They have interesting pedigrees: Meta, Palantir, Neuralink, xAI, SpaceX, Databricks, Energize AI.
It seems clear where this is going. Data mining and algorithmic (claimed!) efficiency improvements while working on an essential and critical production system.
Since these people claim that "AI" does not need to respect privacy and copyright, perhaps they'll also train a model on this.
Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition. Are they not interrupting their enemy while he is making mistakes? That would be the only explanation.
Like Democratic elected officials? They lost. They have no power. They don’t control any branch of government.
They have as much ability to pass laws as you or I personally do. They have as much ability to hand down a Supreme Court or direct law enforcement as you or I personally do. None. Where are we? Complaining on social media I guess.
I’m quite frustrated why my elected officials as well but it is kind of hard to blame them when we don’t give them any actual power to wield.
Sure, but there's other things they can do. They can all stop trying to achieve bipartisan support on things, as the republicans do when they're in the minority. Senators can withdraw their unanimous consent. They can vote against everything. They can drag a bunch of reporters over to Treasury and start loudly asking questions
It sounds like some are finding a clue, like the ones who stomped down to USAID with reporters in tow today. They need to do more of this.
Just because they can't pass legislation doesn't mean they are out of ideas.
What you can do is write to or call them. Ask them to vote no on every senate confirmation. Ask them to not provide unanimous consent. Ask them to make a scene. Demand answers!
Have they voted on a single thing yet except the Laken Riley Act? (Which they probably shouldn't have done, but anyway.) This administration is not waiting on Congress to do anything.
But that aside, I agree that they need to start getting back attention. Being absolutely silent except for individuals saying things that are only reported on Bluesky is not enough to be taking back control of attention.
> Have they voted on a single thing yet except the Laken Riley Act?
I mean on things like confirmations, but when bills start coming up reps need to go full on toddler mode and say no to everything.
They need to read the Mitch McConnell book on gumming up the works of government and grind everything to a halt until the madness stops.
> But that aside, I agree that they need to start getting back attention. Being absolutely silent except for individuals saying things that are only reported on Bluesky is not enough to be taking back control of attention.
I completely agree. Social media doesn't help anything, unless they're live streaming themselves daring the people obstructing Treasury to arrest them.
This isn't a "business as usual" moment, this is a five-alarm-fire moment.
They ignored economic problems for a majority of the population similar to the republicans for 20 years and focused on projects(wars) and culture war topics that are big mostly for the wealthy elite offspring of the ever shrinking middle class. They are by definition unable to act, all they want, left,right,center, is to conserve longer,slow down the decay.
Propaganda, mostly. Conservatives have gained control of most Media outlets, and have been using them to launder consent. It's incredible that we've given Democrats absolutely no power, they can do literally nothing, and yet they're still somehow to blame for what Republicans are doing.
Democrats received more money than Republicans from big tech and media for a very long time, including the most recent presidential election. Are big media stupid for donating more to their enemies than who they purportedly support?
Your other option is admitting that Democrats had previously owned the media and doing precisely the thing you're accusing Conservatives of doing. You definitely cannot claim they did not seeing the checks written out to DNC and other PACs alongside the board seats from previous administrations.
I doubt it was propaganda. If you look at the polls, the most important issues have been the economy, the immigration and the violent crime. All 3 of which have been absolutely disastrous for the Biden/Harris administration.
And people voted accordingly, and correctly.
Biden's approval rating is 39%, disapproval at 58%.
Polling on particular issues can be shifted by propaganda, so this isn’t a particularly strong argument against the idea.
Although, I’m not sure what propaganda really means in this context anyway, I mean, “the economy” is a pretty abstract thing so people engage with it mostly through reporting of various sorts. The decision of what aspects of the economy to focus on could be seen as propaganda.
The admin plays in a global economy which is ridiculously complex, so there’s always room for it to be doing as well as possible when my guy is in charge, underperform expectations when the bad guy is in charge.
that is a dishonest interpretation of the data, the overall _trend_ is "U.S. violent and property crime rates have plunged since 1990s, regardless of data source"
Why should crime ever go up, if other countries show that the floor of crime rate is even lower through policy and enforcement changes? It is always valid to blame the government for high crime relative to other nations with lower crime.
