Anti-Anti-Nazi Barbarian Hordes are Knocking Down the Gates

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DOGE Is Hacking America: The U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history.
by Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Davi Ottenheimer, the vice president of trust and digital ethics at Inrupt, a data infrastructure company.
Foreign Policy
February 11, 2025, 6:49 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/11/do ... -treasury/

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A security guard stands at the entrance to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) headquarters on Feb. 3. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.

First, it was reported that people associated with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed the US Treasury computer system, giving them the ability to collect data on and potentially control the department’s roughly $5.45 trillion in annual federal payments.

Then, we learned that uncleared DOGE personnel had gained access to classified data from the US Agency for International Development, possibly copying it onto their own systems. Next, the Office of Personnel Management—which holds detailed personal data on millions of federal employees, including those with security clearances—was compromised. After that, Medicaid and Medicare records were compromised.

Meanwhile, only partially redacted names of CIA employees were sent over an unclassified email account. DOGE personnel are also reported to be feeding Education Department data into artificial intelligence software, and they have also started working at the Department of Energy.

This story is moving very fast. On Feb. 8, a federal judge blocked the DOGE team from accessing the Treasury Department systems any further. But given that DOGE workers have already copied data and possibly installed and modified software, it’s unclear how this fixes anything.

In any case, breaches of other critical government systems are likely to follow unless federal employees stand firm on the protocols protecting national security.

The systems that DOGE is accessing are not esoteric pieces of our nation’s infrastructure—they are the sinews of government.

For example, the Treasury Department systems contain the technical blueprints for how the federal government moves money, while the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) network contains information on who and what organizations the government employs and contracts with.

What makes this situation unprecedented isn’t just the scope, but also the method of attack. Foreign adversaries typically spend years attempting to penetrate government systems such as these, using stealth to avoid being seen and carefully hiding any tells or tracks. The Chinese government’s 2015 breach of OPM was a significant US security failure, and it illustrated how personnel data could be used to identify intelligence officers and compromise national security.

In this case, external operators with limited experience and minimal oversight are doing their work in plain sight and under massive public scrutiny: gaining the highest levels of administrative access and making changes to the United States’ most sensitive networks, potentially introducing new security vulnerabilities in the process.

But the most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted. It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.

The Treasury’s computer systems have such an impact on national security that they were designed with the same principle that guides nuclear launch protocols: No single person should have unlimited power. Just as launching a nuclear missile requires two separate officers turning their keys simultaneously, making changes to critical financial systems traditionally requires multiple authorized personnel working in concert.

This approach, known as “separation of duties,” isn’t just bureaucratic red tape; it’s a fundamental security principle as old as banking itself. When your local bank processes a large transfer, it requires two different employees to verify the transaction. When a company issues a major financial report, separate teams must review and approve it. These aren’t just formalities—they’re essential safeguards against corruption and error. These measures have been bypassed or ignored. It’s as if someone found a way to rob Fort Knox by simply declaring that the new official policy is to fire all the guards and allow unescorted visits to the vault.

The implications for national security are staggering. Sen. Ron Wyden said his office had learned that the attackers gained privileges that allow them to modify core programs in Treasury Department computers that verify federal payments, access encrypted keys that secure financial transactions, and alter audit logs that record system changes. Over at OPM, reports indicate that individuals associated with DOGE connected an unauthorized server into the network. They are also reportedly training AI software on all of this sensitive data.

This is much more critical than the initial unauthorized access. These new servers have unknown capabilities and configurations, and there’s no evidence that this new code has gone through any rigorous security testing protocols. The AIs being trained are certainly not secure enough for this kind of data. All are ideal targets for any adversary, foreign or domestic, also seeking access to federal data.

There’s a reason why every modification—hardware or software—to these systems goes through a complex planning process and includes sophisticated access-control mechanisms. The national security crisis is that these systems are now much more vulnerable to dangerous attacks at the same time that the legitimate system administrators trained to protect them have been locked out.

By modifying core systems, the attackers have not only compromised current operations, but have also left behind vulnerabilities that could be exploited in future attacks—giving adversaries such as Russia and China an unprecedented opportunity. These countries have long targeted these systems. And they don’t just want to gather intelligence—they also want to understand how to disrupt these systems in a crisis.

Now, the technical details of how these systems operate, their security protocols, and their vulnerabilities are now potentially exposed to unknown parties without any of the usual safeguards. Instead of having to breach heavily fortified digital walls, these parties can simply walk through doors that are being propped open—and then erase evidence of their actions.

The security implications span three critical areas.

First, system manipulation: External operators can now modify operations while also altering audit trails that would track their changes. Second, data exposure: Beyond accessing personal information and transaction records, these operators can copy entire system architectures and security configurations—in one case, the technical blueprint of the country’s federal payment infrastructure. Third, and most critically, is the issue of system control: These operators can alter core systems and authentication mechanisms while disabling the very tools designed to detect such changes. This is more than modifying operations; it is modifying the infrastructure that those operations use.

To address these vulnerabilities, three immediate steps are essential. First, unauthorized access must be revoked and proper authentication protocols restored. Next, comprehensive system monitoring and change management must be reinstated—which, given the difficulty of cleaning a compromised system, will likely require a complete system reset. Finally, thorough audits must be conducted of all system changes made during this period.

This is beyond politics—this is a matter of national security. Foreign national intelligence organizations will be quick to take advantage of both the chaos and the new insecurities to steal US data and install backdoors to allow for future access.

Each day of continued unrestricted access makes the eventual recovery more difficult and increases the risk of irreversible damage to these critical systems. While the full impact may take time to assess, these steps represent the minimum necessary actions to begin restoring system integrity and security protocols.

Assuming that anyone in the government still cares.

[admin]

'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook: In 2022, one of Peter Thiel's favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO”
by Gil Duran
05 Feb 2025
https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elo ... ator-doge/


Contrary to scurrilous rumors that this newsletter is funded by billionaires, The Nerd Reich is brought to you by 78 (heroic) paid subscribers. If you have the means, and if you want this work to continue, please become a paid subscriber.

