How many "mistakes" does an oligarch need to make before he gets fired?

On two occasions in the last few weeks, Elon Musk has admitted that he and his techbros have made mistakes. He's not lying.  But what I want to know is: how many "mistakes" does an oligarch need to make before he gets fired? Here's a list of the ones I've been able to identify (I'm sure there are more).

1. Claimed that USAID sent $50 million worth of condoms to Hamas.  
2. Fired 300 people at the Energy Department, unaware of the fact that they are responsible for managing America's nuclear weapons.
3. Accidentally fired USDA employees working on the bird flu.
4. Spread a nonsense conspiracy theory about 150 year old's getting Social Security checks.
5. Cancelled 875 VA contracts worth $2 billion for things like medical services, cancer programs, and burial services to veterans.
6. Cancelled more than 60 contracts meant to boost efficiency, all while saving no money. 
7. Forced to delete the top five highest savings claims on its “wall of receipts” leaderboard after various news outlets pointed out multiple errors in its calculations.
8. Accidentally fired employees responsible for Ebola prevention.

That list doesn't even include all of the things the shadow president and his techbros have done that are illegal - which is for the courts to decide. They are simply things that are obvious "mistakes."

There are only one of two conclusions we can make about all of this. One would be that the group that claims to be about finding "efficiencies" in the federal government is extremely incompetent - and should be fired. The second is that, in their minds, these are not actually "mistakes." In other words, they are not a bug, but a feature. 

Speaker Johnson - who claims to base his political positions on the Bible - continues to lie

Back in January, I documented that Mike Johnson - who claims to base his politics on biblical principles - told seven lies about immigration in a short four-minute video clip. The Republican House Speaker continues to lie, and recently told a couple of whoppers about federal spending. 

In speaking about the Musk/DOGE efforts to destroy the federal bureaucracy, Johnson said this:

Johnson: "Elon's cracked the code. He's now inside these agencies. He's created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data & as he told me in his office, data doesn't lie. We're gonna be able to get the information. We're gonna be able to transform the way federal govt works."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 24, 2025 at 11:35 AM

In that video, Johnson claimed that the "deep state" hid information about federal spending from congress, and now, "Elon's cracked the code." 

What he doesn't want you to know is that in 2006, congress passed a bill titled "Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act." It was introduced by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and signed by President George W. Bush. As a result, the website usaspending.gov was created, providing everyone - including congress - with access to detailed information about all federal spending.  

In other words, no one was hiding any information - much less the so-called "deep state." Unless he and his staff were too lazy to search a database, Johnson has always had access to the data that doesn't lie.

Along a similar track, Johnson and House Republicans are paving the way to cut $880 billion from Medicaid - which will result in over 20 million people losing their health care coverage. The Speaker is also lying about that.  

REPORTER: Can you say unequivocally that down the line, there won't be cuts to Medicaid programs? MIKE JOHNSON: Medicaid is hugely problematic because it has a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 25, 2025 at 9:58 AM

First of all, everyone DOESN'T know "intuitively" that Medicaid is "hugely problematic because it has a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse."  But to justify his claim, Johnson suggested that experts identified $50 billion per year in fraud alone. That's a lie. Here's what he's referring to:

Each year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) releases estimated Payment Error Rate Measure (PERM) rates on improper payments in Medicaid...The overall 2024 improper payment rate was 5.09 percent, down from 8.58 percent in 2023...

It’s important to note that most of the improper payments are made for eligible health services for people who were eligible for Medicaid; the issue is that proper documentation for the payments is missing. That means that the improper payment rate is a measure of procedural errors not a fraud rate, nor is it an accurate count of funds that were misspent.

In other words, an error in documentation =/= fraud. Furthermore, CMS took specific steps to correct these documentation errors in 2024. 

The truth is that Medicaid fraud doesn't have anything to do with recipients or the services they are eligible to receive. 

The December 2024 report [from HHS and DOJ] lists examples of the different kinds of fraud against Medicaid (and Medicare) that the agencies have identified and prosecuted. Among those convicted are ambulance service providers, durable medical equipment suppliers, diagnostic labs, nursing homes, pain clinics, pharmacies, physical therapists, physicians, and substance use treatment providers. No beneficiaries are in the listing.

