{"id":15693,"date":"2025-04-04T04:34:29","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T11:34:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/douglaslucas.com\/blog\/?p=15693"},"modified":"2025-05-13T15:43:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T22:43:00","slug":"teslatakedown-1of3-crashcourse-musk-dogecoup-resist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/douglaslucas.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/04\/teslatakedown-1of3-crashcourse-musk-dogecoup-resist\/","title":{"rendered":"#TeslaTakedown Pt. 1 of 3: Crash course in Elon Musk, the DOGE coup, and resisting same"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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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\u2014and everything else\u2014with 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 \u0336t\u0336o\u0336r\u0336c\u0336h\u0336 trade in your, or at least your neighbor’s, Tesla, that crappy<\/a> AI experiment on wheels made by his company of the same name. After all, a major Tesla investor told<\/a> Newsweek<\/em> 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n

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Critiquing car and country, unknown NYC editor adds text to parked Tesla vehicle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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!<\/em> reported<\/a> 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<\/a> (see this spreadsheet<\/a>) around the country promise to be even bigger. Even the Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/em> 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<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n

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Protester dressed in dinosaur costume holds sign: “You thought the Nazis were extinct? Don’t buy a swasticar!”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Video game analogy time: So far in Trump2’s 2025, Tesla shares have dropped<\/a> more than 37%, to $243.16 (USD) as of this writing, but if the health bar, I mean share price<\/a>, of the $TSLA boss drops even further in this fight\u2014to $114 or less<\/a>\u2014it’s going to cause Musk some serious problems. He’s secured key loans for his Xitter acquisition\u2014his propaganda Death Star\u2014by using as collateral<\/a>, among other things, Tesla stock. “If Tesla stock keeps crashing,” lawyer and legal commentator Tristan Snell posted<\/a> on Mar. 12, “the banks\/creditors could repossess Twitter[.]” $TSLA\u2014and therefore the fate of those loans and Musk’s propaganda Death Star\u2014is 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<\/a> of Musk’s Death Star to blow that thing<\/a> so we can go home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014yeah, 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<\/a> that MAGA co-opted)\u2014his polls, man, they’re dropping like Tesla stock. Nerds at the Marquette University Law School determined<\/a> 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<\/a>, so they’re gonna start saying the nowhere-to-be-seen conceded Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s favorite curse word<\/a>\u2014”motherfucker”\u2014pretty soon, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, it’s confusing. You’re going to the countrywide #TeslaTakedown protests on Sat. Apr. 5, sure\u2014except, 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. This blog post of about 10,000 words, the first installment of three, is designed as your friendly, but not dumbed down<\/a>, 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<\/em>, so you can do it. This installment\u2014and the future two installments\u2014revolve 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?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Protesters hold signs outside Tesla site, one reading “Honk if you hate Elon” Actual faces replaced by smile faces for anonymization.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Part two will analyze the Trump2 day-one executive order<\/a> establishing DOGE; its contested organizational structure and the implications for FOIA and the administrative coup; Musk’s weird, half-hour speech<\/a> from the Oval Office about DOGE and political philosophy while his kid X \u00c6 A-Xii (that’s his name) rubbed boogers<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part three will elaborate on Elon Musk’s personal history<\/a> 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<\/a>; various odds and ends; and, an assessment of how the protests went, plus suggestions for future mass-collaborative refinements of $TSLA’s stock price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now, strap on your helmet and other antifa self-defense gear, because it’s time for an…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intro to the DOGE Dogshit<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, a month after Elon Musk endorsed<\/a> 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<\/a> Xitter livestream<\/a>, on which Musk pitched a “government efficiency commission” starring himself. Some three weeks later, then-candidate Trump formally announced<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a> for the November 2024 contests altogether was nearly $300 million dollars, all of it to Republican candidates, making him the largest<\/a> and most prominent known donor to U.S. federal elections since 2010 or perhaps even earlier<\/a>. 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!<\/p>\n\n\n

