Elon Musk is a one-man British East India Company, but he's not colonizing India, and he's not colonizing Mars: He's colonizing us. He needs to be stopped.
I wish I could forward this to loved ones of mine who need to know, but they're stanning DOGE too hard right now to stomach your spicier descriptions of Musk and his whole deal. Still, this writeup is a gold mine, especially on all the government transparency resources most of us may not have realized we had.
I passed those resources along to some of my folks, with some excessively gentle reminders like, "Musk's current image as an anti-woke folk hero may obscure what else he really is, a businessman who now has unprecedented opportunity to capture the federal regulatory regime for his own advantage rather than for the liberation of US citizens."
Which isn't to say that the "tyranny" of insufferable cultural trends is really a tyranny, requiring a liberator, or that Musk, who trolls insufferably himself, would be one. But annoyance adds excitement to life if you don't have bigger problems, and can be a welcome distraction from them if you do.
Would mass righteous anger on behalf of those whose livelihoods were harmed by the Great Awokening even have arisen if the Great Awokening hadn't been so super $#@#*$ annoying? Many personal disasters more likely than cancellation pass by without capturing the attention – and irritation – of spectators to fuel the culture wars. As if annoying were the worst thing political enemies could be!
A loved one of mine – not at all stupid – lately reacted with incomprehension to my claim that opposing wokeness isn't all there is to defending freedom. That this world still contains factions both anti-woke and anti-freedom, and that there's much more to freedom than simply opposing "the woke", seemed not to register in the moment, which I found disconcerting. It would still register if stated explicitly, of course, but that it didn't offhand struck me as illustrative.
speaking of loved ones, may i ask you if you think it possibie to forgive loved ones for their, might i say, 'latent' antisemitism? ? I am not a Jew, but have found myself oooh, increasingly distressed that mine appear to have been so continually "processed" through the leftoidal machinations that basically underwrite or lube the success of their careers, that they've now arrived at antisenitism as if by... default? Even as Hamas performs one revoltingly sadistic stunt after another, right before their 'mediatastized' eyes?
You obviously know much more about your own loved ones than I could, and without knowing more than I do, I'd say it depends. Then, beyond the specifics of the situation, there are questions like, "Can you still love someone you haven't forgiven?" and "What really counts as forgiveness, anyhow?" So far, so dull.
As for me, I still love the Episcopal church (I'm a convert from a sort of half-Lutheran nondenominationalism) despite its unfortunate tendency to over-invest in Progressive politics, sometimes even to the point of antisemitism:
I don't view forgiving an entire ecclesiastical hierarchy as my place, but perhaps my continued fondness is as good as forgiveness?
Not being a leftist myself, I can't give good guidance on how to be a leftist without being antisemitic, but I've heard leftists point to this pamphlet as a good guide:
The histrionics of the pamphlet genre (and the left more generally) aside, there's some good advice to its intended audience (which I'm not, so I could be mistaken) in there, like the table on p 21, distinguishing "Clear criticisms of Israeli policy & its backers" from "Antisemitic ideas often repeated by activists with no anti-Jewish intentions" and "Lines emerging directly from neo-nazi & antisemitic organizations".
It should be logically possible to distinguish criticizing specific policies (for reasons other than they're not Zionist enough) from antisemitism, and at least some leftists insist this is possible while remaining leftist.
grokked all that i think you healthily say here aside from "stanning" (googles) Why have i never come across that before? Is it a common umgangsprache in the USA now?
this part, written by not sure who exactly here, seems particularly bizarre
"Air traffic controllers who must climb stairs to the top of a 200-foot air traffic control tower because of an elevator outage may find functioning equipment when they finally arrive, but they are not in the best physical or mental condition to perform their duties. These challenges inject risk into the system"
why would one assume your typical ATC workers to be that unfit?.And since WHEN did physical exertion stop providing energy snd alacrity and cause the opposite?
"Like OpenAI, xAI claims to have AGI in its sights. To be clear, OpenAI is not known for its safety culture. It is in fact known for being appallingly reckless. But OpenAI at least has a team dedicating significant resources to alignment research. By contrast, xAI is known for quick development cycles, and Musk claims to believe that an AI built to “seek truth” will be inherently safe."
i would like CB to tell us what she thinks she means by "But OpenAI at least has a team dedicating significant resources to alignment research"
ok so since you're staying coy let me present what some AI says itself. Its answer should provoke what i think is usually called 'wry amusement'
"Alignment research, primarily in the field of artificial intelligence, refers to the study and development of methods to ensure that AI systems behave in a way that is aligned with human values and intentions, meaning they achieve the desired outcomes without unintended negative consequences, even as AI capabilities become more advanced; essentially, it's about making sure AI systems do what humans want them to do. "
the tech bro always sounds so...timid somehow. Your "values & intentions" or mine?
Claire. I am blown away by this piece. And, I had to subscribe. All in to stop this madness. This article is a real "below the surface look," and, I might have to buy the book referenced in the article.
Claire, this a tour de force, didn't know you had another one in you. Actually I am about 80% through but require a nap before proceeding.
The only point I can add is there is yet one more elephant in the room: Our national defense is utterly dependent on Musk's Star link. I don't know much about that world, but he is dominating both the economical launching of new satellites and the lions share of existing networks. (Apologies if you already covered this somewhere.) THe notion that Musk now dominates so many aspects of our world is surreal. And the dude may actually be loonier than Trump.
How do we prepare for a moment that may come where we must go 'underground'? How can we create networked communities of resistance that are difficult to decapitate? How can we maintain 'schools' for anti-authoritarianism? Where can the culture and spiritual resources necessary be housed and shared? What communication systems might safely keep us connected?
This reminded me, an Australian economist wrote an essay on how the liberal democratic world should now conduct itself, under the assumption that the USA has now been removed from that bloc:
I would've laughed at these questions only very recently. But this is so crazy that I think we have to admit anything could happen.
For answers to your questions, there's lots to draw from by looking at other authoritarian societies. But no one has ever had the experience of living in authoritarian society governed by AI. I don't know how that would affect things. (It won't be good, obviously.)
I’m currently trying to write an article (not something I generally do) encouraging anti-authoritarians to form their own network of heavily armed paramilitary organizations (partly out of discarded civil servants). I don’t know if I’m crazy either. Probably yes. But these days the line seems to be a very blurry one.
As someone who has lived as a civilian through three civil wars, while carrying out activities the repressive governments would not appreciate, they are not new questions to me. But yes, I still can not believe I am asking them, especially in public. And you pointing to AI, after we have all produced enough data for it to determine where our loyalties lie is chilling.