The fact you can't recognize how propaganda can distort the reality of the issues you are listing above, makes one question if you actually understand what propaganda is, or have any interest in understanding reality.
I won't ever claim it's a simple picture, but there's enough peer-reviewed information out on the web to elaborate on your 3 rather unspecific talking points.
We can hold your hand if it's too scary to google each of your issues above, I do have empathy that changing ones belief system is scary, but the alternative is delusion.
I was thinking of a theory that from evolutionary instinct people want to be king of their castle, secure against the enemy tribes and having a happy family - prince meets his princess has kids etc. The Democrat woke principles go against that rather - the rival tribes will take your job because you're the wrong skin color or a bunch crossed over the open border, your prince and princess stuff is outdated because male and female is replaced by gender fluidity and trans etc.
I don't have a strong opinion personally but I don't think it's a vote winner. The dems probably should have gone with a popular mainstream candidate like Shapiro say rather the the pro woke, most left voting in the senate Kamala.
> Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition. Are they not interrupting their enemy while he is making mistakes? That would be the only explanation.
You mean the same Democrats who were not given a majority on neither legislative houses, nor the Presidency?
Some people voted against their best interests. Consequences.
The democrats have effectively no power. They control neither the house, senate, or presidency, the courts have become more conservative, etc. They can only talk. The filibuster will prevent new laws, but that isn't much when the federal government acts according to the presidency, and the filibuster does not prevent government appointments
And the filibuster is nothing more than a polite restriction that the majority of the senate places on themselves — they are free to remove it if they wish.
I guess Elon believes that long wait times for government services is because of an O(n^3) function somewhere...
> Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition
I think because this is so unprecedented the structures to oversee simply don't exist. The article mentions that congress has no mechanisms for oversight, and Elon is moving too quickly in this area for any checks to take place.
The courts are just now beginning to order injuctions and restraining orders, for the stuff that happened last week. The process seems to lag by 2-3 business days. So hopefully we'll be seeing a lot more this week.
How the administration responds to those is going to define how this constitutional crisis unfolds. And it is a constitutional crisis: congress unambiguously has the power of the purse, not the executive.
If Trump gets away with this, it isn't clear that Congress has any power at all.
You can't just prefix any random BS with "you seem to be". No, there is zero indication for that. You're just going "I know you are, but what is Elon?"
Policies do a great deal to determine elections - American political parties are more polarized by policy now than they've ever been. It only seems otherwise because there's a lot of people who don't consider opposition to their policy objectives legitimate, and thus diagnose it as cooked-brain syndrome rather than attempting to understand and compromise.
People's policy preferences are downstream of how cooked their brains are. So it's not really policies that are determining it, it's the fact that their brains are cooked through constant exposure to bad things. If their brains are uncooked through constant exposure to good things, then their policy preferences will also change.
Now I'm not sure what we're talking about. If you postulate that brains can be "cooked" and "uncooked" in response to new information, doesn't "cooked" just mean "persuaded"? I definitely agree that my policy preferences would be more dominant if people spent more time ingesting the good arguments and good evidence that convinced me to hold them.
That's fair -- "cooked" does imply an increase in entropy that can't be reversed. I think it sadly is irreversible in some people, but many others can be brought back (you're already starting to see a backlash to Trump).
Being exposed to the arguments over and over, repeatedly, probably matters more than their quality. That's what I was going for with "cooked", since "persuaded" isn't quite the right word for it.
> I guess we got the government we voted for? And since it’s a democracy, I suppose that means we have exactly the government we deserve?
Well, we voted based on the only two options that were shoved down our throats by various groups of the wealthiest people on the planet. I don't personally think we deserve this, why would we? That said, if we don't do something, it won't get better.
we voted based on the only two options that were shoved down our throats by various groups of the wealthiest people on the planet
Well, we should have made a system that didn’t allow the wealthiest people on the planet to do that.
Not trying to be flip, I’m just trying to point out that it still all comes back to us in the end. We just have to hope for the best at this point. Buyer’s remorse is not gonna change the actions these people are likely to take.
I do agree with you when you say, something needs to be done. If these pres-vice pres pairings are the best the current system could come up with, then obviously there is a need to add some new aspects to the system that might encourage more competence in the candidates it produces.
> Well, we should have made a system that didn’t allow the wealthiest people on the planet to do that.