It's not the beneficiaries - it's the providers that are committing fraud. So as always, it is important to follow the money.

Given that, if Johnson and his Republican pals actually wanted to address the issue of fraud in Medicaid, they might have objected to Trump's firing of the HHS Inspector General. 

Since 2007, the OIG [Office of Inspector General] and the Department of Justice have been operating a special joint task force to root out waste, fraud and abuse in a dozen major metropolitan areas.

The Health Care Fraud Unit has charged more than 5,400 defendants with fraudulently billing Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurers more than $27 billion...

The OIG’s semiannual reports to Congress estimated the agency recovered close to $10 billion for Medicare and Medicaid in 2024, nearly 20 times the 1,500-person agency’s annual budget.

What all of these lies tell us is that Speaker Johnson isn't interested in data, nor is he actually concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse. As I have pointed out previously, he is a Christian reconstructionist, meaning that he believes that the welfare state must be destroyed. 

This is how we puncture the media narrative about Democrats being powerless

Major media outlets (ie, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times) have been critiqued for normalizing the anti-democratic agenda of Donald Trump and then kowtowing to his threats once he was re-elected. But after the president unleashed his "shock and awe" chaos, I noticed an additional pattern emerge. For example, we've seen lots of headlines like this:

"Democrats confront their powerlessness as Trump flexes authority" at CNN

"Powerless, Democrats debate how deep in the wilderness they are" at NYT

"More Democrats fear the party’s image isn’t just damaged – it’s broken" at Politico

There are also some on the extreme left (who make a habit of always criticizing Democrats) that keep telling us the party's leadership is failing us. 

If you focus on that kind of news, you'd have reason to be completely demoralized and not notice that things like this are happening:

WATCH: “When will you stand up to them and say that is enough?” WISCONSIN Republicans Grothman & Fitzgerald run into tough town hall crowds also 👇🏽👀

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) February 21, 2025 at 11:43 PM

As I write, Josh Marshall has documented that constituents have disrupted at least five Republican town halls in the past week. There is enough of a pattern that even the New York Times noticed today.

But it's not just regular voters who are exercising their power. The web site "Just Security" has documented 89 court cases filed against the illegal actions taken by the Trump administration - even as Minority Leader Jeffries is doing his job in the House.

Jeffries: "This budget is a betrayal of working-class Americans... We only need 3 House Republicans -- there are 215 Democrats in the House - we only need 3 to stand up on behalf of their constituents, and that is going to be an ongoing effort over these next few days, to identify those individuals"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 23, 2025 at 8:36 AM

Perhaps one of the most important things we can all learn from this moment is that it is time to stop looking for a leader to save us. The truth is that it's going to take all of us.

If you need some inspiration along those lines, please watch/listen to the speech Kamala Harris gave Saturday while accepting the NAACP Image Award. 

These are some powerful words from our former vice president (emphasis mine).

This organization came into being at a moment when our country struggled with greed, bitterness and hatred. And those who forged the NAACP, those who carried its legacy forward, had no illusions about the forces they were up against — no illusions about how stony the road would be. But some look at this moment and rightly feel the weight of history. Some see the flames on our horizons, the rising waters in our cities, the shadows gathering over our democracy, and ask, ‘What do we do now?’ But we know exactly what to do, because we have done it before, and we will do it again.

We use our power; we organize, mobilize, we educate and we advocate. Because, you see, our power has never come from having an easy path. Our strength flows from our faith — faith in God, faith in each other, and our refusal to surrender to cynicism and destruction. Not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. Not because victory is guaranteed, but because the fight is worth it.

While we have no illusions about what we are up against in this chapter of our American story, this chapter will be written not simply by whoever occupies the Oval Office — nor by the wealthiest among us. The American story will be written by you, written by us — by we the people.

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the Selma march, her words echo those of President Obama ten years ago.

Selma shows us that America is not the project of any one person. Because the single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word “We.” “We The People.” “We Shall Overcome.” “Yes We Can.” That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone.

Musk is an idiot with a Nazi axe to grind

When confronted with the lie about USAID sending $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, Elon Musk said something worth noting. 