Really extraordinary work here Claire. Incredible amount of detail. You’re a force of nature. Cranking this out in a week is pretty amazing. Not sure how you ever find time to sleep.
If I didn't do it, I just be lying awake at night, unable to sleep, beside myself with rage and frustration. Writing about it is at least something I can concretely do. I don't really have any other skills that are valuable when one's country has been seized by a coup regime.
it's the seemingly facile attempts to assimilate the whole of events to Nazidom that tear the largest holes in your work for me. Your opening paragraphs are awe-inspiring but then i see "Nazi-boosting", and my heart sinks. And at another point, when you set about assimilating Rubio to Ribbentrop, i actually had the thought 'isn't one Endlösung enough for Claire, ot what?'
Well, this is an informative essay, but everyone's positions seem to be politically determined. I looked up 1990s conservative stalwarts like Newt Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly, and they think Trump, Musk and DOGE are just great. On the other hand, academics Farrell and Newman are, I guess, deep-state-adjacent left-liberals (both from Georgetown University, and Farrell a CFR member).
To some extent I can see this as just a new chapter in the political influence of American Internet tycoons. The first chapter occurred under Obama, which saw the consolidation of a new network society under Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter. Those new mega-corporations worked very closely with the Obama administration. Just one very small example: the first two administrators of the US Digital Service (which now hosts DOGE) came from Google.
The Obama era ended with Trump's populist revolution, and now in phase 2 of that revolution, which coincides with the era of AI, a new tycoon, Musk, is providing tech support for the political agenda of the day, an agenda which in general horrifies liberals and thrills conservatives. (The closest thing to an intermediate position I've seen is from Eric Weinstein.)
I found this article from a guy immersed in both the worlds of philosophy and silicon valley tech to be quite a snort of smelling salts.. He explains how radical tech titans have been planning the brew of AI and authoritarianism for a decade. I'm a former computer dude and smell that he is credible. We actually are living in a dystopian sci fi novel. BTW, I happen to believe our lunatic overlords are going to fail, but I don't want to spoil your fright:
Richard. Great find on Mike Brock. Truly, it is happening. Let's hope democracy or some refined form of democracy is left after this techno-surgical castration. Maybe call it upheaval? J
Such an incredible, well-researched, well-sourced, fact-based, well-written article. Thank you for your great work. After reading this, I was so inspired by your hard work and dedication to the truth and to exposing the ongoing threat to our country and to the world by this lawlessness and corruption especially by Elon and his ilk that I became a monthly paid subscriber. I had already been a loyal reader and follower. Thank you. Keep up the fantastic and much needed work.
I’d be honored if you subscribed to mine as well. It’s no where near the level of yours in terms of writing or readership. Just trying to do my small part.
This is a very good essay that gave me a lot to think about. Vesting too much power in the hands of a single person is almost never a good idea. It doesn’t matter if the person is well-intentioned or not. It doesn’t even matter if the person is smart or stupid. Love him or hate him, Elon has been handed a lot of power and that power seems to be completely unchecked. It’s definitely a cause for concern.
One quibble I have is with Claire’s characterization of the DOGE employees. In her essay, she continuously implies that by and large they’re obnoxious and unqualified spoiled brats. Maybe they all are or maybe some of them are. Maybe none of them are. Claire doesn’t know and neither do I.
But Claire spends no time critiquing the civil servants who now have to report to members of the DOGE team. Anyone who has spent any time with Government employees knows that too often, they are lazy, incompetent and unpleasant. It’s a myth that civil servants go to work for government because they are dedicated to public service. For the most part, they apply for government jobs because they are too mediocre to be hired anywhere else. It’s the stock room at Walmart or flipping hamburgers at McDonalds that’s their true alternative. Who wouldn’t rather work for government instead?
The laziness of government workers is hard to overestimate. That’s why so many suffered paroxysmal hysteria when required to come back to the office full-time.
Government workers who work for regulatory agencies are often motivated not by the public good, but by their desire to demonstrate their own power. They are motivated by little more than vanity and the need to soothe their fragile egos. The reason for this is simple. The workers who work for regulated companies are so much smarter and well-paid than the civil servants are; the civil servants resent it and their resentment inspires bad and often spiteful decisions. It’s one of several reasons that America’s regulatory system is so insane.
Why have Americans in general been so happy to see the DOGE workers humiliate government workers? I think it’s because anyone who has interacted with employees at the IRS or Social Security Administration knows first hand what morons they are likely to interact with. You may not like the DOGE employees, Claire, but many Americans, maybe even most Americans, have little to no respect for America’s civil servants. The disdain is well deserved. It’s an open question whether we are better off trusting inexperienced DOGE brats or highly experienced but often stupid and lazy civil servants.
To many of us who think that America is profoundly broken, we look at what Musk is doing and are convinced that taking a meat ax to the system is a prerequisite to fixing it. We don’t believe that Congress is being bypassed, we believe American democracy is being bypassed by a huge bureaucratic deep state controlled by an elite far more nefarious than Elon Musk and staffed by the lazy and incompetent apparatchiks that I described above.
If we thought this broken system could be reformed we would be all for it. We don’t believe it. We think that people like you who cleave to the status quo and encourage repairing the system by tinkering around the edges just don’t get it.
Does what Musk is doing present risks? I’m sure it does. But I think that it’s a bigger risk to keep going down the road that we were traversing right up until the last presidential election.
Hey Wigwag, I'm interested in your risk calculus! Something I suspect we agree on: it's incredibly difficult to reform large bureaucracies; they have a well-known self-preserving inertia. On the other hand, government does a lot of stuff, and a lot of it is important; stuff (like, maybe, nuclear weapons or waste storage programmes, or air traffic control) could go a lot wrong, either suddenly or slowly, if the relevant parts of the bureaucracy takes its eye of the ball.
So... what are the measures? How do we tell if DOGE-style slash-&-see surgery is working, and how do you assess the downsides? I'm trying to understand the balance that tells you it's a bigger risk to carry on broadly the way you did (whereby the US has been the pre-eminent power for decades, with trend growth continually outstripping all other advanced economies) than allow one unelected guy and his DOGE crew so much power with so little accountability? What would a good result look like to you - and how would that be different from say, budget cuts enacted by Congress in the traditional (constituional) way?