The Point: In 2022, one of Peter Thiel's favorite thinkers envisioned a second Trump Administration in which the federal government would be run by a “CEO” who was not Trump and laid out a playbook for how it might work. Elon Musk is following it.

The Back Story: In 2012, Curtis Yarvin — Peter Thiel’s “house philosopher”—called for something he dubbed RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. The idea: Take over the United States government and gut the federal bureaucracy. Then, replace civil servants with political loyalists who would answer to a CEO-type leader Yarvin likened to a dictator.

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” he said.

Yarvin, a software programmer, framed this as a “reboot” of government.

Elon Musk’s DOGE is just a rebranded version of RAGE. He demands mass resignations, locks career employees out of their offices, threatens to delete entire departments, and seizes total control of sensitive government systems and programs. DOGE = RAGE, masked in the bland language of “efficiency.”

But Musk’s reliance on Yarvin’s playbook runs deeper.

In an essay dated April 2022, Yarvin updated RAGE to something he described as a “butterfly revolution.” In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk wreak havoc on the United States Government (USG) over the past three weeks.

Wrote Yarvin:

We’ve got to risk a full power start—a full reboot of the USG. We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945. This level of centralized emergency power worked to refound a nation then, for them. So it should work now, for us.”

(The metaphor of “full power start” comes from Star Trek and entails a risky process of restarting a fictional spaceship in a way that might cause “implosion.” The World War II metaphor casts the federal government as a conquered enemy now controlled by an outside force.)

Yarvin wrote that in a second term, Trump could appoint a different person to act as the nation’s “CEO.” This CEO would be enabled to run roughshod over the federal government, with Trump in the background as “chairman of the board.” The metaphors clarify the core idea: Run the government as a rogue corporation rather than a public institution beholden to the rules of democracy.

Trump himself will not be the brain …He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.

This CEO will bring a new radical new style of leadership to the federal government:

The CEO he picks will run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts, probably also taking over state and local governments. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Trump will be monitoring this CEO’s performance, again on TV, and can fire him if need be.

Sound familiar?

Yarvin continues: Trump should amass an army of people willing to staff his new regime. Once he wins, this “magnificent army” of “ideologically trained” and Trump-loyal “ninjas” will be unleashed on the federal bureaucracy.

[H]e will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern. It is to understand the government. It is to figure out what the Trump administration can actually do—when it assumes the full Constitutional powers given to the chief executive of the executive branch…

The regime must have the capacity to govern every institution it does not dismantle. The Trump regime is not a barbaric sack of America’s institutions. Genghis Khan is not in the building! It is a systematic renewal of America’s institutions. No brand or building can survive. But the new regime must perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.

Many institutions which are necessary organs of society will have to be destroyed. These organs will have to be replaced. If they have not already been replaced in the larval stage, or even if they have, to scale—these replacements will need staff.

Government isn't the only target for this hostile takeover, wrote Yarvin:

Finally, it is not sufficient to have an army of parachute ninjas large or smart to drop into all the agencies in the executive branch. Many institutions of power are outside the government proper. Ninjas will have to land on the roofs of these buildings too—mainly journalism, academia and social media.

The new regime must seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections. Anything can be nationalized—so long as the new regime has the staff, the prize crew as it were, to nationalize it.

Yarvin envisioned a crew of experienced and educated government workers who would be recruited to staff the new regime. Musk appears to have different ideas. As Vittoria Elliott of Wired reports, Musk's chief lieutenants at DOGE (Destruction of Government by Elon) are very young men with no experience in government.

(Read "The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover," and please subscribe to Wired, which is doing excellent work.)

Yarvin is not alone in envisioning a massive purge of government. In 2021, J.D. Vance lauded Yarvin's work and called for a government purge:

I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.

Like Yarvin, Vance compared the federal government to a conquered enemy:

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

He added that Trump should defy any court orders designed to stop his purge.

The idea of a massive purge also appears in the writings of Balaji Srinivasan, whose ideas seem primarily derived from Yarvin's. I've written much about Srinivasan in this newsletter, so I won't quote him at length here. But his core idea, which he clearly got from Yarvin, is a corporate takeover of governments, which will afterward be run like tech companies (specifically, Twitter). Just as Musk took over Twitter and stripped "Blue Checks" of their status, he will now defrock civil servants, experts, and anyone who is loyal to democracy instead of the current regime.

Of course, the plot to destroy the federal bureaucracy also has a partner in the far-right Heritage Foundation. Project 2025, which is clearly being implemented despite mocking Republican denials during the 2024 campaign, calls for a purging and dismantling of government as well. As the Association of Federal Government Employees warned last July:

What could happen to our government and the federal workforce in 2025? A group of conservative organizations have a plan, and it’s not good for federal employees.

The plan is detailed in a blueprint called Project 2025, organized by the far-right Heritage Foundation, and backed by over 100 conservative organizations.

The plan promises a takeover of our country’s system of checks and balances in order to “dismantle the administrative state” – the operations of federal agencies and programs according to current law and regulation, including many of the laws and regulations that govern federal employment.

Longtime readers may recall that back in September, the Heritage Foundation and particular San Francisco tech interests held a conference called "Reboot 2024: The New Reality."

The New Reality

Analysis: What once seemed like a fringe theory is now being carried out by the corporate powers that have wholly captured our government. While there are some minor differences between Yarvin's approach and Musk's, here's a summary of what they have in common:

1. Install a CEO Dictator

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Trump appoints a CEO to run the country like a private corporation, bypassing Congress and the courts.

• Musk’s Moves: Acts as federal CEO, demands unilateral control over sensitive government programs, positioning himself as an unelected decision-maker as Trump stays in the background.

2. Purge the Bureaucracy

• Yarvin’s Plan: “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE) – fire career civil servants and replace them with loyalists.

• Musk’s Moves: DOGE is gutting teams, demanding mass resignations, locking employees out of offices, and threatening mass layoffs in federal government. Meanwhile, DOGE is recruiting inexperienced young men who owe their loyalty to Musk/Thiel.

3. Build a Loyalist Army

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Recruit an “ideologically trained” army to replace experts and enforce the new regime.

