You’ve seen the news: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is said to be slowly but surely taking over the United States Government and its social safety nets—and everything else—with something called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And this DOGE thing is, like, related to his weird fantasies of artificial intelligence (AI) taking over humanity and made-up dog money?
Point being, people are pissed, and you, like they, are increasingly itching to ̶t̶o̶r̶c̶h̶ trade in your, or at least your neighbor’s, Tesla, that crappy AI experiment on wheels made by his company of the same name. After all, a major Tesla investor told Newsweek on Mar. 20 that the board of directors needs to oust Musk as the car-company’s CEO since “so much brand value has been eroded to the point that cars are being set on fire” following Musk’s “extremist statements.”
It’s true. Bewitched by activists who most certainly would never vandalize anything, Teslas are being magically transmogrified, one by one, into more obvious junk than they already are, from coast to coast, every single day now and counting. “Fuck Elon,” the scrawl across one such vehicle unwisely parked in New York City explained succinctly. To spark joy, this three-post series will present plenty of amazing photos of such high art critiques of car and country. Meanwhile, Tesla owners reticent to trade in their autos are rushing to place disclaimer stickers on their bumpers. They might check with their financial advisers, too: Musk is also chairman of Twitter (now X or, as I like to call it, Xitter); the CEO of SpaceX (and thus boss of its wholly owned subsidiary, Starlink); the CEO of his artificial intelligence company, xAI; and the leader of multiple other rotten companies.
It takes a lot to distance yourself from DOGE and Musk, and bumper stickers or not, nobody’s in the mood to listen to excuses: Democracy Now! reported that on Mar. 29, 200+ Tesla dealerships and facilities nationwide saw mass protests, with the top target being Musk’s illegal administrative DOGE coup. Saturday’s 1,268+ planned #TeslaTakedown protests (see this spreadsheet) around the country promise to be even bigger. Even the Wall Street Journal has explained that Musk has been communicating regularly with Kremlin autocrat Vladimir Putin secretly since at least late 2022, around the time Musk purchased Twitter. So equipped, he’s been using propaganda via his Xitter, his money, and his other forms of influence to boost far-right movements in 18 or more countries across six continents. Therefore, taking down Tesla helps the globe. It’s a great way to earn back some of the international good will that the MAGA-controlled U.S. is rapidly losing. And no, vandalizing a car is not “violence.”
Video game analogy time: So far in Trump2’s 2025, Tesla shares have dropped more than 37%, to $243.16 (USD) as of this writing, but if the health bar, I mean share price, of the $TSLA boss drops even further in this fight—to $114 or less—it’s going to cause Musk some serious problems. He’s secured key loans for his Xitter acquisition—his propaganda Death Star—by using as collateral, among other things, Tesla stock. “If Tesla stock keeps crashing,” lawyer and legal commentator Tristan Snell posted on Mar. 12, “the banks/creditors could repossess Twitter[.]” $TSLA—and therefore the fate of those loans and Musk’s propaganda Death Star—is now in the hands of heroic hordes of pissed-off teenagers and even more pissed-off grandparents out on the streets living their lives to the fullest in a virtuous display of power. So when you fuck up a Tesla, you’re a one-man antitrust official singlehandedly regulating the financial markets and proton-torpedoing the thermal exhaust port of Musk’s Death Star to blow that thing so we can go home.
Granted, Musk is so rich he’s called a centibillionaire, so he can pay to make problems go ‘way, but his greedy house of cards eventually has to come tumbling down. Dropping $TSLA to $114, the floor price for the margin call, is definitely a workable goal for the estimated time when he’ll really be shitting bricks. His polls—yeah, Musk gets his approval ratings measured by pollsters, even though nobody elected him (ironically, he’s actually becoming a perfect example of a deep stater, a longstanding, legitimate political science term that MAGA co-opted)—his polls, man, they’re dropping like Tesla stock. Nerds at the Marquette University Law School determined that 60% of respondents in Wisconsin “view Musk unfavorably.” Half the country hates the motherfucker, more plainly put, and the other half are starting to realize he’s placing their own Social Security checks at risk, so they’re gonna start saying the nowhere-to-be-seen conceded Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s favorite curse word—”motherfucker”—pretty soon, too.
However, it’s confusing. You’re going to the countrywide #TeslaTakedown protests on Sat. Apr. 5, sure—except, with everything going on in the United States these past two-and-a-half months with Trump2 taking power and running with it, tracking all these news-nerd details and weaving them into a coherent comprehension would take you more time than you understandably have available. Hasn’t some freelance investigative journalist done that work already so you could read it on the bus on your way to the protest, or in the gym, resting between sets as you prepare to punch Nazis?
Yes. This blog post of about 10,000 words, the first installment of three, is designed as your friendly, but not dumbed down, crash course on the #TeslaTakedown, Elon Musk, the DOGE administrative coup, and resisting same. 10k words is roughly as long as a typical big feature story showcased on the print cover of say, the New Yorker, so you can do it. This installment—and the future two installments—revolve around the Apr. 5 protests and where we go from here. Read, and you’ll not only know what’s up with your coup-beleaguered country, you’ll also be able to fully appreciate all the witty signs you’ll see at the Tesla protest you’re about to go to this Saturday. Right? RIGHT?
Part two will analyze the Trump2 day-one executive order establishing DOGE; its contested organizational structure and the implications for FOIA and the administrative coup; Musk’s weird, half-hour speech from the Oval Office about DOGE and political philosophy while his kid X Æ A-Xii (that’s his name) rubbed boogers on the Resolute Desk and told Trump he needs to go ‘way because he’s not the real president (like Daddy is); Trump and Musk staging a half-hour Tesla commercial from the White House South Lawn (overt corruption) and threatening protesters of his AI car company with domestic terrorism charges; profiling the Muskrats (his foot soldiers at DOGE); and, more about the Apr. 5 #TeslaTakedown protest.
Part three will elaborate on Elon Musk’s personal history and connections, including his relationship with Trump himself; more on Musk’s criminal and civil liabilities; additional info regarding the administrative coup and its backing fascist, masculinist philosophies; DOGE in the context of Project 2025; Dogecoin and the U.S. Government’s new cryptocurrency stockpile; various odds and ends; and, an assessment of how the protests went, plus suggestions for future mass-collaborative refinements of $TSLA’s stock price.
And now, strap on your helmet and other antifa self-defense gear, because it’s time for an…
Intro to the DOGE Dogshit
Last year, a month after Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump for the most recent U.S. presidential election in the minutes following the Pennsylvania assassination attempt, he and the Republican frontrunner spent more than two hours discussing themselves over a glitchy Xitter livestream, on which Musk pitched a “government efficiency commission” starring himself. Some three weeks later, then-candidate Trump formally announced the concept of such a commission at the Economic Club of New York. He said it would be headed by Musk and tasked with “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reform.” But this tidy timeline omits a significant piece of the puzzle.