The reason most didn't want to come back to the office wasn't because they were lazy. It's because to cut costs, many of these departments downsized or even eliminated the physical offices; the offices that remain don't have enough space (i.e., desks, parking) to accommodate all the workers. No one checked to see if there were offices to return to before issuing this edict. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-in-person-work-mandate-office-space-b2692895.html
What's more, people have organized their lives--at the *urging* of the federal government, which wanted to save money by reducing rent on offices (they also wanted to improve the quality of hires and employee retention, because people prefer jobs where they can work from home; --see this OPM report on telework and the federal workforce: https://www.opm.gov/telework/history-legislation-reports/status-of-telework-in-the-federal-government-2024.pdf): "Based upon savings reported by agency (see Appendix 18), telework-related reductions in real estate, commuter costs, and energy savings contributed to a total cost savings of more than $230 million across Executive agencies in fiscal year 2023. The most commonly reported savings related to transit/commuting costs (46 percent), rent/office space (28 percent), human capital (20 percent), reduced employee absences (19 percent), utilities (17 percent), and training (14 percent)." So some live nowhere near the nearest federal office and have no idea how they'll even get there; people have made major life decisions--like buying a home, organizin childcare--in the expectation that they will be working remotely.
That may be true for some of them but I don’t think it’s true for most. If they don’t live near their offices, they should move or find a non-governmental job closer to home. I’ve worked with scores of government employees at the CDC, NIH and the DOD-CDMRP. I was shocked at how unproductive the government staff was. Superimposed on their listlessness was their absolute fear of making even the most trivial decisions. My professional experience with government employees was terrible and the agencies I was dealing with were supposedly some of the best.
On a personal level, I needed to resolve a social security issue for an elderly relative recently. In the old days (pre-Covid) you could walk into a social security office without an appointment and wait (sometimes hours) to speak with an employee. In most cases the employee was clueless but occasionally you lucked out and spoke to someone who knew their stuff. After Covid, the staff dispersed and now if the offices are manned at all, it’s a skeleton crew holding down the fort. These days what the Social Security Administration does is encourage Americans to make phone appointments. The problem is that the phone appointment typically takes at least two months to get and the employee who asks “how can I help you” is usually dumber than dumb or, even worse, couldn’t care less.
Most government workers are worthless. Firing the whole damn lot of them and starting over seems to be a reasonable thing to contemplate.
Why aren’t more Americans sympathetic to the travails of government workers losing their jobs in droves? It’s very hard to have sympathy for people so prone to incompetence and rudeness.
If you were ever looking for a "ruling class imposing their will on the people" example, the return to the office movement is a product of c-suites and their mouthpieces.
"What, our profits weren't sustainable? Oh... uh, it's because of the workers, not management." Oldest lie in the books.
Thank you for taking the time to mischaracterize us as stupid and lazy.
And thank you for all of your efforts to undermine expertise and replace it with fucking ignorant morons who fire hundreds of people before realizing the colossal mistake they've made and attempt to rehire them. Beijing appreciates your efforts.
Your ability to ignore evidence and stick to a narrative is inspiring to anyone looking to undermine a nation. You've done excellent work taking advantage of a human weakness to a fallacy, "A is flawed, therefore B is the solution, regardless of details."
If I may quote, "But they are no more imbecilic than the Americans who applaud them."
Thanks for being a civil servant. Must feel pretty damned thankless these days. I assume you must be worried about losing your job, so this is immediately personally stressful, in addition to the stress we all feel as a result of watching the United States melt down?
Thank you. I can lose my job and find another. Contrary to the comment section, I do have some marketable skills and success at accomplishing tasks.
If they fully abandon the rule of law, I'm going to have a much harder time. I'm incapable of thanking the portrait of Trump for every glorious morning that he protects me from South Americans and trans people.
Anybody who has worked with government employees understands WigWàg's points.
Government officials are expert at navigating the bureaucracy.
Able to produce worthwhile results? Much less so.
One common theme of this website is the incompetence of government. Think what it means when a very left leaning readership agrees with a conservative minority about government incompetence.
Also, DOGE is producing copious evidence of the looting of our wealth by corrupt organizations.
And very few government officials did their jobs to protect taxpayers.
My own experience working with civil servants from the US, UK and Australian Treasuries: some of the smartest, most focused, hardest-working people I've ever met. People who definitely could (and in a few cases did) significantly increase their salaries by moving to the private sector. Mostly frustrated by bureaucracy.
DOGE is producing copious evidence of nothing. Everything Musk says is a lie. In some cases, they're whole-cloth lies, pure inventions; in other cases, he's taken some detail totally out of context and either deliberately or out of ignorance made it appear to be something completely other than what it is.
I typed out a few responses here but they were all far too kind.
I'm not going to pretend criticism of bureaucracy is a valid defense of Trump. That's like burning down your home because you've got ants. Be a grown up and stop pretending a tantrum is a reasonable course of action.
ref: "Nazi salute whipping-out, incurious, ketamine-addled antisemitic incel Nazis"... There must be a reason that I've stacked up in my archives, almost altogether unread, at least the last ten Cosmo-Globo postings by our hostess and her clone co-posters. Yet so far —out of past personal loyalty and affection— I haven't terminally pulled the plug. How about more one-hundred-word-or-so, tear-stained lamentations over beloved dying cats instead?
Well I had surfed through enough of it to garner those semi-verbatim quotes with which I opened my posting just above. Assuming that I ran it correctly —which I might not have, nor did I establish the font size and formatting— after just now uploading the full text of "Dangerous as Hell" into MS-Word and running the Word Count tool, the stats that came up were "49 pages; 15,596 words; 293 paragraphs; 1,415 lines; 96,596 characters with spaces". In her recent bonafide defence here at CosmoGlobo of having always being right-leaning to the core, Claire mentioned that she was fired [from a journalism capacity-building] consultancy, where I was a not-quite colleague and semi-secret admirer, although I didn't know her then personally, as a result of a critical report she wrote many decades ago —and later published in W.F. Buckley's National Review (!) under the title "The Laos Logos: corruption and Repression in Laos and the United Nations Development Program"— for which, by comparison, the MS Word stats I generated just now were: "7 pages; 3,082 words; 31 paragraphs; 248 lines; 18,845 characters with spaces". Worth reading if you can find it. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Just came upon an apparently kosher stat saying that over the past several elections, the DC electorate went roughly 90-10 for the Dems. Would hazard a guess that the well-heeled NorVa counties housing the non-DC-dwelling apparatchiki would look about the same. Having briefly been a Fed apparatchik myself on the west coast, I saw the main problem not as laziness, stupidity or rudeness amongst us. But that agency post-facto project evaluation —such as it was— never was keyed primarily towards critically assessing whether any of our nominal external objectives; i.e., successfully protecting critical wetlands or endangered species, were being achieved. But devoted rather to procedural administrative mic-mac: e.g., how many waterfront development permits had been issued or denied?, how many employee-hours were spent on each?; and how many weeks or months it took to process every such application?