Musk acknowledged that "some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected." 

Given that he and his DOGE minions haven't produced much (if any) evidence of fraud, it would be more accurate of him to acknowledge that "most of the things I say will be incorrect." But it's also important to notice where he is aiming his "incorrect" statements. Much like USAID, they're likely at agencies/programs, he is preparing to take down.

One of them is the child tax credit. Musk recently responded to this post on X by saying, "such a big jump in such a short time doesn't make sense."

Did you know the IRS is one of the largest providers of Welfare in the USA?

The IRS relies on US Residents (not just citizens) self-certifying their qualification for these IRS Welfare programs that are effectively a "negative income tax".

From 2011-2019, there were ~30M IRS… pic.twitter.com/HYBOF0Evsz

— ~~datahazard~~ (@fentasyl) February 15, 2025

The bar they're referring to is the light green one labelled "refundable credits" because you can get a refund even if you don't owe any tax. Musk's response makes sense only if you are ignorant of two facts:

1. 2020 was the year of the COVID pandemic, when so many people lost jobs and increased their likelihood of qualifying for the refundable child tax credit, and
2. 2021 was the year that Biden and Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan, temporarily increasing the child tax credit from $1,400 per child to $3,600. 

Equally ignorant are Musk's attacks on Social Security. During that same press conference where he admitted that he'd say things that are incorrect, the shadow president suggested that people who are 150 years old are receiving Social Security payments. He followed that up with this post on Friday.

His reference to vampires suggests that he thinks this is all some kind of joke. Which it isn't! 

But here's the thing: rather than spread lies about fraud, Musk could have checked out a report from the Social Security Inspector General (that Trump fired) published less than two years ago about this very topic. They found that "Years of birth for 18.9 million numberholders born in 1920 or earlier have no death information on their Numident [SSA's computer database file] record." 

So Musk and his minions have not uncovered anything new. But here's what the IG also reported: approximately 18.4 million (98%) of those numberholders are not currently receiving SSA payments. At the most, that means a potential 2% rate of fraud on the $1.35 trillion in Social Security payments per year.

But even those numbers overestimate the problem. Here are some actual facts about Social Security:

As a percentage of all payments, improper payments account for 0.84% of the total, the inspector general has found.

That’s "better than any private insurance company in the nation," and with a lower cost of administration, said Henry J. Aaron, a fellow with the Brookings Institution think tank and a former chair of the Social Security Advisory Board.

The fact is that Musk thinks he's some kind of genius when instead, he's just an idiot with a Nazi axe to grind. Perhaps that makes him less dangerous than an intelligent/informed person with a Nazi axe to grind. But that's debatable. 

A second essential safeguard of democracy is now at risk

On February 6th, Senator Angus King (I-ME) gave an important speech as he and his colleagues debated the confirmation of Russell Vought to be the Director of OMB (emphasis mine). 

Here's a paradox at the heart of the creation of any government, whether it's here or anywhere else on Earth, and anywhere else in history. There's a paradox built in, because the essence of creating government is to give it power, give it our power,...in order to provide for the common defense, to ensure domestic tranquility, to provide justice to our people.

In other words, we're giving our power to this separate entity. But we have to do so with the realization that the power that's being given has the potential to be abused. In other words, how do we give power to this entity, this government, and ensure that the government itself doesn't use that power to abuse us as citizens? This is a question at the heart of all political discussion throughout history...

Our framers understood this. They were deep students of history and also human nature. And they had just won a lengthy and brutal war against the abuses inherent in concentrated governmental power...

So how did they answer the question? How did they answer the question who will guard the guardians? They answered it by building into the basic structure of our government two essential safeguards. One was regular elections. In other words, returning the control of the government to the people on regular scheduled elections...But the other piece that's built into our system that's the other essential safeguard is the deliberate division of power between the branches and levels of government.

As we are bombarded with the chaos and corruption emanating from the Trump/Musk administration on a daily basis, it is important to recognize that our democracy rests on two essential safeguards: (1) regular elections, and (2) the separation of powers. 

Much of what we're witnessing from Trump/Musk is the neutering of number two. Ignoring laws passed by Congress and threatening to disobey the courts is at the heart of destroying the separation of powers in order to establish the president as dictator. 