A day or so before the Aug. 12, 2024 Xitter livestream, a super PAC that Musk co-created assuredly had helped seal the deal when it emerged from a spending lull and started dumping into swing states, for the next several weeks, some $33 million dollars of ads promoting Trump. Further, the known total Musk gave for the November 2024 contests altogether was nearly $300 million dollars, all of it to Republican candidates, making him the largest and most prominent known donor to U.S. federal elections since 2010 or perhaps even earlier. For teen Muskbros who might have stumbled upon this post and are wondering why everything going up for sale in life is wrong, here’s one reason: this quid-pro-quo spawning of DOGE need not account for merit or lack thereof: Musk give Trump bigly money, Trump give Musk bigly perch, simple!
DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. It’s not actually a department of the U.S. federal government, nor is it efficient, but we’ll get to those. An overt reason that Musk displayed a week after the livestream for calling it DOGE was to riff on the Dogecoin cryptocurrency by using the same four letters and associated memes. The paperless, electron-based asset was created in 2013 as a competitor to better-known cryptocoins (such as the first, Bitcoin) and was branded on the very popular Doge meme featuring Kabuso, a Shiba Inu well loved online and called by admirers a doge—pronounced something like “doughzhe” and nothing more than a cutesy way of saying dog.
How much Dogecoin does Musk own? Dunno; he’s denied owning wallets for the canine-themed coin, whether public or private—but, see that crypto- prefix in cryptocurrency for the obvious caveat: crypto- means hidden, secret, as in cryptographic. As of this March, two unknown parties each have a Dogecoin wallet holding more than $200 million worth of the virtual asset. Perhaps the world’s richest man or his cronies could be among them? Or are Musk’s Doge-doings, as one economics professor suggests, merely a way for him to connect with, to win over, key political and industry audiences (read: MAGA techbros)? Some of both?
Musk, as far as publicly known, started promoting the digital doggy token in 2019 with this dumbed-down tweet: “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It’s pretty cool.” He likes calling himself the “DOGEfather” and—as a ‘joke’ typed onto his Twitter bio that immediately jumped the price 17%—the “former CEO of DOGEcoin.” As recently as Mar. 17, 2025, Musk tweeted a lucky St. Patrick’s Day meme alluding to the cryptocurrency; merely alluding, as if some of the regulators he hasn’t yet arranged to be fired—we’ll get to that—might be looking over his shoulder for any misstep.
If we can just shake his tightrope some …
Elon Musk has been on a tightrope for a while. A RICO class action launched in mid-2022 alleged Musk was marketing/pumping Dogecoin insider-trading style, but had its appeal attempt denied in September 2024 after a district court decided Musk’s statements about the cryptocurrency were merely “aspirational and puffery,” not factual claims, so no reasonable investor would rely on them. Except the reasonable man of law has long since been dragged out to pasture and shot. Whether rational or coked up, investors clearly respond to Musk’s antics. Most infamously—well, most infamously prior to this Trump2 administration—Tesla stock fell in 2018 when Musk drank whiskey and smoke pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast, leading the United States Air Force to review the taxpayer-funded billionaire’s secretive billion-dollar Pentagon contracts. That review apparently had little to no effect, although the airmen have recently resumed scribbling about him, which we’ll get to. And as it turns out, fascism is still lethal even when dressed up in “aspirational and puffery” social media aesthetics, such as the unfortunately tarred Shiba Inu doggo—Kabuso did nothing wrong.
In 2021, Elon Musk—or sometimes, to his critics, “Elmo,” a contraction of his name referencing Sesame Street‘s novicial, stuck-in-falsetto red monster—went on Saturday Night Live and tried to boost Dogecoin by plugging it during his monologue, but did so poorly with his performance overall that the price plummeted at once. If you’ve never seen his five-minute SNL monologue, it’s worth suffering through—it recalls another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, trying to seem cool in front of high school students who couldn’t have cared less (“Who Bezos?” one said into the ears of history).
Like the then-Amazon CEO’s automaton-ish appearance, Musk’s stilted, awkward behavior resembles someone pretending to be human, which he self-referentially tried to joke about during his SNL monologue, attributing it to Asperger’s syndrome. Without going down that rabbit hole, it should be emphasized that there’s more than one reason in life someone can be noticeably disconnected from their emotions and empathy; unrecovered victims—and unrecovered perpetrators—are among the VIP dissociated, for reasons having to do with that adjective: unrecovered, you know, from trauma: the cycle of abuse.
According to his brother, Musk’s childhood was marked by domestic abuse, severe violence at school, and other Adverse Childhood Events (to use the psychology lingo). He shows no traits evidenced by those who work intensely on mental health recovery: compassion, altruism, wisdom are all scant in him, and he tries to teach the world that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization[.]” Alhough the definitions are contested, it makes sense to think of sympathy as cognitive pity, and empathy as emotional contagion—for example, while sympathy is saying a rote “oh how sad” when skimming an awful news story, empathy is giggling as your lover starts giggling during postcoital snuggling, even though you haven’t yet cognized what it is they’re laughing about. Empathy, the capacity to sense or experience others’ emotions, makes it possible, even when just reading news stories, to share some of the victims’ pain and anger, rather than merely saying a “tut-tut” (sympathy) or trying to carve up crimes for “only this group or only that group is allowed to be mad about this” (group affiliation careerism). Empathy isn’t without danger—it can encourage groupthink—but edgy portrayals of it as the fundamental Big Bad are merely upsellings of sociopathy. Musk hasn’t backpedaled significantly on trying to teach everyone to fear what he calls the “empathy exploit” or more simply, “empathy.” Rather, now, years after SNL, he typically shows more confidence when performing publicly—bad news for the rest of us. Ketamine covering up his underlying trauma? We’ll get to that.
Speaking of abuse, at least three occurrences have led people to wonder aloud if Musk is involved in high-level pedosadism rings and operating under, or armed with, the inevitably accompanying blackmail. One: the widely circulated pic of Musk at the Vanity Fair Oscars party on Mar. 2, 2014 with Ghislaine Maxwell, now imprisoned for child rape trafficking and, back then, the top accomplice of the late blackmail mogul Jeffrey Epstein; two: Musk’s attendance at the 2011 annual “billionaire’s dinner” event in Long Beach, California—run by the Edge Foundation, a so-called intellectuals’ club—the same night Epstein attended as a convicted-and-known pedo; three: Musk getting subpoeaned by the Virgin Islands in 2023 for their civil suit accusing J.P. Morgan of profiting off of Epstein’s pedosadism since he was their close client for years even following his pedo guilty plea, the profits in question perhaps tied to Epstein’s dubious boasts in 2018 that he was supposedly advising Musk about Tesla. Elmo denies all this or dismisses it as negligible, tweeting in 2023 about Epstein: “That cretin never advised me on anything whatsoever” and in 2020 about Maxwell: “Don’t know Ghislaine at all. She photobombed me once at a Vanity Fair party[.]”