Under Bush 2, Obama, Trump 1, and Biden, the US was in a death spiral.
Increasing debt, unrestrained (and corrupt) spending, decreasing military power, a coalesced enemy (Iran, NK, Russia, and China working in concert), pathetic allies (the exceptions are obvious), an ever expanding administrative state, increasingly unhinged lefties, and hostile American factions meant that the US would auger in at some point.
Nobody knows when, but we had crossed the tipping point.
Trump and Musk offer an alternative.
Good, realistic, likely to be successful? No idea.
If you voted for Trump, you voted to throw the baby (our Constitution) out with the bathwater (whatever problems you assume we have), In any case your list of accusations is so overblown as to be laughable were it not the stuff of some MAGA fantasy.
What they are attempting, whether you see it or not, is the wholesale upending of our Republic, largely for their own purposes and having little or nothing to do with the health of the Republic.
If you go along with that, you forfeit the title of American in favor of something else entirely.
I have met too few Trump voters to know whether Steve F’s views are representative of the majority, but assuming for the moment that he is typical of conservative but not diehard MAGA, he did face a real dilemma: our two party system. Unless and until a viable 3rd party candidate magically appears, a voter who is dissatisfied with the incumbent’s policies has three choices— vote for the other major party guy or gal, vote for Mickey Mouse (or whichever no-hoper is running not as an R or D), or not voting at all.
So Steve wanted change. Hell’s bells, a lot of Democrats ( not to mention certain Republicans, like Liz Cheney) wanted a change of some sort, but they still voted for and actively supported Kamala Harris.
So, Steve and his fellow travelers wanted change. Now they’ve got change.
Turns out, the kind of change we are seeing is gross illegality and extreme risk to our national security. But what the fuck, you got the change you ordered, Steve, so now you own the consequences. Thanks a bunch.
I grant that an essential part of our problem is an ossified two party system in which party loyalty often trumps common sense discussion of the issues across whatever boundaries we perceive to exist The Founders knew the risks of what they called ‘factionalism’, and then they went ahead and initiated it anyway. Human nature, of which they actually had a pretty good idea, is one of the things that doesn’t change under the sun.
But to demand change for the sake change without a rational and realistic comprehension of a nation and a world that has grown geometrically more complex and interconnected than the Founders could have either predicted or, perhaps, even understood guarantees little but chaos.
Steve F’s description of the country he sees is so wildly out of sync with any kind of rational appreciation of where we are as to beggar the imagination. We were hardly in a ‘death spiral’ under Bush, O’Bama. or Biden. In fact, we were closer to one under Trump 1.0 than we were at the end of Biden’s term.
Yes, Biden should have pulled out of the race far earlier than he did. Indeed he should have stuck with his initial plan of being a one-termer. And yes, his handling of the border issue was faulty. Inflation, on the other hand, is not solely the responsibility of any President. Economists differ in their interpretations and predictions almost as much as politicians.
Is our bureaucracy overloaded? Of course it is. Bureaucracies have been both overloaded and self-perpetuating since the Sumerians invented them over four thousand years ago. But they are also utterly necessary for the maintenance of any state. Going at it with a machete in the hands of a billionaire dilettante rather than in those of a surgeon with a scalpel isn’t the answer.
The question of military power in this current world is a tricky one, but one thing is for certain - putting nuclear power in the hands of a blustering bully is not likely to end well. And given our present conditions, that ending may well be pretty complete.
The ‘lefties' are not nearly as unhinged as those on other extreme. Yes, they have overdone the ‘identity’ thing, but greatly narrowing the definition of what constitutes ‘an American’ and threatening everyone who doesn’t fit is no better an answer.
Finally, of course, entrusting the nature of ‘change’ to the hands of a man who has demonstrated a capacity of lies and distortions unprecedented in our history, and who has so utterly disdained and disavowed any comprehension of or intent to abide by our Constitution is likely to lead to a far more rapid 'death spiral' than any of his predecessors.
Recall Abraham Lincoln in 1838: “As a nation of free men, we shall live through all time, or die by suicide”. Trump is suicidal.
A tad over three weeks into the Trump presidency seems maybe bit early to assay the "consequences", ehhh? But the sputterers and pointers like Mr. Hodson gotta sputter and point, when that's their entire repertoire.
Gee, thanks Alan Potkin for your charmingly picaresque description of my comments on this platform. Sputtering and pointing are a few of the techniques in my repertoire, but not “all” I can do. Think clearly and analyze are two other things that I can do. Unfortunately, as a private citizen I am pretty much limited to pointing out the mistakes and absurdities of our politicians and sputtering over their shortsightedness.
Thanks, Claire.
I wish I could forward this to loved ones of mine who need to know, but they're stanning DOGE too hard right now to stomach your spicier descriptions of Musk and his whole deal. Still, this writeup is a gold mine, especially on all the government transparency resources most of us may not have realized we had.
I passed those resources along to some of my folks, with some excessively gentle reminders like, "Musk's current image as an anti-woke folk hero may obscure what else he really is, a businessman who now has unprecedented opportunity to capture the federal regulatory regime for his own advantage rather than for the liberation of US citizens."
Which isn't to say that the "tyranny" of insufferable cultural trends is really a tyranny, requiring a liberator, or that Musk, who trolls insufferably himself, would be one. But annoyance adds excitement to life if you don't have bigger problems, and can be a welcome distraction from them if you do.
Would mass righteous anger on behalf of those whose livelihoods were harmed by the Great Awokening even have arisen if the Great Awokening hadn't been so super $#@#*$ annoying? Many personal disasters more likely than cancellation pass by without capturing the attention – and irritation – of spectators to fuel the culture wars. As if annoying were the worst thing political enemies could be!
A loved one of mine – not at all stupid – lately reacted with incomprehension to my claim that opposing wokeness isn't all there is to defending freedom. That this world still contains factions both anti-woke and anti-freedom, and that there's much more to freedom than simply opposing "the woke", seemed not to register in the moment, which I found disconcerting. It would still register if stated explicitly, of course, but that it didn't offhand struck me as illustrative.
speaking of loved ones, may i ask you if you think it possibie to forgive loved ones for their, might i say, 'latent' antisemitism? ? I am not a Jew, but have found myself oooh, increasingly distressed that mine appear to have been so continually "processed" through the leftoidal machinations that basically underwrite or lube the success of their careers, that they've now arrived at antisenitism as if by... default? Even as Hamas performs one revoltingly sadistic stunt after another, right before their 'mediatastized' eyes?