This feels correct-ish, but also pretty unrealistic. If you're born into a system where you have to choose between getting slapped and getting stabbed, then obviously the system shouldn't have been made that way -- that doesn't change the fact that it is that way, and you have to act within that system regardless of what ought to be the system instead.
I agree to an extent. Most of us are either still young, or just getting our bearings and seeing the problems as adults in the last 10 or so years. I feel comfortable saying that, knowing the demographics of the site. Most of us had little-to-no ability to shape the current situation. Our window has just opened.
No, but enough people voted for the party that put the supreme court justices in place who ruled on citizens united over the years.
Voting isn't a one time thing, it has repercussions that can be felt decades later (see shortages of ATC because of the actions of Reagan in the 80's).
Ok, so you stalked my comment history so I stalked yours.
What about the Trump administration is "intelligent"? Trump lies about everything. Pointing out other politicians lie isn't a good comeback. Trump lacks all understanding of how tariffs work, he said he was going to "repeal and replace" Obamacare on "day 1" in 2016, only to say he has "concepts of a plan" in 2024, whatever the fuck that means. He rarely has "ideas", he just bitches about stuff and handwaves away everything when pressed for any details.
"Lawful order"? I don't know that that means. I would say that writing a lot of executive orders that go directly against the constitution is literally the opposite of "lawful order", but you're free to disagree.
Deporting all these violent illegals has been outstanding in my opinion. He's actually enforcing existing immigration laws.
By way of threats of tariffs, He's gotten Columbia, Mexico and Canada to enact policies in the interests of America.
America gets constantly screwed by other nations because we've allowed great trade imbalances and weak borders. Other nations have been happy to step back and let the US fund the UN, NATO, etc. Historically, we have the lowest tariffs and accept the most illegal immigrants in the world. Trump's changing that and I'm here for it.
Btw, I'm all for legal immigration. I'm one myself. My family escaped a communist country and has experienced life under a leader much more authoritarian that what the Left conjures up about the other side.
Deporting violent immigrants is fine. Biden enforced immigration laws too, and when there was a bipartisan immigration reform bill Trump asked the conservatives to block it.
Trying to revoke birthright citizenship is not “enforcing existing law”.
The concessions from Mexico and Canada were already planned from last administration. Moreover, now there are retaliatory tariffs coming from them.
How does a trade imbalance imply that we are “screwed”? Trump repeats that constantly but it doesn’t seem implied to me.
The stuff about NATO is a lot more complicated than you’re making it out to be.
This is my biggest issue with Trump and his supporters, they treat everything as this incredibly reductive, black and white, “simple” issue.
No he did not. Biden's first acts were to repeal Trump's stringent immigration orders. After 3 and half years with another election looming and seeing the disaster that caused, all of the sudden, his administration wasn't so hot on open borders anymore. If he enforced immigration laws, we wouldn't have so many people who have illegally entered the country.
> Trying to revoke birthright citizenship is not “enforcing existing law”.
And I never claimed that. But I support an amendment towards that end.
> The concessions from Mexico and Canada were already planned from last administration.
Nope, the 10,000 troops Mexico just agreed to is on top of whatever other things they "promised" to do. And tariffs are off the table for now.
> Moreover, now there are retaliatory tariffs coming from them.
Nope, no tariffs have been enacted on either side at the moment.
> How does a trade imbalance imply that we are “screwed”?
We also have historically the lowest tariff rates in the world. Gee, I wonder if that's related. And then when we raise them to level the playing field, everyone bitches and whines.
> The stuff about NATO is a lot more complicated than you’re making it out to be.
> This is my biggest issue with Trump and his supporters, they treat everything as this incredibly reductive, black and white, “simple” issue.
Pretty hand wavy there.
My issue with liberals is the lack of common sense, e.g. allowing biological men to destroy women in sports, not being willing to define what a woman is, getting mad at Trump for enforcing immigration laws (i.e. not letting people enter the country illegally and kicking out those who do)
I dunno, sure doesn't look like Biden let up on enforcement to me [1]. More likely is that Trump destablised the west and caused a net increase in illegal migration attempts. Since Congress refused to pass comprehensive immigration reform (to please Daddy, of course) they didn't have the tools or money needed to keep up.