• Musk’s Moves: Surrounding himself with young, inexperienced loyalists who enforce his will without question. Project 2025 will also provide Republican cadre to run what's left of the federal government.

4. Dismantle Democratic Institutions

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Strip power from federal agencies, courts, and Congress, centralizing authority under the executive branch.

• Musk’s Moves: Undermining the credibility of the federal government, downplaying legal oversight, and defying regulatory authorities. Dismantling government agencies and functions with no plan for their replacement.

5. Seize Media and Information Control to Maintain Power

• Yarvin’s Blueprint: Take over government, journalism, academia, and social media to control public narratives.

• Musk’s Moves: Buying Twitter, firing journalists, boosting propaganda, and promoting fringe narratives while attacking traditional media. Leading the hostile tech takeover as Trump’s “CEO.”

Did I miss anything?

Conclusion: There is a lot more to say. What surprises me most is how the political press generally fails to inform the public that Musk is taking a systematic approach, one that has been outlined in public forums for years. (Some press outlets, like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, are owned by billionaires keenly interested in kowtowing to Musk and Trump.)

We are witnessing the methodical implementation of a long-planned strategy to transform American democracy into corporate autocracy. The playbook was written in plain sight and is now being followed step by step. Some dismiss the Yarvins of the world as unhinged nuts, but that's the point. These guys, with their bizarre and dangerous ideas, have gotten very far in 2025. Just look at the news.

Yarvin pitched his vision as a fictional or unlikely scenario. Unfortunately, it now appears to be our new reality. The press's failure to connect these dots isn't just a journalistic oversight — it's a critical missed warning about the systematic dismantling of democratic governance. By the time most Americans understand what's happening, the "reboot" – the destruction of government – may already be complete.

Note: Journalists or academic researchers interested in getting full access to Yarvin's post can contact me directly.

[admin]

DOGE’s DUMBEST Firing Yet
by Sam Stein
The Bulwark
Feb 21, 2025 Bulwark Takes

Sam Stein talks to Andrew Egger about his article Inside DOGE’s Dumbest Cut Yet.