You obviously know much more about your own loved ones than I could, and without knowing more than I do, I'd say it depends. Then, beyond the specifics of the situation, there are questions like, "Can you still love someone you haven't forgiven?" and "What really counts as forgiveness, anyhow?" So far, so dull.
As for me, I still love the Episcopal church (I'm a convert from a sort of half-Lutheran nondenominationalism) despite its unfortunate tendency to over-invest in Progressive politics, sometimes even to the point of antisemitism:
https://livingchurch.org/covenant/anti-semitism-in-the-episcopal-church/
I don't view forgiving an entire ecclesiastical hierarchy as my place, but perhaps my continued fondness is as good as forgiveness?
Not being a leftist myself, I can't give good guidance on how to be a leftist without being antisemitic, but I've heard leftists point to this pamphlet as a good guide:
https://www.aprilrosenblum.com/_files/ugd/4dc342_10d68441b6c44ee0a12909a242074ca6.pdf
The histrionics of the pamphlet genre (and the left more generally) aside, there's some good advice to its intended audience (which I'm not, so I could be mistaken) in there, like the table on p 21, distinguishing "Clear criticisms of Israeli policy & its backers" from "Antisemitic ideas often repeated by activists with no anti-Jewish intentions" and "Lines emerging directly from neo-nazi & antisemitic organizations".
It should be logically possible to distinguish criticizing specific policies (for reasons other than they're not Zionist enough) from antisemitism, and at least some leftists insist this is possible while remaining leftist.
grokked all that i think you healthily say here aside from "stanning" (googles) Why have i never come across that before? Is it a common umgangsprache in the USA now?
It made it into a translation of Beowulf I've been meaning to read –
https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/06/beowulf-translated-by-maria-dahvana-headley/
I'm not sure where I picked it up from, other than I'm still young enough I would.
this part, written by not sure who exactly here, seems particularly bizarre
"Air traffic controllers who must climb stairs to the top of a 200-foot air traffic control tower because of an elevator outage may find functioning equipment when they finally arrive, but they are not in the best physical or mental condition to perform their duties. These challenges inject risk into the system"
why would one assume your typical ATC workers to be that unfit?.And since WHEN did physical exertion stop providing energy snd alacrity and cause the opposite?
"Like OpenAI, xAI claims to have AGI in its sights. To be clear, OpenAI is not known for its safety culture. It is in fact known for being appallingly reckless. But OpenAI at least has a team dedicating significant resources to alignment research. By contrast, xAI is known for quick development cycles, and Musk claims to believe that an AI built to “seek truth” will be inherently safe."
i would like CB to tell us what she thinks she means by "But OpenAI at least has a team dedicating significant resources to alignment research"
I'm not sure what part is unclear?
The part tuat i quoted there? What does it mean?
ok so since you're staying coy let me present what some AI says itself. Its answer should provoke what i think is usually called 'wry amusement'
"Alignment research, primarily in the field of artificial intelligence, refers to the study and development of methods to ensure that AI systems behave in a way that is aligned with human values and intentions, meaning they achieve the desired outcomes without unintended negative consequences, even as AI capabilities become more advanced; essentially, it's about making sure AI systems do what humans want them to do. "
the tech bro always sounds so...timid somehow. Your "values & intentions" or mine?
Did you read this? It's about the alignment problem: https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/foom?utm_source=publication-search
will do asap. thankyou Miss Claire (i have this odd need to address you in as varietous a manner as i can!)
Claire. I am blown away by this piece. And, I had to subscribe. All in to stop this madness. This article is a real "below the surface look," and, I might have to buy the book referenced in the article.
J.
Claire, this a tour de force, didn't know you had another one in you. Actually I am about 80% through but require a nap before proceeding.
The only point I can add is there is yet one more elephant in the room: Our national defense is utterly dependent on Musk's Star link. I don't know much about that world, but he is dominating both the economical launching of new satellites and the lions share of existing networks. (Apologies if you already covered this somewhere.) THe notion that Musk now dominates so many aspects of our world is surreal. And the dude may actually be loonier than Trump.
How do we prepare for a moment that may come where we must go 'underground'? How can we create networked communities of resistance that are difficult to decapitate? How can we maintain 'schools' for anti-authoritarianism? Where can the culture and spiritual resources necessary be housed and shared? What communication systems might safely keep us connected?
This reminded me, an Australian economist wrote an essay on how the liberal democratic world should now conduct itself, under the assumption that the USA has now been removed from that bloc:
https://johnquiggin.com/2025/02/11/how-to-dispense-with-trumps-us/
I would've laughed at these questions only very recently. But this is so crazy that I think we have to admit anything could happen.
For answers to your questions, there's lots to draw from by looking at other authoritarian societies. But no one has ever had the experience of living in authoritarian society governed by AI. I don't know how that would affect things. (It won't be good, obviously.)
I’m currently trying to write an article (not something I generally do) encouraging anti-authoritarians to form their own network of heavily armed paramilitary organizations (partly out of discarded civil servants). I don’t know if I’m crazy either. Probably yes. But these days the line seems to be a very blurry one.
If a significant percentage of your militia is made up of ex-civil servants, then be prepared for a bunch of lazy, incompetent, and entitled soldiers.
Does not bode well for your prospects of winning.
principal's office
As someone who has lived as a civilian through three civil wars, while carrying out activities the repressive governments would not appreciate, they are not new questions to me. But yes, I still can not believe I am asking them, especially in public. And you pointing to AI, after we have all produced enough data for it to determine where our loyalties lie is chilling.
Really extraordinary work here Claire. Incredible amount of detail. You’re a force of nature. Cranking this out in a week is pretty amazing. Not sure how you ever find time to sleep.
If I didn't do it, I just be lying awake at night, unable to sleep, beside myself with rage and frustration. Writing about it is at least something I can concretely do. I don't really have any other skills that are valuable when one's country has been seized by a coup regime.
it's the seemingly facile attempts to assimilate the whole of events to Nazidom that tear the largest holes in your work for me. Your opening paragraphs are awe-inspiring but then i see "Nazi-boosting", and my heart sinks. And at another point, when you set about assimilating Rubio to Ribbentrop, i actually had the thought 'isn't one Endlösung enough for Claire, ot what?'