A researcher working toward the #OpDeathEaters long-term goals told me they believe Musk’s absence from Epstein’s unredacted little black book—a ‘trophy collection’ of contact info and names Epstein knew or sought to know in order to use them socially, financially, or physically—likely indicates Musk and Epstein ultimately never did business together, though if chance had differed, it’s plausible overall that they would have. A more likely speculation is that Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell) pursued Musk in the hopes of establishing a business relationship, yet for whatever reasons, a deal never came to pass. The world’s richest man must know a lot of vile blackmailers, some infamous, others shadowy, some in his own mirror, so there’s no guarantee he’s deeply connected to this or that specific super-predator from the headlines; however, as the three points above suggest, all this is of course the dirty water he and his ilk swim in. It’s not just powerful child rapists who need prosecution, but their criminal support networks, too, including those who might not be pedos themselves yet still understand in complicit detail what’s happening. “She photobombed me once” isn’t the same as coming clean—unfortunately, what’s under the hood (or covers) with Elon Musk, financially or otherwise, is by no means a fully open book. Yet.
Musk’s connection to Epstein-Maxwell, then, was probably just in passing(s), never consummated, yet his generalized immersion in such pestilent waters is absolutely certain; point being, the robotic Elmo, the story of whom gets worse still, already doesn’t sound like a good guy to put in charge of a fake department with a federal government-wide austerity remit. Trump2, in his Mar. 4 State of the Union speech (okay, technically an address to a joint session of Congress), said DOGE “is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.” Republicans applauded; about an hour earlier, Rep. Al Green (D-TX), who in February announced his plan to file articles of impeachment (for an impeachment to be successful, Green said, “the people have to demand it”), had become the first lawmaker in modern history to be kicked out of a State of the Union, for standing up with his cane at age 77 to shout at Trump that he lacks a mandate and shan’t cut Medicaid; many of the rest of the Dems, younger and healthier, cowered in their seats silently, holding up signs with milquetoast clapbacks written on them; days later, ten Democrats proceeded to join with Republicans to censure Green for having had the courage to interrupt The Donald. Musk, watching from the gallery—is he who truly heads DOGE, as Trump said? Its organizational structure is disputed. Which we’ll get to.
Back to Musk on a tightrope, the one we’re going to shake until $TSLA falls off, all the way down to $114 or less, rocking Elmo’s financial empire enough to encourage various regulators and plaintiffs and angry investors to get in on the smackdown too. Roughly a month before the November 2024 elections, ex-Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson interviewed Elmo on Xitter, and the pair couldn’t stop laughing as Musk said about then-candidate Trump, “If he loses, I’m fucked.” Musk’s succinct description of the tightrope he’s walking came at the start of the video Carlson published, an in medias res outtake that the producers kept in, so there’s scarcely any context for it, although about four minutes later, Musk stated that “vengeance” could be directed at him were Trump to lose. In case there were any doubt what Elmo meant by “fucked,” he continued: “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?” and “I have no plausible deniability[.]”
I suppose the surface idea is that a Harris administration would retaliate against Elmo for his (purported) truth-telling and aspiration to enforce efficiency on everyone, et cetera, and perhaps too the subtler risk that, if Musk winds up seen as a huge problem for MAGA—as someone who causes losses for the self-declared King Trump—then infighting among Trump-Musk factions, which has already happened off and on, could take him down as well. Yet while Democrats (or Republicans) might indeed single him out due to personal vendetta motivations, they could nonetheless find plenty of wrongdoing to base criminal charges on, such as those revolving around his numerous conflicts of interest. (We’ll get there.) It would be clearer just how Musk thinks he’s “fucked” had Tucker Carlson’s team not cropped out the preceding dialogue. ‘Transparency’ bullshit artists.
In short, ever since Elmo went, as he and Tucker Carlson put it, “all in” for Trump, the criminally liable Musk’s outcomes have been unstably yoked to outcomes for the criminally liable Trump (and outcomes for the criminally liable Department of Justice that the president is securing more control over). Imagine the tightrope: you’re the world’s richest man—with an unhealed, bullied, raging child inside—fearing prosecution from whoever heads the U.S. government, so why not just take that government over with an administrative coup to head it yourself, to protect yourself and exercise your own revenge fantasies? Not to mention fun times with the boys, kicking it with other broligarch billionaires, discussing in Silicon Valley salons the ideas of pro-monarchy/autocracy blogger Curtis Yarvin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug (see below) as to how to best create a U.S. monarchy, which, uh, 1776?
Conflicts of interest and the ongoing administrative coup
Musk has already been under heightened scrutiny as the boss, with a top-secret security clearance, of two of the most important Pentagon and spy agency contractors—SpaceX and its wholly owned subsidiary Starlink. Scrutiny has been especially close in terms of conflicts of interest, for which NBC News determined there’s no evidence that he’s obtained the standard waiver subsequent to becoming a Trump2 “special government employee.” That “job title” is merely a U.S.G. job category, not a job title—it’s not publicly known what Elmo’s actual job title is. If he even has one.
The White House told NBC News on Mar. 21 not to worry about oversight or whatever since Musk is receiving ethics briefings—is receiving: note the passive verb in the vague present progressive tense. Besides, as press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained regarding excusing himself from conflicts of interest, Elmo promised us he’d be good, so how can we question him or demand accountability measures? He’s “abided by all applicable laws,” Leavitt lectured, which is like saying the dude never even jaywalks and suggests if you pass a law, doesn’t matter, Musk already has been in, is in, and will be in full complia—say, where’d the Department of Education go? His DOGE team is mostly moving faster than the legal system can keep up, which is, sad to say, an inspired strategy on their evil part.
Yeah, headed de facto by Musk, DOGE is a shadowy team of fast-typing “Muskrat” twenty-somethings (we’ll get to them) on what might at first seem—and partially is—an Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan kick, gutting federal agencies, firing or forcing out their staff, and slashing budgets to the bone. In some cases, DOGE’s efforts are tantamount to taking down longstanding federal departments and agencies entirely or as close as possible to it. Sounds a bit coup-like, no?
To explain: the power to establish or abolish federal departments or agencies rests with Congress—which is why the Department of Government Efficiency isn’t a real department (hey, we finally got to that one!)—although there have been moments in U.S. history (today not yet among them) when, sometimes because horny for an authoritarian to tell everyone what to do, Congress has temporarily extended such powers to the president on a limited basis under the rubric of reorganization acts. Beginning in 1932, limited reorganization authority has been temporarily extended to nine presidents across 16 separate occasions, most recently in 1994. Requests from presidents from both major parties following 1994 have been roundly rejected by Congress over and over.
Republicans in the House are now eager to minimize safeguards on executive power such as “limited” authority and “temporarily” extensions when it comes to the forthcoming “reorganization” of the federal government they hope for. Their proposed bill out of committee, H.R. 1295, as I understand it, would lower—from 2/3 majority to simple majority—the threshold of Congressional votes that’s required to bless any reorganization plan proposed by the Trump2 administration to delete a federal department or agency. In other words, Congress would be weakening itself for the benefit of the Oval Office (including Musk). Further, and again on my inexpert reading, H.R. 1295 would grant Trump2 authority to propose (for the blessing of simple Congressional majorities) the deletion of independent government agencies, a power he currently lacks and that the Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 very much wants him to have. It would allow fast-tracking of the DOGE/Trump administrative coup; critics are calling it a rubber stamp.
