Mashed up by me from H.R. 1295 text via Congress.gov, Creative Commons photo of White House, and vector graphic of crown

Note: My Apr. 4 blog post—#TeslaTakedown Pt. 1 of 3: Crash course in Elon Musk, the DOGE coup, and resisting same—I published as part one of three. Under my own Douglasian reorganization authority, and to make my own life easier, I hereby declare this post part two of that series. Part three comes—eventually!

On June 4, Rolling Stone published my latest article: Republican bill would legalize DOGE and let Trump dismantle everything: The Reorganizing Government Act is a longshot in the Senate, but that could change—and so would the separation of powers. As usual, I drafted more text than could be squeezed in, so please find below bonus material—mostly concerning statutory presidential reorganization authority’s history and some political philosophy—for the truly autodidactic among ye.

A short history of reorganization authority power struggles

The Reorganizing Government Act of 2025’s House sponsor, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), portrayed his bill during the Mar. 25 House Oversight Committee session as a fairly routine granting of long-gone special powers. “I want to reiterate that between 1932 and 1984,” Comer said, “presidents submitted more than 100 reorganization plans, presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan, used this authority to create or dismantle federal agencies.” While President Reagan did briefly hold Congressionally granted reorganization authority, he didn’t use it to create or dismantle any federal agencies—he didn’t even submit a single reorganization plan to Congress. To give Comer’s Southern drawl the benefit of the doubt, it sounds like he just misplaced the clause “presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan” in his sentence. It should have gone after “between 1932 and 1984″—then it would have been accurate.

Comer also claimed “Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama requested renewed and expand[ed] authority” to submit reorganization plans. None of those past presidents obtained the authority, especially because, not to embarrass Comer or anything, Clinton never even asked. At the meeting, no Representative corrected Comer, but the Congressional Research Service report he received unanimous consent to enter into the record, does. (It also explains the accurate Reagan history.)

Clinton in 1993 tasked Al Gore with cutting bureaucratic costs, and in each term, the then-vice president’s National Performance Review pursued that mission. Among the Review’s thousands of pages was indeed the recommendation that the White House seek reorg. authority. But the Clinton administration never took up the idea in earnest, much less formally requested such powers from Congress. Comer’s claim, apparently an attempt to turn such minutiae into a main character to normalize an unprecedented power grab for Trump, is specious.

Back in January, Trump told Congress that DOGE “is headed by Elon Musk”; Musk claimed the austerity team is akin to the concluded National Performance Review, which was a White House-led task force—as DOGE arguably is.

Yet Gore’s crew traveled the country to listen to agency staff and compile their ideas into wonkish suggestions for Congress and Clinton to consider—and faced no serious legal challenges. In contrast, Musk and his 34-time felon president stand accused, in the AFGE lawsuit, of top-down rogue lawbreaking to dismantle government unilaterally from under the White House cloak of an efficiency task force. In their complaint, the plaintiffs write: “In sum, OMB [Office of Management and Budget], OPM [Office of Personnel Management], and DOGE have usurped agency authority, exceeded their own authority, acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, and ignored procedural requirements by requiring federal agencies throughout the government” to “Impose cuts to functions and staffing according to ‘targets’ and ‘goals’ imposed by DOGE.”

Musk boasted of his team, “all of our actions are maximally transparent”—yet they tell requesters suing for records under the Freedom of Information Act, No way, even after a federal judge found in March that DOGE is “likely covered by FOIA.”

If the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were actually a cabinet-level department created through Congress, it’d be very subject to FOIA and other obligations. But DOGE’s ‘name’ is a mere label Musk styled after a dog- (or doge-)themed cryptocurrency he’s denied owning in a contentous, closed court case. The operatives’ continuing refusal to disclose their names and their literal opacity—papering over windows in a basement conference room—has encouraged accusations, including from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), that the crew of hacker-y twentysomethings is a “shadow government.”

At the Oversight session, Comer ignored or dismissed concerns about DOGE’s doings, painting his bill and the Trump administration as simply cleaning the government up of unnecessary bureaucrats: “We have to have a reorganization of the government—it’s gotten out of hand over the past 4 years! Bureaucracies have grown, bureaucrats have increased in number, and the people taking it on the chin in the federal workforce are the ones who actually do the work at the bottom of the organizational chart. This is a reorganization for them!” (Yeah, sure.)

Curiously, Comer didn’t discuss the first Trump administration’s reorganization authority request. The related Reforming Government Act of 2018 died prior to floor voting. Unlike Comer’s legislation, the Trump 1-era bills expressly forbade plans to ax independent regulatory agencies or all of their statutory programs and would have constrained the presidential powers by limiting them to “consolidation authority.” Like moving a computer file from one directory to another, deleting the former location’s in the process and hoping everything works out with the file in the fresh spot, consolidation authority would have presumably preserved whichever statutory programs’ existence when shifting their position in the org charts.

Consolidation authority similarly made the Trump 1 request less extreme than failed Republican reorg. authority legislation from earlier in the 21st century. President George W. Bush was, like top Trumpers now, pushing maximalist unitary executive theory: flex the presidency by bending or breaking the Constitution. Bush 43 would have obtained statutory reorganization authority—unexpiring—to propose ending departments, independent regulatory agencies, and some/all of either’s statutory programs, but only if his White House deemed the targets intelligence related. Obama’s request for two-year authority, by contrast, would have left independent regulators alone and stayed under consolidation authority for his plan to merge particular executive organizations: he said he’d arrange six of them into a new take on the Commerce Department, eliminating the old one in the process—so he technically needed the power to abolish departments. Republicans feared he wouldn’t stop with the Commerce Department, but that dispute seems minor compared to today’s Trumpian dismantlings: Neither Obama nor Bush 43 were boasting that they were gunning to end the Education Department altogether, as Trump is. And the expansive Reorganizing Government Act of 2025 envisions no consolidation authority constraint for Trump 2, making Comer’s comparison of his bill with Obama’s request bogus.

In hindsight, the Trump 1 effort comes off like a befogged dry run for the Heritage Foundation, much of the brains behind it—and behind today’s more prepared, Project 2025-shaped Trump 2. After all, ideas for reorganization plans that emanated quietly from his relatively inexperienced, disarrayed first administration strangely amalgamized cross-partisan priorites: a smattering of low-profile, quasi-technical moves, among them merging food safety programs; centrist or liberal schemes like spinning off FAA air traffic control into a nonprofit corporation to better procure the latest, best staff and technology with less political interference; and conservative fixations such as prepping the U.S. Postal Service for privatization. That last is a jaw-dropping commonality between the 2018 and 2025 bids. In March, Musk agreed with Trump that the familiar, constitutionally authorized snailmailmen should be delivered to industry, saying, “we should privatize anything that can be[.]”

This most recent of reorg. authority’s three historical phases has seen Congress deny every presidential request for it since the statute last expired in (of all years) 1984.

Sometimes, these 21st-century bids have downplayed their expansive scopes by trading on the authority’s preceding, more widely popular mid-20th-century phase. That’s when Congress, often routinely, blessed most presidential reorg. plans, not infrequently advertised as merely improving the government’s operational mechanics. Reorganizers promised to steer clear of normative beliefs (somehow)—to remain agnostic about what Uncle Sam should do—and instead hyperfocus on tweaking how government operates.

These wonkish middle-phase plans—President Carter’s among them—have been lampooned as nothing more than “boxology”: shuffling agencies around on the org-charts without really fixing anything. Sometimes they have been rather mundane: President Kennedy’s first reorganization plan in 1963 restructured the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library with a change-up involving “ten guards, one repairman, and two janitors at a total cost of $87,000 a year.”

Other times, second-phase reorganization authority, largely freeing presidents from lawmakers’ snail-speed deliberations and entrenched dependencies on specific districts and states, facilitated surprising results quickly from a birds-eye view. For example, President Nixon’s third reorganization plan in 1970 created the Environmental Protection Agency, now targeted by DOGE.

Searches for historical evidence of major savings from this better-liked second period—or any period—of presidential reorganization authority will find little, aside from some of its uses in winding down World War II. The same report from 2012 that Comer entered into the record states that there have been “few instances in which reorganization plans resulted in documented cost savings.”

Reorganization authority’s earliest phase wasn’t so much about money, but about the first half of the 20th century generating widespread, amped-up hopes that significantly strengthening executive power to advance social goals could lead to sizable restructurings that would help heal the deep, long-lasting traumas of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.

The historical analogy isn’t lost entirely even on the unscholarly Donald Trump. He’s repeatedly invoked comparisons between himself and Roosevelt, who during the Great Depression and into the 1940s wielded enormous executive power mainly for very different ends: progressive New Deal social programs and fighting Axis countries instead of Trump’s You’re fired! commands for ever-smaller government and aligning with fascist leaders. Further, whereas Trump’s dismantlings this year have proceeded through a barrage of 150+ executive orders, many legally questionable—some paused by courts pending litigation—Roosevelt revamped government largely by ensuring Congress passed well-crafted, durable legislation.

Vanderbilt political science professor John A. Dearborn, who specializes in power shifts between Congress and presidents, told me that “FDR primarily viewed reorganization authority as a way to make government work more efficiently, and better, rather than simply as a tool to drastically cut back on agencies and functions.” That included a failed 1937 attempt to establish, at the same time as his proposed restructuring legislation would have granted him reorganization authority, a new Department of Public Works and a new Department of Social Welfare.

“Like Trump,” Dearborn said, “FDR was accused of seeking too much power for the presidency. He framed his ambitious reorganization proposal in 1937 as a way to ‘prove to the world that American Government is both democratic and effective’ while authoritarian systems were on the rise abroad. Congress scuttled many of the boldest elements of that plan”—among them not requiring him to seek Congressional review and its lack of an expiration date for his authority (almost always, when Congress extends the preorgative, it’s been on a temporary basis). “Nonetheless,” Dearborn continued, “while the reorganization authority lawmakers granted FDR in 1939 included some important limits on his powers, the law still relied on legislators’ assumption that a president would be uniquely focused on the good of the nation as a whole when formulating and submitting reorganization plans.”

The national culture backing FDR was an enormous facilitator of his reorg. plans and legacy. The culture back then was much more unified than today’s extreme polarization, as illustrated by the song “Why I Like Roosevelt,” originally from the 1940s. It’s embedded below as a 1990s-era recording of the elderly Willie Eason playing guitar in the Sacred Steel tradition and singing.

But another president Trump often mentions, this one trepidatiously, is much less well regarded, particularly due to his tariffs worsening the Great Depression. That’s Herbert Hoover, in 1932 the first president to receive from Congress statutory reorganization authority as presently understood, powers he’d championed as Commerce Secretary in 1924 for his then-boss, President Coolidge. During that year’s relatively mild recession, Commerce Secretary Hoover wrote that the public deserved “little right to complain about our economic situation”—foreshadowing Trump’s own Commerce Secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, lecturing this March that if Social Security checks go unsent, it’s “fraudsters” who’d complain, whereas in such dire straits, his elderly relatives would just hope for their next checks in patriotic silence.

Hoover ignored the warning a thousand-plus economists sent him and signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 to dramatically hike duties on imports. The Smoot-Hawley Act was a major part of that era’s tariff policy, which Trump said, in his Apr. 2 “Liberation Day” speech, would have stopped the Great Depression had tariffs—Hoover’s among them—been even more aggressive, as his own were: per Fitch Ratings, Trump’s early April effective tariff rate was reaching levels not seen since twenty years prior to 1929’s Black Thursday. His recent tariff de-escalation with China significantly decreased the total effective rate only temporarily and still has investors anxious over yo-yo-ing uncertainties. (On June 3 Trump doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum—from 25% to 50%—which will particularly affect neighbors Canada and México.)

Trump is likewise ignoring the warning of more than 700 economists and other scholars not to “repeat the catastrophic errors of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.” Tariffs generally raise prices of imported goods, effectively disrupting manufactural supply chains and taxing consumer demand. In a bankster country that, starting in the later 20th century or so, has compensated for offshoring manufactural production by using the military, the spy-meddlers, Madison Avenue, monetized intellectual property enforcement, and more to manipulate much of the globe into keeping the U.S. dollar the default international currency, it’s particularly perilous to crater the buying power of the planet’s biggest importers at the same time as world leaders are losing faith in dealing with The Donald anyway.

Fears of international de-dollarization—and of saying goodbye to stock market gains and Treasury bonds—among money-capital factions may well undo Trump. In January, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called it “The Dumbest Trade War in History,” and even the high school economics teacher in the comedy flick Ferris Bueller’s Day Off managed to succinctly explain a 1986 version of why.

The economy’s bottom falling out would be a catastrophe Trump would presumably blame on anyone cast as his negative image—women, non-whites, poor people, those beyond U.S. borders in the supposed here be dragons lands—and leverage as pseudo-justification for further wrecking-ball powers, much of which the Reorganizing Government Act would legalize.