Transcript

[Sam Stein] Hey guys me Sam Stein managing Eder at
the bulwark here with Andrew Edgar
who is live on the CPAC floor there's
like a 55 to 65% chance his internet
goes out and then there's a 30% chance
that the j6 choir starts singing right
behind him uh so if that happens uh
that's great uh if the 5% chance is that
we get this done correctly so be it in
the meantime subscribe to the feed uh
Andrew first off before we get to your
story uh which is what we're here to
talk about about uh this inexplicably
dumb
Doge cuts at uh Los Alamos uh which uh
if you're worried about nuclear safety
not the best cuts to make before we do
that uh tell us what's CPAC like yeah so
uh so you know we're we're we're a small
outfit here at the bull workk you finish
up one story uh you go hering off to the
next one uh and then you know while
you're there you try to do the video
content for the last story for the
YouTube page uh I haven't even been in
yet I've just I'm I'm I'm kind of
outside of the exhibitor hall where all
of the Mega lifestyle Brands um you know
Hawk their Wares and and raise raise
awareness I've seen a lot of you know
interesting people walk by Hans Von
spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation you
know how it is at CPAC The Heavy Hitters
um guys like that uh but uh but yeah you
know we're gonna we're GNA do a day at
CPAC and and see how it is we were
supposed to do it yesterday but then
this story happened yeah okay so let's
talk about the story
um first of all uh I think the context
here is important which is doer has been
going around cutting basically
everything um a few key agencies that
they're supposedly getting to um and
then trying to figure out if they
up uh and often times they have and
they've had to bring people back uh on
board who they cut we knew uh prior to
today that they had done the same uh at
this nuclear safety agency what's the
name of the agency yeah it's the
national nuclear Security Administration
which is a a subset of the Department of
energy and they basically handle you
know a lot of the the nuclear um Safety
Management of our current nuclear
stockpile as well as a lot of the uh
well they're they're involved with a lot
of the manufacturer of new nuclear
components um both to refurbish uh the
nukes that we already have and to build
new ones all right so we knew that they
had made these cuts and we knew that
they had frantically tried to rehire a
lot of these people and their portrayal
of this this is the Doge folks their
portrayal of This was oh you know the
people we cut were not critical but we
you know so nothing was we were never
too much danger um there primarily
administrative people um but that wasn't
the case according to your reporting
tell us what the actual story yeah so
this is I mean this is kind of a
remarkable thing because because this
whole story kind of blew up last week
right where where everyone just realized
that there were these there had been
these cuts at this at this extremely
critical uh Sub sub uh uh agency of the
Department of agency semi- autonomous
agency within the department of of
energy um and uh and it was so obvious
so quickly uh that this had been a
problem that uh uh you know the
administration quickly backtracked and
quickly at the beginning of this week
sent uh sent you know rehire notices to
a lot of these people uh to to all to
nearly all of them almost all of them
and and and nearly all of the ones who
got those notices have come back on and
so kind of the narrative has been wow
that sure was a screw up um but at least
you know says the department of energy
it was really just kind of a handful of
sort of clerical and administrative
employees uh and and you know it's just
kind of a thing that happened in the
past and we're all kind of back to
normal now but I've been talking to to
you know a number of current and for
former officials at uh in NSSA for the
last couple of days and the picture that
they give is very different first of all
um they are are they find it kind of
like a bad joke this idea that these are
kind of low functioning or not low
functioning but low-level uh kind of
clerical pencil pushing employees it's
kind of true in the sense that their
whole role at these nuclear manufacturer
sites like Los Alamos in New Mexico is
Administrative these are sites that are
um essentially all of the on the ground
stuff is done not by government
employees at all it's done by
independent contractors but they are
they are the eyes and ears of the
federal government at those sites to
direct the work and to um you know
ensure that it's it's always in
accordance with all federal you know
safety uh standards all just kind of
operational uh standards and just you
know make sure they're doing the what
the Department of Defense wants them to
be doing essentially with the energy
wants them mo doing as well um and so uh
when these Cuts came through as they
have at many agencies they essentially
hit everybody who was probationary and
in fact it was a little bit um you know
more we don't need to get into it but a
little bit more chaotic even than that
there were some people who who weren't
even like really probationary according
to the sense that it's actually legal to
fire them they were they were kind of
thought of as probationary they got on
lists for different reasons but the the
most striking of all of these people and
just to kind of give you a sense of it
is that uh the the acting chief of uh
defense nuclear safety at the entire
agency is a guy named James Todd he was
one of the people who found himself
locked out of his systems at the end of
last week when all these purges went
through now there it's a little unclear
and just let me say that again this is
the top authority at the entire National
nuclear Security Administration the top
authority for everything related to
nuclear safety at that agency so this a
kind of an important guy right it's a
little unclear because there's so much
fog of war with all this whether he was
ever like quote unquote supposed to be
one of these guys who was fired um and
and and and you get into like what does
supposed to be even mean like none of
it's really supposed to be happening
there's no no real sense of that any
it's legal it's just these guys who are
going around like slashing and burning
and he was one of the guys who got
slashed and burned right he was one of
the guys who got locked out of the
system who was then kind of very
hurridly brought back at the beginning
of this week he's not somebody who
talked to me for the story um but but I
think like that that he was um you know
one of the people involved is is really
really a striking thing hey YouTube fam
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the comments so behave what kind of
panic did it send throughout the agency
uh when they saw that James Todd and
others at Le relatively similar levels
had been locked out well what's what's
crazy is I mean I I I mentioned the word
fog like the term fog of War a minute
ago a lot of people didn't even really
know who all had been locked out because
there were no like kind of you know
agency-wide um you know announcements
about all who all had and had not gotten
the The Descent people kind of knew who
the probationary employees were right um
the ones who you know were the were the
legitimate probationary employees the
the the new people who had been there
for less than a year um but so so they
kind of had a sense going in who was
likely to get the AE but there was there
was never any kind of um you know
sitewide notice or agency wide notice
and and you know when the people would
get the AE they'd immediately be locked
out of systems and then they couldn't
communicate right it's and it became you
know it was it was hard to know who all
was who but but but uh I mean even even
even among kind of the the quote unquote
normal probationary employees there's
still like a bunch of people who are
like incredibly Mission critical staff
at these different field offices and I
zoomed in on the field office at Los
Alamos um the sit's emergency
preparedness manager was a probationary
employee guy who maintains plans to
minimize the effects of a nuclear
accident on site their radiation
protection manager was a probationary
employee the security manager the fire
prot the fire protection engineer two of
their facility Representatives who are
kind of like onsite um you know
supervisors of the contract and and kind
of eyes and ears for for the agency like
on the floor there um and and uh and
these are all people who just like kind
of were kind of like in a horror movie
just sort of snatched up by the by the
beast at the end of last week um by the
Doge yeah and with very little warning
by the way because I I should also say
this that that you know their kind of
understanding as early as the beginning
of last week uh their their assumption I
should say was that they were not going
to be affected by by these Cuts because
a lot of um a lot of it's all been very
foggy keep saying this because this is
true across the federal government but
but one keep saying yeah but but one big
one big thing in all this is that in
theory like uh immigration enforcement
law enforcement National Security
officials uh are not sub uh uh subject
to a lot of this stuff at least
according to the initial executive order
so they kind of all thought well you
know we're unbelievably important uh
nuclear safety workers we'll probably be
fine so let's talk about that for a
second because Los alos National
Laboratory it is the development site
for the first ever nuclear bomb
obviously it still conducts research
today uh they have storage of nuclear
plutonium pits as I've understand it um
so it's a serious Place obviously they
actually manufacture those plutonium
Pits on site at that laboratory and
they're the only laboratory that does it
got you so um I guess my my qu it's not
question like if you this is the type of
thing where if you sort of
knew about the subject matter a bit more
or if you knew how government operated
in this field a bit more
if you had taken some time rather than a
couple weeks to just sort of go through
the probationary employees and slash
them all away you might have been like
ooh that's not a good idea like we can't
just you know find people to like fill
in here uh because this is a highly
technical highly specialized line of
work that also happens to be in the
middle of nowhere New Mexico um
but that wasn't what happened there's no
indication that any research or homework
or Outreach was done in advance
to figure out who would be the best
people if you had to cut to cut from
this agency at least that's my R of it
is that your R of it AB absolutely
especially as this thing that happened
last week now they are there's a lot of
kind of fear and anxiety among the
workforce right now that such uh kind of
more detailed Force reduction could
still be coming down the pipe where they
they try to do go where where they do
try to go with a little bit more of a
scalpel the problem is that this we're
talking about field Offices here and
again I just zoomed in on the one at Los
Alamos um but but field offices that are
already working kind of significantly
below uh capacity I mean like this is
this is an office that that has a a 95
uh uh uh or sorry 97 is the number of of
uh employees that are authorized by
Congress and funded to be working there
the going into this year the number they
actually had working there was 85
because it like like you mentioned it's
just hard to hire like insanely
qualified post do postdoctoral you know
officials to move out to the middle of
nowhere in New Mexico and commute an
hour through the desert to get to this
like highly classified facility you
can't bring your smartphone into and you
know you know what I mean like it's it's
a tough sell to get people there in the
first place and what they've been doing
as they've been going through these
agencies is not only a hiring freeze on
all new civilian uh uh staff or staff
positions but also you know when when
they've gone through and had people take
the buyouts or or gone through with
these Doge purges they've just
eliminated all of the positions as the
person goes out the door and it's like
it's like this insane Kafkaesque thing
where like you I mean like the the the
top guy there like imagine if that if
that had stayed there what you're just
not going to have like a a head of
safety for nuclear stuff at the nuclear
safety agency
anymore yeah um so it's I mean it's you
move fast and you break things and you
have a little nuclear drip that's just
what you so that's what I mean just
let's see what happens it's really kind
of hard to to even communicate just how
sort of Crest Fallen and and unsettled
and bemused all of these all of these
employees are who you know they have now
been restored to their jobs but they
don't know that future Cuts aren't
coming they they are like kind of newly
incentivized to maybe just get out the
door themselves you know there's there
have been people who have made comments
to other outlets that okay well you know
I wasn't planning on retiring but now
maybe that is going to be the best move
for me and my career in the future and
and and I think the other thing that's
so important to emphasize and this is a
thing that that these employees talked a
lot about was just
it's not I mean like you you're talking
about some of the most kind of like
highly specialized technical work uh
like that you could picture anywhere
they don't there are no like kind of
classes uh that you can take in college
to kind of like prepare you to hit the
ground running when they hire you to
handle nuclear waste or to do nuclear
security I mean one guy one guy I said
with you go ahead hold on
speak for yourself this is my side
Pursuit I have the I have the capacity
to fill in if they need yeah you gota
watch out look we got to run you got to
run let me say one other thing was one
of these guys said if you try to if you
try to you know teach yourself about
some of this stuff you know prior to
coming to the agency that's how you get
yourself on the list you know so it's
like uh so the the the worry the worry
is brain train right the worry is that
you you're kicking these people out
they're the only person knows how to do
it you can't bring anybody in and then
you know it's just all awful forever so
that's that's exciting that's the that's
the whole thing and now I'll let you go
Sam I know you have plac to well we'll
have that we'll have that to look
forward to for sure uh all right Andrew
go back to your crappy Wi-Fi and your
CPAC experience eager to see what you
have uh for folks who want to read the
full piece it's up on the uh site but
also you should subscribe frankly to
morning shots it's called inside Do's
dumbest cut yet Andrew thanks a bunch
man really appreciate it