In the aforementioned Education Department instance, DOGE technically hasn’t terminated any federal departments/agencies just yet, but instead is sticking its cyber-hands down their throats, ripping out their innards—their core functions—and leaving their flat, emptied bodies on the ground so the centrists can say, “See, they still exist!” This is an administrative coup in the sense that the status quo government is being dismantled and being replaced, with Elmo/Trump cronies and themselves, sometimes even via separate structures they’re installing with the aim of existing past just four years.
DOGE wants to shift-delete the Department of Education, USAID—and quite possibly the necessary structures around Social Security, Medicaid, the air traffic controllers, the weather scientists, the food inspectors, and the rest. A clever coup: like Monsanto/Bayer killing everything that isn’t authorized as Roundup Ready, abolish most everything that isn’t you, including Congress ceding much of their own power.
Under DOGE—or maybe even under a mysterious company of Musk’s already in existence on paper in Texas, such as United States of America Inc.—how then will social safety net services be provisioned to those USians enduring any forthcoming unforecasted natural disasters, the rising number of passenger plane crashes, disabilities, old age, and the hundreds of cases of measles spreading across the unvaccinated as bronze-faced health secretary RFK Jr. continues to diss the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, as he did during a Mar. 10 FOX News interview (part one; part two)? You know the interview that he gave from, no joke, a Steak ‘n Shake, promoting one of his misleading theories, this one about how he’s going to make fast food great again?
Why, social services will be delivered with utmost private sector efficiency by your friend from Sesame Street, Elmo! You are special, you are loved, and you have a friend named Elmo who just wanted to say ‘hi’! Let’s play profit motive extortion with Elmo! Elmo says, kill the poor! Or more precisely, it’s the voice of aforementioned pro-monarchy blogger Curtis Yarvin / Mencius Moldbug dominating, discussed below. In 2008, Yarvin wrote that “Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide” after “just kidding” that the “not productive” should be converted “into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.” He even ‘joked’ that the problem with such “naive [Ayn] Randian thinking” isn’t the killing of innocents, it’s that dead bodies make unpopular fuel. With much more than a foot in the door at MAGA megadonor (and agent of multi-evil) Peter Thiel’s and thus the Oval Office, Yarvin’s now rapidly acing the ultimate test for a fascist: making genocide openly popular instead of just evoking the usual “shrug, what can ya do” banal-complicity response, since performing additional wide-scale exterminations needs a lot of labor and eager, not just banal, complicity.
DOGE has been taking those federal department/agencies innards—the offices’ key functions—and transferring them to barely related federal entities (presumably where they can be more easily leashed) as Musk’s companies move in to fill the vacuums his DOGE just created. Imagine the “big three” entitlement programs (Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid), long primarily funded by taxes—that’s payroll taxes on worker-bees, silly, not on billionaires or nonhuman corporations or, coming soon, on artificial intelligences (in govcorp hands not all that much more than overhyped calculators with soaring, secret environmental costs). Imagine the big three entitlement programs run by Musk’s companies for the motive of his profit: We’ll keep the weak alive—so long as they’re strong enough to pay Elmo! is otherwise known as human extermination or, when carried out by its very victims such as Musk’s bro fandom, autogenocide; as ever, the imbalances of trade/hierarchy/profit maximalism are inevitably, lethally unfair. (Support the leopardine face-eaters and you know whose face they eventually eat.)
If you caught the Feb. 20 news blip video of Musk waving around a red chainsaw on the stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), that was all about DOGE imposing austerity. To the roaring applause of CPAC, Elmo, trying to look cool in black shades and a black “Dark MAGA” hat, showcased the big stupid red toy—waving it around without actually turning it on—yelling, “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!” You know, bureaucracy, including wee things like human rights laws and social safety nets for basic essentials. The red chainsaw was gifted to Musk on stage by another CPAC attendee and man-child, Argentinian president Javier Milei, who has made the chainsaw a symbol of his own austerity measures dispossessing his own country, to the cartoonish extent of showily placing chainsaws atop conference tables during government meetings. An Argentinian journalist friend of mine wrote about Milei last year—and you can see how Milei’s chainsaw-ing is being imitated in the United States in the next section immediately below. It’ll help inspire you to tank $TSLA to $114.
Body count: federal departments/agencies DOGE is destroying
Time to list a few of the many federal departments/agencies lying on the floor right now, their dependents increasingly wondering where the life support is (that’s where you, the public, come in, as Rep. Green similarly pointed out). A teen Muskbro or Randroid might make the argument that the gub’ment is bad, so why not wish it into the cornfield—disappear it, drain the swamp? I agree that, as statist hierarchy maximalism, much of gub’ment is bad (corporations are worse), but if accelerationists replace it with jack shit, rather than with practiced, powerful bottom-up mutual aid and community-, caregiver-backed institutions of self-governance, that leaves us with the law of the jungle, every man for himself. In that dystopia, as much as zombie TV episodes make you think that—in the absence of clean water, mail delivery, weather forecasts, national defense against a planetful of adversarial countries and eager terrorists (whom the U.S. has multiplied for years by wantonly bombing their innocent friends and families with Trump openly gloating about same)—you’ll suddenly become a rugged individualist badass, well, flatly, you won’t.
Now, a complete DOGE body count isn’t possible (no one is successfully tracking all this, not even yours truly amped up on caffeine and Megadeth), so I’ll just describe the DOGE-destruction at four federal departments/agencies and a dishonorable mention to give you a sense of what’s happening across the U.S. government at the hands of Musk. If you want much of the rest, see this handy Mar. 27 Business Insider compilation, which details the devastation at more than a dozen additional departments/agencies.
- Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Thousands of employees gone; USDA is running a skeleton crew, with coastal ports hard hit, and hundreds of food inspectors fired—“Oh, good!” Elmo says. “Let me think, why would Elmo need food inspectors?” Even if MAGAs don’t mind eating poisonous food to own the libs, their wallets will be hurt—now it’s getting serious—when other countries stop buying grub from the United States, though to be fair, some 20+ countries have partially or fully banned GMOs already: among them, many in the European Union such as Germany and Italy and France; Mexico; India; others. (Ever tried looking up peer-reviewed scientific papers about GMOs from their databases instead of the Trumplandia ones?)