Akin to Hoover’s years of championing the idea until presidential reorganization authority became for the first time a real prerogative—and in his hands—Trump could claim that, to fix economic and other problems of his own making, Congress should grant him extreme powers, among them unmatched reorganization authority. It’s quite possible his allies would continue to paint it as nothing unusual, perhaps “not fit for camera” and along the lines of second-phase “boxology”—if they justify the authority to the public any more than the little they did at the Mar. 25 Oversight session.

Given such pessimistic precedents, it’s worth reiterating that Congress has denied presidents the optional reorganization authority for the last four decades and counting.

Vanderbilt University political science professor David E. Lewis, an expert on presidents and the bureaucracy, told me that “In the late 1980s, as the Cold War was ending and the peace dividend beginning, Congress pursued military cuts on their own. They created a commission—the Commission on Base Realignment and Closure—to recommend changes and made themselves vote the recommendation up or down with no amendments allowed. Congress did not need the president to help them improve efficiency via structural changes. They did it themselves.”

Reorganizing the response: extra material about Federalist 51

Standing in the Oval Office on Feb. 11, Musk gave a muddled half-hour speech groping toward political philosophy as his five year old, X Æ A-Xii, rubbed boogers on the Resolute Desk and whispered to a scowling Trump sitting behind it: “You are not the president and you need to go away.” 

Musk said that to understand the “whole point of democracy”—according to the FOIA-dodger, it’s being “responsive to the people”—we should imagine “ask[ing] the founders” as if they were alive today. Without specifying any founders or what they said, Musk then criticized the bureaucracy as an unelected fourth branch usurping democratic rule. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau he seeks to “Delete” would likely qualify as such a bureaucracy in his eyes, though that may have more to do with the consumer-protecting independent regulators’ jurisdiction over his companies Tesla and xAI, probably a conflict of interest for DOGE, than it does with anything approaching political philosophy.

Besides claiming the bureaucracy overpowers voters and Congress—a set of debatable, multifaceted questions, to which he simply asserted an axiomatic answer—Musk didn’t address the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Yet “Publius” did, in 1788.

“Publius” was the pseudonym of the founder—almost certainly James Madison, Bill of Rights champion and later, fourth president—who in Federalist 51 argued for ratifying the Constitution. He explained how the core document, if treated as more than mere magic paper, can defend “liberty” by preventing, or at least forestalling, power-grabs by any of the three branches that might aspire to tyranny. That’s a risk inherent to expansive reorganization authority given to presidents who enjoy compliant Congresses.

Each branch, Publius wrote, “should have a will of its own” with members “as little dependent as possible” on the others. Although the Constitution permits Congress to delegate powers such as reorg. authority to presidents—much as lawmakers may delegate certain other powers to various agents, say, to independent regulators, the task of ascertaining abstruse particulars of complicated regulations—if Congress hands over too much, it risks losing its own will.

In a famous line, Publius wrote that the secret to maintaining the separation of powers is this: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Congressional ambition to guard its own turf and expertly will its own authority can counteract presidential ambition to apotheosis.

While certainly imperfect, ambition counteracting ambition is a formula leaps and bounds away from Rep. Tim Burchett’s “fully support[ing] any effort that allows President Trump to make government more efficient.” But the Republican from Tennessee isn’t the only one giving himself over to The Donald.

Such toadyism to an autocrat aspirant emerges from right-wing ideologies, among their ideologues Christian Nationalists and Silicon Valley adherents of the “TESCREAL” variety pack of beliefs that often uphold sci-fi-style eugenics.

Crucially, the ideologies mostly unite against another point in Federalist 51: in “republican”—that is, kingless—”government,” Publius wrote, “the legislative authority, necessarily, predominates.”

Most predominant and consequential of the ideologies may be the neo-reactionary movement (NRx)—also called the Dark Enlightenment—which puts an outright despotic bow on the others.

In a January New York Times interview, the most prominent monarchist ideologue, blogger Curtis Yarvin, claimed Roosevelt took “absolute power”—FDR did not.

Maximalist unitary executive theory from both Bush 43 and Trump

President George W. Bush was, like top Trumpers now, pushing maximalist unitary executive theory: flex the presidency by bending or breaking the Constitution, and the failed legislation for giving Bush 43 reorganization authority should be seen in that context. Of course, advocates of maximalist unitary executive theory would say they’re simply using the Constitution’s second article to the fullest. For a contemporary statement of the viewpoint, see Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership policy agenda guidebook drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. They don’t use the concept of monarchy, but maximalist unitary executive theory certainly has the effect of facilitating the far-right project of getting the country there.

Soft coup to benefit foreign foes: National Labor Relations Board whistleblower Daniel Berulis

In April, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cybersecurity staffer Daniel Berulis described seeming Kremlin-DOGE digital cooperation in a corroborated sworn whistleblower declaration filed with the Senate Intelligence Committee, sparking an ongoing investigation by the Board’s inspector general.

Berulis described DOGE arriving at the NLRB’s D.C. headquarters on Mar. 3 in a police-escorted black SUV to procure highly-privileged accounts on NLRB systems. Soon after, attempts to log in from Russia with those same credentials were geo-blocked, but followed by the DOGE accounts siphoning away reams of sensitive data to U.S.-based servers—final destinations unknown.

Per his lawyer, Berulis was threatened a week prior to filing his sworn whistleblower declaration: an unexplained note mentioning his then-forthcoming disclosure—complete with drone photos of Berulis walking his dog—was taped up on his home door.

In February, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called DOGE a “shadow government,” a “hostile takeover,” and “part of a troubling pattern of Russian and Chinese Communist sympathizers increasing their influence on American foreign policy.”

U.S. statutes and federal regulations both formally identity, among others, the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation as foreign adversaries of the United States.

This blog post, Extra material for my Rolling Stone article about the Reorganizing Government Act of 2025, 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/2025/06/04/extra-material-rollingstone-reorganizing-government-act/. 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!

Mashed up by me from H.R. 1295 text via Congress.gov, Creative Commons photo of White House, and vector graphic of crown Note: My Apr. 4 blog post—#TeslaTakedown Pt. 1 of...

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 1984. Requests from presidents from both major parties following 1984 have been roundly rejected by Congress over and over.

Republicans in the House are now eager to minimize safeguards on reorganization authority when it comes to extending it to Trump for a different breed of “reorganizations” of the federal government they hope for. Their proposed bill out of committee, H.R. 1295, as I understand it, would lower—from a 2/3 majority in the Senate to simple majorities in both chambers—the threshold of Congressional votes on the joint resolutions required to bless any reorganizations plan proposed by the Trump2 administration to delete a federal department or agency. In other words, Congress would be sidelining itself for the benefit of the Oval Office (including Musk). Further, and again on my inexpert reading, H.R. 1295 would grant Trump2 the authority to propose (for the blessing of simple Congressional majorities) the deletion of independent regulatory 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!

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...

TL;DR: Here’s my talk as a DRM-free .mp4 and my corrected English subtitles in .srt or .vtt format. Watch below, and the corrected subtitles are already inside the embed, but you’ll probably need to click the three vertical dots at the video’s bottom right and select “Captions” to turn them on (Chrome) or click the [cc] box at the video’s bottom right to toggle them on (Firefox). The subtitles greatly remediate editing errors and also gaps in my speech where I omitted transitions or didn’t make certain logical connections fully explicit. You’ll want to watch with them on. Don’t forget the recommended resource list. Enjoy!

Note: You might also be interested in my Foreign Policy article from two months ago about G, the global commons for public data collaboration. Gift hyperlink; alternate hyperlink.

On Oct. 9, the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) staff made every talk from this summer’s HOPE XV conference in New York City available via their website. Buy them all on a thumbdrive or download individually. I bought just mine and embedded the DRM-free .MP4, meant for sharing, above. It’s also on my youtube. HOPE staff said then that sometime soon, they’ll put this year’s presentations on theirs.

I gave the talk on Friday, July 12 starting at 7 p.m. on the main Marillac Auditorium stage. Sure, there were technical difficulties and I used too many filler words—it was my first time presenting to adults without scripting it all before, and due to life/journactivism exigiencies, I’d prepared the outline just hours prior, meaning no rehearsals or revisions, especially as I was busy writing the 14-page recommended resource list (PDF) that accompanies my presentation, as mentioned in my talk.

But if your goal is to learn from a Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security, the video will meet that need, especially if you employ the corrected subtitles.

The $.99 downloadable from HOPE came with subtitles—English, German, Spanish, French—and the transcript .txt they’re based on. I edited the numerous errors, some at the hands of 2600 (I replaced these), others my own mistakes while speaking [fixed in brackets]. Here’s the corrected transcript and the corrected English subtitles (.srt; .vtt). If anyone wants to translate my corrected version to any language, email me and I’ll add your subtitles to this post for others to peruse.

Much of my talk is simply trying to steer you toward the recommended resource list—your homework, so to speak. That document definitely puts election security and activism knowledge in your hands so you can do something awesome with it—which would make a great story to leave in the comments. In my presentation, I also mention uploading the flowchart to my site; I’ll do that at some future date when I have time and can improve it. For my June post and one-minute video promoting this talk, go here.

Embedded below, the full Biden video I showed on stage during my talk (all 41 seconds). HOPE’s after-the-fact editing removed the audience gasp and shortened Biden’s three kisses to two. Following the full Biden video, a few final notes for my presentation overall, in quick bullet points.

• Here are the two RAMRANTS tweet-thread URLs, mentioned in my talk, leading to many more examples of Biden being creepy, mostly C-SPAN footage:
  
  https://x.com/RAMRANTS/status/930122872000995328
  https://x.com/RAMRANTS/status/930065838387863552
  
  
• In the Q&A, someone asked about the accuracy of recent U.S. elections. I gave two answers: we need more data, and second, that though former pollster Jonathan Simon’s exit poll forensics show many voting jurisdictions presenting legitimate results, there have also been enough jurisdictions with significant enough disparities between totals and exit polls to raise serious alarm.
  
  A third answer would have been to give a bird’s eye view of the strength and frequency of official audits. These are voting jurisdiction staff doing sort of the same thing Simon is, but drawing on very different data sets, usually spot-checking handmarked paper ballots and comparing those samples with the vote totals, ideally according to Stark risk-limiting audit protocols. If you can see what’s going into a black box and what’s coming out of a black box, and it makes sense against a neutral standard (i.e., spot-checked handmarked paper ballots), then you don’t have to fear, say, the proprietary black box software so much—though people debate that too, particularly if audits aren’t conducted, as they should be, for every single contest regardless of margins of victory.
  
  Here’s what the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote in 2018 in the first volume of their underexamined report on Kremlin election interference in the 2016 U.S. elections: “Statistically sound audits may be the simplest and most direct way to ensure confidence in the integrity of the vote. States should begin to implement audits of election results. Logic and accuracy tests of machines are a common step, but do not speak to the integrity of the actual vote counting. Risk-limiting audits, or some similarly rigorous alternative, are the future of ensuring that votes cast are votes counted. [Unnamed] State 8, State 12, State 21, State 9, State 2, State 16, and others already audit their results, and others are exploring additional pilot programs. However, as of August 2018, five states conducted no post-election audit and 14 states do not do a complete post-election audit. The Committee recognizes states’ concern about the potential cost of such audits and the necessary changes to state laws and procedures; however,the Committee believes the benefit of having a provably accurate vote is worth the cost.”
  
  Verified Voting has a map/visualizer, as of 2022, for post-election audit law and practices. It appears that two years ago—i.e., four years after Senate Intelligence Committee passage above—we had five states carrying out risk-limiting audits, though not always binding or fully comprehensive ones. And we had eight states with no post-election audit law. The remaining states (and setting aside the territories) were somewhere in between: audits, but not the risk-limiting gold standard kind; or audits that were optional, partial, nonbinding, or otherwise deficient …
  
  It’s a hodgepodge mess. The results are likely trustworthy, except where they aren’t; you just can’t trust ’em, except where you really can because of overlapping accountability layers of high-quality audits, statistical forensics, scrutineers, and more. And all of this is in motion every single day. It does seem to be slowly getting better…so the swing state majority who come to consensus for a particular presidential candidate can impose on the rest of the country, and more can feel confident that the destined-to-be-unfair hierarch will enter into the White House above them fairly.
  
  
  
• In the video, I mention MAGA’s Stop the Steal lawsuits tanking except for one minor case in Pennsylvania. A great resource on all that is the July 2022 report Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.
  
  
• For details on the 3000+ counties versus 6000+ voting jurisdictions nuance, I’ve been pointed to the 2015 book “Administering Elections: How American Elections Work,” which I haven’t read yet sadly.
  
  
• One great thing about Scrutineers.org that I neglected to mention in the talk is that they’re specifically working to bring together—to bridge the gap between—on the one hand, the grassroots, boots-on-the-ground movement activists, often black activists, fighting decades-old voter suppression tactics—which stymie vote capture—with, on the other hand, the academic, cerebral, often white guys who are digging into the proprietary voting computer vulnerabilities, which interfere with the vote tallying side. These two disparate realms really need to come together, as they increasingly have in Coffee County, Georgia, for example.
  