[admin]

“Grand Theft Government”: Federal Workers Send SOS over Musk-Led Mass Firings, Service Cuts
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 20, 2025
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/20/ ... transcript

Amid the indiscriminate dismantling of the federal government by the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, federal workers, thousands of whom could lose their jobs, are fighting back. “All of us do something not only essential, but also mandated by Congress,” says union organizer and Army Corps of Engineers employee Chris Dols. Dols is part of a growing movement of federal workers and their allies staging mass protests to Save Our Services and warning of the long-term consequences of these extreme cuts to the bureaucracy. “They’re trying to immiserate the working class, and they’re doing it through the federal workforce,” says Dols, who is also a national coordinator with the Federal Unionists Network. “It’s about gutting the services that create a safety net in this country, because the more miserable we are, the easier it is for them to exploit us.” He calls on the larger public to join the worker-led movement resisting these radical cuts. “The whole public sphere is at stake.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Federal workers and supporters rallied in cities across the United States Wednesday to call for an end to mass firings ordered by President Trump and DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Their demand? SOS — Save Our Services.

In just one example of the impact of the cuts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday it was seeking to rehire several agency employees who had been assigned to the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak before their jobs were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s mass firings. In a statement, the USDA said the workers were fired in error, since their jobs are considered, quote, “public safety positions.”

Here in New York, public workers held several rallies Wednesday. In a minute, we’ll speak with one of the organizers, but first, this is Democratic Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressing workers and their supporters who gathered in the bitter cold at an SOS rally in Foley Square Wednesday night.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Elon Musk is not going after efficiency. He is not going after making these things better for people. He’s trying to steal Medicaid so that he can enrich himself. He is trying to steal. He’s trying to steal and gut NASA for — to line his pockets with SpaceX. He is trying to gut everything that is good in America for his own private profit.

This is the culmination of what oligarchy is all about and what oligarchy seeks to do. It’s the fusion of and the capture by the billionaire class of our democracy. That’s what they’re trying to do.

But it’s very important to understand that it is not sustainable. They may seem like they have power right now, but all of this dramatic action is trying to create the sense of inevitability, the sense of power, so that we abdicate in advance.



I want everyone who is here and folks who are watching who are not here, especially our federal workers, to listen to me very carefully, because we have very specific instructions in this moment. And I don’t say this as a Democrat. I don’t say this as a person with any sort of specific political views in this moment. I say this as an American who has sworn an oath to the United States Constitution. And as someone who cares about this Constitution and who cares about this country, we have an obligation to resist kings. We have an obligation to resist oligarchs. We have a sworn duty to this nation to resist oligarchy, including any billionaire that tries to undermine our Constitution. America is not for sale.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Democratic Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressing the Save Our Services protest in Foley Square in Manhattan Wednesday night.

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday afternoon, hundreds also protested outside the federal building in New York City as part of the national day of action to support public workers being purged as part of the Trump administration’s cuts under the Department of Government Efficiency, led by the billionaire Elon Musk.

For more, we’re joined by someone who still works in the building — for now, national coordinator with the Federal Unionists Network who helped organize the day of action. Chris Dols works for the Army Corps of Engineers.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what’s happening across the country, with people getting emails at various times in the day to leave their work, that they are fired, and then, in the case of nuclear safety workers, in the case of disease detectors within the CDC, as we’re dealing with an avian flu epidemic, a number of them, the government then tries to refind them, because they’ve cut off their government email, to say, “Whoops, we made a mistake”?

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah, before I start, I need to, by government regulation, disclaim, because you mentioned my employer, that anything I say is my opinion in my personal capacity and does not reflect the views necessarily of the Army Corps of Engineers. And I am the president of my local and, like you said, a coordinator with the Federal Unionists Network.

I mean, they’re really not after efficiency. The attacks on probationary employees is making it much, much harder for all of us who remain.

AMY GOODMAN: And can I just —

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — make a clarification on probationary? We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of workers, and they can be people who work under two years, but they can also be someone who worked for 30 years, was promoted, right?

CHRIS DOLS: That’s right. There’s this —

AMY GOODMAN: And that then becomes a probationary period, and they can be fired within that.

CHRIS DOLS: That’s right. There are two categories of probationary employees: those who have just started with the federal government in the last one or two years, depending on which agency, and, yes, those who were, for whatever reason, changed job series and moved to a different part of the federal government but are otherwise longtime federal employees. I think there’s a misconception that all probationary employees are recent college grads or something like that. But, like myself, I started with the federal government after working for seven-and-a-half years with a dredging contractor, and it was my dredging expertise that made me a good cost engineer for the Army Corps. The person who I spoke with last night was — is a lawyer who spent years in private sector and brought his legal expertise to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to help protect against fraud there.