> My issue with liberals is the lack of common sense, e.g. allowing biological men to destroy women in sports, not being willing to define what a woman is
I find this one so funny. Most liberals agree with you on this, but none of us will get on board with turning to fascism because an incredibly small portion of the population needs a civil rights issue addressed. That means we are forced to deal with the radical leftists who you are so angry about, because at least they aren't trying to overthrow the government. It would get settled much faster, and much more to your satisfaction, if a third of the country wasn't determined to act in bad faith and pretend those people don't exist. That's just as bizarre as the people who pretend that biological women and trans women are the same.
> More likely is that Trump destablised the west and caused a net increase in illegal migration attempts.
nope, border encounters have dropped significantly after Trump took office.
To your last points, I won't address because you throw up unsubstantiated accusations that has become the Leftist party line. There's no discussion to be had here.
> nope, border encounters have dropped significantly after Trump took office.
Ok propaganda. CBP doesn't have numbers for January posted, so you have no idea what is actually happening.
> To your last points, I won't address because you throw up unsubstantiated accusations that has become the Leftist party line. There's no discussion to be had here.
Oh please, by all means, substantiate your last point. Ya'll are going to get exposed the next four years for being such feckless dorks.
> Ok propaganda. CBP doesn't have numbers for January posted, so you have no idea what is actually happening.
wrong. From the border chief:
"In the past seven days, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 4,577 individuals attempting to enter the country illegally, a significant 55% decrease from the previous week’s 10,281 apprehensions. This trend indicates that our enhanced border security measures produce results. With more boots on the ground, we’re making a substantial impact to the security of our borders."
> Ok propaganda. CBP doesn't have numbers for January posted, so you have no idea what is actually happening.
the above is what you claimed and are undeniably wrong about.
You can't admit error because you don't operate in truth, just emotions. When confronted with truth, you twist it to fit your narrative as you're doing here.
And the quality of the words (or lack thereof) that you choose to use e.g. feckless, dork, anti-social losers, weird, loathe reflects on you and your character and state of mind more than anything else. Here they are categorized as ad hominem attacks and are not looked upon highly because the kind of people who use them lack substantial arguments and thus resort to these low effort personal attacks.
You've spent the entire thread making unsubstantiated claims about trans people based on right wing propaganda. Practicing ad hominem attacks downthread is all you are good for, why would I waste actual effort on you?
> I went to the CBP website and you went to twitter
I went to Google and the twitter post from the official account of the CBP chief came up in search results. You claimed that reports from January from CBP weren't posted so I "have no idea what is actually happening.". You are wrong. Based on numbers from the CBP chief himself, I do have an idea of what is happening.
You also posited "More likely is that Trump destablised the west and caused a net increase in illegal migration attempts." when actually, based on the CBP numbers, the opposite has happened under Trump's leadership.
> You've spent the entire thread making unsubstantiated claims about trans people based on right wing propaganda
If you you actually go through this thread again, you'll see I mostly discussed tariffs and immigration. Out of this entire thread, I've written one phrase about the transgender issue:
> "allowing biological men to destroy women in sports, not being willing to define what a woman is"
And both of those claims have been well documented. They are facts, not propaganda. E.g. high school volleyball play Payton McNabb who sustained life long head injuries when a trans gender player spiked a ball in her face. E.g. at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing she was asked if she could define what a woman is and her reply was "I can't --".
Again, you are not operating in truth.
> ad hominem attacks downthread is all you are good for, why would I waste actual effort on you?
You are part of the "smug left"[0]. It's no wonder Joe Klein says this about the Democratic party ""The intellectual corrosion is comprehensive; it is only matched by the self-righteous arrogance.". I'm not sure about the first part, I avoid calling people stupid, but the latter point about the arrogance of the left is spot on.
I don't really want to comment on most of this post, but I want to address your final point:
> You are part of the "smug left"[0]. It's no wonder Joe Klein says this about the Democratic party ""The intellectual corrosion is comprehensive; it is only matched by the self-righteous arrogance.". I'm not sure about the first part, I avoid calling people stupid, but the latter point about the arrogance of the left is spot on.
Where the fuck did conservatives get the idea that they can say whatever they want and people will always be nice to them? The "smug left" stuff comes from the fact conservatives will hitch their wagon to so much stuff that is, in so far that this can be objective, very stupid.