But recent news suggests that Trump/Musk might be going after elections as well. At this point, they're not threatening to stop them from happening. But here's what they ARE doing:

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen all of its election security work and is reviewing everything it has done to help state and local officials secure their elections for the past eight years, WIRED has learned...

In a memo sent Friday to all CISA employees and obtained by WIRED, CISA’s acting director, Bridget Bean, said she was ordering “a review and assessment” of every position at the agency related to election security and countering mis- and disinformation, “as well as every election security and [mis-, dis-, and malinformation] product, activity, service, and program that has been carried out” since the federal government designated election systems as critical infrastructure in 2017.

“CISA will pause all elections security activities until the completion of this review,” Bean added. The agency is also cutting off funding for these activities at the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, a group funded by the Department of Homeland Security that has served as a coordinating body for the elections community.

For a quick review of some recent history, the initial concern of the Obama administration when Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election was that they would hack into state/local election systems. Just before leaving office, then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson designated election infrastructure as a "critical infrastructure" - setting up the federal government to help state/local officials prevent cyber attacks. Those are the funds/activities/personnel that are being frozen right now by the Trump/Musk administration. 

In reporting on this freeze, the right wing website New York Post quoted a DHS official who said, "The agency has determined that federally funded work organized under the EI-ISAC [the group that coordinates activities with local election officials] no longer effectuates Department priorities."

I know there's a lot to absorb right now. But shutting these systems down is basically a nod to Russia (or Iran, China, etc)) that they have an open door to hack into state/local election systems and control them. That's democracy's second essential safeguard going down the tubes. 

Vought suggests that independent agencies are unconstitutional. How about NASA?

It can be interesting to speculate about why Elon Musk has gone after USAID so viciously, but as Nancy Pelosi said about Trump, I suspect that "all roads lead to Putin." 

There is, however, another faction of the Trump administration that has laid out their motivations. That one is led by Project 25's author, Russ Vought - who currently serves as the Director of OMB. Here's what he told Tucker Carlson not long after the 2024 election (emphasis mine):

So my belief, for anyone who wants to listen, is that you have to — the President has to move executively as fast, and as aggressively as possible, with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy and their power centers. And I think there are a couple of ways to do it.

Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such — SEC, or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup — but that is not something that the Constitution understands. So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.

USAID is one of those "independent agencies" and Vought suggested that they are not constitutional. 

Here's where it gets interesting, though. Among those independent agencies is one that Musk is likely to protect at all costs - NASA. That's because, over the last 10 years, his SpaceX company has gotten $11.8 billion in contracts from the agency. All of that is despite the fact that SpaceX relies on undocumented immigrants and has a horrific record when it comes to worker safety. 

I doubt these conflicting views will ever come head-to-head. Vought is likely to find some way to carve out NASA from his campaign against independent agencies. The fact is that these guys don't feel an iota of shame when it comes to hypocrisy. But I still think it's worth noting. 

The Trump administration's attack on free speech

On Wednesday, Matt Taibbi once again testified before Jim Jordan's House Judiciary Committee, claiming to address government censorship. He specifically attacked John Kerry for expressing concern that the First Amendment restricts our ability to address disinformation. Taibbi also went after USAID for funding provided to an organization called "Internews," presumably because - in their efforts to support trustworthy news - they "tackle disinformation." 

But what I found most interesting is the actual censorship that Taibbi chose to ignore. Since January 20th, the Trump administration has done the following:

• Banned the use of words like "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based" and "science-based" at CDC
• Banned the use of words like "women," "disability," "bias," "status," "trauma," "Black," "Hispanic communities," as well as "socioeconomic," "ethnicity" and "systemic" at the National Science Foundation.
• Banned the use of words like "immigrant," "undocumented," "foreign assistance," "Green New Deal," "climate change," "diversity," "equity," "racism," "discrimination," "transgender," "LGBT," "abortion," "pregnant," "birth control" and "fetus" from the Commerce Department.

Senator Brian Schatz and Chris Murphy had a little chat about all of this on the Senate Floor.