So, the probationary workforce is an extremely qualified workforce in the government. And, you know, I think the fact that they’re going after such high-quality employees, be they probationary or not, matches up with the chaos that they’re sowing, where they themselves now have to make up for the fact that they summarily fired all these people and have to go rehire them because, oh, it turns out they were doing something essential.

Well, it turns out all of us are doing something not only essential, but mandated by Congress. None of us do anything that’s not mandated by Congress, which, of course, gets at the deeper constitutional crisis element of what we’re talking about here. You know, the fact that all three branches of government are on board with this really begs the question of where the checks and balances are going to come from. And that’s where the federal workforce and the broader workforce and labor movement need to step in, because we’re the checks and we’re the balances that are going to be able to stop this before they go any further.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Chris, say: What is your message to other labor unions across the country?

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah. I mean, so, we picked the slogan “Save Our Services,” ”SOS,” on purpose, right? This is a distress signal coming from us in the federal sector. Yes, our workforce is under direct, immediate attack, and a lot of the media wants to tell the human interest story about how, you know, our family lives, our lives are being disrupted. And yes, that’s a story. But the bigger story, what they’re really after, is to gut the services that all Americans depend on. You think about, like, how many of us depend on home health aides. You think about the subsidies to schools that come through the Department of Education. You think about Medicaid, that’s now on the chopping block, or veterans’ healthcare. All the essential stuff that affects our ability to live our lives, that’s what they’re after, because from Elon Musk’s point of view, the more miserable we are, the less likely we are to fight back. They’re trying to immiserate the working class, and they’re doing it through the federal workforce. It’s not about efficiency. It’s not about the federal workforce. It’s about gutting the services that create a safety net in this country, because the more miserable we are, the easier it is for them to exploit us.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you think, in fact, that they’re going to come after private sector employees, as well.

CHRIS DOLS: I mean, they are. They’re already going after the NLRB. The —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain, the National —

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — Labor Relations Board, how that connects the two.

CHRIS DOLS: Yeah, the National Labor Relations Board is staffed by federal workers, many of whom are active in the Federal Unionists Network, alongside folks from all the agencies, and at the NLRB, their job is to uphold the right to organize, the ability to keep an abusive boss in check. All the things that allow for workers to push back against their exploitation and the abuse of management, people like Elon Musk, you know, really big bullies in their workplaces, that is enshrined by law, and it’s carried out by the NLRB.

And they’ve already pursued unprecedented attacks on that agency, and we know it’s going to get worse. We know that Elon Musk has lawsuits that he’s hoping to get in front of the Supreme Court soon to actually declare the NLRA, which is the act that established the NLRB, unconstitutional. So —

AMY GOODMAN: And do you think there’s a relationship between the fact that there are complaints against Elon Musk —

CHRIS DOLS: Of course.

AMY GOODMAN: — at the NLRB and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, two of the first agencies he went after?

CHRIS DOLS: Totally, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. You know, Tesla has a financing operation that is meant to be regulated by the Consumer Financial Bureau. And go figure, the man is going after the very agencies that regulate his businesses.

So, we’re putting out the distress signal to the broader labor movement that we all have to enter the streets, that we all have to create — they’re creating the crisis. We’re not the ones creating the crisis. But they think they can manage the crisis. Our job is to prove to them that it’s unmanageable and to make it unmanageable. You know, this is grand theft government. They are pursuing the biggest theft in world history, probably, given the scale that we’re talking about. And it’s going to be up to not just federal workers, but to the broader public, because it’s the whole public sphere that’s at stake.

So, if I can plug our — you know, the place to get involved, whether or not you’re a federal worker, or you just want to support the federal workforce because you see the attacks, it’s go.savepublicservices.com. And there, you can sign up, and we’ll make sure to plug you into all the actions that are coming ahead, because this will be weeks or months, but we can stop them if we mobilize.

AMY GOODMAN: Chris Dols is a union organizer and Army Corps of Engineer employee, national coordinator with the Federal Unionists Network.

[admin]

“Crack-Up Capitalism”: Historian Quinn Slobodian on Trump, Musk & the Movement to “Shatter” the State
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 20, 2025
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/20/ ... transcript

"Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy"

"Speed Up the Breakdown"

Who are the minds behind DOGE, and what do they really believe? Historian Quinn Slobodian says three strains of conservatism have converged to form the second Trump administration’s anti-democratic coalition: finance-backed corporate interests previously friendly to the Democratic Party, Christian conservative think tanks who have long advocated for the end of the administrative state, and the online-driven movement of reactionary extremists who traffic in white supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric. Meanwhile, says Slobodian, “Trump is a person who doesn’t believe in much, but he believes in money,” leaving him willing to enact the political visions of these three pro-capitalist projects. Slobodian, an expert in German history, also discusses the connections between the Trump sphere and Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, supported by Musk and Vice President JD Vance.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We look further now at the purge of the federal government underway by DOGE, led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. As protests mount, the two, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, appeared on Fox News together to defend their cuts. This is Elon Musk.

ELON MUSK: I think what we’re seeing here is the sort of — the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This comes as President Trump spoke at an investor conference in Miami Wednesday and floated the idea of sharing some of the savings he claims DOGE is making.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt, because the numbers are incredible, Elon, so many billions of dollars — billions, hundreds of billions.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University, author of Crack-Up Capitalism. His new piece is “Speed Up the Breakdown.” It’s about Musk’s push to do that.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Professor Slobodian, if you can start off by telling us what Elon Musk is doing? This whole question over the last two days: What is his role? Does he run the Department of Government Efficiency, that President Trump says, when questioned about it, because court papers came out that indicated he didn’t, he just said, “Well, what counts is he’s a patriot”?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, I might have something to say about the patriot question later, but I think that, first, I think it’s helpful to kind of dispel some of the fog of war and the sort of chaotic, anarchistic impressions that we’re getting out of Washington these days, with a sense of what the actual lineages are of the political projects we’re seeing unfolding here, because I think, and what I wrote about in the piece, is I think there’s basically three somewhat distinct political projects underway here that haven’t really had the chance to weave together and have the space close to power the way that they have now in the past.