It’s always such a relief for me to read your writing just to have confirmed that I’m not necessarily the clinically maddest writer on Substack.
Well, this is an informative essay, but everyone's positions seem to be politically determined. I looked up 1990s conservative stalwarts like Newt Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly, and they think Trump, Musk and DOGE are just great. On the other hand, academics Farrell and Newman are, I guess, deep-state-adjacent left-liberals (both from Georgetown University, and Farrell a CFR member).
To some extent I can see this as just a new chapter in the political influence of American Internet tycoons. The first chapter occurred under Obama, which saw the consolidation of a new network society under Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter. Those new mega-corporations worked very closely with the Obama administration. Just one very small example: the first two administrators of the US Digital Service (which now hosts DOGE) came from Google.
The Obama era ended with Trump's populist revolution, and now in phase 2 of that revolution, which coincides with the era of AI, a new tycoon, Musk, is providing tech support for the political agenda of the day, an agenda which in general horrifies liberals and thrills conservatives. (The closest thing to an intermediate position I've seen is from Eric Weinstein.)
Bill Kristol was a 1990s conservative stalwart and he is horrified by Musk.
This is the most frightening article I‘ve ever read.
hold my beer.
I found this article from a guy immersed in both the worlds of philosophy and silicon valley tech to be quite a snort of smelling salts.. He explains how radical tech titans have been planning the brew of AI and authoritarianism for a decade. I'm a former computer dude and smell that he is credible. We actually are living in a dystopian sci fi novel. BTW, I happen to believe our lunatic overlords are going to fail, but I don't want to spoil your fright:
https://substack.com/@mikebrock/p-156755682
Richard. Great find on Mike Brock. Truly, it is happening. Let's hope democracy or some refined form of democracy is left after this techno-surgical castration. Maybe call it upheaval? J
Thank you.
That‘s scary as well. Both articles taken together are truly horrifying.
Andre. I have been reading the same 2 articles. I feel smarter. I will take that.
Lots of digital creepiness happening and 99% of the population have no idea
WTF is really happening.
Such an incredible, well-researched, well-sourced, fact-based, well-written article. Thank you for your great work. After reading this, I was so inspired by your hard work and dedication to the truth and to exposing the ongoing threat to our country and to the world by this lawlessness and corruption especially by Elon and his ilk that I became a monthly paid subscriber. I had already been a loyal reader and follower. Thank you. Keep up the fantastic and much needed work.
I’d be honored if you subscribed to mine as well. It’s no where near the level of yours in terms of writing or readership. Just trying to do my small part.
Thanks so much for subscribing. People who do are the only thing that permits me to do this.
This is a very good essay that gave me a lot to think about. Vesting too much power in the hands of a single person is almost never a good idea. It doesn’t matter if the person is well-intentioned or not. It doesn’t even matter if the person is smart or stupid. Love him or hate him, Elon has been handed a lot of power and that power seems to be completely unchecked. It’s definitely a cause for concern.
One quibble I have is with Claire’s characterization of the DOGE employees. In her essay, she continuously implies that by and large they’re obnoxious and unqualified spoiled brats. Maybe they all are or maybe some of them are. Maybe none of them are. Claire doesn’t know and neither do I.
But Claire spends no time critiquing the civil servants who now have to report to members of the DOGE team. Anyone who has spent any time with Government employees knows that too often, they are lazy, incompetent and unpleasant. It’s a myth that civil servants go to work for government because they are dedicated to public service. For the most part, they apply for government jobs because they are too mediocre to be hired anywhere else. It’s the stock room at Walmart or flipping hamburgers at McDonalds that’s their true alternative. Who wouldn’t rather work for government instead?
The laziness of government workers is hard to overestimate. That’s why so many suffered paroxysmal hysteria when required to come back to the office full-time.
Government workers who work for regulatory agencies are often motivated not by the public good, but by their desire to demonstrate their own power. They are motivated by little more than vanity and the need to soothe their fragile egos. The reason for this is simple. The workers who work for regulated companies are so much smarter and well-paid than the civil servants are; the civil servants resent it and their resentment inspires bad and often spiteful decisions. It’s one of several reasons that America’s regulatory system is so insane.
Why have Americans in general been so happy to see the DOGE workers humiliate government workers? I think it’s because anyone who has interacted with employees at the IRS or Social Security Administration knows first hand what morons they are likely to interact with. You may not like the DOGE employees, Claire, but many Americans, maybe even most Americans, have little to no respect for America’s civil servants. The disdain is well deserved. It’s an open question whether we are better off trusting inexperienced DOGE brats or highly experienced but often stupid and lazy civil servants.
To many of us who think that America is profoundly broken, we look at what Musk is doing and are convinced that taking a meat ax to the system is a prerequisite to fixing it. We don’t believe that Congress is being bypassed, we believe American democracy is being bypassed by a huge bureaucratic deep state controlled by an elite far more nefarious than Elon Musk and staffed by the lazy and incompetent apparatchiks that I described above.
If we thought this broken system could be reformed we would be all for it. We don’t believe it. We think that people like you who cleave to the status quo and encourage repairing the system by tinkering around the edges just don’t get it.
Does what Musk is doing present risks? I’m sure it does. But I think that it’s a bigger risk to keep going down the road that we were traversing right up until the last presidential election.
Hey Wigwag, I'm interested in your risk calculus! Something I suspect we agree on: it's incredibly difficult to reform large bureaucracies; they have a well-known self-preserving inertia. On the other hand, government does a lot of stuff, and a lot of it is important; stuff (like, maybe, nuclear weapons or waste storage programmes, or air traffic control) could go a lot wrong, either suddenly or slowly, if the relevant parts of the bureaucracy takes its eye of the ball.
So... what are the measures? How do we tell if DOGE-style slash-&-see surgery is working, and how do you assess the downsides? I'm trying to understand the balance that tells you it's a bigger risk to carry on broadly the way you did (whereby the US has been the pre-eminent power for decades, with trend growth continually outstripping all other advanced economies) than allow one unelected guy and his DOGE crew so much power with so little accountability? What would a good result look like to you - and how would that be different from say, budget cuts enacted by Congress in the traditional (constituional) way?