For example, when I was a teenager, Conservatives were really trying to push for Creationism being pushed in schools. Creationism has no scientific basis, it has no business in a science classroom, it's based on an extremely stupid set of books, and yet this is the hill Conservatives wanted to die on.
Sometimes I decide to push back, even politely, but frankly it's exhausting. Creationists are just wrong, how many times should I be expected to have the same polite argument when they clearly have very little desire to actually learn anything?
This might come off as "smug", that's fine. I'm ok with being considered "smug". If you're really making your political decisions based on how polite some people are to you, then that's a lot more telling of you than me.
I appreciate your willingness to engage. I've lost the willpower to believe I can do anything to lift the veil. They are too scared...imagine the sheer panic of your belief system being challenged, when you've already got an insecure and victim mindset that MAGA has exploited.
I almost want to just hold their hands as they tremble through widening their overton window.
Don't try and lift the veil. Point out the veil is stupid looking and people who wear it are dorks. We don't need MAGA people to agree with me, we need the apathetic non-voters of this country to see them for the weird, anti-social losers that they are, and loathe them for it.
> No he did not. Biden's first acts were to repeal Trump's stringent immigration orders. After 3 and half years with another election looming and seeing the disaster that caused, all of the sudden, his administration wasn't so hot on open borders anymore. If he enforced immigration laws, we wouldn't have so many people who have illegally entered the country.
Again, a bipartisan immigration reform was on its way to pass through congress until Trump told all the conservatives to kill it.
> And I never claimed that. But I support an amendment towards that end.
So you agree that an executive order ending birthright citizenship is bad?
> We also have historically the lowest tariff rates in the world. Gee, I wonder if that's related.
You still haven't demonstrated how having a trade imbalance implies that we're "being screwed". Trump keeps asserting that, but that doesn't seem obvious to me.
> Pretty hand wavy there.
Sure, I was writing this on my phone and I didn't have time to go into the details of the intricacies of NATO. You're free to look into the details of NATO yourself (you haven't), and if you do you'll likely understand why saying that the US is being screwed by paying more for NATO doesn't make sense.
> My issue with liberals is the lack of common sense,
That's because "common sense" doesn't actually mean anything. What do you think that "common sense" means? Your "gut feeling"?
"Common sense" is a phrase used by pseudo-intellectuals who want to reduce everything into pithy one-liners and ignore the fact that the world is actually pretty complicated, and your "common sense" is often wrong. It's not exclusive to conservatives, but it does seem to be a phrase that's extremely popular with them.
I reject the notion that immigration, NATO, biological gender, and pretty much any federal policy can be easily explained with "common sense". But what do I know, I'm just a liberal who doesn't have any I guess.
> Nope, the 10,000 troops Mexico just agreed to is on top of whatever other things they "promised" to do. And tariffs are off the table for now.
You're right, I looked it up, though what I should point out is that Biden was able to get Mexico to send troops without starting a trade war. It's not clear to me that this required the threat of a trade war.
> Again, a bipartisan immigration reform was on its way to pass through congress until Trump told all the conservatives to kill it.
That bill had concessions that loosened asylum restrictions and border closure measures. Why would would Republicans who want a secure border pass that when they could wait for Trump to become president and get everything they want in terms of a strong, secure border and tough laws against illegal immigrants?
Besides, even if it did pass, Biden has shown he is unwilling to enforce laws on illegal immigration.
> So you agree that an executive order ending birthright citizenship is bad?
If it turns out to be unconstitutional, then it's illegal and yes, therefor "bad". That's up to the courts to decide. Either way, I absolutely support legally repealing birthright citizenship.
> You still haven't demonstrated how having a trade imbalance implies that we're "being screwed"
Ok, looks like you're right on this, a trade imbalance is not necessarily bad for the US. It is bad for specific domestic industries that are affected by it though. I'd argue to a certain extant a nation has an obligation to protect its businesses in the context of international trade.
Here are some examples of common sense
- Don't let biological men (humans with XY chromosome and a penis) into women's restrooms and locker rooms
- Don't let biological men compete in women's sports because it's unfair and dangerous
- Don't let violent thugs enter our country and if they do, kick them out.