Yes, it is absurd. It is also extremely dangerous when it comes to things like medical research. But...it is also the most blatant attack on free speech that I've seen in my lifetime. Unlike Taibbi's pearl clutching about government asking social media companies to abide by their own rules of conduct, this is the government banning the use of certain words that - for whatever reason - they don't like. 

Catherine Rampell identified some additional examples of government censorship.

Civil servants have been ordered to snitch on colleagues who might secretly harbor support for DEI — or diversity, equity and inclusion — initiatives. An executive order issued on Wednesday says the government will withhold funding from public schools that teach concepts such as “unconscious bias.”...

The president and his allies have also leaned on private firms to disavow politically incorrect values. For example, a group of 19 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to Costco demanding the retailer drop its diversity commitments, citing a Trump executive order.

Just this week, the Trump administration punished the Associated Press for not complying with its speech rules. 

I have to admit that it's hard to keep up with all of the ways this administration is attacking free speech. So I'm sure I've missed a lot of examples. But as we've seen, despite Trump's executive orders on religious liberty and free speech, the entire First Amendment is under attack. In the Trump/Musk/Vance era, you are only allowed to believe and say what they find acceptable. 

J.D. Vance previously described a lot of what this administration is doing

I want to highlight two recent developments in the Trump/Musk/Vance administration. First of all, the National Institutes of Health dramatically slashed grants to support research institutions by putting a cap of 15% on what is allowable for so-called "indirect costs." Look behind that curtain and here's what you'll find:

It’s the Trump administration’s latest blow to the American higher education system, which Republicans for years have charged with cultivating progressive culture and churning out liberal-minded graduates.

In case you're wondering if that is an exaggeration, Stephanie Miller, who directs communications at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and is married to Stephen Miller, wrote on X that, in making these changes to NIH grants, "Trump is doing away with Liberal DEI Deans’ slush fund."

The all-out assault on higher education is underway.

Trump is calling for changes that reach every type of school and could affect almost every function of college life from financial aid and academic services for students to research funding that has long driven innovation. 

None of that is happening by accident. Three years ago the vice president gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference that was actually titled "The Universities are the Enemy." Here's how Vance opened his remarks:

If any of us want to do the things we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

So yeah, that's where things are headed.

Secondly, the Trump/Musk/Vance administration is getting some push-back on their attempted coup from the courts. 

At least nine federal judges — from Washington, D.C., to Washington state — have halted aspects of Trump’s early-term blitz, from his effort to rewrite the Constitution’s birthright citizenship guarantee to his sweeping effort to freeze federal spending to his plans to break and remake the federal workforce.

So, of course, we're starting to see arguments from right-wingers suggesting that this is "judicial interference."  

Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are “legitimate” can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.

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— Steve Vladeck (@stevevladeck.bsky.social) February 9, 2025 at 7:31 AM

In case you've never heard of Adrian Vermeule, he is a proponent of Catholic Integralism (ie, the Catholic version of Christian Nationalism).

The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.

Vermeule seems to have decided that the courts must bow to the will of our "Dear Leader" president and his unelected oligarch.  

The vice president, who embraces those views, didn't simply repost the tweet from Vermeule. He responded with his own post speculating about defying the courts. 

After a judge blocked DOGE access to Treasury system and Elon Musk promoted a post suggesting that the order should be defied, Vice President JD Vance chimes in:

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— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) February 9, 2025 at 10:03 AM

That comes as no surprise because, in 2021, he said this:

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”...

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Whether it's about destroying our systems of higher education or denying the legitimacy of the courts, J.D. Vance previously described a lot of what this administration is doing. Perhaps some of the time the media spent chasing down Vance's lie about immigrants eating pets should have been used to unpack his actual agenda. I would simply remind you that a lot of it mirrors the radical ideas proposed by Curtis Yarvin, who thinks Americans "need to get over their dictator phobia" and welcome a monarch.

The Trump administration's attacks on religious liberty

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Trump said that "If we don't have religious liberty, then we don't have a free country." If he actually believes that (I have my doubts), then he might want to check in with his own people who are viscously attacking various religious groups - most of whom fall under the banner of being Christian.