Meanwhile, China is doing that creepy thing again that they did during the declared COVID pandemic where their vendors are snailmailing unidentified seeds to USians in Texas, Florida, Washington state, and more. Invasive species can damage the food supply; if you receive these possibly uninspected packages, don’t open them, definitely don’t plant them, and ask state-level authorities, not feds, for help. (The 50 state governments will keep taking on more importance as all this continues.) Musk/DOGE has been firing USDA dog-trainers, too: they train, or past-tense trained, dogs to sniff out, at ports of entry, weird diseases such as swine fever and invasive species. Florida, for example, had a single dog capable of detecting the invasive, dangerous Giant African land snail, and its trainer has now been fired. Elmo says, I love you! - Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
Longer and longer lists of recent passenger airline crashes or almost-crashes start with January’s mid-air collision between a Pentagon Black Hawk chopper and an American Airlines flight over the Potomac River some three or four miles from the White House. The disaster—which killed all 67 people aboard both aircraft—followed Trump2’s inauguration by nine days, so fairly or not, blame for it has been pinned on his second administration in the public mind. Grilled by reporters as to whether he’d visit the crash site, a traditional move for leaders to make to honor those grieving a tragedy, Trump mockingly replied: “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”
In between blaming the collision on the pilots, Trump also blamed his predecessors’ Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) initiatives for supposedly creating unsafe skies—professionals purportedly so afraid of “reverse racism” skin color stuff that until liberated by The Donald, they’ve feared to speak out about safety problems even if it means their own planes crashing—surely a guilt deflection the former television game show host tailor-made for his legions of FOX News fans, inexperienced as they are living out their lives immured in a very small pond and therefore incapable of discerning when The Donald is bullshitting.
A week later, on Feb. 5, Elmo chirped on his social media Death Star that his DOGE “team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.” DOGE’s involvement was confirmed by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who chairs the FAA-overseeing Senate Commerce Committee.
Beginning Valentine’s Day, at least 400 workers at the already short-staffed FAA were let go, presumably the doing of DOGE, and certainly a doing of the Trump2 administration as a whole, of which DOGE is a sort of a free-floating (read: illegal, coup-executing) part. Trumpers denied it, but former FAA employees and their union said more than a fourth of the personnel cuts included “aviation safety assistants, maintenance mechanics and [aero]nautical information specialists.” Politico reported that their termination notice came from the email domain usfaa.mail.onmicrosoft.com, which is not a U.S. government address—yet more evidence that what’s happening is actually a (relatively slow-moving administrative) coup.
By mid-February, meanwhile, SpaceX employees were already being onboarded at the FAA; by Feb. 24, Elmo was tweeting that the “Verizon [FAA] system [a contract awarded in 2023] is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk”; two days later, the Washington Post reported that the FAA is “close to canceling [the] $2.4 billion contract [with Verizon] to overhaul a communications system that serves as the backbone of the nation’s air traffic control system and awarding the work to Elon Musk’s Starlink”; the same day as the WaPo report, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) told the Transportation Secretary it’s “a conflict of interest for someone [Musk] whose company [SpaceX/Starlink] is regulated by the federal government to be involved in anything that affects his personal financial interest, his company, or his competitors”; on Feb. 28, per Rolling Stone, FAA officials verbally (i.e., avoiding putting it in writing) directed staff to locate tens of millions of dollars for a Starlink deal; on Mar. 13, the Campaign Legal Center filed an ethics complaint with the Department of Transportation, concluding that “the FAA’s business relationship with Starlink is tainted by Musk’s influence. Musk is a government official with broad authority who acts with direct support from the President. With this authority and support, he has openly criticized the FAA’s contractors while directing the agency to test and use his company’s services. These facts establish a possible criminal conflict of interest violation, and an [Office of the Inspector General] investigation is needed to determine whether the facts constitute a legal violation.”
Note: There are tons of open contract listings across the federal government for artificial intelligence goods/services, such as this NASA one for AI air traffic management and this DARPA one for studying AI-human joint making of military decisions. Musk and his companies—such as X’s new parent, xAI Holdings, the recent sale implying that nearly two decades of twitter data is now being more easily fed into Musk’s artificial intelligence operations—are likely eyeing such contracts for the unfair taking, though this is just informed speculation on my part. Removing oversight obstacles to conflicts of interest would help him “obtain” such contracts. - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
NOAA, which has the National Weather Service (NWS) as a component, heads up weather forecasts, climate data analysis, and tracking extreme weather crises. As a Commerce Department component, NOAA has bureaus and offices across dozens of federal agencies, carrying out its critical mission of understanding and predicting the Earth’s climate (maybe not something Trump2’s industry backers want people to understand or predict). Per a group of Democratic lawmakers’ Feb. 6 letter to the Commerce Department boss, Trump2 appointee and billionaire Howard Lutnick (and to his acting secretary Jeremy Pelter), DOGE has been visiting NOAA’s headquarters, aiming to break up the agency and send its functions packing to some dim corner of the Department of the Interior.
Per Business Insider, the “lawmakers argue that DOGE is illegally attacking NOAA without congressional approval, in an attempt to dismantle and privatize the agency which they say would rob American farmers, businesses, and citizens of crucial, life-saving services. The Trump administration has already laid off hundreds of workers at NOAA, which meteorologists say will degrade weather forecasts and public safety.” A former professional meteorologist had to explain to the U.S. public this March that just because your phone has non-NWS weather apps doesn’t mean you can do without the NWS sending up daily balloons to create the weather forecasts those apps rely on. He explained the “apps only” view is tantamount to arguing you don’t need farmers since you can just go to the grocery store. “Again,” he said, “everything that we use, almost every type of weather information that you see, no matter where it comes from, again, has its heart in the National Weather Service.” - National Institutes of Health (NIH)
A Feb. 15 National Institutes of Health internal email indicated the Trump2 administration had axed at least 1,165 workers at the agency. Reuters, who obtained the email, wrote that the 1,165 figure “accounts for around 6% of the 20,000 people employed by the NIH, an agency overseeing 27 institutes and centers and the top public funder of medical research on everything from vaccines for emerging pandemic threats to targets for new drugs.” Officials at the agency expect that, under RFK Jr., an almost 4,000 more workers will lose their jobs. (NIH is under Secretary of Health RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services.)
Meanwhile, a Feb. 7 NIH directive took effect immediately and imposed a 15% cap on so-called “indirect costs” for medical/scientific research projects—personnel, equipment, maintenance of facilities like laboratories, sounds pretty direct to me. $4 billion annual dollars of research funding went up in smoke overnight. A textbook example common in the United States for why taxes are good is that some diseases are so rare, it doesn’t profit private industry to research cures for them, so you need public interest-minded efforts, even coercive ones such as taxation, to accomplish the same. Those rare diseases can always mutate to become more infectious, so much so that even titans of industry, bronze-faced or not, can fall prey to them. None of this seems to have mattered much to DOGE. - Dishonorable mention: Firing inspectors general
The DOGE connection to Trump’s inspector general (IG) firings will become clear by the end of this dishonorable mention.