The reason most didn't want to come back to the office wasn't because they were lazy. It's because to cut costs, many of these departments downsized or even eliminated the physical offices; the offices that remain don't have enough space (i.e., desks, parking) to accommodate all the workers. No one checked to see if there were offices to return to before issuing this edict. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-in-person-work-mandate-office-space-b2692895.html
What's more, people have organized their lives--at the *urging* of the federal government, which wanted to save money by reducing rent on offices (they also wanted to improve the quality of hires and employee retention, because people prefer jobs where they can work from home; --see this OPM report on telework and the federal workforce: https://www.opm.gov/telework/history-legislation-reports/status-of-telework-in-the-federal-government-2024.pdf): "Based upon savings reported by agency (see Appendix 18), telework-related reductions in real estate, commuter costs, and energy savings contributed to a total cost savings of more than $230 million across Executive agencies in fiscal year 2023. The most commonly reported savings related to transit/commuting costs (46 percent), rent/office space (28 percent), human capital (20 percent), reduced employee absences (19 percent), utilities (17 percent), and training (14 percent)." So some live nowhere near the nearest federal office and have no idea how they'll even get there; people have made major life decisions--like buying a home, organizin childcare--in the expectation that they will be working remotely.
That may be true for some of them but I don’t think it’s true for most. If they don’t live near their offices, they should move or find a non-governmental job closer to home. I’ve worked with scores of government employees at the CDC, NIH and the DOD-CDMRP. I was shocked at how unproductive the government staff was. Superimposed on their listlessness was their absolute fear of making even the most trivial decisions. My professional experience with government employees was terrible and the agencies I was dealing with were supposedly some of the best.
On a personal level, I needed to resolve a social security issue for an elderly relative recently. In the old days (pre-Covid) you could walk into a social security office without an appointment and wait (sometimes hours) to speak with an employee. In most cases the employee was clueless but occasionally you lucked out and spoke to someone who knew their stuff. After Covid, the staff dispersed and now if the offices are manned at all, it’s a skeleton crew holding down the fort. These days what the Social Security Administration does is encourage Americans to make phone appointments. The problem is that the phone appointment typically takes at least two months to get and the employee who asks “how can I help you” is usually dumber than dumb or, even worse, couldn’t care less.
Most government workers are worthless. Firing the whole damn lot of them and starting over seems to be a reasonable thing to contemplate.
Why aren’t more Americans sympathetic to the travails of government workers losing their jobs in droves? It’s very hard to have sympathy for people so prone to incompetence and rudeness.
If you were ever looking for a "ruling class imposing their will on the people" example, the return to the office movement is a product of c-suites and their mouthpieces.
"What, our profits weren't sustainable? Oh... uh, it's because of the workers, not management." Oldest lie in the books.
"This is a very good essay that gave me a lot to think about."
I can now die happy. WigWag has agreed with me.
Not so fast - approval is not agreement??
(Great essay tho. And from my own experience, 100% correct on "Fake Audit". All the wrong people looking in the wrong places to do that.)
Hi, I'm an American Civil Servant.
Thank you for taking the time to mischaracterize us as stupid and lazy.
And thank you for all of your efforts to undermine expertise and replace it with fucking ignorant morons who fire hundreds of people before realizing the colossal mistake they've made and attempt to rehire them. Beijing appreciates your efforts.
Your ability to ignore evidence and stick to a narrative is inspiring to anyone looking to undermine a nation. You've done excellent work taking advantage of a human weakness to a fallacy, "A is flawed, therefore B is the solution, regardless of details."
If I may quote, "But they are no more imbecilic than the Americans who applaud them."
Thanks for being a civil servant. Must feel pretty damned thankless these days. I assume you must be worried about losing your job, so this is immediately personally stressful, in addition to the stress we all feel as a result of watching the United States melt down?
Thank you. I can lose my job and find another. Contrary to the comment section, I do have some marketable skills and success at accomplishing tasks.
If they fully abandon the rule of law, I'm going to have a much harder time. I'm incapable of thanking the portrait of Trump for every glorious morning that he protects me from South Americans and trans people.
Matt:
Anybody who has worked with government employees understands WigWàg's points.
Government officials are expert at navigating the bureaucracy.
Able to produce worthwhile results? Much less so.
One common theme of this website is the incompetence of government. Think what it means when a very left leaning readership agrees with a conservative minority about government incompetence.
Also, DOGE is producing copious evidence of the looting of our wealth by corrupt organizations.
And very few government officials did their jobs to protect taxpayers.
My own experience working with civil servants from the US, UK and Australian Treasuries: some of the smartest, most focused, hardest-working people I've ever met. People who definitely could (and in a few cases did) significantly increase their salaries by moving to the private sector. Mostly frustrated by bureaucracy.
Your mileage may vary.
My experience is with the FBI, the EPA, and the CA Air Quality Board.
I stick by my statements.
DOGE is producing copious evidence of nothing. Everything Musk says is a lie. In some cases, they're whole-cloth lies, pure inventions; in other cases, he's taken some detail totally out of context and either deliberately or out of ignorance made it appear to be something completely other than what it is.
I typed out a few responses here but they were all far too kind.
I'm not going to pretend criticism of bureaucracy is a valid defense of Trump. That's like burning down your home because you've got ants. Be a grown up and stop pretending a tantrum is a reasonable course of action.
ref: "Nazi salute whipping-out, incurious, ketamine-addled antisemitic incel Nazis"... There must be a reason that I've stacked up in my archives, almost altogether unread, at least the last ten Cosmo-Globo postings by our hostess and her clone co-posters. Yet so far —out of past personal loyalty and affection— I haven't terminally pulled the plug. How about more one-hundred-word-or-so, tear-stained lamentations over beloved dying cats instead?
Did you actually read the whole post? If not, please do so.
Well I had surfed through enough of it to garner those semi-verbatim quotes with which I opened my posting just above. Assuming that I ran it correctly —which I might not have, nor did I establish the font size and formatting— after just now uploading the full text of "Dangerous as Hell" into MS-Word and running the Word Count tool, the stats that came up were "49 pages; 15,596 words; 293 paragraphs; 1,415 lines; 96,596 characters with spaces". In her recent bonafide defence here at CosmoGlobo of having always being right-leaning to the core, Claire mentioned that she was fired [from a journalism capacity-building] consultancy, where I was a not-quite colleague and semi-secret admirer, although I didn't know her then personally, as a result of a critical report she wrote many decades ago —and later published in W.F. Buckley's National Review (!) under the title "The Laos Logos: corruption and Repression in Laos and the United Nations Development Program"— for which, by comparison, the MS Word stats I generated just now were: "7 pages; 3,082 words; 31 paragraphs; 248 lines; 18,845 characters with spaces". Worth reading if you can find it. Brevity is the soul of wit.