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Kabuso photo from 2010; the image later went viral online<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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> 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<\/a> featuring Kabuso, a Shiba Inu well loved online and called by admirers a doge<\/em>\u2014pronounced something like “doughzhe” and nothing more than a cutesy way of saying dog<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much Dogecoin does Musk own? Dunno; he’s denied<\/a> owning wallets for the canine-themed coin, whether public or private\u2014but, see that crypto-<\/em> prefix in cryptocurrency<\/em> for the obvious caveat: crypto- means<\/a> hidden, secret, as in cryptographic. As of this March, two unknown parties<\/a> 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<\/a>, merely a way for him to connect with, to win over, key political and industry audiences (read: MAGA techbros)? Some of both?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Official logo of Dogecoin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Musk, as far as publicly known, started promoting the digital doggy token in 2019<\/a> with this dumbed-down tweet<\/a>: “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It\u2019s pretty cool.” He likes calling himself the “DOGEfather<\/a>” and\u2014as a ‘joke’ typed onto his Twitter bio that immediately jumped the price 17%<\/a>\u2014the “former CEO of DOGEcoin.” As recently as Mar. 17, 2025, Musk tweeted<\/a> 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\u2014we’ll get to that\u2014might be looking over his shoulder for any misstep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we can just shake his tightrope some …<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elon Musk has been on a tightrope for a while. A RICO class action<\/a> 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<\/a> 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\u2014well, most infamously prior to this Trump2 administration\u2014Tesla stock fell<\/a> 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<\/a> 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\u2014Kabuso did nothing wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Elmo says, I’m Elmo, from Sesame Street!<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In 2021, Elon Musk\u2014or sometimes, to his critics, “Elmo,” a contraction of his name referencing Sesame Street<\/em>‘s<\/a> novicial, stuck-in-falsetto red monster\u2014went on Saturday Night Live<\/em> and tried<\/a> to boost<\/a> Dogecoin by plugging it during his monologue, but did so poorly with his performance overall that the price plummeted at once<\/a>. If you’ve never seen his five-minute SNL monologue<\/a>, it’s worth suffering through\u2014it recalls another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, trying<\/a> to seem cool<\/a> in front of high school students who couldn’t have cared less (“Who Bezos?” one said into the ears of history).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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\u2014and unrecovered perpetrators\u2014are among the VIP dissociated, for reasons having to do with that adjective: unrecovered, you know, from trauma: the cycle of abuse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to his brother<\/a>, 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<\/a> the world that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization[.]” Alhough the definitions are contested, it makes sense<\/a> to think of sympathy as cognitive pity, and empathy as emotional contagion\u2014for 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\u2014it can encourage groupthink\u2014but 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<\/em>, he typically shows more confidence when performing publicly\u2014bad news for the rest of us. Ketamine covering up his underlying trauma? We’ll get to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> Oscars party on Mar. 2, 2014 with Ghislaine Maxwell<\/a>, 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<\/a> in Long Beach, California\u2014run by the Edge Foundation, a so-called intellectuals’ club\u2014the same night Epstein attended as a convicted-and-known pedo; three: Musk getting<\/a> subpoeaned<\/a> by the Virgin Islands in 2023 for their civil suit<\/a> accusing J.P. Morgan<\/a> of profiting off of Epstein’s pedosadism since he was their close client<\/a> for years even following his pedo guilty plea<\/a>, the profits in question perhaps tied to Epstein’s dubious boasts in 2018<\/a> that he was supposedly advising Musk about Tesla. Elmo denies all this or dismisses it as negligible, tweeting<\/a> in 2023 about Epstein: “That cretin never advised me on anything whatsoever” and in 2020<\/a> about Maxwell: “Don’t know Ghislaine at all. She photobombed me once at a Vanity Fair party[.]”<\/p>\n\n\n

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The infamous 2014 photo of Ghislaine Maxwell and Elon Musk at the Vanity Fair<\/em> Oscars party<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

A researcher<\/a> working toward the #OpDeathEaters<\/a> long-term goals<\/a> told me they believe Musk’s absence from Epstein’s unredacted little black book<\/a>\u2014a ‘trophy collection’ of contact info and names Epstein knew or sought to know in order to use them socially, financially, or physically\u2014likely 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\u2014unfortunately, what’s under the hood (or covers) with Elon Musk, financially or otherwise, is by no means a fully open book. Yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> an address to a joint session of Congress), said<\/a> 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<\/a> 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<\/a> 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<\/a>, ten Democrats proceeded to join with Republicans to censure Green for having had the courage to interrupt The Donald. Musk, watching from the gallery\u2014is he who truly heads DOGE, as Trump said? Its organizational structure is disputed. Which we’ll get to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> Elmo on Xitter, and the pair couldn’t stop laughing as Musk said<\/a> 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<\/em> 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[.]”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014as someone who causes losses for the self-declared King Trump<\/a>\u2014then infighting<\/a> among Trump-Musk factions<\/a>, which has already happened<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, ever since Elmo went, as he and Tucker Carlson put it, “all in” for Trump, the criminally liable<\/a> Musk’s outcomes have been unstably yoked to outcomes for the criminally liable<\/a> Trump (and outcomes for the criminally liable<\/a> Department of Justice that the president is securing<\/a> more control<\/a> over). Imagine the tightrope: you’re the world’s richest man\u2014with an unhealed, bullied, raging child inside\u2014fearing 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?<\/p>\n\n\n