The trade imbalance, like GDP, is a very crude economic measure. Do a search for “iPhone China trade imbalance” for more details. TL;DR is every iPhone is added to the trade deficit with China. However, China (Foxconn) just puts them together. The actual components come from all over the world. Then Apple sells them for 3x plus all the iCloud services. Samsung (Korea) makes more than Foxconn per iPhone.
> Besides, even if it did pass, Biden has shown he is unwilling to enforce laws on illegal immigration.
Again, the Biden administration deported a comparable number of people per year as Trump did first term. You keep repeating this, and sources have been provided to you, so it's bordering on dishonesty at this point.
> If it turns out to be unconstitutional, then it's illegal and yes, therefor "bad". That's up to the courts to decide. Either way, I absolutely support legally repealing birthright citizenship.
You didn't answer my question. The 14th Amendment really doesn't leave much wiggle room on this, and it's certainly not enough wiggle room to overrule it with an executive order.
Even if you think birthright citizenship is bad, wouldn't you agree that it's a terrible precedent to have a the president be able to arbitrarily be able to decide which Constitutional amendments need to be followed? Wouldn't you be against Biden writing an executive order repealing the second amendment?
I don't really see how birthright citizenship is bad, you haven't demonstrated this, all you've done is fear-monger about immigrants.
> I'd argue to a certain extant a nation has an obligation to protect its businesses in the context of international trade.
Sure, but the tariffs that Trump is threatening would be potentially helping some local businesses at the expense of others. It's not a clear cut net-win. If we impose tariffs on Canada, China, Mexico, or the EU, they are likely to give us retaliatory tariffs and that might affect businesses that depend on imports from those countries.
At least that's what nearly every economist says. Maybe they don't have common sense.
> Here are some examples of common sense - Don't let biological men (humans with XY chromosome and a penis) into women's restrooms and locker rooms - Don't let biological men compete in women's sports because it's unfair and dangerous
Well I'm glad you have it figured it out. I think people relying on "common sense", a term that doesn't mean anything for reasons already described, is really, really stupid. I also think that fear-mongering about trans people is pretty telling.
> Don't let violent thugs enter our country and if they do, kick them out.
No one wants violent criminals in here. Biden did deport violent immigrants. No one here wants violent people in the country. You can keep bringing this up as if I didn't already agree that we should deport violent criminals, indicating that you either a) didn't actually read my responses, b) ignored my response, or c) are just lying. I'm inclined to pick C at this point.
The filibuster in the Senate is powerful but it basically only blocks new laws from going in you can't really touch all the things Trump is doing via EO through Congressional obstruction the main avenue for blocking that is through the courts which ultimately have limited enforcement power.
Where it's going is largely irrelevant I suppose. The only reason the "doge" thing is going on is because Elon needed a way to insert himself into the government, and everybody else involved is too technically inept to realise (or care).
But the effects don't really matter because this is what the American public voted for. As an outsider who's read Daemon and Freedom when are you yanks gonna start the darknet already?
The democrats are busy trying to squeeze more AIPAC money for when they get massively primaried for backing a genocide. No, i'm not joking the house minority leader gave a speech on israel's success in gaza this week
Maybe the strategy is to let it play out until there is enough of a case that the other branches can’t look away? Let Elon show himself out by inevitably crossing Trump and going the way of so many other advisors?
> * Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) “Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payments systems of the Treasury, but you don't control the money of the American people. The US Congress does that under Article 1 of the Constitution ... we don't have a fourth branch of government called 'Elon Musk”
> * Rep. Chris Murphy (D-CT) “This is a constitutional crisis that we are in today. Let’s call it what it is.” -And- "Let's not pull any punches about why this is happening. Elon Musk makes billions off of his business with China. And China is cheering at this action today. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our govt right now is doing it based on self-interest."
> * Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) "It is a matter for Congress to deal with, not an unelected billionaire oligarchy named Elon Musk. And Elon, if you want to run USAID, get nominated by Trump and go to the Senate and good luck in getting confirmed."
> * Rep. Van Hollen (D-MD) “We asked to enter the Aid building, really on behalf of the American people, but to talk to Aid employees, because … there’s been a gag order imposed on Aid employees. So we wanted to learn first-hand what’s happening. We were denied entry based on the order that they received from Elon Musk and Doge, which just goes to show that this was an illegal power grab by someone who contributed $267bn to the Trump effort in these elections.”