  
• I mention in the talk that Trump almost certainly owes China substantial money. Here’s my 2021 blog post on that (CTRL+F “China” to jump to the relevant section). Some other information on the topic worth checking out: Jan 2024 report on Chinese-owned or -backed entities spending millions of dollars at Trump’s properties while he was in office, likely a violation of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause; in 2016 he described himself as the “king of debt,” saying, “I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing” and explained, “You go back and you say, ‘Hey guess what, the economy crashed, I’m going to give you back half'”; In 2023 Trump said of Xi Jinping, who abolished his own term limits in 2018, “He runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Smart, brilliant, everything perfect.”
  
  
• Just two notes to self for future talks. First, I’m going to practice not using filler words when I leave voicemails on Signal or whatnot. Second, as in fiction, my examples should have been on theme. My example of a dominance hierarchy struggle, for instance, should have been political candidates vying to win the same office (on theme) instead of two boxers fighting (not on theme).
  
  
• Finally, links to my election security journalism, all from 2023: Texas Observer article on whistleblower Reality Winner; investigative article on Coffee County Georgia and accompanying AM/FM nationally syndicated radio appearance on the BradCast; another investigative article related to Georgia not patching voting software despite the Coffee County elections office breach; Daily Dot investigative article about the missing laptop in Coffee County, GA with accompanying blog post. Those are all in the recommended resource list (PDF).
  

This blog post, Video: My HOPE XV talk: Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security (45min), 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/2024/10/26/video-hope-xv-survey-scrutiny-election-security/. 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, then email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

TL;DR: Here’s my talk as a DRM-free .mp4 and my corrected English subtitles in .srt or .vtt format. Watch below, and the corrected subtitles are already inside the embed, but...

Note: On Sept. 22, the Daily Dot published my latest article, Election 2024: The future of TikTok and tech policy under Trump versus Harris. It’s an overview of where the two leading U.S. presidential candidates stand on various tech topics: TikTok, net neutrality, the FCC, Section 230, the digital divide, and more, with a few surprises along the way—such as power-to-the-people NYC Mesh. My article also discusses their stances on artificial intelligence. I had some paragraphs on that subject left over unused, so I decided to put together this quick blog post. If you’re an actual human reader, rather than an AI scraping my webpage, enjoy.

On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning for the U.S. presidency, spoke at a fundraiser in Manhattan, raising more money—$27 million—than you or I will ever see, reportedly her highest-grossing fundraiser. It should help her warchest stay better funded by far than that of her main opponent, the twice-impeached first presidential felon Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee. But her speech? It echoed another she gave, nearly a year ago, at the U.K.’s Bletchley Park.

In both talks, she spoke of government collaboration with the AI industry, portraying it as voluntary rather than as demanded. Maybe aside from the helpfulness of machine translation services such as Google Translate, as well as other AI tools, and maybe beneath the opulence and publicity, things aren’t so safe. Or at least, the topic of artificial intelligence is too poorly understood for rando-journos to really give helpful hot takes without first boning up on the underlying material—material that started, more or less, some 80 years ago in/near Bletchley Park, though Harris didn’t mention the particular ghost in question when she was there last November.

To merit $27 million in a single day, Harris must have said something really interesting at Sunday’s swanky event venue, Cipriani Wall Street (pictured left), yeah? She did, if you’re a venture capitalist (or journalist) seeking more details on her tech positions, some of which she’s been circumspect about. Indeed, until Sunday, she hadn’t—as a presidential contender—stated openly her position on cryptocurrency, leaving Trump to chest-pound about being the “crypto candidate” while she focused on traditional voter concerns such as reproductive rights. According to Bloomberg, at Sunday’s fundraiser, Harris said, “We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets,” (read cryptocurrency for the latter) “while protecting our consumers and investors.”

Sounds a bit like former POTUS Barack Obama. We will do the good things that are important and that bring us hope and prosperity, and we will not do the bad things that cause problems for folks in this country. God bless you and God bless the United States of America. It’s a strategy: as long as Harris continues painting by numbers without enormous gaffes or grave October surprises, and sans whatever serious, hard-to-predict dangers might arise from election interference, I say she’ll probably sit behind the Resolute Desk come Jan. 20.

But what about AI? In terms of direct quotes from Harris, not much more has trickled out of her fundraiser speech thus far—not that I’ve seen. She did say, apparently in the same passage addressing cryptocurrency and AI, that she “will bring together labor, small business founders and innovators and major companies[.]” Some say that’s Harris pitching young men leaning Republican.

Likely so, but it’s also in line with something I mention in my Sept. 22 Daily Dot article: the voluntary industry agreement she facilitated as current Prez Joe Biden’s “AI czar.” She touted this AI safety agreement at the Bletchley Park inaugural global summit on AI in 2023, two days after Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence calling for the United States to lead AI development while ensuring safety.

The bog standard campaign schmaltz and vagueness, combined with rejuvenated hopes after the happy Harris replaced the about-to-pass-out Biden, maybe make this stuff regarding AI, the industry, the voluntary non-binding safety promises—this We can all work together, biz, labor, even the guy passed out on the tarmac, wait is that Jo– stuff—feel enticing. Maybe it is: though the agreement is on paper non-binding, a presidential administration has antitrust and other levers at hand to knock companies in the head with reminders. But I doubt it.

Why am I not more certain, or why are AI agreements not critiqued in depth across news media? I’ve been given a few recommendations, but generally, I don’t know of any deep-digging investigative reports on where the AI industry is headed that, crucially, combine a valuable, highly literate philosophical perspective on what computers and artificial intelligence are accomplishing, and threatening, beyond the journo-exposés about Silicon Valley powers-that-be signing up for cryonics, aiming to infuse themselves with young blood, throwing zillions down shady corners, the youzhe. Know of some? Let me know. Astute philosophy, remember. I know that the TESCREALs/rationalists (today’s, not Spinoza) are orgiastic over their quasi-famous neckbeards pronouncing this or that, but I don’t agree with their scientism, so skip ’em. People who touch grass please.

We need better, more insightful assessments of artificial intelligence, because, among other reasons, algorithmic bias, as a chief aspect of it, is putting on steroids plain ol’ human bigotry’s human rights violations and body counts.

Harris gave her voluntary agreement! high-profile speech at the first global AI Safety Summit, which took place at none other than Bletchley Park. That country estate in England was once home to the British government’s Code and Cypher School, now called Government Communications Headquarters, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. At the first ever global summit on artificial intelligence, in other words, Harris was discussing its emergence precisely where the 1940s originated Five Eyes, the post-World War II secret-sharing alliance between five countries’ worth of intelligence agencies staffed by actual humans, including those of the United States.

At the summit, Harris discussed the Biden administration’s efforts to safeguard against AI dangers such as “algorithmic discrimination[,]” undertakings for which she was the seniormost Biden administration official involved. One such effort Harris spotlighted: the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” The non-binding Blueprint lays out expectations for technologists developing artificial intelligence systems—such as Google’s sentiment analyzer that a 2017 Vice article footnoted by the Blueprint found to be biased. Among other goals, the expectations aim at reinforcing and expanding existing anti-discrimination legal protections “to ensure equity for underserved communities[,]” defined to include “Indigenous and Native American persons,” as well as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex” people, and various others.

Like a ghost unseen at the Bletchley Park summit, unmentioned in Harris’s Bletchley Park speech, late British mathematician Alan Turing, who dreamed up the idea of computer software in a 1936 math paper, worked at that same country estate for the Code and Cypher School in the 1940s cracking Nazi codes. Shortly after the end of World War II, Turing gave the first public lecture on AI. He said, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience” and “alter its own instructions[.]” Interpreting those as Turing himself often did—by setting aside religious or philosophy of mind questions in favor of mathematical and engineering ones—today’s artificial intelligence is understood by experts as doing both to some sizable degree.

In the longstanding philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing in 1950 proposed what’s now called the Turing Test: essentially a guessing game or experiment where, by writing down questions and passing around slips of paper, a person tries to determine which responses are generated by an unseen human and which by an unseen AI—with the argument that, if the person can’t tell the responses apart, the AI should be considered to be thinking as legitimately as the unseen human is considered to be thinking. That’s how the Turing Test is typically presented—bereft of the gender codings in the 1950 original, which subtly and impishly (by 1950s standards) depict gender as something as fluid as intelligence.

The original Turing Test is also not so behavioristic as it sounds from textbook glosses, with Turing’s actual writing praising the “quite a strong” counterargument “from Extrasensory Perception” (this is why read primary source and not just watch youtube vids). While in this portion of the paper he mostly sticks to familiar psionics language such as telepathy and precognition, one might discern someone living in a dissociated world where empathy (as emotional contagion, not as cognitive exercise) is regularly off the table, especially for someone sensitive, “good as a telepathic receiver” (see Turing’s best-known premonition), and required to keep silent. About classified secrets. About what he must have witnessed and heard of, the 1940s birthing the current world order dominated by spy agencies and an attempt at a global mono-empire underpinned by information technology. About even his own criminalized sexuality.

Sentenced for “gross indecency” under anti-homosexuality laws in 1952, one of the foremost founders of artificial intelligence was instructed by a British court to pick either estrogen-based chemical castration or imprisonment. Turing chose the former and, almost certainly as a consequence, was driven to alter his own instructions fatally in 1954 at home, alone.

It seems wrong to me that Harris, at Bletchley Park, did not mention him in her speech, though the U.K.’s government-backed Alan Turing Institute was among the contributors to the voluntary agreement. I assume she didn’t mention him at Cipriani Wall Street, either, despite his story as one of the foremost founders of AI—occasionally argued to be the founder—waiting as a perfect example of how good deeds especially get punished when you’re deemed to fall into the wrong group affiliation categories, and how that’s the kind of bias, now often enshrined into algorithms, that she says we need safeguards against. Marketing happyspeak, however, is what brings in the $27 million/night.

Artificial intelligence didn’t kill one of its founders, but bigotry, one of AI’s biggest problems, sure did. It’s presently up for grabs to what extent the 47th U.S. president, others in power, and the worldwide public can learn from such experiences as AI becomes increasingly more common, assuredly with dignity-depleting privacy violations in its train. Like some coked-up computerized version of the long and sorry history of human bias, algorithmic bias has zillions in funding, endless apologists, and a growing body count. Politicians limit themselves to the art of the possible, for better or worse, but definitely crop out anything their “possible” and “realistic” tunnel visions don’t have time for, like, say, omitting mention of Bletchley Park ghost Alan Turing and anybody else who might lie in a grassy field and dream up system-changing ideas such as computer software or artificial intelligence. More time spent understanding AI’s origination and its development over three quarters of a century would be a good start to transforming it from a pol- and journo-buzzword into something we can usefully self-govern.

This blog post, Kamala Harris, AI, and the Bletchley Park ghost, 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/2024/09/24/kamala-harris-ai-bletchley-park-ghost/. 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!

Guidelines touted by Kamala Harris at Bletchley Park in 2023 Note: On Sept. 22, the Daily Dot published my latest article, Election 2024: The future of TikTok and tech policy...

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: 14-page PDF I put together: a recommended resource list for this talk, presented July 12, 2024. The resource list contains the following sections: Books and papers; Documentaries; Reality Winner and Kremlin cyberattacks on 2016 elections; BMD vulnerabilities, Coffee County, Georgia elections office breach, and ongoing statewide voting software compromise; Election activism; General deep politics and activism; Douglas Lucas.

UPDATE: The conference schedule is now available. My talk is at 7 p.m. on Friday July 12 in Marillac Auditorium; 50 minutes total including Q&A.

A decade ago, I was a panelist at HOPE X, the tenth Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City. Youtube of that panel — on crowdsourcing research into the cyber-intelligence complex — still collects views.

On the way home from the conference, I wrote a humorous article describing my experience: my surprising, then interviewing NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake; the private spies who showed up to surveil the panel and seemed more interested in my articles than most people I actually know are; my rooted smartphone getting hacked … Ah, wonderful times, so long ago.

Now — well, next month, July 12-14 — I’ll give a solo talk at HOPE XV titled Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security.

Wait, what’s this conference again? Sponsored by the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, HOPE is held every other year in New York City — previously in Manhattan, now in Queens at St. John’s University. Top-billed speakers over the years have included Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, frenemy of the state Edward Snowden, you get the idea. Typical offerings include lockpicking villages, ham radio and vintage computer stuff, vendors, film screenings, socializing, controversy real or ginned up, private spies watching me, people hacking my phone … plus panels/talks.

You can check out the conference website here, speakers’ bios over here, various promo videos HOPE requested way over here, and short descriptions of every panel/talk all the way over here. The description for mine:

Fake news or flawless? Our computerized elections are neither. To truly understand corporate, closed-source election computers requires understanding how they fit into the wider electoral system and its interlocking parts. Douglas’s investigative journalism will provide case studies documenting how it can go haywire: the 2016 Kremlin cyberattacks on U.S. election infrastructure exposed by whistleblower Reality Winner, the MAGA-led Coffee County elections office breach still compromising Georgia’s statewide voting software, and more. Such details will show how you can help secure elections: scrutineers, statistical forensics, free software voting companies … the list goes on. He will address democracy’s evolution, too, scrutinizing statist voting within the bigger picture of human collaboration.