Per CBS News: “After the Watergate scandal under President Nixon, Congress set up a system to audit the executive branch and ensure the rights of federal workers.” This included, pretty much per each big agency, an office of the inspector general (OIG). Think of the IGs as akin to, but more powerful than, newspaper ombudsmen a.k.a. public editors—readers’ representatives at news organizations who check up on the honesty of the rest of the staff. (Now that I think of it, the New York Times got rid of theirs in 2017, claiming the salaried watchdog position is outdated in an era of social media when we’re supposed to do it for them for free for the rest of our lives.) I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you that inspectors general were uniformly heroes of government oversight ushering in a new era of utopia, but I can tell you their reports and proceedings were far better than nothing, sometimes had good impacts, and often served as great starting points for serious research and initiatives. IGs hunted down fraud, waste, and abuse—what DOGE is claiming to hunt.
For instance, a multi-year investigation involving IGs led to several criminal convictions in 2023 for a decade-plus-long bribery scheme that affected almost half a billion dollars in government contracts. Similarly, in 2022, the Department of the Interior OIG determined that the Bureau of Land Management was astonishingly awarding mineral extraction leases, including oil and gas, without even confirming if the winners were prohibited from doing business with the federal government, reportedly forcing the Bureau to begin reviewing the federal exclusions list prior to handing over any more such leases. That list excludes, among others, certain individuals and entities from China, a foreign adversary of the United States by statute and regulation, at a time when federal investigators have found secretive Chinese actors buying up domestic land surrounding U.S. critical infrastructure such as nuclear weapons installations. Sounds important for somebody to be keeping tabs on.
Accordingly, four days into his new administration, Trump fired them. 18 inspectors general, to be exact, as well as, without explanation, the director of the similar Office of Government Ethics. For the firings, Trump2 gave Congress neither 30 days notice nor substantive rationales, leading some to argue he’d unambiguously broken a law that was strengthened in response to similar, less brazen moves of Trump1; others disagreed with that legal analysis.
On Mar. 26, Reveal asked fired Labor Department IG Larry Turner if Trump2 is going to install new inspectors general, and Turner answered: “We really don’t know what’s going to happen with that.” The fired inspectors general were replaced by their deputies who already had full-time jobs—the deputies are now the acting IGs—but there’s no way one person can now do two jobs at each of these IG offices.
Turner also said, “they have basically dismantled the civil service. And what they have done is cruel.” He said the firings were “intentional. It was a power play. It was a power purge to get rid of the people, the watchdogs that actually provide oversight.” He added, “I don’t think our citizens understand just how bad[] this is.”
“[S]ome of the things that you see going on in the government right now, even with Musk and some of the things he’s doing, would be considered a conflict of interest,” Turner said. He and seven other IGs sued for their jobs to be reinstated, but D.C. Circuit Judge Ana Reyes told them on Mar. 27 that although Trump2 “violated decency” and possibly even federal law (who knows if that’s like her job or something to figure out), giving the IGs back their jobs would be pointless since the president would, according to her crystal ball, just fire them again. History may well judge her as pointless: one wonders if the Biden appointee chants things like “Remedies for victims are stupid, The Donald’s impunity is awesome, and I can’t wait to find yet more legalism pretexts to surrender even more of the third branch’s power to fascism!” each morning when she wakes up, or if she ever spends any time thinking about things like dignity and courage.
The DOGE connection? The nonprofit Public Citizen assessed on Mar. 4 that the Trump2 administration has halted or moved to dismiss investigations against 89 corporations, including Musk’s companies, across myriad federal agencies. Recall the Campaign Legal Center filing about Musk’s FAA conflict of interest with the Verizon contract: “These facts establish a possible criminal conflict of interest violation, and an [Office of the Inspector General] investigation is needed to determine whether the facts constitute a legal violation.” The more watchdogs such as IGs that Trump2 can fire, and threaten with further firings, the fewer the dogs are watched as they try boost Dogecoin, philosophize about the rationality of zero-sum worldviews (we’ll get there) and, as corrupt oligarchs in the cyber-kleptocratic style, gain at your expense.
That’s enough for now; if you want to read up on how DOGE is downsizing or destroying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, or others, again, that Business Insider piece collects the basics, and in the forthcoming two parts of this blog-post series, I’ll describe some of the remaining federal department/agencies bleeding out and more dishonorable mentions, such as those “fork in the road” Office of Personnel Management emails offering to buy out federal employees if they quit.
And consider: with ethics tossed aside, the more indispensable Elmo makes himself and his companies, the harder it becomes for rivals to take him down. We gotta shake that tightrope he and Tesla are on. It should come as no surprise that, as his DOGE austerity team guts federal agency budgets and staff rosters nearly into nonexistence (and then maybe Trump2 and Congress performing a finishing move if H.B. 1295 passes), the companies winning contracts to take over the slack are—you guessed it, Mr Elon empathy is weakness! Musk’s.
Why?
Is there a philosophy behind Musk’s whole DOGE austerity thing, this elimination of life-sustaining services that the United States public has no ready prosocial substitutes for at scale?
Three strands of intellectual justifications, by no means separate and all of them fascist and masculinist in nature, appear to unite messily in Elon Musk and DOGE. As one strand, he seems to simply rely on the default receptivity instilled in the U.S. public since Ronald Reagan (or 1963 or 1947) toward far-right precepts floating around in the cultural ether as generalized axioms detached from their origins: government is bad, greed is good, any sharing is Stalin, you know how it goes. Then for a second strand, or set of strands really, there’s his TESCREAL grab-bag of Silicon Valley-heavy, dystopian science fictional beliefs: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (contemporary) Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism, particularly the anti-empathy rationalism and the human-rights-someday-on-Mars-but-not-for-you-now longtermism. The third strand: Musk’s philosophy seems to emanate from the “Dark Enlightenment” pushed by thinking-challenged thinkers such as blogger Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and his fanboy Nick Land, a former philosophy professor, who openly argue that the United States should be run by a CEO-king, which got Yarvin taken very seriously by the ombudsmen-skeptical New York Times.
Let’s go through all three strands, one at a time. First, Musk/DOGE lazily depending on the default culture to back him up in the United States, where free health insurance is oft viewed as among the worst things a person could possibly have, yet running over protesters is lionized and in some areas effectively legalized. It’s where the encouraged rape of women and femicides are still, by and large, considered of no real import, especially next to the supposed summum malum of inflation devaluing the savings of businessmen. It’s the country that tells innocents around the world that its self-proclaimed exceptionality merits their deaths as good policy, and expects to be taken seriously.
Here’s a lengthy example of how the United States going MAGA worked over time: consider the far-right Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). For decades, they’ve sent approaching five million copies of Ayn Rand’s being selfish is fucking awesome! novels into high schools across the country free of charge, tempting kids to read them with the bait of $20,000 in prize money from ARI’s annual essay contest. Confronted with this carefully orchestrated, well-executed, decades-long campaign of evil (not unlike the CCP’s intellectual property-ganda), liberals, resting on their laurels and couches, offer up milquetoast witticisms such as “Lol my hero comedian said Ayn Rand took Social Security, haha sick burn!” Teenagers, not yet resting on their laurels and couches, understand that Rand taking Social Security is no refutation since it’s completely consistent with her (vile) underlying philosophy (which also championed “reason” and “rationality,” which will become relevant below). Accordingly, many of the teens assuredly turn off the unserious liberals on their screens to keep reading Rand instead, as more and more politicians cite her to explain why crushing loser welfare moochers and exalting The Virtue of Selfishness—Rand’s 1964 essay collection title—are good things to do, actually.
