Elon Musk's Revolutionary Terror -- The New Yorker

[ancianita]

https://archive.ph/TNL7J

...I spoke with a Republican who worked closely with the architects of America’s botched Iraq invasion. I asked whether he had been surprised by anything so far in a Trump Administration designed to shock. Yes, he replied—Musk’s sneaky takeover of the apparatus of the vast U.S. executive branch was something entirely new in the annals of global coups. “Elon figured out that the personnel, information-technology backbone of the government was essentially the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteen-fifties television tower in the Third World,” he observed, and “that you could take over the government essentially with a handful of people if you could access all that.” My friend, incidentally, chose to speak on background despite his years of public criticism of Trump, noting that a think tank with which he is affiliated receives government contracts. Fear, in this revolution, as in all revolutions, is perhaps the most effective weapon of all...

We don’t yet know to what extent this brazen ploy will succeed, of course. Congressional Democrats and others have mobilized to defend various embattled agencies; lawsuits have been filed; protests have been convened. But for now, the politics may even be working for Trump and Musk. The Democratic strategist David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, have both warned that they fear their party is falling into a trap in defending U.S.A.I.D. “My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’ ” Axelrod told Politico’s Rachael Bade. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”

It’s also true that, if cutting the federal government is what this is all about, then Trump and Musk would not be bothering with tiny U.S.A.I.D., whose estimated budget of some forty billion dollars is less than one per cent of the federal government’s. The point is not a policy fight; it’s an execution. They are killing one agency to terrify a thousand others. Congress should be one of the main aggrieved parties here, given that it passed the laws authorizing U.S.A.I.D. and other departments under attack and appropriating the funding for them, but this is the Republican-controlled Congress in the age of Trump. Speaker Mike Johnson, on Wednesday, dismissed the furor over Musk’s power play as “gross overreaction in the media.” Perhaps the most perfect distillation of where elected Republican officials are at right now came from the North Carolina senator Thom Tillis. Asked about what Musk is doing on Trump’s behalf, he replied, “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he added, “nobody should bellyache about that.”...

Earlier this week, I spoke with one of Vought’s millions of targets, a career prosecutor who’s spent decades in the Justice Department’s environment division...
If trauma is the goal, Trump and his minions have already succeeded. But my source also offered up an eloquent rebuttal to the mindless cutting, an approach that she compared to an elementary-school principal deciding that, rather than trim the budget a few per cent, she’d just go ahead and eliminate the entire third grade. Should we get rid of air-traffic controllers and FEMA and E.P.A. testing for lead in your kids’ water, too? She asked. Frankly, her defense of the federal government was better than just about anything I’ve heard from the beleaguered Democrats. The revolution, however, will get the last laugh: after more than thirty years of public service, she already planned to retire later this year. Congrats, Elon Musk. ♦

You might want scroll down the archive link to check out this one... "Donald Trump Throws the Doors to the Patriot Wing Open"

[dalton99a]

1. We are ruled by a demented tyrant and an evil terrorist

A must read.