I guess that would be this? https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/vientiane-times (4200 words)
"But they are no more imbecilic than the Americans who applaud them."
Just going to re-post this in the comments... no reason.
Just came upon an apparently kosher stat saying that over the past several elections, the DC electorate went roughly 90-10 for the Dems. Would hazard a guess that the well-heeled NorVa counties housing the non-DC-dwelling apparatchiki would look about the same. Having briefly been a Fed apparatchik myself on the west coast, I saw the main problem not as laziness, stupidity or rudeness amongst us. But that agency post-facto project evaluation —such as it was— never was keyed primarily towards critically assessing whether any of our nominal external objectives; i.e., successfully protecting critical wetlands or endangered species, were being achieved. But devoted rather to procedural administrative mic-mac: e.g., how many waterfront development permits had been issued or denied?, how many employee-hours were spent on each?; and how many weeks or months it took to process every such application?
You just described oversight. A significant portion of my day is taken up by it. It's as annoying as you might imagine.
The solution to this is not to replace my supervisors with some one dumber, more corrupt, and who will never be held accountable by his fan club...
Consider one counter opinion.
Under Bush 2, Obama, Trump 1, and Biden, the US was in a death spiral.
Increasing debt, unrestrained (and corrupt) spending, decreasing military power, a coalesced enemy (Iran, NK, Russia, and China working in concert), pathetic allies (the exceptions are obvious), an ever expanding administrative state, increasingly unhinged lefties, and hostile American factions meant that the US would auger in at some point.
Nobody knows when, but we had crossed the tipping point.
Trump and Musk offer an alternative.
Good, realistic, likely to be successful? No idea.
But different.
So I voted for change.
I voted to give the US a chance.
Steve F. — OK, you wanted “change”. Are you happy now?
Delighted.
We have hope for something better.
"No idea?"
Maybe if you should have tried listening to the warning signs instead of making excuses for them, you'd have an idea.
Instead, you act like More Corruption is the solution to Some Corruption. Well done.
If you voted for Trump, you voted to throw the baby (our Constitution) out with the bathwater (whatever problems you assume we have), In any case your list of accusations is so overblown as to be laughable were it not the stuff of some MAGA fantasy.
What they are attempting, whether you see it or not, is the wholesale upending of our Republic, largely for their own purposes and having little or nothing to do with the health of the Republic.
If you go along with that, you forfeit the title of American in favor of something else entirely.
I have met too few Trump voters to know whether Steve F’s views are representative of the majority, but assuming for the moment that he is typical of conservative but not diehard MAGA, he did face a real dilemma: our two party system. Unless and until a viable 3rd party candidate magically appears, a voter who is dissatisfied with the incumbent’s policies has three choices— vote for the other major party guy or gal, vote for Mickey Mouse (or whichever no-hoper is running not as an R or D), or not voting at all.
So Steve wanted change. Hell’s bells, a lot of Democrats ( not to mention certain Republicans, like Liz Cheney) wanted a change of some sort, but they still voted for and actively supported Kamala Harris.
So, Steve and his fellow travelers wanted change. Now they’ve got change.
Turns out, the kind of change we are seeing is gross illegality and extreme risk to our national security. But what the fuck, you got the change you ordered, Steve, so now you own the consequences. Thanks a bunch.
I grant that an essential part of our problem is an ossified two party system in which party loyalty often trumps common sense discussion of the issues across whatever boundaries we perceive to exist The Founders knew the risks of what they called ‘factionalism’, and then they went ahead and initiated it anyway. Human nature, of which they actually had a pretty good idea, is one of the things that doesn’t change under the sun.
But to demand change for the sake change without a rational and realistic comprehension of a nation and a world that has grown geometrically more complex and interconnected than the Founders could have either predicted or, perhaps, even understood guarantees little but chaos.
Steve F’s description of the country he sees is so wildly out of sync with any kind of rational appreciation of where we are as to beggar the imagination. We were hardly in a ‘death spiral’ under Bush, O’Bama. or Biden. In fact, we were closer to one under Trump 1.0 than we were at the end of Biden’s term.
Yes, Biden should have pulled out of the race far earlier than he did. Indeed he should have stuck with his initial plan of being a one-termer. And yes, his handling of the border issue was faulty. Inflation, on the other hand, is not solely the responsibility of any President. Economists differ in their interpretations and predictions almost as much as politicians.
Is our bureaucracy overloaded? Of course it is. Bureaucracies have been both overloaded and self-perpetuating since the Sumerians invented them over four thousand years ago. But they are also utterly necessary for the maintenance of any state. Going at it with a machete in the hands of a billionaire dilettante rather than in those of a surgeon with a scalpel isn’t the answer.
The question of military power in this current world is a tricky one, but one thing is for certain - putting nuclear power in the hands of a blustering bully is not likely to end well. And given our present conditions, that ending may well be pretty complete.
The ‘lefties' are not nearly as unhinged as those on other extreme. Yes, they have overdone the ‘identity’ thing, but greatly narrowing the definition of what constitutes ‘an American’ and threatening everyone who doesn’t fit is no better an answer.
Finally, of course, entrusting the nature of ‘change’ to the hands of a man who has demonstrated a capacity of lies and distortions unprecedented in our history, and who has so utterly disdained and disavowed any comprehension of or intent to abide by our Constitution is likely to lead to a far more rapid 'death spiral' than any of his predecessors.
Recall Abraham Lincoln in 1838: “As a nation of free men, we shall live through all time, or die by suicide”. Trump is suicidal.
A tad over three weeks into the Trump presidency seems maybe bit early to assay the "consequences", ehhh? But the sputterers and pointers like Mr. Hodson gotta sputter and point, when that's their entire repertoire.
Gee, thanks Alan Potkin for your charmingly picaresque description of my comments on this platform. Sputtering and pointing are a few of the techniques in my repertoire, but not “all” I can do. Think clearly and analyze are two other things that I can do. Unfortunately, as a private citizen I am pretty much limited to pointing out the mistakes and absurdities of our politicians and sputtering over their shortsightedness.
That's the tragedy. They will never own the consequences.
If the Dear Leader makes an undeniable error, all he has to do is blame The Democrats or immigrants, and they'll lick his hands clean of the guilt.
Hey, I really like that "Dear Leader" bit. Maybe too clever by half, no?
10 years ago I would have agreed with you.
I never would have believed so many Americans would supplicate for delusion. I've since had to lower my expectations.