I’ll create an online reading list for attendees interested in learning more, as well as an overview diagram of the election system’s interlocking parts.

As of this writing, I don’t know which exact day and time my talk will be, but the conference website should be updated with that information any moment [see update above]. If you decide to attend and want to get together, email me: dal@riseup.net. I plan to arrive a day early and stay a day after. Otherwise just watch my talk afterward on Youtube or at the happenin’ headquarters of DouglasLucas.com.

Will I get into any zany HOPE incidents this decade around? Probably. If I encounter anyone from Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — their three uses of the word security there totally isn’t overcompensation or anything — I have some remarks for them, including regarding my potential lawsuit over their FOIA deni… but that’s another story.

Just remind me not to root my phone.

This blog post, My talk at HOPE XV: Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security: July 12-14, NYC, 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/2024/06/02/talk-hope-election-security-july-nyc/. 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!

Promo video for my talk (also on youtube) ADDITIONAL UPDATE: 14-page PDF I put together: a recommended resource list for this talk, presented July 12, 2024. The resource list contains...

Note: In 2021, I wrote a new blog post every weekend or so. I skipped Week 51 for various reasons. But here’s the final entry for this year, number 52!

In 2021, I blogged for an entire year consistently for the first time in my life. I wrote a new entry each and every weekend, pretty much. The effort totaled 42 posts.

This post describes what I learned from the experience as well as my writing plans for 2022. Then in closing, a list of all 42 posts from 2021 with their titles and hyperlinks; the ones I recommend most are in bold.

What I learned from a year of blogging

Before 2021, I wrote blog posts often, but I was either rusty (years back) or simply hadn’t yet managed to pull off a full year of nonfiction blogging (2020). That’s now changed with my completed year of blogging in 2021.

My blog entries this year have usually been about matters of social significance … except in many ways, I wrote them for me, primarily to improve my blogging skills and consistency. Putting together an entry remains a lot of underpaid/unpaid work—often a single post, when all is said and done, eats up an entire weekend—but it no longer feels particularly overwhelming. Nowadays I’m confident I can bust out such a blog post easily. Might feel sleep deprived and a bit out-of-body after making phone calls and staring at PDF details for ten hours straight, but such mild nuisances are at this point mere matters of routine.

Regarding writing craft. Readers have told me they don’t have much time to read my posts, what with crumbs to clean and kids to feed. They’ve asked for shorter posts. And I have been shifting toward providing shorter entries. Plus, I usually now include reader-friendly subheads and try to stick to a single point or two, or at least mark where my train of thought diverts to a side topic. That wasn’t the case when I began in January, but now it thankfully is.

Another big lesson I learned was how important the under-the-hood elements of a blog are. For example, this year, for the first time in half a decade, I updated the blogroll (list of links on the right side). To oversimplify, online writers shifted from the blogosphere to social media half a decade or more ago, but now we seem to be returning, at least a very little, to individual URLs, so it was time to spiff mine up. I added, across my website (here and here specifically), images of publicity I’ve received over a decade-plus from various venues. I scrutinized my whole website to upgrade hyperlinks from HTTP to HTTPS. I improved the leave-a-comment area to hopefully make it more enticing for readers to use. For instance, it now optionally sends you a notification email after I approve your comment following its initial hold in the moderation queue. All that stuff took not exactly gigantic, but still significant, amounts of time.

Many of my posts include original research, the result of excitedly engaging sheer curiosity. While writing about the Belarusian dictatorship declaring opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya a terrorist, to take one example of dozens, I found the Belarusian KGB’s online Excel spreadsheet (since taken down) where you could see her designation on Sheet 1, Row 730. It’s my hope that readers might share my curiosity and click through to see such a crazy spreadsheet, and thereby become more invested in themselves (their own curiosity, passion, etc.) as well as in the Belarusian pro-democracy resistance that involves the United States too. Hopefully such research—even if some items, like the online KGB spreadsheet, aren’t exactly revelations—makes my posts unique in a field where journalistic competitors often offer nothing more than speculation. I remembered what I already knew from a decade ago, my days of pouring through Stratfor emails, that it takes quite a lot of time to conduct such research and fit it into a post, especially since researchers never know ahead of time for sure what they will or won’t find.

I don’t like the dumbed-down approach, even if it would generate dolla dolla bill. Yet I’m having to slowly drag myself in that direction, kicking and screaming, since this blog made, in 2021, less than $20 USD in donations. Bear with me for a moment; I’m not going to complain, just point out some facts that impact whether this blog will continue, not in 2022, but in 2023. Too often, audiences haven’t deigned to consider any story wherein they themselves might need to change, including when it comes to forking over cash; since in the blog relationship, audiences monopolize the power of the purse, that leaves us with a story about how independent content creators should alone bear the burden of changing. Have you tried Patreon? Are you on Medium? I’ve heard people are having success on Substack, why aren’t you there yet? When I do comply with those requests, audiences typically move the goalposts, mentioning yet another site they expect me to add a profile to instead of opening their wallets. In the final analysis, just as audiences are slow to change from banal complicity with oligarchs to amazing resistance against them, so they’re likewise slow to warm up to the idea that they could deliver donations instead of unsolicited advice about how I might could milk donations out of some other third party. Well, authors have been complaining, er not complaining, about this for only hundreds of years. And besides, blogging, even unpaid, is a much better way to spend time than being forced to work in a mine or not having any freedom of expression. It’s just, when I leave the United States for the Netherlands in mid- to late 2022 if they approve my business plan (under the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty), there’s every reason to think I just might have to quit blogging in 2023 due to lack of income from it.

I’ve ghostwritten oodles of content marketing pieces in the past decade and I’ve recently begun a highly regarded content marketing certification course—but I hope not to revamp my blog in that style. Thankfully, even putting out verbose, meandering posts routinely led to or at least likely facilitated additional opportunities for me this year, including giving a talk at a college hacker club and a quite sizable, important venue commissioning a nonfiction essay from me for 2022. And I’m not much for another option sometimes seen: the telegraphic, truncated style of listing seemingly endless human rights violations. I hope some readers find the variety of subject matters, quotations, history, literature, etc., threaded together in my posts a valuable and somewhat unique sales point rather than an erroneous lack of message discipline.

Speaking of impact, that was the best thing about this year of blogging. In a handful of instances, individuals contacted me, perhaps people I hadn’t heard from in a long time, asking for more information about something in one of my posts. Because of a June entry, for example, pharmaceutical consumers who’d never heard of how and why to use compounding pharmacies until my writings are now getting their pills in custom dosages, whereas they were previously limited to the manufacturers’ increments due to fog of war, lack of knowledge. When I wrote about the Belarusian KGB’s murder of Andrei Zeltser, an employee of a Pennsylvania-based IT firm who like that company opposed the Lukashenko dictatorship, I wrote about how his wife Maryja Uspenskaya, the sole witness to his shoot-out death—about which the regime created propaganda footage that spread around the world—was placed in a psychiatric hospital, with, worryingly, no info available in English about her whereabouts or well-being for more than a month. I mentioned how Uspenskaya had been left off lists of Belarusian political prisoners. The day after my entry, the opposition leader herself tweeted to recognize Maryja Uspenskaya as a political prisoner. (Progress on her case still needs to be made.) The point of these examples is not to humble-brag but to show that, instead of centering a career/life on complying with corporate publishers, DIY bloggers can have impact, so why not try it yourself? And definitely, much thanks to everyone who’s been reading this blog, commenting, contacting me, sharing the entries, critiquing, donating, and more. That’s what separates a blog from a diary.

My writing plans for 2022

There’s more I need to do for my website on the technical side of things. In terms of design, readers understandably want something formatted well on their phones and tablets. I could make improvements there. I need to install and regularly use better analytics so I can observe factually what’s happening with reader traffic, not just imagine things in my needy head. Probably I should provide chatty video with screensharing graphics of open records requests and the like; in 2021, I did start a youtube channel.

In 2022, I’ll aim to post on the same day—maybe even at the same time—every week, as that consistency would probably increase audience loyalty and prevent audience attrition. For the United States, Sunday mornings would likely be best, meaning I could write and line everything up on Saturday, then do a final revision in the morning after a night of sleeping on the prose, then click publish and shoot off the teed-up social media posts.

In 2021, I took off several weekends—ten, to be exact—but some additional weeks I took halfway off, so to speak, putting up short “placeholder” posts instead of leaving the blog blank of new entries. In 2022, I want to hit all 52 Sundays, even if some entries will be very short. That consistency will let you know you can tune in at the same bat time, same bat channel, every single weekend.

I’ll make my final decisions on these matters in the next workweek, but in short, douglaslucas.com/blog will continue more or less as is for 2022, just with the above changes in the pipeline. I’ll even keep the same Note: In 202x… intro, except modified for 2022!

My big news for 2022, however, is that I’ll start writing and self-publishing new flash fiction! That means each item will be 1000 words or less. My web hosting service told me DouglasLucas.com can have more than one WordPress blog installation. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to say hello and leave comments at a new subfolder of this site, probably douglaslucas.com/fiction/2022, which doesn’t exist just yet. At first—in January 2022 and perhaps in February 2022—I’ll simply make available two of my already completed “trunk” stories (old stories) that haven’t ever been published, self- or otherwise. I’ll get the new fiction blog configured and maybe write up some of my research into northeast Oregon and the year 2036, the setting of some of my forthcoming fiction. But the main focus will be new flash fiction pieces. They might or might not connect with my 2036 setting (still thinking that through).

The 2022 fiction blog will mainly be intended to do for my fiction-writing what my 2021 nonfiction blog did for my nonfiction-writing. Get me accustomed to quickly and consistently creating what one of my creative writer friends, Aelius Blythe, calls literary graffiti fiction. To that end, I’ll probably use plot formula, standard tropes, prefab characterizations (e.g., Star Trek characters as in fanfic), and so on. The 2022 fiction blog isn’t supposed to win any prizes; it’s supposed to be fun; it’s supposed to repair the rust on my fiction-writing gears. Though you can still comment, share, donate, etc. if you want! I’ll try to engage a visual artist(s) to sketch. Maybe each entry can have a single, quickly sketched image at the top.

And while the 2022 nonfiction blog (this one) will continue mostly in the same vein as in 2021, I hope to focus more on original investigative journalism work, although that might end up in other-published places since I have some sneaky biz ideas for commissions. Whether the original investigative journalism work is self-published here or other-published, some of my posts here, whatever the content, will remain defiantly noodly, philosophical, random, simply about the moments of our strangely global lives …

List of all 42 posts from 2021

Behold, listed below, all 42 of my 2021 blog posts. The 22 in bold are the entries I most recommend. And what’s this? Ahem, that’s my donation page! So that you and I and anyone else can continue enjoying this site without paywalls, without advertisements, without wrong walls ….

January 6: Running as exploration and adventure
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/01/06/running-exploration-adventure/

January 14: Check out SpookyConnections.com
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/01/14/check-out-spookyconnections/

January 23: Meet new president Joe Biden, part 1 of 2
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/01/23/meet-new-president-biden-1-of-2/

January 30: Gamestop & r/wallstreetbets: fairness just a starting point
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/01/30/gamestop-wallstreetbets-fairness-starting-point/

February 5: Photos from Snoqualmie Pass’s Gold Creek Pond trail
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/02/05/photos-snoqualmie-pass-gold-creek-pond-trail/

February 11: RIP Chick Corea, fusion jazz keyboardist
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/02/11/rip-chick-corea-fusion-jazz-keyboardist/

February 19: Review of the novel Shantaram
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/02/19/review-novel-shantaram/

February 2: Seattle graffiti about coronavirus
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/02/27/seattle-graffiti-about-coronavirus/

March 5: Vaccinated, first jab! Here’s how it went
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/03/05/vaccinated-first-jab/

March 13: Views of happiness: Journey versus destination, part one of two
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/03/13/happiness-views-journey-destination-1of2/

March 20: How I addressed a trauma anniversary that psychiatrists weren’t curious about
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/03/20/trauma-anniversary-curiosity/

March 26: The battleground of names
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/03/26/battleground-names/

April 3: Antipsychiatry playlist
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/04/03/antipsychiatry-playlist/

April 10: How and why to make a beet root smoothie
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/04/10/how-why-beet-root-smoothie/

April 17: Review of education books, part one of two
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/04/17/education-books-review-1of2/

May 1: Shucks, I missed entry 16
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/01/shucks-missed-entry16/

May 2: Postmortem on a specific failure to #AbolishICE … and a reboot?
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/02/postmortem-specific-failure-abolishice-reboot/

May 15: Here’s some math empowerment
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/15/shucks-missed-entry18-math-empowerment/

May 22: New, optional notifications for commenters … and Myanmar news blast
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/22/new-optional-notifications-commenters-also-burma/

May 29: More features for commenters; Colombia news blast
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/29/more-commenters-features-colombia-news/

June 5: Benefits of making a timeline, both personal and anti-corporate … plus global resistance news
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/05/benefits-making-timeline-personal-anticorporate-global-news/