The above pattern concludes with liberals claiming on Facebook that they’re “baffled” why Trumpers’ lies and disinfo are winning. Answer: the right, such as ARI—or Musk with his Xitter Death Star—devotes millions, billions of dollars and years and years and years of consistent daily effort to orchestrating propaganda campaigns, presumably with young interns working nights and weekends underpaid or unpaid to win their ideological war; in contrast, many U.S. people “on the left” explain again and again why they’re personally exempt from putting in any effort at all since they’re “tired” and “their heads hurt” from their six-figure corporate complicity employment, so they “deserve” to sit on the couch never lifting a finger against injustices. When it comes to the question of why those who put in effort to change the culture win, and those who do not, and who even champion apathy and appeasement and banality, lose, one thing we cannot say to depict the one-sided power struggle is that it is “baffling.” It’s like a pack of dedicated chessmasters facing down an opponent on the other side of the board who suddenly knocks over all of his own pieces and then asks the world: “How did I just lose? Baffling!”
Musk can just shoot, rapid fire, rightwing-flavored phrases out of his mouth at random, because those phrases’ underlying ideas have been expensively seeded for decades by the likes of the Ayn Rand Institute and MAGA mastermind Steven Bannon and the rest (and their interns). “Chainsaw for bureaucracy!” Musk yells; “reduce spending to live within our means!”; embrace “temporary hardship!”; “the goal of DOGE […] is to restore democracy!”; etc. And when many in the U.S. “on the left” advocate immediate and indefinite surrender—”just be happy”; “focus on other things”; “nothin’ but da comedians!”—the right’s decades of expert propaganda can simply mop up and declare the country theirs. And yet, growing numbers of people in the States are resisting—including the 1,268+ countrywide protests on Apr. 5—deciding that, even in the face of insults from their civic freeloader “friends” (you think too hard you care too much helping others is Peter Pan), they prefer effort and selfhood and strength and dignity and courage and meaning. The biggest enemy of the general public is the general public, but the biggest ally of the general public is the general public.
A second strand of Musk’s philosophy is his embeddedness in the assortment of TESCREAL beliefs circulating around Silicon Valley. You can catch up on the TESCREAL bundle of ideas conveniently via this mid-2023 essay by scholar Émile P. Torres, which provides an overview. But let’s just take two of the letters: Rationalism and Longtermism. Rationalism, sometimes but not necessarily autism spectrum adjacent, insists that the scientistic, positivistic, oh-so-efficient reason of the West must hold sway over every last iota of the human experience—especially empathy—planetwide, and longtermism insists that today’s untermenschen (that’s you and me) must be sacrificed for the greater good of rocketing future Übermenschen (that’s Elmo) to Mars or throughout the local galactic supercluster to conquer its stellar resources (see below).
The TESCREAL grab-bag even comes standard with its very own afterlife (long-term) punishment fears: meet Pascal’s Wager, I mean Roko’s Basilisk, the AI in the future that’s mad at you for not handing over enough of your money to Silicon Valley now in order to fuel its apotheosis fast enough. (A basilisk is a mythological snake-creature that can, Medusa-like, kill with its gaze; Roko’s came into being thanks to a seemingly random comment in a prominent forum, this particular forum—LessWrong—a longstanding website-haven for TESCREAL-type beliefs.) Passing through the internet-obsessed realms I’ve passed through personally and professionally over the decades, I’ve actually met (in person and online) individuals who are legit scared the Basilisk is gonna get ’em, despite their self-descriptors as rationally devout militant atheists. But wait! How does the future Basilisk know that you, today, aren’t forking over to the Unification Church, I mean to Silicon Valley Great Men aspirants, enough of your hard-earned—because see, we might be living in a GOP-, I mean Basilisk-, run simulation where timeless decision theory dictates that the long-termist … you get the idea, or more precisely, maybe you don’t and now have just seen enough to drop this “rationalism” stupid shit.
Musk tweets “Rococo basilisk” a lot, mere dumb wordplay apparently—referencing the name of the post-Baroque art movement’s similar sound to “Roko”—but stupid or not, it by twists and turns led him to dating the musician Grimes. When they made their relationship publicly official, she walked the red carpet with him at the 2018 Met Gala wearing a BDSM submissive-suggestive collar shaped into the Tesla logo. I don’t know about you, but that really makes me want to set some of his cars on fire.
So, when the “Dark MAGA” guy isn’t in the Oval Office lecturing the world on democracy and trying to gut Social Security while his and Grimes’ first child wipes his boogers on the Resolute Desk, Elmo is nerding out about Roko’s Basilisk—but to make matters worse, Musk is even moreso into longtermism, which is the designator given to a collection of philosophical abstractions and brainy arguments leveraged toward articulating at exhausting length why you get to die now for his Mars someday. It gets still worse. Know that Musk retweeted TV host Liv Boeree saying in 2022 that Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom’s paper “Astronomical Waste” (2003) is “likely the most important paper ever written[.]” What’s this philosophy paper Musk agrees is the greatest of all time? Seems kind of important, right, when he’s running the country, that we might ponder it?
“Astronomical Waste”: all right, Musk’s DOGE claims to slash and burn government waste, correct? So, what’s the celestial waste? In his (more or less utilitarian school of thought) paper, Bostrom essentially posits that with each passing second that we fail to colonize the local galactic supercluster, its stellar resources—what else would these people do with stars besides conquer them, what, gaze at them or something?—go unharnessed. Therefore the uncaptured energy-reserves consequences are that, per second, we’re failing to bring “about more than 1029 human lives” into existence (cf. fascist emphasis on population growth). In other words, by not conquering the surrounding stars, a mere eight billion of us are managing to deny all these one hundred octillion future humans (like the future Roko’s Basilisk) their chances at a happy existence (or draft slots in far right militaries). A simple reductio ad absurdum: in one possible future world, Musk and Trump are beheaded by guillotines on live television, as millions enjoy the traumatizing sight; so if you aren’t ̶t̶o̶r̶c̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ trading in as many Teslas as possible on Apr. 5, it’s all your fault that these potential future execution-watchers are being denied their rightful, trauma-laden, longtermist joy. Philosophers’ modal possible universes—like Bostrom’s—can ease your task of making up almost whatever shit you want and blaming other people for your not having it already, and for all the science fiction flavor of TESCREAL beliefs, oligarchs shifting the blame for their greed onto everyone else is as old as the hills.
I hope all this helps explain the fascism underpinning these TESCREAL beliefs—and, the right brutality is not that different from the left brutality, such as the fictional “March to the Stars” decried by Ursula K. Le Guin in her prescient novel The Telling (2000) based on Chairman Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that decreed the little guys and gals’ suffering was for the longterm benefit of bigly Communist China, et cetera—and I hope the Grimes-Musk anecdote helps illuminate, a little, the Great Man masculinism sewn throughout the Silicon Valley TESCREAL belief hodgepodge.
