Homeland Security has ended an 18-year-old policy that puts extra restrictions on political activities by senior department personnel. The policy in place since 2007 went further than the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from engaging in political activity on the job. Senior DHS employees could not attend political events, canvassing voters, publicly endorsing candidates, and other activities while they were off the job as well.

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Going beyond the Federal government’s exorcism of DEI, 19 Republican Attorney Generals have sent a letter to Costco, concerning its diversity, equity and inclusion practices. The company shareholders rejected a proposal to evaluate risks associated with DEI policies on January 23.

There is a pattern of Trump-appointed officials suggesting that entities opposing its ideological agenda and erasure of history are breaking the law. Congress has passed no such laws and courts have (yet) not made any rulings pointing to illegal acts in these areas.

Check out the language being used by lead Texas AG Ken Paxton in a news release:

• "Discriminatory DEI policies are unethical, unlawful, and fundamentally un-American. The fact that Costco continues to defend such practices is reprehensible. DEI programs consistently promote divisive and discriminatory ideology as opposed to ensuring that all individuals are treated equally and with respect, and that’s why I’m calling on Costco to end their woke policies immediately."

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I’m totally not impressed with the Democratic Party’s response thus far to what’s going on.

It’s the moral violations – failed leadership, betrayal, breaking of promises, harm to families –that represent the opportunity to rhetorically oppose the Trump administration.

What’s going on is bigger than just our country. Trump foreign policy aims to destabilize the world, creating an environment more suitable for the kind of strongman rule that can be (not must!) the result of chaos.

A couple more things: The Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency) is a guidebook provided for ordinary people in German-occupied areas during WWII who wanted to throw sand in the gears of the Nazi war machine without getting themselves “taken out” and without access to special training or equipment. It’s become amazingly popular since the inauguration.

Just Security has set up a continually updated online tracker of legal challenges to Trump administration actions. Cases filed and in progress are sorted by topics. There is much encouraging news to be had at this location.

Historian Timothy Snyder sums up what’s happening:

• All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

• Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

• Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.

‘Headed for Technofascism’: the Rightwing Roots of Silicon Valley by Becca Lewis at The Guardian)

• At the height of the dotcom mania in the 1990s, many critics warned of a creeping reactionary fervor. “Forget digital utopia,” wrote the longtime technology journalist Michael Malone, “we could be headed for techno-fascism.” Elsewhere, the writer Paulina Borsook called the valley’s worship of male power “a little reminiscent of the early celebrants of Eurofascism from the 1930s”.

• Their voices were largely drowned out by the techno-enthusiasts of the time, but Malone and Borsook were pointing to a vision of Silicon Valley built around a reverence for unlimited male power – and a major pushback when that power was challenged. At the root of this reactionary thinking was a writer and public intellectual named George Gilder. Gilder was one of Silicon Valley’s most vocal evangelists, as well as a popular “futurist” who forecasted coming technological trends. In 1996, he started an investment newsletter that became so popular that it generated rushes on stocks from his readers, in a process that became known as the “Gilder effect”.

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The Rise of the Social Innovator by ethicist Laura Miller at The Lens of Authenticity

• We’ve been trained to think of innovation as something exclusive to tech—building apps, raising venture capital, or disrupting industries. But innovation is far broader than that. It’s about taking what exists and making it better. It’s about redesigning society.

• You don’t have to build the next big tech product to be an innovator. Social innovation requires a mindset shift. It’s about merging creativity with equity, justice, and humanity. It’s about solving the biggest challenges—like climate change, justice, education, and healthcare—using the tools of innovation.

• Innovation isn’t just for techies anymore. It’s for anyone who can think critically, creatively, and humanely. You don’t need coding skills to create social change. What you need is the desire to make the world better—and the courage to act.

• Think about it: What could innovation look like in your field?

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Add F*cking to Your Google Searches to Neutralize AI Summaries by Thomas Maxwell at Gizmondo

• This is not the first time internet sleuths have discovered a way to disable Google’s AI-powered results. Other methods are more complicated, however, like adding a specific string of characters to the search results page URL. This method of swearing and pleading at Google to “just give me the fucking links” is much more cathartic.

• We are going to go out on a limb here and say that if people are regularly finding techniques to disable AI summaries in Google searches, perhaps that means they do not want them in the first place? Google search results have never been perfect, of course—there is still a lot of poor information across the web. But AI summaries present users with a prominent blurb at the top of their search that looks authoritative when it just risks compounding the misinformation problem with more erroneous slop.

• It is the same way Siri has been made worse by its integration with ChatGPT. At least in the past, when the voice assistant did not know how to answer a question it would just throw users to the web. Now Siri offers up ChatGPT-generated responses instead, sometimes spitting out incorrect nonsense instead of admitting it is not sure. But this is all being forced on users whether they like it or not. From Google Docs to X and Instagram, there are AI buttons and search boxes and dropdowns everywhere now, because every tech company needs to have an AI strategy. Is a basic keyword search too much to ask?