We can start with the big one in the news lately. Our shadow president has called USAID "a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” “evil” and “a criminal organization.” But here's how it's described by Christianity Today:

Most of USAID’s budget goes to grants for specific development projects, including at Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, World Relief, Catholic Relief Services, and many other faith-based groups...

“The total closure of USAID would cause irreparable damage to a number of Christian mission institutions across Africa, and I’m sure across the world,” said Matthew Loftus, a missionary doctor in Kenya.

In other words, the organization that provides funding to Christian mission institutions is, according to Musk, "a viper's nest of radical-left marxists who hate America." And he's bragging about putting it through a wood chipper. Got it!

Trump's demonization of refugees (except white South Africans) is also leading to attacks on religious groups. Those have focused on organizations providing food, shelter, and other necessities to those awaiting court dates for their asylum hearings. 

When Catholic Bishops called for the humane treatment of refugees, the vice-president basically accused them of being greedy.

As a practicing Catholic, I was heartbroken by that statement. And I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?

Trump's BFF Michael Flynn joined the chorus, accusing Catholic Charities of "ripping off American taxpayers." He went on to suggest that they were "likely supporting child sex and slave trafficking." Here's what Catholic Charities actually does:

Last year, 92 percent of the services provided by the 168 independent Catholic Charities agencies around the country covered basic needs — access to food, housing, health care and other necessities — for families and individuals struggling to get by. These vital services include food pantries for those who can’t afford groceries, childcare programs for low-income families, meal deliveries for homebound seniors, job training resources for veterans, temporary and permanent housing, mental health services and much more.

Flynn then went after Lutheran Social Services - with an "attaboy" from Musk - calling it a "money laundering operation."

All of this comes on the heels of Trump's response to Bishop Mariann Budde's plea for mercy. The president called her “a Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” “ungracious” and “nasty in tone and not compelling or smart.” Lining up to attack the whole concept of mercy were court evangelicals like Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas and Rob Pacienza, senior pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale.

This points to a dilemma for those who are determined to make this country a so-called "Christian nation." To paraphrase Barack Obama, "Even if we only had Christians in our midst - if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America - whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would it be Robert Jeffress's or Mariann Budde's?"

During Trump's first term, most of his attacks on religious liberty were leveled at Muslims. This time around, it looks like they're going after anyone who actually pays attention to what Jesus taught.

The old "Twitter files" gang has gotten back together to attack USAID

Here's a headline from Newsmax that you might have missed if you haven't been paying attention to right wing news: "USAID Paid for Trump Impeachment Effort." The author of that piece is quoting Michael Shellenberger, of "Twitter files" fame. 

The claim is that USAID provides funding to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which, in 2019, published a report on Rudy Giuliani's work with Lev Parnas and Igor Furman to fabricate dirt on Joe Biden. The whistleblower's complaint that spurred Trump's first impeachment cited that report four times. Nevermind that pretty much everything reported by OCCRP and the whistleblower turned out to be true, somehow USAID funding is to blame, not a president who engaged in lies and extortion. 

Apparently our shadow president thinks these accusations raise good questions.

As Brandy Zadrozny and Lora Kolodny explain, the lies being perpetrated about USAID reveal a "pattern [that] is similar to one that played out with the so-called Twitter Files in 2022, when selectively framed narratives and out-of-context internal documents were weaponized to fuel allegations of a grand government censorship conspiracy." But it's not only the methods that are the same. The players are also the ones who were involved in the whole Twitter Files affair: Elon Musk, Mike Benz, Michael Shellenberger, and (to a smaller extent) Matt Taibbi.

While you may not have heard of Mike Benz (the guy Musk responded to in the post above), he is the one behind both the attacks on Twitter and USAID. 

Benz, 39, has positioned himself as a leading voice for many conservatives by tapping into a broader right-wing wave of disaffection with perceived social media and government censorship...

Benz also amplified the “Twitter Files,” documents released by Musk that revealed internal debates about content moderation and communications with outside organizations, governments, journalists and researchers. For months, in videos and threads posted to Twitter, Benz has framed those internal debates as grand conspiracies and maligned the academic researchers and institutions involved as government spies and plants.

When it comes to USAID, Benz has been spreading lies about the organization since 2022.