June 13: FOIAs and the rest of life, now with executive function
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/13/foias-executive-function/

June 19: How and why to use compounding pharmacies, plus Belarus and Ethiopia news blasts
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/19/how-why-compounding-pharmacies/

June 26: Thoughts and photos re: NE Oregon, plus Belarus and US news blasts
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/26/thoughts-photos-neoregon-belarus-us-newsblasts/

July 2: Just two videos for fun this week: Star Trek and Jordan Reyne
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/02/two-forfun-videos-startrek-jordanreyne/

July 10: PNW heat dome, climate change media, and optimistic fiction, plus Myanmar and Brazil news blasts
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/10/heatdome-climatechange-media-optimistic-fiction-myanmar-brazil/

July 17: Summer 2021 thoughts from North Texas
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/17/north-texas-thoughts-summer-2021/

July 24: Revisiting the biggest Southern Magnolia in DFW; news blasts for Cuba and Texas
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/24/revisiting-biggest-southern-magnolia-dfw-cuba-texas/

July 31: COVID-19 update: masks, Delta mutation, evictions; news blasts: Haiti and United States
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/31/covid19-masks-delta-evictions-haiti-us/

August 6: Skills for falling asleep, 1 of 2; Haiti news blast
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/08/06/fall-asleep-skills1-news-haiti/

August 14: Skills for falling asleep, 2 of 2; news blasts for Haiti and Serbia
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/08/14/fall-asleep-skills2-haiti/

September 6: On leaving the United States
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/09/06/on-leaving-the-united-states/

September 13: Leaving the United States: more reasons why, and jumping the ECA, IELTS hurdles
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/09/13/leaving-unitedstates-reasons-jumping-eca-ielts-hurdles/

October 10: IELTS Enquiry on Results, Pfizer + blog updates, and news blasts for US, China, and the worldwide trade economy collapse/change … plus music and fiction!
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/10/10/ielts-enquiry-on-results-pfizer-blog-newsblasts-china/

October 18: Why are Southern Magnolia trees in Seattle?
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/10/18/why-southern-magnolia-trees-seattle/

October 24: Talk by me at Univ Washington club Wednesday; news blasts: France, Belarus, and JFK / United States
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/10/24/talk-batmanskitchen-france-belarus-jfk/

November 7: Reading ‘The catalyst effect of COVID-19’, a year and a half later
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/07/reading-catalyst-effect-covid19-year-half-later/

November 13: Quick, funny story about a phone scammer trying to get a Riseup email invite code from me
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/13/phone-scammer-riseup-email-invite-codes/

November 22: #PardonRealityWinner: Whistleblower moves to three years of supervised release on November 23, 2021
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/22/realitywinner-whistleblower-supervised-release-pardon/

November 27: #StandWithBelarus: Writing pro-democracy political prisoners for the international day of solidarity with the Belarusian opposition
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/27/writing-belarus-prisoners-international-solidarity-opposition/

December 12: Progress on #PardonRealityWinner and #FreeBelarus
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/12/12/pardonrealitywinner-freebelarus-progress/

December 19: Intellectual history for hacktivists: Video of my 27 Oct ’21 talk at University of Washington hacker club Batman’s Kitchen
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/12/19/intellectualhistory-talk-uw-hacker-27oct2021/

This blog post, My 2021 year of blogging in review … and 2022 website plans!, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/12/31/2021-blogging-review-2022-website-plans/ You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I wrote a new blog post every weekend or so. I skipped Week 51 for various reasons. But here’s the final entry for this year, number 52!...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 50 of 52.

On October 27, I gave an in-person talk to the University of Washington computer security club Batman’s Kitchen. The presentation was simultaneously virtual over Zoom. I obtained the video file back a bit, but was busy substitute-teaching at the local youth jail for three weeks; that assignment completed Friday, I’m today making the video available, right above!

The title of the talk on the first slide, Hacktivism meets journalism (or something like that), is a little misleading. Because of time constraints—I created the presentation in a hurry, within something like a 48-hour period—the majority of the material I provide is actually intellectual history as it applies to people, especially young activists, interested in computer science, including but not limited to those going into the field as a profession.

Some helpful details. The footage is under two hours and fifteen minutes (since hundreds of years of philosophical history can’t particularly be conveyed in a quick monosyllabic bumper sticker slogan). The Questions & Answers section begins at 1:48:12. Download the .MP4 file or the powerpoint if you like. I’ve added this event to both the in the media page and the front page of this website.

In related news, I created a youtube channel finally, where this Zoom footage may be found. If 100 people subscribe to my nascent youtube channel, where I’ll use words like nascent without apology, I can customize my youtube URL. So whatever you do, don’t hit that like button, and definitely don’t smash subscribe, for we here all believe in reverse psychology.

Next talk, I’ll not waste time with cutesy images of cats and Castlevania—older generations in the United States want those things, but thankfully Gen Z doesn’t need them, I observed—and hopefully cut the metacognitive authorial intrusions that permeate my speech. Minor flaws aside, I hope people learn something from the video! Share as thou wilt.

Even more #PardonRealityWinner progress

Yesterday, I put into a USPS dropbox my snailmail letter to the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney, advocating for a pardon of Putingate whistleblower Reality Winner, whose story you can read about here (my article from her sentencing), here (my entries about her on this blog), or by following her mother Billie J. Winner-Davis on twitter.

Reality Winner and her whistleblowing to alert everyone regarding Russian military hackers executing, just days before the 2016 elections, cyberattacks against US voting infrastructure, remain of key importance.

Consider, for example, Friday’s Washington Post opinion piece authored by three retired Army generals expressing grave concern that, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, a politically divided US military will be vulnerable to foreign attacks and will see rogue units supporting a successful coup by Trump (or some other reactionary demagogue). “Not a single leader who inspired” the January 6 coup attempt “has been held to account,” they write correctly. While failing to address the country’s private spies and private militias such as those Blackwater members pardoned by Trump, the three retired generals urge convictions for the January 6 conspirators, mandatory civics reviews for Pentagon members (hey throw in some international law while at it!), and coup-based war games along with defensive intelligence work.

Without Air Force veteran Reality Winner, it’s quite possible—maybe even probable—that such a WaPo piece wouldn’t exist, since we’d be living in a universe where Trump would be perceived as a horrible but legitimate ongoing occupant of the White House, akin to how many viewed George W. Bush while he was in office (prior to that war criminal’s latest rehabilitation as an affable, Michelle Obama-hugging grampa).

(Side note: The opinion piece also states: “Imagine competing commanders in chief […] Biden giving orders, versus Trump […] issuing orders as the head of a shadow government.” Well, imagine as well the public heading yet another shadow government that, instead of issuing orders much, horizontally helps one another in everyday ways as we do during natural disasters, another example of regular government breaking down. Imagine that shadow-government-of-the-public recognizing its own power and expanding it. That would be genuine self-governance.)

Achieving a pardon for Reality Winner would send a strong signal domestically and internationally that the United States refuses Trump/Putin-style autocracy. The Office of the Pardon Attorney does give advice to the president regarding pardons in some cases (I don’t yet know the details of that). Plus, whatever intern opens the envelope might start an interesting water cooler discussion, you know? And such things matter.

I based the letter on the one I sent last week (PDF) to Joe Biden; I improved the text overall, too. If you want to use my letter as a basis for your letter to the Office of the Pardon Attorney, clicky-click for a PDF or clicky-click the below embed to read it. You can always share your own beseeching of the Office in the comments below or online elsewhere. Consider using the #PardonRealityWinner hashtag.

Remember, smugly explaining to each other that wisdom means defeatism is out, whereas taking specific, real life, step by step, existent, active-y action yourself to achieve huge prosocial goals is in. If you prefer to be out, well, then just psychology reverse. :)

This blog post, Intellectual history for hacktivists: Video of my 27 Oct ’21 talk at University of Washington hacker club Batman’s Kitchen, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/12/19/intellectualhistory-talk-uw-hacker-27oct2021/ You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 50 of 52. On October 27, I gave an in-person talk to the University...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 46 of 52.

You probably remember the name Reality Winner and at least some of her story: in May 2017, when Trump fired then-FBI director James Comey for his investigation into the Putin regime’s interference with the presidential election on behalf of a certain cheeto-colored demagogue, a whistleblower in her twenties leaked a classified document detailing how the Russian military hacked US election systems just days before the November 2016 election. I reported in person from her August 2018 sentencing in Augusta Georgia, where, in the Trump administration’s first espionage case against a domestic whistleblower, Reality Winner was given the longest prison term ever for a disclosure to the media.

This week, news in the United States — whether social, corporate, or other — will likely focus on Reality Winner again since the Bureau of Prisons on Tuesday is changing her status from her current home confinement situation (began June 9) to three years of supervised release, phase similar to the more familiar, state-level term parole, which technically no longer exists on the federal level. Her ankle monitor will finally be removed. Recent and ongoing media of various types continue to focus on her case, especially this week.

As a result of the news, the public may have a lot of questions. This post provides an overview of her case, the leaked document and its implications, as well as the surrounding media discourse, plus definitions of relevant Bureau of Prisons jargon and a menu of actions you can pick from to help Reality Winner gain a pardon, the chief goal her family is calling for help with.

Who’s Reality Winner again? What was that document about?

Reality Winner is an idealistic, intelligent, and altruistic Texan. The two best sources of information about her as a person are probably the 2017 New York Magazine profile titled “The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread” and the twitter feeds of her family: her mother Billie J. Winner-Davis, her sister Brittany Winner, and her (step)father Gary Davis. If you’re interested, follow those accounts, or at least know how to search their tweets. A good rule of thumb for whistleblower cases: get your information not from the social-climbers and co-opters, but from their families, loved ones, and lawyers like Reality Winner’s attorney Alison Grinter. (The whistleblowers themselves are usually under gag orders.)

Winner is also an Air Force veteran who, at the time she snailmailed the restricted document to The Intercept, was working for Virginia-based spy contractor Pluribus International. You might know the US spy agencies — rebranded intelligence agencies especially following 1970s revelations of scandals such as Operation Mockingbird — are mostly staffed by contractors, whose trade secrets and other private properties are exempt from public oversight due to the laws of biz. In other words, the so-called intelligence community, its structure if not particular individuals within, is motivated not by public safety, but by profit and worse. For Pluribus International, the multilingual Winner translated into English surveilled terrorist communications from languages such as Farsi and Pashto. As Trump was firing Comey, a secret network board system, akin to a classified version of Reddit and accessible by Pluribus International staff, ranked a certain document highly, indicating wide interest in it.

The document, and The Intercept article about it, describes cyberattacks, carried out just days before the 2016 elections, by Russian military hackers against more than 100 local election officials in the United States and at least one U.S. supplier of software used to manage voter rolls in multiple counties. In short, Winner gave everyone information required for self-governance, gave everyone necessary knowledge otherwise unavailable. That includes any voting vendor staff who, without security clearances, would not have been able to access such protective classified information unless it appeared in open discourse. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote in a June 9, 2017 post on his personal website that the cyberattacks disclosed by Reality Winner “illustrate the real threats and vulnerabilities facing our elections, and they point to solutions.”

Such computer vulnerabilities ultimately show how state, corporate, or other criminal actors (or combinations thereof), anywhere in the world, can manipulate elections, anywhere in the world, to secretly condition the public into believing lies. As philosopher and former Wikileaks Central editor Heather Marsh explains in my article from Winner’s sentencing:

“This document is more than just evidence of Russian interference. In many ways, the US election is a high-profile, long-term investigation into the nature of how democracies work today. Opinions are manipulated by organizations such as Cambridge Analytica in conjunction with intelligence collection by organizations such as Wikistrat. These are problems which have plagued all democracies for years now–Canada’s 2011 voter suppression robocalls and Andrés Sepúlveda’s decade-long manipulation of Latin American elections are two earlier reported examples of modern election interference.”

Marsh’s quotation continues in my article from her sentencing. The public’s understanding of TrumPutin wouldn’t have developed to the extent it did, had Winner not gifted us (and Congress) with the secret document.

In that same article of mine, long-time elections integrity activist Bev Harris explains the cyberattacks described Winner’s in disclosure are part of the same cyberattacks that make up the last count in then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s ’12 Russians’ indictment against the Putin regime’s military hackers. The top prosecutorial agency in the United States issuing an international criminal indictment drawing in part from the deed of this imprisoned whistleblower, an individual in her mid-twenties wrongly called by that same agency’s lawyer Bobby L. Christine “the quintessential example of an insider threat,” suggests, as do many other things, that Winner deserved a medal, not a prison sentence, and at the very least deserves a pardon now.