The first one is the idea that the government should be run like a corporation, right? There’s a kind of a core Clintonite notion here that we should treat citizens like consumers, we should, you know, expose bureaucracy to the same kind of competitive pressures and kind of hallmarking and benchmarking that private companies are, and then you have to go in and sort of act like an asset-stripping private equity firm and peel out all the waste and abuse and put back in sort of more efficient processes. That’s how Musk sold DOGE to the American people in late 2024, and that’s actually why even some Democrats were on board with a DOGE caucus already in December still. So, there’s something kind of normal about that, and there’s a reason why Musk has been posting pictures of Clinton and Gore and saying, “Hey, I’m just doing that sort of business here.” But, obviously, things have gone to another level.

The third strain, though, that sort of gets to some of the more extreme dynamics that people have been picking up on is what I think you can call right-wing accelerationism. So, this is a kind of very online ideology, often associated with people like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. And there, the idea is that you don’t just sort of trim the state or kind of streamline it, but you shatter it altogether. And so, there’s a vision of total decentralization of sovereignty, back to smaller kind of fortified private enclaves, turning the United States into a kind of a patchwork of fiefdoms, or “sovcorps,” as Yarvin calls them, where people are sort of, you know, opting in, paying to get into gated communities, and then sort of in zero-sum social Darwinist competition with the world beyond them. And that’s quite sci-fi and kind of speculative, but at times I think that the sort of sense of panic that we feel is people wondering whether you can just delete all of the kind of capacities of the state and expect to be able to plug them back in at any level afterwards, or if there is a kind of irreversible process of dismantlement happening here.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Professor Slobodian, we’ll get to Curtis Yarvin in a minute, whom you mentioned, but if you could elaborate on some of the ideological precursors to these three strains you identify? I mean, you mentioned in the second, for example, deconstructing the administrative state. We heard that first from Steve Bannon. So, if you could, you know, elaborate on where these strains are coming from within the American political tradition, most recently, you know, the last Trump administration, but also prior to that?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, many of these things that we think of as kind of natural parts of the way the U.S. government operates — for example, something like income tax — are actually just over a hundred years old. So, the idea of having a federal government that oversees many parts of social life is actually — you know, it’s only a few generations in the past. And there are conservatives who see that as a kind of a project of decline.

So, famous examples would be someone like James Burnham, who wrote about what he called the managerial revolution. So, there was this fear that, you know, the kind of the essence of American enterprise was being strangled because there were just all of these civil servants producing a kind of a sclerotic layer over the economy and then pursuing their own kind of ideological projects. So, Russell Vought at OMB talks about what he calls the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy.” He talks about a almost complete Marxist takeover of the government.

So, this isn’t really that much of a sort of neoliberal economic way of thinking. It’s this belief that the state is a kind of a battlefield for opposing ideologies. And that’s been, you know, pretty consistent on the American right, and certainly was informing Steve Bannon’s more cultural and political idea of the kind of wars that need to be fought inside of bureaucracy and, indeed, outside of it.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about that battle right now between Bannon and Elon Musk, and who, in fact, is winning? He’s been talking about vowing to get Elon Musk kicked out, just said, “He’s a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” and most recently referred to him as a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” Talk more about these two strains.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Sure. Yeah, I mean, this really flared up, obviously, at the end of last year with the debate about immigration, with the sort of Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Silicon Valley wing defending temporary visas, so-called H-1B visas, for their sector, because they need a lot of skilled workers kind of in the back office, and then Bannon saying that that was itself unpatriotic, and there needed to be a American-jobs-for-American-native-workers policy and a much more complete kind of exclusion of, you know, new incoming workers.

What was interesting is that got extremely heated. I mean, as you say, Bannon has been not holding back at all in the way he’s been describing Silicon Valley as an “apartheid state.” He’s even using categories that are more common on the left, like calling it “technofeudalism,” and claiming that, like, the bayonets are out, and he’s advancing, and he’s coming for Musk. But what’s symptomatic and interesting there is the way that Trump has sort of kept aloof from the whole conflict, right? I think that he is probably instinctively seeing you don’t actually need to choose a side. Actually, you can accommodate — and you will, I think, and are accommodating — both sides of this apparent schism inside of the big MAGA coalition.

So, there’s no reason why the kind of hard-border nativists can’t get the kind of sadistic roundups that you were talking about at the top of the program, can’t produce terror in the lives of young people in the way that they are doing so effectively, that will fulfill the kind of libidinal, sadistic desires of a certain sector of the MAGA coalition, even as, you know, more quietly, you keep doing more pragmatic immigration policy to fill out the programmers in the back offices of Silicon Valley. I think that, more likely than not, we’re going to get a mixture of both.

And as to who gets closest to Trump’s ear, I mean, the answer, I think, is in the bank accounts. There are 500 billion reasons why Trump is going to listen to Musk more than he’s going to listen to Bannon. And Trump is a person who doesn’t believe in much, but he believes in money. And he doesn’t trust many people, but he trusts people who are richer than him. And Musk’s ability to kind of, you know, stroll through the White House as if he has been elected himself, have his 3-year-old sort of like muttering to Trump in the middle of a press conference, I think it gives us as much evidence as we need of the fact that he has been given kind of carte blanche here to act as, effectively, unelected co-president.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go back to Curtis Yarvin, who you mentioned earlier. This is Yarvin speaking on The New York Times podcast The Interview last month. In this clip, he’s asked about his belief that the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery were bad for the formerly enslaved.

DAVID MARCHESE: But are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than the era —

CURTIS YARVIN: The era of 1865 to 1875 was absolutely — and the war itself wasn’t good, either, but if you look at the living conditions for an African American in the South, they are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875. They are very, very bad, because, basically, this economic system has been disrupted —

DAVID MARCHESE: But abolition was a necessary step to get through that period towards —

CURTIS YARVIN: So —

DAVID MARCHESE: — to make people free.