Over the next two years, he posted waves of tweets and dozens of hours of video presentations marked with highlighted texts and red notes, scribbles, circles and arrows, flicking at a sprawling narrative of USAID as a covert operations division of the CIA in which staff members sought to enrich themselves, spread leftist ideology at home and abroad and harm Trump. The theory alleged that USAID was behind the mass censorship of Americans, as well as global efforts to manipulate social media, rig elections and quash dissent.

Oh...and Benz is also (surprise, surprise) a white supremacist.

Benz appears to have been a pseudonymous alt-right content creator who courted and interacted with white nationalists and posted videos espousing racist conspiracy theories, according to recordings, livestreams and blog posts reviewed by NBC News.

Perhaps now you see why our shadow president is so fond of Benz that he's interacted with him on X over 40 times in the last week. Either Musk buys into all of the conspiracy theories about USAID, or he finds them useful for his own nefarious purposes.

Destruction is the point

In her February 1st newsletter, Heather Cox Richardson identified the three factions currently at work in the Trump administration. 

1. Trump and his minions who want revenge
2. The Project 25 crew who want to establish a theocracy
3. The tech bros, led by Elon Musk, who want a monarchy in which the oligarchs rule 

As she points out, there's something that all three groups have in common, despite their different motivations - a "determination to destroy the federal government. " 

That's where Timothy Snyder, author of "On Tyranny" steps in with a specific warning about the tech bros (emphasis mine).

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

It's true folks, there is a coup going on...as we speak.

The word for this is "coup."

[image or embed]

— Heather Cox Richardson (TDPR) (@hcrichardson.bsky.social) February 2, 2025 at 10:41 AM

“That’s when they suspended the constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t any rioting in the streets. People stayed home, watching their televisions, looking for direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put a finger on.” - Margaret Atwood, Handmaids Tale

— desertdiva2024.bsky.social (@desertdiva2024.bsky.social) February 2, 2025 at 10:51 AM

Snyder notes that, while Trump is merely a tool the oligarchs are using, Vice President J.D. Vance has been in on the plot all along. 

Back in 2018, Adam Sewer rightly pointed out that cruelty was the point. When it comes to the president himself, that is still true. But since Musk bought him off, the oligarchs are now in control and the central charge is all about destruction. 

It is imperative that we all understand that this is what's going on. It can feel like the whole world is topsy-turvy and that none of what's going on makes any sense. In one way it doesn't. But as the walls of our democracy begin to crumble around us, we need to understand that destruction is the point. Once that sinks in, we are better prepared to develop the guerrilla tactics that are necessary for the kind of asymmetrical confrontation we're facing. Snyder has some ideas on that. So I recommend that you read his whole piece.

Think like a community organizer: Do a power analysis.

As rational Americans, we're right to be enraged and afraid right now. The response from some folks has been to criticize elected Democrats for not shouting loud enough.

What we’re not hearing is your anger. We’re not hearing your outrage. We’re wondering whether or not you actually hear us.

My suggestion would be to shout as loud as you want. But when you're done, take a moment to think about the serenity prayer. 

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. 

There is a reason why the serenity prayer has been such a powerful tool in helping people who are dealing with addiction. Too often when we are enraged and/or fearful, we lash out at things that are out of our control. In the end, we are defeated and feel powerless. That's when the second part of the prayer emerges. Our energies are better focused on the things we actually have the power to change. The wisdom comes in knowing the difference, and in embracing the fact that we are not powerless victims. 

In the picture above, Barack Obama isn't leading an AA meeting. He's teaching community organizing. The picture cuts off the top right-hand corner, but it is clear that - much like the serenity prayer suggests -  he's talking about doing a "Power Analysis." That starts with learning the difference between where we do/don't have the power to change things.

I have been reminded of that as I watch Josh Marshall basically do a power analysis over at TPM.  He, too, invoked the serenity prayer.

But this is also fundamentally a battle for public opinion, which means it’s about the next election and sowing divisions in the majority party. That means it’s very much a long haul. Unsatisfying and scary, yes, but that doesn’t make it less the reality. The whole game here [for MAGA] is whipping up false perceptions of urgency that can’t be met, which leads people to despair and giving up.