And what the hey, let’s throw in Musk’s Singularitarianism beliefs—the S of TESCREAL—since this week, on Apr. 2, he tweeted: “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence[.]” The technological (as opposed to societal) singularity, as fans of the Schwarzenegger-starring Terminator action/sci-fi movie series know, is that presumed forthcoming moment in history where, per Wikipedia (accessed today), “technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization.” Often “technological singularity” refers more specifically to the rise of some Terminator Skynet-like “digital superintelligence” AI bent on either sherpa-ing us to higher heights or just killing us all. This take explains more, but the gist of Musk’s tweet is that human “biological” bodies are disposable evolution-wise, just temporary husks means to “bootload” ̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶s̶u̶i̶c̶i̶d̶a̶l̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶n̶s̶m̶o̶g̶r̶i̶f̶i̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶v̶e̶l̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶e̶e̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶i̶e̶n̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶H̶a̶l̶e̶-̶B̶o̶p̶p̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶e̶t̶ the new digital systems that we—or rather, he and his friends, now or in the longtermist future—will ascend into, uploading their psyches into computers and all that Matrix-y stuff, so they can capture the local galactic supercluster’s stellar resources or become Tessier-Ashpool out of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer or whatever. Had enough?
It’s a bit like the Terminator 2 (1991) script’s exchange, cut from the film version, that has the heroine and Arnold Schwarzenegger—playing a robot who’s been sent from the future back to the movie’s 1995 setting—discussing how Skynet will soon be built:
Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton): Then those fat fucks in Washington figure, what the hell, let a computer run the whole show, right?
Terminator (Schwarzenegger): Basically.
Elmo suggests he’s here to make sure it all goes swimmingly. You might ask why Musk’s body doesn’t get ground into dust as soon as Skynet goes online if bodies are merely disposable bootloaders. Why, I’m guessing, before Musk ascends into his modem or onto Mars, Roko’s Basilisk (or whatever) needs him and DOGE kicking around to explain all this to the rest of us dunces … while he cuts Social Security and drains Memphis, Tennessee to build xAI’s “Colossus,” the world’s bigliest supercomputer—cough, cough, compensatory—in order to make the “the most powerful AI training system yet.” Nothing beside remains.
Finally, the third strand: the Dark Enlightenment, a label coined by aforementioned Curtis Yarvin fanboy and former philosophy professor Nick Land and mostly synonymous with the neo-reactionary movement a.k.a. NRx. I’ll likely take it on in a subsequent installment and just give you the, uh, short version for the time being. Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), promoted by Land, has been and continues to be a huge influence on the (proto-)PayPal mafia leaders such as MAGA megadonor Thiel, and as a result, a bigly influence on Vice President J.D. Vance and Trump. So when you see Trump call himself a (masculinist) king (they never advocate for queens), and repost memes to that effect, he’s not joking—just as he told NBC on Mar. 30 that he’s “not joking” about a third presidential term, which, due to the 22nd Amendment, would be unconstitutional: illegal.
The more you dig into the Dark Enlightenment, the more you see that they see only zero-sum win-lose power struggles everywhere, not sharing, not fountain-like surplus infinities, not an exuberant reality where creative, balanced or balancing interactions between one and one actually can make, not two, but 11. Time for us all to introduce Tesla to some department of inefficiencies, amirite?
Regarding the connections between Musk/DOGE, the Dark Enlightenment, and fascism, a huge goal for them all is to establish so-called “Freedom Cities“, a.k.a. “Startup Cities” or “Startup Nations” or “Network States,” essentially unregulated zones—say, in Greenland, the semi-autonomous, largest non-continental island that Trump2 has lately been bullhorning about conquering from Denmark by force—where corporate boy-kings shall preside over their own lands/cities/countries and over rightless employees with zero gub’ment interference to distract from the endlessly accelerated capitalism. DOGE’s destructive deregulation comes in handy for founding such cities, like yesterday’s company towns, like tomorrow’s out of Octavia Butler’s Parable science fiction novels.
The Dark Enlightenment’s “Freedom Cities,” fatally overdosed on the techbro jock asshole stuff, indicate that behind the showy Musk and the showy Trump of the showy federal government are the somewhat quieter corporate interests that must also be taken on.
Like, say, Tesla.
Apr. 5: #TeslaTakedown
Saturday’s protests are less than 36 hours away as I’m wrapping up this blog entry, so we’re going to summarize to save us both time. And if you’re wondering, the lovable canine that the doge internet slang for dog arose from is now dead—as of May 2024. It was leukemia and liver disease, but Kabuso still feels like something of a canine political prisoner, her image an absolute spiritual unit of intellectual non-property to be reclaimed.
For attending protests, you can find most of the direct information you need at the aptly named TeslaTakedown.com; there’s a Bluesky account around the same here, and as you know, Bluesky doesn’t require an account or signing in just to read posts. Other major nationwide protests planned for Apr. 5 and beyond include the Hands Off! protests—Stop creepy-touching public resources, Elmo!—and the 50501 protests against executive overreach and in support of the Constitution. See also this spreadsheet of Apr. 5 protests or the Big List and PolRev protest aggregators. You might also come across references to the #3E goals—#EndImpunity, #EndAutogenocide, #EndOligarchy. Those are explained here.
You can find guides on protest safety via Bluesky threads such as this one or collections of related zines/books via websites like the Anarchist Library. Check out local affinity groups and mutual aid communities—Food Not Bombs chapters are a good bet—where you can ask new friends in person your embarrassing questions about how to go to a protest and find someone to have your back while you have theirs. For news updates via Bluesky on the #TeslaTakedown topic, click the hashtag, follow me, follow YourAnonCentral, follow anyone who floats your boat and sinks Elon Musk’s. You can find theory in philosopher Heather Marsh’s Binding Chaos books, and practical praxis guides in her Resistance series of shorter books, the first two now being released and titled Stigmergy: How To Create a Mass Movement and How To Dismantle a Dictatorship. You can even find inspiration (and adrenaline) in music (example; example; example; example; example; example; example), literature (example; example), and other forms of art.
But above all, to take down Tesla, you must do something. You only live once. Make it count. It shouldn’t feel like a duty or chore—it should feel fun. If it doesn’t, give your anxiety or other disorder the middle finger and drag your ass out there anyway (you can watch from a distance at first if you’re really scared). You’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by what may happen when you escape the comfort zone of the glowing screens. Musk hasn’t apologized for X Æ A-Xii wiping his boogers on the Resolute Desk, so by all means, feel free to wipe your boogers on Elmo’s Teslas until $TSLA and that $114 price become best friends.
I’ll see you Saturday.
This blog post, #TeslaTakedown Pt. 1 of 3: Crash course in Elon Musk, the DOGE coup, and resisting same, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2025/04/04/teslatakedown-1of3-crashcourse-musk-dogecoup-resist/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!
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