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2011 photo from Edge’s website<\/a> shows Zack Bogue, co-founder of Monteara Capital Partners, at the billionaire’s dinner in fairly close quarters with Elon Musk in the background at viewer’s far left, his head turned to the right as he speaks with someone (Musk identifiable especially since his clothes match his in another photo<\/a> from the same event); at viewer’s far right, seated, that’s Jeffrey Epstein attending as a known and convicted pedosadist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Conflicts of interest and the ongoing administrative coup<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014SpaceX 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<\/a> 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<\/em>, not a job title<\/em>\u2014it’s not publicly known what Elmo’s actual job title is. If he even has one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The White House told<\/a> NBC News on Mar. 21 not to worry about oversight or whatever since Musk is receiving ethics briefings\u2014is receiving<\/em>: 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<\/a> 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\u2014say, where’d<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, headed de facto<\/em> by Musk, DOGE is a shadowy team of fast-typing “Muskrat” twenty-somethings (we’ll get to them) on what might at first seem\u2014and partially is\u2014an 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?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Oval Office, Feb. 11, 2025: unelected Elon Musk lecturing on austerity and philosophy; his boogery kid; and seated behind the Resolute Desk, Donald Trump<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

To explain: the power to establish or abolish federal departments or agencies rests with Congress<\/a>\u2014which is why the Department of Government Efficiency isn’t a real department (hey, we finally got to that one!)\u2014although there have been moments in U.S. history<\/a> (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<\/a>, most recently in 1984. Requests from presidents from both major parties following 1984 have been roundly rejected by Congress over and over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Republicans in the House are now eager<\/a> 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<\/a>, as I understand it, would lower\u2014from a 2\/3 majority in the Senate to simple majorities in both chambers\u2014the 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<\/a> 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<\/em> regulatory agencies, a power he currently lacks and that the Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 very much wants<\/a> him to have. It would allow fast-tracking<\/a> of the DOGE\/Trump administrative coup; critics are calling<\/a> it a rubber stamp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014their core functions\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DOGE wants to shift-delete the Department of Education, USAID\u2014and quite possibly the necessary structures around Social Security<\/a>, Medicaid<\/a>, 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<\/em>, abolish most everything that isn’t you<\/em>, including Congress ceding much of their own power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under DOGE\u2014or maybe even under a mysterious company of Musk’s already in existence on paper in Texas, such as United States of America Inc.<\/a>\u2014how then will social safety net services be provisioned to those USians enduring any forthcoming unforecasted natural disasters, the rising number<\/a> of passenger plane crashes, disabilities, old age, and the hundreds of cases<\/a> of measles<\/a> spreading across the unvaccinated as bronze-faced health secretary RFK Jr. continues to diss<\/a> the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine<\/a>, as he did during a Mar. 10 FOX News interview (part one<\/a>; part two<\/a>)? You know the interview that he gave from, no joke, a Steak ‘n Shake, promoting one of his misleading theories<\/a>, this one about how he’s going to make fast food great again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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!<\/em> Or more precisely, it’s the voice of aforementioned pro-monarchy blogger Curtis Yarvin \/ Mencius Moldbug dominating, discussed below. In 2008, Yarvin wrote<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DOGE has been taking those federal department\/agencies innards\u2014the offices’ key functions\u2014and 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\u2014that’s payroll taxes on worker-bees, silly, not on billionaires or nonhuman corporations or, coming soon, on artificial intelligences (in govcorp hands<\/a> not all that much more than overhyped calculators with soaring, secret environmental costs<\/a>). Imagine the big three entitlement programs run by Musk’s companies for the motive of his profit: We’ll keep the weak alive\u2014so long as they’re strong enough to pay Elmo!<\/em> is otherwise known as human extermination or, when carried out by its very victims such as Musk’s bro fandom, autogenocide<\/a>; as ever, the imbalances of trade\/hierarchy\/profit maximalism are inevitably<\/a>, lethally unfair<\/a>. (Support the leopardine face-eaters<\/a> and you know whose face they eventually eat.)<\/p>\n\n\n

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Musk waving red chainsaw around the 2025 CPAC stage as its donor, Javier Milei, looks on, giving two thumbs up<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

If you caught the Feb. 20 news blip video<\/a> 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<\/a>” hat, showcased the big stupid red toy\u2014waving it around without actually turning it on\u2014yelling, “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<\/a> 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<\/a> about Milei last year\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Body count: federal departments\/agencies DOGE is destroying<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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Image for the Apr. 5 nationwide “Hands off!” protests<\/a>, simultaneos with #TeslaTakedown.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Time to list a few of the many federal departments\/agencies<\/a> 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<\/a>\u2014disappear 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<\/a> 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<\/em>. In that dystopia, as much as zombie TV episodes make you think that\u2014in 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<\/a>)\u2014you’ll suddenly become a rugged individualist badass, well, flatly, you won’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>), 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<\/em> compilation<\/a>, which details the devastation at more than a dozen additional departments\/agencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n