Sinners in the hands of an angry audience

FOX News ran a paint-by-numbers campaign tarring Winner, the arguments of which are easy to dismantle. The TV hosts, typically on whatever forms of speed — just hit pause and look at their eyes; also, how do you think they manage to broadcast nonstop? — raged about how on social media, Winner called Trump an “orange fascist” and messaged her sister about hating America. Besides considering Trump’s actual fascism and horrible things done by the United States (for instance, by the CIA), just imagine for an analogy that you’re waiting at Discount Tire for the mechanics to finish with your car. In the morning, a caffeine-deprived mechanic in the back employee area, perhaps a decorated veteran like Winner, grouses to another mechanic about hating Discount Tire’s early start times and lack of vegan food in the break room. As afternoon arrives, the same mechanic and a third mechanic talk together about how the company does offer them good things too, including the opportunity to tinker with a steady stream of various automobiles. By evening, the mechanic says they have mixed feelings about Discount Tire and the company should make some improvements. That’s essentially what the comments of Winner and everyone else venting about politics on social media boil down to. It isn’t difficult for those outside tunnel vision to understand.

Meanwhile, on the mainstream US left, comfy members of the public have seemingly decided that nothing is possible except voting for evil on un-auditable computerized election infrastructure while making fun of whistleblowers’ unusual names. If horrific human rights violations happen every day and humanity goes extinct, well, the thinking seems to go, at least they got a few more moments to [insert distractions here]. Expecting lifelong entertainment, these audiences will get angry when instead they’re presented with education.

The duopoly stereotypes above are fortunately dissolving faster and faster as the public, especially younger generations, communicate interpersonally more and more, thanks to the Internet. However, the propaganda battles online continue, as does increasing authoritarian control of the online world.

Bottom line, fight for justice: don’t be a newb whose biggest ‘contribution’ this week is shitposting lazy remarks about Reality Winner’s excellent aptronym; instead, learn more about her case (below) and select a way to help her get a pardon (also below).

Recent or ongoing media offering more about the whistleblower and/or the document she disclosed

Reality Winner is the subject of Is This A Room, a new Broadway stageplay based on the transcript of her FBI interrogation, during which she was not Mirandized: she was not read her rights, not for remaining silent, not for a lawyer’s presence. This (il)legal sleight of hand was pulled off in the courtroom by the prosecutors denying the context and insisting Winner “would have felt free to terminate the encounter.” But the eleven FBI agents, each male and almost all of them armed, pressured her in many ways, tantamount to coercion, including by bullying her into the titular seven-by-nine-foot unfurnished back room she told them was “creepy” and “weird.” With her cramped into the claustrophobic space, they blocked the doors and proceeded with the supposedly voluntary interrogation. According to reviews, the stageplay — I’ve yet to see it — reunites the transcript and the context, helping to alter our crazymaking world into something new that actually drives people sane.

(Such isolation and control as the FBI agents’ is similarly employed elsewhere in our lives to produce bogus psuedo-realities. To take one example out of zillions, consider an antidepressant trial started when the COVID-19 pandemic started. How’s the confound of a terrifying pandemic removed from the analysis of the psychopharmaceutical’s efficacy? Likewise, the context of study participants being paid and promised better lives, is likewise snipped out by contractor scientists who sometimes even hold conflict-of-interest patents on the pills in question, since unlike salaried scientists, contractor scientists, akin to those contractors staffing spy agenices, are exempt from disclosure requirements, that is, transparency and accountability requirements.)

Is This A Room, 70 minutes with no intermission, runs at the Lyceum Theatre through November 27. Official website; buy tickets. The stageplay has received critical acclaim and sudden popularity.

Given the success of the stageplay, the Broadway Podcast Network recently launched a series entitled This Is Reality. With more on the way, they presently offer four full episodes, released between October 18 and November 17. I recommend listening for great, up-to-date information about Reality Winner, her case, and more, including how the 1917 Espionage Act, more than a century old, is used federally not to prosecute individuals for sharing military movements with foreign enemies, but to prosecute domestic whistleblowers for sharing restricted knowledge with the public (usually via the media), i.e. the enemy of authoritarians is the public, you and me.

The DC-based Dworkin Report, hosted by politico Scott Dworkin, cofounder of The Democratic Coalition political action committee, offers a trio of recent interviews. First, from August 4, an interview with Winner’s lawyer, Dallas-based Alison Grinter. Second, from October 5, an interview with the whistleblower’s sister, Brittany Winner. Third, from October 7, an interview with Billie J. Winner-Davis, Reality Winner’s mother who on social media fiercely advocates for her family every single day. Those Dworkin Report links have been going down sometimes, so if they’re temporarily unavailable, try elsewhere: first interview, second interview, third interview. Make sure you listen to Scott Dworkin’s interview of Billie J. Winner-Davis, the whistleblower’s mother. I’ll note two things about it. First, she calls upon Biden to grant her daughter clemency (a pardon is a form of clemency). Second, about Glenn Greenwald. After I spearheaded a successful effort to drag him in 2014 long before it became popular to do so (see here, here, here, here, and elsewhere), I switched to just ignoring Greenbacks, since that’s often the most effective way to turn someone’s volume down. However, Billie J. Winner-Davis says something in the third interview that I think is worth making an exception for, worth amplifying. Reality Winner was burned (arrested) as a source for The Intercept because (as the official story goes, anyhow), journalists there not only talked with government officials trying to confirm the document’s veracity (which is fine), but also sent them the document itself (which isn’t fine), enabling them to track the whistleblower down from various clues associated with the document. Asked about that, Billie J. Winner-Davis told Scott Dworkin:

“Glenn Greenwald is, I mean, he’s hard to figure out; he likes to use Reality to create, you know, a social media storm. But that’s what he’s doing: he’s using her. I wish he would just stop. You know, I have gotten so much support from people from The Intercept and from First Look Media who have reached out to me personally who have expressed the regret about what happened to Reality and who have expressed their support for her and for our family. Glenn Greenwald is not one of those people, and I just wish he would go away.”

I predict that during this new decade, revelations will arrive of popular US-based or US-ish lefty journalists being on the take (receiving illicit money from) the BRICS regimes such as Putin’s. Occasionally I look at job openings at tiny “radical news” outlets and see the high pay and think, yeah, this doesn’t add up. As Spock might say, simple logic. An important byproduct of Winner’s leak has been the reactions of others, exposing who cares about inflating themselves as Great Men while supporting red-brown alliance (red commies cliquing up with brown fascists as oft black-clad anarchists go on as DIY as ever) and BRICS interests (here’s looking at you, clan Assadnge), versus who cares about human rights, including for whistleblowers who are women (and thus too often downplayed or ignored), as well as open democracy over authoritarianism.

Another source of information: documentary filmmaker Sonia Kennebeck’s 93-minute movie United States vs. Reality Winner that premiered earlier this year.

Finally, my August 2018 article from her sentencing is the only detailed narrative from the courtroom, and one of the very few written detailed analyses, besides the original Intercept article, of the leaked document. I’ve also written posts about her case here, which you can find via clicking my blog’s Reality Winner tag. I have some additional unpublished investigative material I plan to pull together for release soon.

Frequently asked vocabulary

Like any bureaucracy, the carceral industry and the Bureau of Prisons in particular have their own specialized, intentionally impenetrable jargon. Since these terms will be thrown around this workweek — and in the future regarding other federal whistleblower cases — here’s a quick glossary explaining what the lingo actually means on the federal level and how it pertains to Reality Winner.

Note: To follow the below, it helps to understand the timeline of Winner’s imprisonment: after sentencing, she was moved to incarceration at FCC Carswell in Fort Worth. Then on good time earned, she was moved a little early to incarceration in person at a halfway house. Next, on June 9, she moved to home confinement, still considered incarceration, involving conditions such as a buzzing electronic ankle monitor, and requiring frequent reporting to the halfway house for drug testing and the like. Then Tuesday she’s no longer incarcerated, but on three years of supervised release, basically the federal equivalent of parole.

Now the definitions. On Monday I asked Winner’s lawyer Alison Grinter about these terms, but any mistakes are mine.

Supervised release) A period of time after incarceration that’s supposed to help prisoners re-integrate back into society. Sort of a midpoint between full Bureau of Prisons custody and living out in the free world. It’s close to the more familiar, state-level concept of parole, which no longer exists on the federal level. If a prisoner on supervised release is held to have violated conditions, the Bureau of Prisons can yank them back behind bars for the remainder of the sentence.

Halfway house) To be exact, halfway house is an umbrella term that encompasses a few different types of facilities. Generally, though, and in Reality Winner’s case, a halfway house means what the Bureau of Prisons calls a Residential Reentry Center (RRC), unsurprisingly run by a private contractor. Typically, federal prisoners go to these halfway houses directly after incarceration and physically stay there. Later, during home confinement, the prisoners frequently report to the halfway houses, which set the conditions of their home confinement period.

Home confinement) Still considered incarceration, home confinements see prisoners living at home with a heavy electronic ankle monitor. They’re expected to obey strict conditions and report to the halfway house periodically.

Clemency) Formally speaking, clemency isn’t a federal concept. Informally, though, it refers to the remedies an executive can give prisoners, among them commutations and pardons. Reality Winner asks for clemency, specifically (and more precisely) a pardon.

Commutation) A commutation is a federal remedy that essentially speeds up a prisoner’s sentence. A commuted sentence is stopped early; prisoners’ sentences are over sooner than they would have been otherwise. But with the behind bars, halfway house, and home confinement phases over on Tuesday, Reality Winner is no longer seeking a commutation; instead, she’s seeking a pardon.

Pardon) A convict receiving a federal pardon is no longer a felon; in the eyes of the law at least, they’re fully and completely forgiven. Yet there’s no federal expungement: the pardoned individual’s case still happened. The point of the pardon is that legally, any and all the felony conviction disabilities, as the adverse consequences are called, are removed. That said, what specific employers or apps choose to do regarding a pardoned former felon, may be up to them.

Expungement) This isn’t available at the federal level. Expungement is a state-level remedy. For example in Texas, an expungement (“expunction” in the Texas statutes) means files about a crime are destroyed and the offense is removed from the person’s criminal record.

Parole) A state-level concept. Parole technically no longer exists at the federal level; it’s been replaced by the concept of supervised release. For general audiences, though, it’s fair enough to imprecisely refer to someone’s supervised release as parole, but for the more exact among us, supervised release is correct.

Probation) This doesn’t relate to Reality Winner’s case. Probation is something imposed in place of incarceration. For example, at a sentencing, a federal judge might impose two months of probation on a defendant as opposed to two years in prison.

Office of Probation and Pretrial Service) Also known as the U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services System, this is the bureau in the judicial branch that not only administers probation, but also administers supervised release.

Probation officer or supervised release officer) Employed by the Office of Probation and Pretrial Service, this person is the one making the day-to-day decisions about a felon’s supervised released conditions. Technically, they’re called a supervised release officer. They might refer to themself as a probation officer, given their employer. That may even be true of Reality Winner’s officer, despite her being on supervised release, not probation.

Those are the vocabulary terms for how the federal carceral system is supposed to work, although as a May 2017 article I wrote for The Cryptosphere shows, things may play out differently in practice, suggesting a strange mix of incompetence and/or decision-makers who aren’t on the up and up, to say the least.

#PardonRealityWinner

It’s important to recognize that even on supervised release and afterward, Reality Winner, though outside prison walls, isn’t free. Her felony record and plea agreement will continue to prevent her from fully speaking out about her case and the leaked document and its implications. On Monday, I asked Winner’s lawyer Alison Grinter about that adverse consequence of her conviction and the additional adverse consequences I describe in the two paragraphs below, but again, any mistakes are mine.

While Winner’s on supervised release for three years, she must obey strict conditions, which may vary according to her supervised release officer’s interpretations or caprices. To legally dispute the officer requires expensive, time-consuming, and stressful requests to the court in Augusta Georgia. Winner on supervised release has a curfew (can’t leave before 6 a.m. and has to be home by 10 p.m.) and must remain physically within the Southern District of Texas, though it’s the Augusta Georgia court that convicted her that ultimately calls the shots. The officer may choose to continue the surveillance of her smartphone. References in interviews to dating apps blocking her as a user revolve not around the supervised release conditions, but rather those apps querying databases and determining she’s a felon and thus barred from swiping.

Without a pardon, Winner will suffer what lawyers refer to as the disabilities of being a felon. For example, she’s banned from certain federal lands (the specifics are complicated). She’s not eligible for various federal benefits such as housing. She can’t own weapons (not uncommon in rural Texas), nor, in a strange provision, may she own body armor. Certain other countries may forbid entry or permanent residency to a U.S. felon. The list goes on.

A pardon would delete all of the above problems and restore Reality Winner’s freedom. It would allow her to share the full story. Like the full story, a pardon would also send an enormous domestic and international signal that the United States does not endorse TrumPutin-style autocracy. In other words, in the interest of open democracy, the United States Government has the need and ability to pardon Reality Winner not just for her, but also for itself and the public. Obama commuted the sentence of, but did not pardon, whistleblower Chelsea Manning; that suggests a pardon for Reality Winner can indeed happen under the Biden administration, but it will take significant effort.