I tend to think of these things in a political form of the “serenity prayer” usually attributed to the 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: know what power you lack, use the power you have to the maximum extent possible and do your best to distinguish between the two. “Serenity” sounds to many people to very much fail to meet the moment. But serenity is actually power. (It’s also resilience but let’s focus for now on the power part of the equation.) This is of necessity very much an asymmetric confrontation. It can’t not be. The White House has all the executive authority and, indirectly, the congressional power as well. When Trump or Bannon or Steven Miller talk about overwhelming the opposition, they really mean goading them to meet every new thrust as a pitched battle on open ground which they’ll of course lose since — to extend the metaphor — the Republicans have a big army and the Democrats have no army. Because of the 2024 election. So Democrats keep running out onto the open field with no power or defense and getting crushed, which creates these repeated set pieces of helplessness and impotence. That amounts to free programming for Donald Trump. To stretch the metaphor a bit further, this is for the moment a guerrilla conflict for the Democrats — cutting communications and supply lines, taking out fuel and arms depots and then running back into the hills. As we said yesterday: “Find what you can actually do that’s not begging or meaningless and then do it.”

The part we cannot change is the fact that we are very much in the midst of "an asymmetric confrontation" due to the results of the 2024 election. Democrats hold none of the traditional forms of political power. 

So we can keep beating our heads against a wall and feeling powerless, or we can assess what power we actually have. Marshall has laid out some possibilities.

1. We have the power to influence public opinion.

Sometimes, getting the message out to the people who need to hear it (ie, Trump supporters) involves working with those who have institutional power and are seeing their own self-interests affected by Trump/Musk. 

For example, we're expecting Trump to unleash his 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada today. While we've grown accustomed to backpedaling from Sen. Susan Collins, she just issued some dire warnings about what those tariffs will mean to her state of Maine. Similar warnings are coming from J.P. Morgan.  While Republicans probably wouldn't listen to Democrats complaining about things like tariffs, they're more likely to listen to Republican politicians and J.P. Morgan. We can all share their concerns with friends/family/coworkers.

As the fallout from Trump/Musk grows, there will be a lot of these kinds of examples that can be used to influence public opinion.

2. We have the power to challenge Trump/Musk in the courts.

I have bookmarked the "Litigation Tracker" being maintained at the web site, Just Security. As I write, 23 lawsuits have been filed against the executive orders issued by Trump. Marshall explains why that is important.

[C]ritical to a battle over public opinion in an onslaught such as this is slowing things down as much as possible, throwing as much sand in the gears as possible. That’s stretches out the time people can get an understanding of what’s happening. It increases their visibility of what’s happening...

But the point isn’t ‘courts will save us’ malarkey. (In any case, that’s now mainly the mocking phrase of wreckers and sad sacks.) It’s putting sand in the gears, slowing things down as one front in the battle for public opinion.

3. We have the power to force change when Republicans have to work with Democrats on things like the debt ceiling. Here's how that would work:

The clearest lever out there is that the White House needs a debt limit increase sometime this spring, probably pretty soon. There’s been chatter that Republican leaders are going to try to put together a spending deal with Democratic help that would include a debt limit increase or suspension. That has to be taken off the table. No debt limit increase unless the President renounces illegal and constitutional actions. That’s the clearest place where opposition Democrats can take the initiative and force the President and GOP leadership to come to them. Anything that doesn’t force that is basically meaningless.

You’ve probably heard me say before that no one should ever play chicken with the full faith and credit of the United States. Well, these are extraordinary circumstances.

I have to admit that I have reservations about that one. We've always understood that it is dangerous to play chicken with the debt ceiling. But I'm willing to at least entertain the idea given our current circumstances.

Those are the tactics Marshall has put forward. I suspect that there are a lot more guerrilla tactics that could be used at this point. It's time to do a power analysis, let go of the things we can't change, and get on with using the power we DO have to be the opposition.  

P.S. I'm quoting Josh Marshall a lot because, as far as I can see, he's doing the best job of analyzing our current situation and proposing pragmatic steps for going forward. If you haven't already, I urge you to subscribe to his site, Talking Points Memo. It is an invaluable resource.