HOW RICH, HOW SMART, HOW BRAZEN THEY ARE

Invasion of the sociopaths

I think a lot of Americans are starting to ask themselves, “What the hell is going on around here?” And well they should. There has never been in the history of our country a direct assault on our government like this.

It isn’t a military assault by land, or air, or sea. It’s a political and economic assault by a small group of people who for deeply nefarious purposes are gutting the U.S. government. President Bill Clinton cut the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands of people - through a responsible, gradual, and deliberative process. Elon Musk and DOGE, however, are simply - with no knowledge of how government works or even what it does - taking a hammer to our federal agencies. They are causing all manner of trauma to our civil servants, which, according to their ally Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget, is precisely their intent.

Weather forecasting is being stymied, which will drastically diminish the capacity of local governments to serve their communities. Public lands are being sapped of the professionals who cared for them, all the easier to allow bad actors to sell off our precious national resources. In Sudan and Ethiopia, warehouses full of food cannot reach 150,000 starving mothers and children because DOGE stopped the process. It’s hard to fathom how one individual so wealthy that he could feed millions of starving people, is instead bragging about withholding all that food from those who need it in order to survive.

Though Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that food should go out as part of his life saving waiver, even he apparently has no power over the unvetted, unelected and unscrupulous Elon Musk. Twelve per cent of the Social Security workforce is slated to be fired as well, which will imperil the delivery of Social Security checks to millions of people who rely on those checks for food to eat and a bare minimum of dignity.

The Trump administration has also canceled thousands of contracts that funded malaria prevention, polio vaccine initiatives, tuberculosis treatments, Ebola surveillance and hospitals in refugee camps. We are dismantling a vast humanitarian network that has saved millions of lives, that every American should be proud of.

And my God, I ask you: for what??

That is the question we need to ask ourselves, and in no universe does it make sense to say “so we can cut out the fat.” Musk and his cronies aren’t cutting out the fat. They are cutting into the bone marrow. They aren’t repairing a broken system. They’re destroying it… and they know it. Mr. Musk and his gang of computer techs are not responsible servants of the public good. They are destructive, cruel, and dangerous purveyors of whatever plot they’ve got going.

Millions of people at this point are clearly concerned; convinced we are experiencing a coup, awake to the techno billionaire-sponsored takeover that seeks to replace our democracy with a barely disguised soft dictatorship. People do see this. Some say, “At this point, there is nothing we can do.” I’ve talked to some who are planning to move to Costa Rica, to Canada, to Portugal or elsewhere. Many are simply going about their lives, living as they did before, but in a state of deep and quiet panic, with an inestimable sorrow and a prayer that somehow this will reverse itself.

I think it will.

Americans are often distracted by shallow things, but we’re not stupid. We can be slow to wake up to a problem, but then we’re ready to deal with it magnificently once we do. What I see is a nation in process. I see the wheels spinning. I see a vast, inchoate intelligence beginning to emerge among us. It’s forging within us a new Americanism - the kind of appreciation you can feel for something only when you realize you’re at risk of losing it - and from this will emerge a new America.

Elon is rich beyond imagining, but that doesn’t make him all-knowing. He knows engineering. He knows cars. He knows rockets. He knows how to build things, and he knows how to destroy things.

But he doesn’t know us.

NOTE: Starting tomorrow and on every Tuesday and Wednesday in March, I’ll be co-hosting RISING. I hope you’ll check it out and send me good energy! I appreciate it.