Here are several ways to make #PardonRealityWinner happen:

• Correspond with the US Pardon Attorney by phone +1 202 616 6070, by email USPardon.Attorney@usdoj.gov, and/or by snailmail: U.S. Department of Justice / Office of the Pardon Attorney / 950 Pennsylvania Avenue – RFK Main Justice Building / Washington, DC 20530. It would be very helpful for them to be deluged with international messages explaining how a pardon for Reality Winner would improve the international standing of the United States after the Trump administration convicted her for keeping the investigation into Russian interference alive.

• Share articles and posts about pardoning Reality Winner, including in places other than your most familiar/comfortable social media sites. For example, during offline conversations, on social media sites you aren’t yet familiar with, via art such as graffiti or music, and so on.

• If you know more than one language, translate and share articles and posts about pardoning Reality Winner.
  
  
• Politely badger elected officials about Reality Winner, always pushing for the goal: pardoning her. Schedule appointments, call, donate a small amount to get them to actually reply (hey if corporate interests can bribe so can constituents). I’ve talked about Reality Winner with Kamala Harris at one of her campaign stops; I’ve talked to federal staffers, etc. If you haven’t done similar already in your life, you should, even just for the interesting experience.
  
  
• Anything else you can dream up. Don’t listen to the naysayers boasting of their cynicism to promise themselves it was wise to have given up in life. Beautiful Trouble is a handy resource book / toolkit for learning nonviolent tactics.
  
  
• Sign the online petition, but don’t let that stop you from doing any or all of the above.

This blog post, #PardonRealityWinner: Whistleblower moves to three years of supervised release on November 23, 2021, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/22/realitywinner-whistleblower-supervised-release-pardon/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 46 of 52. You probably remember the name Reality Winner and at least some...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 45 of 52.

On September 4, I answered my phone to hear the voice of a man in his thirties or forties: “I’m calling you out of nowhere, and this is a pretty strange call and pretty strange request, so bear with me.” With an opening like that, how could I not keep listening? (I recorded what happened at the time but never got around to blogging about it until tonight.)

Just before the phone rang, I was at home in my high castle, right, reading obscure histories of northeast Oregon towns, digitizing old documents, or whatever it is I do with my eccentric life when I’m not substitute teaching, ghostwriting for dimes scraped off someone else’s dollar, or otherwise answering to the trade economy’s myriad commercial imperatives.

When my phone rang, I thought, Probably another damn spam call. Those in the United States know how they’ve been getting worse in the past few years: another sign of the times, likely. But hey, the area code was 213. Los Angeles! Maybe, just maybe, opportunity was knocking. Hey, even anti-careerists can daydream.

Well, I was wrong. Opportunity wasn’t knocking. Hilarity was.

You won’t believe what happened next

After his fantastic opening line, the mystery caller then explains he’s looking to get an email account with Riseup Networks. For the uninitiated, Riseup is a longstanding Seattle-based provider of email and other tech services for millions of activists worldwide. They’re a savvy collective with decades of meritorious history.

I’ve been using Riseup email—dal@riseup.net—since 2012. Back then, Riseup gave out email accounts to anyone who agreed, or clicked that they agreed, with certain basic human decency principles, free of charge, donations encouraged. Nowadays, Riseup no longer just hands out email accounts. If I recall correctly, they stopped around 2016. Tightening things up; could be. Yet another sign of the times, likely. Currently, to get a Riseup email account, aspiring users need an invite code from someone who already has an account and is willing, in some algorithmic digital trust network sense, to vouch for them.

So, the mystery caller tells me he specifically wants a Riseup email invite code. I say I’m curious how he got my number—not because I’m offended, I explain, but because as a journalist/researcher, I often dig up information on people, and I want to know his tricks.

Like steam exiting the depressurizing coolant expansion tank of an overcompensating pickup truck’s tortured engine system, he barks odd laughter. He can’t help but tell me he ran a search for “riseup.net” and came across my email address and phone number in some online Freedom of Information Act filing of mine. When I used to conduct adversarial interviews more often than I do now, I was amazed at how readily interviewees expectorated the information I sought. Today I understand it’s because they’re tightly wound bio-psycho-socially. If, like Kevin Costner at the climax of his cheesy Robin Hood movie, you aim your interviewing bow and arrow just right, they become spectacularly undone with unintentionally confessional words torrenting out of their big mouths. You might be surprised at how far playing dumb as an interviewer can get you in life, unless you watch the old detective show Columbo.

En garde!

To his black market credit, the mystery caller recovered his poise quickly. Of course, under no circumstance was I going to give him, a total stranger, a Riseup invite code. But I wanted to see how this call was going to go down, and I think he wanted to see, too. That meant at this point in the conversation, the two duelists had taken stock of each other’s lightsabers. The battle was now to begin in earnest.

He launches into a predictable sob story about how he lost his wife and dog and money and homework, could I please give him a Riseup invite code. Man, that’s all he’s got?

I tell him No, I don’t give Riseup invite codes to people I don’t know personally, ever. But I can tell him a good way of going about getting one.

He doesn’t understand I’m hinting at volunteering. He tells me of some corner of the Internet where people are, he says, selling Riseup invite codes. I tell him if a Riseup account is linked to scammers, it poisons the reputation of the account that invited the scammer in, or more generally poisons the trust network of email accounts associated with the scammer, so don’t bother.

With the embarrassing bravado of a demagogue, he pivots to his next attack.

Really? Really?

Then the caller tells me he knows, of all people … the founder of Bitcoin! None other than the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, whose legal identity, despite many theories, remains uncertain. Wow, someone knows the founder of Bitcoin and just so happened to call me on a random Saturday morning. Que suerte! Not.

Rule number one of an adversarial interview is to keep the interviewee talking. The more words they emit, the more likely they’ll mis-step. So I ignore, sorta acting like I, too, know Satoshi Nakamoto. Doesn’t everyone?

But wherever he’s going with his Bitcoin founder thing is lost because I start laughing, unfortunately breaking character. Out of my typical benevolence, I tell the guy he should join the Riseup Internet Relay Chat channel and volunteer his time, building karma that way until he earns an invite code.

The caller’s totally not interested in ye olde effort. By this point in the call, I’m getting bored. Time to wrap this crap up.

He asks me a final time for an invite code. I say No. “Why are you against it?” he pleads. And I say, “For one thing, because I do get these requests [by email] every other month or so, and they take up way too much time while I’m trying to get work done. Bye!”

A half hour later, he text-messages me a giant poop emoji. The poor thing.

If you use Riseup Networks and can afford to, please donate to them!

This blog post, Quick, funny story about a phone scammer trying to get a Riseup email invite code from me, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/13/phone-scammer-riseup-email-invite-codes/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 45 of 52. On September 4, I answered my phone to hear the voice...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 44 of 52. I skipped entry 43 due to travel in the last week of October. I took the photos herein from that trip. The coastal beach pics are off Highway 101 just south of Oregon’s city of Gold Beach. The forest ones are from northwest California’s Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. You can find more photographs on my instagram account. Enjoy; I sure did!

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization for the first time characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. Problems with the United Nations and its agencies aside, WHO is the authoritative international body providing global health education and coordination, a situation likely to remain until supranational power or the (hopefully informed) public replaces it with their or our next organization. Thus, its director-general’s written opening remarks from that fateful Wednesday’s press conference are quite historically notable. If you’ve never read them, you should; the document’s expertly composed and concise, put together in the heat of a very stressful geopolitical moment.

On April 25, 2020, philosopher Heather Marsh wrote a piece titled “The catalyst effect of COVID-19.” Her post too has had significant impact around the planet already, but if you’re from, or answer to, an intellectual background deriving from the last few centuries in Europe, you might find that assessment a little strange: How could something I’m not already aware of and that’s not on Netflix be important? I actually know an erudite, older activist in Texas who explicitly believes the corporate amplification awarded to Eurocentric thinkers, including Nietzsche, is based not on their demographics and proximity to power, but on merit. For such readers, consider it might be challenging to measure impact for an author who gets censored and who in 2014/2015 sparked worldwide and ongoing discussion of pedo human trafficking. Or just look at the academic credibility she already has. Or recall that the Communist Manifesto, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sent from London to the European continent behind schedule, wasn’t considered historically important until decades after the 1848 revolutions it was meant to influence. Not everything important is already in the important! section of the university bookstore, and who’s arranging the shelving, right?

Walking through the California state park marveling at the redwoods, I was having reminded of Marsh’s “The catalyst effect of COVID-19” due to a wonderful conversation that led me to put a two-and-two together in, I believe, a new way. I’d like to share that small insight. Plus, let’s take a fresh look at Marsh’s post (her glossary may help in reading it; the reading grade is pretty high). A year and a half later, have her predictions about how COVID-19 would catalyze the world come to pass?

Why the most radical transformation the world has ever seen?

The main of Marsh’s post starts with an astonishing sentence: “We are, or will be, going through the most radical transformation the world has ever seen; people are justly terrified, excited, depressed, heartbroken and hopeful, all at once.” Humans in today’s form have been around for hundreds of thousands of years—and now, the most radical transformation ever? Why?

My little insight answer—besides other factors such as election cycles—that I came up with while the interlocutor and I were hiking back from the redwoods to the de facto trailhead, is that we have two pan- things arriving together, one of them unique, for the first time in our history. As the globe has learned in the past two years, pan- means every, as in everyone and/or everywhere.

The first pan- thing, the unique one, is global communication. As opposed to feudal villages, where you might go your whole life knowing your entire town but never a stranger, we’ve now been approaching a point where everyone can communicate with everyone else, or at least try to do so. Many have made or hinted at this “Information Age” observation—whether that’s Marsh, journalist Barrett Brown, or simply Seattle-based heavy metal band Queensrÿche. Even Marx and Engels noted nearly two centuries ago the importance of “the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.” In 2010, merely six years after the introduction of Facebook in 2004, then-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt said: “There were five exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003. Now that same amount is created every two days.” Some are still left out of this info-flood—perhaps people with developmental disabilities, or those doomed to spend their lives down in mineshafts, or others somehow blocked from or not desiring tech access. However, though estimates vary, social media platforms nowadays have billions of users, and that doesn’t count the tremendous amount of additional people if you consider shared accounts and shared devices.

The second pan- thing is the pandemic; humans have suffered pandemics before, but now everybody can talk about one of them—in real time. In the past, crises that have affected all have been too complicated or too removed to impact the daily experience of plenty of individuals such that they understand what’s going on. For instance, issues are around ozone layer depletion/recovery and the Montreal Protocol banning CFCs are simply over the heads (pun intended) of individuals unfamiliar with the subject: Something new will go wrong with the sky? Yeah whatever! Even the frustrating topic of money, seemingly universal, is pretty much irrelevant for decorative members of contemporary royalty, kept in lifelong gilded cages. Yet everyone is threatened by contagion; the novel coronavirus can infect anyone, no matter who or where you are. I imagine there must be exceptions, very few, to universal awareness of the idea of COVID-19 contagion risk (even if some disagree it’s a genuine risk), but—perhaps to the surprise of reactionaries—refugees near the Del Rio International Bridge between Texas and Mexico (a human rights crisis heightened in Sept/Oct of this year but existing previously and surely again) understood the concept of anti-coronavirus mitigation measures, and so do infants, in their own faint way, when they feel their parents’ stress or enjoy/endure longer, soapy bath-times. To sum up, basically everyone on the planet has some understanding, however minimal, that a serious pandemic, or the idea of it for those who (incorrectly) disagree it’s serious, is going on.

In short, for the first time in human history, rare exceptions aside, not only is everyone talking with everyone, but everyone is talking with everyone about a somewhat easy to understand problem that affects all: contagion, from a widespread respiratory virus. I think that’s one huge reason why COVID-19 is catalyzing unprecedented change. Humans are fundamentally driven by knowledge and communication, and are now equipped to share their actions, experiences, and ideas in hopes of overcoming the more or less understandable (if in some aspects shrouded in mystery) planetary crisis and any other crises that surface.

The key point: two rival economic ideologies converting into a single global mono-empire

After saying the thought-provoking lines “It is very tempting to stop everything and live in the moment, but some things need us to be alert, careful and creative. One thing I have been saying for years is the US, China and Russia (and others) are all headed for a major crisis in 2020 (which is here now!) and so is the world generally. While some states are undergoing terror and totalitarianism, others are seeing unprecedented opportunities for healing,” Marsh continues: “The key point is that we are scaling up into a mono-empire from a system of two rival economic ideologies (cold war communism and capitalism).”

In the United States, a younger person may be familiar with trying to convince a reactionary Boomer that capitalism is dumb. The reactionary Boomer might, well, react by saying: “A little stupid sometimes maybe, but communism is far worse, therefore capitalism is the only answer.” Reminiscent of former UK prime minister and arch-conservative Margaret Thatcher insisting that “there is no alternative” to market economy worth anyone spending any time on. If you try to ask Boomers not about capitalism versus communism, but rather about capitalism versus feudalism, or capitalism versus whatever’s coming next, you might get blank stares, or the conversation might improve and open up. Such dialogue demonstrates that Cold War-era USians generally see political options forever boiled down, as in Manicheanism, to two opposing choices: communism or capitalism. That vanishing, yet still influential, stage of history is getting converted, and converted fast, into a single planetary empire.