Estimated crowd of 100 protesters (reported). Other attendees and speeches made by Congressmen Beyer, Raskin, Connolly, Omar, Olzewski, Senator Van Hollen (seems like more maybe there not much coverage to confirm)
> Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition. Are they not interrupting their enemy while he is making mistakes? That would be the only explanation.
This is the kind of thing that someone who's on TikTok a lot says. The line being fed to people by the Chinese government to make the Democrats look bad as well. But the truth is the Democrats have no power. None. They can't do anything to stop this. Elizabeth Warren and AOC have just as much power as I do to stop Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Democrats have bigger fish to fry and DOGE isn't a real department so it doesn't have a whole lot of authority to do things on its own. It can only advise the government so in the end, until an executive order is signed or some other action is taken, there's nothing to be done.
I'm not sure what could possibly be a bigger fish right now. This is, quite literally, the dismantling of our entire government and its public services unfolding before our eyes.
> I try to keep emotion out of this newsletter. I have always tried to write Notes on the Crises in a calm, detached tone so that the information I highlight shines through. However, I must be honest with readers: I’m absolutely terrified. When I first read the Washington Post’s reporting I subsequently had a panic attack. I am not subject to those. I didn’t have one during the start of Covid-19 when I started writing about the full health, economic, and political consequences in March 2020 and knew before many, many people that millions would die. Nor at any time subsequently did I have one. Even as someone who has spent an unusual amount of time thinking about the Treasury’s internal payments system for a person who has never been in government, I find grasping the full implications of Elon Musk and his apparatchiks reaching into and trying to exert full control over the Treasury’s payment system mind-boggling.
> There is nothing more important on the entire planet than getting Elon Musk and DOGE out of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and allowing career civil service employees to run the Treasury’s internal payments system without capricious and self-serving interference from billionaires and their allies. This effort must fail if we are to safeguard any semblance of due process and lawfulness in the executive branch. A vague anonymous promise that DOGE only has “read only” access is not enough. They need to be rooted out so that we can return to the slower moving, less dangerous, “five alarm fire” constitutional crisis we were having as of Friday morning.
Same as you, I have no idea what’s going to happen. But something will, and it might be good. It might be bad as well, but at least the news will be interesting.
Same as me? Speak for yourself, I don't care about what might or might not happen, to avoid honestly dealing with what is happening. That they started doing this on a Friday night should tell you they know what they're doing, that is, that it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. That it "might be bad".
> It might be bad as well, but at least the news will be interesting.
For those who read nothing about the first half of the 20th century, sure. For them this is surely "interesting". But since you wouldn't like your harm to be someone else's entertainment either, that's not an argument for anything.
He’s a threat to the unsupervised government institutions. If measured by the amount of money being stolen, the US government is the most corrupted in the world.
In context, that question would not about the present, but the future:
> It might be bad as well, but at least the news will be interesting.
Of course this doesn't mean "this might suck for me, but at least it will be interesting news for others". Why pretend otherwise?
> Approximately 20 members of Elon Musk’s staff have begun working within the Education Department. They have gained access to multiple sensitive internal systems, including a financial aid dataset containing the personal information of millions of students enrolled in the federal student aid program.
You don't receive such aid, correct? So why care. Just a bunch of dudes soaking up highly sensitive information to do whatever with.
Trump spoke plenty of times of his desire of purging all sorts of things including the "deep state". It's amazing to me that all it takes is to tack on some vague claims about "efficiency" from a guy who lies like a child about the dumbest things, for some Americans to say "but what IF it saves a bit of money?" and just ignore the whole "using a very flimsy excuse to purge political opposition" thing.
You have no real handle on the scale of damage being done and DOGE is a real department as it was merged into the US Digital Service through executive order.
No, USDS is an organization within the President's executive staff.
The constitutional requirement is that "Officers of the United States" need Senate confirmation unless Congress has provided otherwise. The precise contours of this have never been super well defined, but it doesn't sound like Musk is exercising sovereign power under his own authority, at least not yet.
It seems clear where this is going. Data mining and algorithmic (claimed!) efficiency improvements while working on an essential and critical production system.
Since these people claim that "AI" does not need to respect privacy and copyright, perhaps they'll also train a model on this.
Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition. Are they not interrupting their enemy while he is making mistakes? That would be the only explanation.