What is this global mono-empire of supranational power? International tech corporations manipulating, disappearing, and propagandizing knowledge or “knowledge” while permanently storing our personal data that joins other permanently recorded information for their management of a reputation economy that will continue and worsen the extermination of the poor (read more and evidence here). To know what to do about it, we need, among other things, to see what’s before our eyes, as Marsh’s post explains.

Three things to watch for: diminishing trade economy, law of the last circle, and escaping the mono-empire

Before getting started on this section proper, a quick vocabulary note. To read the below passages, as a kind of shorthand, you can think of an endogroup as, due to emergency conditions and fear/guilt symbiosis, affiliated people claiming they have an exclusive identity, idealizing an image (perhaps a leader or symbol), and believing an exceptional myth of their endogroup, while empathic and euphoric conduits to life outside their endogroup are blocked. Endosocial strategies are not necessarily bad, but endosocial extremism is. Endosocialism is contrasted with exosocial expansion, the “[u]ninhibited expansion of self through continual establishment of euphoric conduits through relationships, discovery, creation, spirituality, etc.” Exosocial expansion is something humanity needs more of. (Read Marsh’s book on self since it’s more complicated than this quick Cliffs Notes-style summary.)

Here’s the first thing to watch for from Marsh’s April 2020 post: dramatically decreasing importance of trade.

One, the [trade] economy is not going to be nearly as important as it was before. This may be unimaginable to people who have been accustomed to framing all of our problems in terms of economics, but think of how religions and states faded as the dominant endogroups when new transcendental endogroups appeared. Things that appear essential to society can fade into irrelevance if they are based only on endoreality, as [trade] economics is. The crash we started the year [2020] off with will not simply produce a depression and then recovery. Instead, it will illustrate the fact that economics now is simply an abstracted power structure [consider] with no underlying support in universal reality (like all endoreality). Economics as we know it, is dead. This does not mean it will disappear completely overnight, or that it will not remain in some form in some places, but, like religions, states, families, and other formerly dominant endogroups, it will no longer be the dominant or authoritative power structure in our lives. This is explained in great detail in The Approval Economy which will be published one day.

I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about how the trade collapse/change is playing out in most countries, but I’m aware of what’s happening here in the United States and in a few other places. Of course USians have heard about supply chain problems, such as the article last month in The Atlantic titled “[The United States] is running out of everything.” Those in the know for the past few decades have acknowledged the taboo subject of how in the US, far from its intelligentsia able to remain forever smug about not signing portions of international law from a catbird seat position, will find itself increasingly dependent on, and unable to force compliance from, those it previously mocked (or invaded). USians might notice non-USians are more and more vocal on global social media every day, and that the centuries-old hell is other people Eurocentric philosopher tomes are not stopping, say, Myanmar rebels from sharing their news online. But like trusting Nate Silver in 2016 that Hillary Clinton would win the White House, many in the United States today promise themselves that we’re in just another merely temporary economic downturn. Instead, what’s happening will be far more transformative. I’ve started tracking this topic on my blog using the tag economics and the header “worldwide trade economy collapse/change.” You might consider that, as international experience demonstrates, USians are typically exceptionally helpless and all too often admire an idiocracy, especially when it comes to insisting social support is for only weaklings and imposing shame for it. But the US is going to need social support badly; and, the US won’t be able to provide enough of it from within. For more on this, and other topics such as the international implications of US federal FATCA law (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act), see my blog’s Leaving the US tag.

Verdict? Yeah, we’re seeing the worldwide trade economy collapse/change come to pass, even if arriving in a strange, slow-mo, lumbering Frankenstein’s monster sort of way.

Here’s the second thing to watch for from Marsh’s “The catalyst effect of COVID-19”:

Two, in accordance with the law of the last circle, also explained in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, places like the US, and China are going to try to fall back to old real or imagined endogroups such as those around states, religions, etc. as the economic endogroups weaken. We have already seen this in the global reversion to various forms of endogroups producing widespread nationalism, sexism, racism, religious cults and every other form of endosocial extremism. This will continue in some regions, and we are still at risk of civil wars and other endogroup atrocities from this.

The retreat to far-right demagoguery playing out in many countries currently is an example of Marsh’s law of the last circle; think fascist Jair Bolsarano in Brazil, for instance, or the likely return of Trump in November 2024. Revivals of authoritarian, patriarchal religion would be another example, as in the “Christian America” antagonists in science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1990s Parable novels, who decades before Trump, chanted “Make America Great Again.” Another example would be Steve Bannon allying with Moonie cults that literally worship assault rifles and are setting up compounds in Tennessee and Texas. A lighthearted and non-harmful example would be my reading the recent autobiographies of the heavy metal rock star men I grew up idolizing, when I’m tired, depleted, and want to turn my brain off before bed. We all employ various endosocial strategies from time to time, but endosocial extremism threatens atrocities, already existent or forthcoming, and threatens to block exosocial expansion.

Verdict? Yes, the law of the last circle is increasingly observable, with people retreating from the possibility of evolution by fleeing, in greater numbers than just prior, toward their former (real or imagined) endogroups.

The third and final thing to watch for from Marsh’s post is the global mono-empire, and how to resist it. The global mono-empire can be seen, for example, in Mark Zuckerberg’s October 28 announcement—in response to revelations, of the manipulation and misery of Facebook and Instagram users, that whistleblower Frances Haugen provided to the Wall Street Journal and the Facebook Consortium—that Facebook will rebrand to Meta. The prefix meta- means “transcending”; it’s seen in terms such as metaverse, metacognition, and metafiction. Facebook’s new brand identity, Meta, suggests transcendental improvement, but will mean only transcendence above that Cold War binary of capitalism or communism, into the global mono-empire of knowledge hoarding and manipulation (propaganda), permanent personal data storage (no privacy), reputation economy, and so on. Note that Facebook, and any future Meta, will (continue to) have users who think of themselves as small biz capitalist, state communist, corporate capitalist, anarcho-communist, or as humans equal to some other ideology, but it doesn’t matter, with surveilled fixed identities, they will all answer to these tech corporations … unless,

Thankfully, the public can also scale up with its pan- connections to each other, with regional communities interconnecting for mutual benefit while retaining insofar as possible, their own autonomy, self-governance, and cultures. The public can resist the global mono-empire, while supporting, or revoking support for, international, transparent, peer-promoting epistemic communities providing expertise with the help of knowledge bridges (decode that mouthful here). In her post, Marsh provides a 14-point list of opportunities activists can pursue to take advantage of the pandemic to achieve worthy goals. The COVID crisis is not only an opportunity for the global mono-empire, but also for us. For instance, one of her suggestions is, since public transit was becoming free of charge in many places, not to let it become unfree ever again. Seattle failed to accomplish that goal. During the early phases of the pandemic, the City of Seattle made bus rides free; then in later phases, the transit authorities said, time to return to paying bus fare. As far as I’ve been able to make out from my high castle, Seattleites hearing news of the upcoming change explained to each other they just knew that doing anything to stop it would be unrealistic, so the transit authorities said Wow that was easy and resumed charging money for bus rides, unhindered. And Seattle conservatives don’t care if bus rides cost money because they hate the idea of anybody (beyond families, churches, and other masculinist endogroups) providing or using goods and services for sheer fun, like basking in the sunlight that funds Earth life for free. (All of life is literally free; ultimately, the sun is paying for all this.) I don’t know what the status of the free public transit goal is outside the United States. Imagine if there had been just 14 journ-activists available, each one tracking a single of the 14 goals worldwide; then we’d know, and maybe more people would have been persuaded to understand and pursue the 14 aims! It can still happen, there’s some word that starts with d and rhymes with phonate that may be relevant. Regarding resisting the mono-empire, Marsh writes about the importance of her proposed global commons for public data (GetGee) and suggests using the news of supply chain problems to encourage, not development of evermore hierarchical forced trade dependency, but development of collaboration through networked fostering of strength and support. Check out her ‘The catalyst effect of COVID-19’ post for the other fascinating points on her list of 14 goals, which might call to mind, somewhat, how Marx and Engels created a 10-point plan in the Communist Manifesto (recommending for instance the abolition of all rights of inheritance) or the Black Panther Party put forth their 10-point plan in 1966 (demanding among other things an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people).

All of the above in one encounter

Driving back to Seattle, I parked along the way—somewhere off Highway 38 in southwest Oregon—to buy a cap for the air inflation valve of one of my tires. As the commercial jingle has it, I got in the zone: AutoZone! Therein I had a single encounter that encompasses all three points Marsh’s post recommends watching for.

A heavily tatted clerk rung up my tiny plastic bag of four tire air valve caps at the register and grumbled aloud about how AutoZone store staff (trade) is supposed to be a family (families are fine but converting workplaces to one hints of the law of the last circle) and how the other employees were letting him down by not coming in and working overtime (economic trade collapse/change, as r/antiwork posts from this month also suggest). Forgetting I was apparently the only dude in the store, and perhaps the whole rural red area, with long hair and an anti-COVID19 face mask on, I tried to make a joke about how the forthcoming zombie apocalypse might be filmed by Tarantino, you know, Quarantine Tarantino. The tatted clerk ignored me entirely, instead initiating a new conversation with an employee in the back (sticking with his workplace trade endogroup dominance battles rather than experiencing an emotional conduit with an outsider offering something punny). The tatted guy beseeched the second employee to come in as soon as possible for overtime. That other employee refused. The heavily tatted clerk began loudly bemoaning the general state of things. “I want to rejoin the Army,” he said bluntly. “I want to go back to Afghanistan!” Since his trade economy endogroup is collapsing, then it’s law of the last circle, at least in his imagination, reverting or regressing back to his former cherished endogroup, the hierarchical militia of Pentagon mercenaries he’d belonged to before. I punched in my payment card’s PIN and did the remaining button-presses, thereby entering my transaction and other personal data into permanent ledgers for manipulation use by the global mono-empire, regardless of whether the bureaus of that mono-empire advertise themselves to their populations as capitalist, communist, or perhaps someday soon, neither. When I left O̶m̶e̶l̶a̶s̶ AutoZone, I enjoyed the cool night weather (primary euphoria / exosocial joy), reminded myself to be grateful for the valve cap as I installed it and for my knowing how to install it in the first place, i.e. not being afraid of car maintenance as many are (gratitude, another emotion associated with exosocial interactions, in this case with older siblings who taught me car stuff), and finally, plain ol’ smiling and feeling good from this great trip I’d just enjoyed (rather than, as I know some do, including Western thinkers amplified by academia, arguing that happy nature hikes should be permanently off the table since the trails eventually come to a end, causing nihilistic sadness). Were the public having a blast sharing free essentials (among the recommended goals in Marsh’s post), providing for one another, as Food Not Bombs does (it’s real! it’s realistic!), I and others would be freed from unwanted paid-employment, and could more often enjoy examples, small or big, of expansive exosocial life.

Timelessness and chaos

Visiting the redwoods, you inevitably think of how these giant trees, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of years old, were here long before you were, and will be here long after you’re gone. A thought that might feel scary in an extreme endosocial headspace/environment, becomes natural and good in the exosocial great outdoors. Your time is part of, not some stupid endogroup cult, but the greater timelessness of Mother Nature.

In the United States, it can be common for activists to brag that any proposed change is unrealistic, especially if the origin of the proposal is not the usual vaunted Angry Intellectual Men. People telling each other (due to propaganda) that they just know of good change, that’ll never happen, is actually the only real obstacle. If people went out by the truckloads to catch invisible Pokemon a few years back, they can be convinced in truckloads to read books. Well, maybe. Among many other reasons, as a result of such US-specific barriers to activism (at least among my generation), I’m leaving the country, eventually, an aim of mine fans of this blog will be familiar with. It might take a while, and I worry over leaving people I care about in a metaphorical sinkhole they or those around them might not be able to see, but …

Elsewhere in the world, the COVID-19 catalyst effect might mean many people going outside and rediscovering efforts like Food Not Bombs, sharing food with each other in new and joyous ways. In the United States, movements afoot to ban dual citizenship, lock down borders permanently, and deprive residents even further of quality knowledge and trust might eventually mean something horrifying countrywide. Myanmar, and the open air prison of Palestine, a stage-setting for security forces training and live weapons industry advertising expo, come to mind.

Philip K. Dick also comes to mind, one of my favorite science fiction authors, whose stories have been popularized by Hollywood movies that strip out almost all his philosophical content and replace it with action heroes and fight scenes. PKD’s stories deal with questions around defining reality and acting authentically. Ultimately, he banked on the courage of the public and his “secret love of chaos.” Instead of picking identities demanded by the mono-empire’s drop-down menus, we can choose to change daily, or even moment to moment, in our chaotic world. You see a lot of that in the forest or on the beach. Crashing waves, bickering birds, falling trees. Slowly erranding slugs. Happily climbing humans.

I’ll give PKD the last word:

I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

This blog post, Reading ‘The catalyst effect of COVID-19’, a year and a half later, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/07/reading-catalyst-effect-covid19-year-half-later/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 44 of 52. I skipped entry 43 due to travel in the last week...