CURTIS YARVIN: Sure.

DAVID MARCHESE: Like, I can’t believe I’m arguing this.

CURTIS YARVIN: Brazil — Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880s without a civil war.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, that was Curtis Yarvin, someone who Vice President JD Vance frequently invokes. And back in 2021, Vance, then Ohio candidate for U.S. Senate, he was interviewed by the conservative Jack Murphy Live podcast. Murphy just asked Vance how to root out wokeism from American institutions.

JD VANCE: There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who’s written about some of these things. And so, one is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself, right? … I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left, right? We need like a de-Ba’athification program, but like a de-woke-ification program in the United States, right?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could tell us, Professor Slobodian, who is Curtis Yarvin? You note in your recent New York Review of Books piece, “His idea” — this is quote — “His idea of RAGE — Retire All Government Employees — looks a lot like that of DOGE.” So, who is this guy? Where did he emerge from? And how did he become so influential?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, he was someone who moved to the Bay Area and became a computer programmer, also kind of an amateur poet, and, I guess, most importantly, a pretty widely read blogger in the 2000s, especially the late 2000s, under the name Mencius Moldbug. And he became someone who was kind of giving voice to a nascent kind of what was called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment sentiment in Silicon Valley, which I think combines, as the way I’ve been describing it, a kind of belief in economistic bottom-line thinking and productivity, but then also an idea that what we need to get back to is a proper sense of hierarchy in this country and in the world.

In November-December 1908, at the age of 26, Anthony Mario Ludovici lectured at the University of London on the subject of Nietzsche's philosophy. From the man who later translated Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche's infamous biography of her brother, it comes as no surprise to find statements such as the following: 'The strong will and must discharge their strength, and in doing so, the havoc they may make of other beings in their environment is purely incidental.' In 1967, displaying a remarkable lifelong attachment to ideas that had long since become unfashionable, Ludovici claimed in his last book that 'everywhere in Europe the mob, high and low, has been indoctrinated with the Liberal heresy that heredity plays no part in human breeding, and that therefore special endowments cannot be transmitted from one generation to another'.

In this chapter I discuss the writings of Anthony Ludovici, a man who, despite his many publications (over fifty books and pamphlets, and numerous articles), has been almost totally forgotten. The interest of Ludovici's extreme ideology lies not in 'the fact that he was the only person to espouse the views he did -- at least before 1939 -- but in the fact that he continued to maintain his position until his death in 1971, entirely failing to modify his opinions. Furthermore, the peculiar melange of ideas which went into making Ludovici's ideology cannot easily be labelled with any familiar term. I argue that we should not forget the 'extremes of Englishness' just because its ideas, here represented by Ludovici, did not ultimately inform policy.

While it would be overstating the case to claim that Ludovici's writings were widely influential, he was well known as a public figure, whose ideas, particularly early on in his career, acquired some intellectual currency. But the Whiggish view of history which still dominates interpretations of British fascism -- that its failure was a result of the inherent strength of British parliamentary institutions -- means that he has long been ignored. Ludovici's idiosyncratic blend of Forster-Nietzscheanism, Lamarckianism, social Darwinism, antisemitism, anti-feminism, monarchism and aristocratic conservatism was, however, not as ridiculous to Edwardian minds as it is to ours today; it is easy to dismiss Ludovici as a crank, and therefore miss the fact that many of his ideas chimed in with those being espoused by people on the left as well as on the right certainly before 1914, and even until 1939. I argue that reminding ourselves of the existence of men such as Ludovici -- who was not as marginal as might at first appear -- can help in dispelling the complacency which still surrounds the historiography of British fascism.

-- Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, by Dan Stone

So, one of the problems of the administrative state is that it has been pursuing equality, and it’s been working under the false assumption that all humans are somehow equal, that in fact there are kind of hierarchies of intelligence, best measured in IQ, which people like Yarvin and increasingly Vance and Trump are seemingly quite obsessed with. It can be measured in things like race — group differences in IQ are, you know, commonly assumed to be real empirical facts in the world of the sort of Silicon Valley right — and, perhaps most importantly, into hierarchies of gender. So, the masculinity component in all of this is kind of impossible to overstate. There is a reason why the sort of apparent scrambling of gender in gender queer and trans movements is so triggering and so terrifying to people in this world. Elon Musk has described the “woke mind virus” as having killed his child, even though his child is very much alive.

So, the project, I think, is really about how, through the mechanisms of the market and the dismantlement of the sort of post-New Deal state, the post-Great Society and civil rights state, we can get back to what they see as a more natural world where men are in charge, white people are in charge, and there is a kind of restoration of the natural order of things. And that sort of wishy-washy treatment of things like slavery is sort of a provocative way of reopening those questions.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Slobodian, this is about both JD Vance and Elon Musk, the question of their stance on the far-right German party AfD. On Friday, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference where he repeatedly attacked Europe on a number of issues. And he, while in Germany, held a 30-minute meeting Friday with the head of Germany’s far-right AfD party, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rebuking Vance for meeting with the AfD ahead of Germany’s election. And, of course, you have Elon Musk repeatedly using his social media platform X to support what many call the neo-Nazi party, or the Nazi-curious party, for those who are more generous.

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Yeah, I mean, the AfD in Germany is actually a really good example of one of these sort of strange bedfellow-type parties that I actually think is sort of unhelpfully described as either neo-Nazi or Nazi-curious. What it actually is is it was founded by ordoliberal economics professors who disliked the way Merkel was handling the eurozone crisis, and thought you needed more monetary discipline and more fiscal discipline. They then created an alliance with basically ethnonationalists, traditionalist members of the so-called New Right, who felt that modernity had produced a fallen world, and we needed to get back to more rooted links to the land and that certain populations belonged in some spaces and not others. And now they have created this kind of this far-right neoliberal party, that Alice Weidel sort of gives voice to when she says that, you know, “We’re actually a libertarian conservative party,” as she said in her Spaces chat with Musk.

The AfD is one of only many far-right parties that now Musk is aggressively platforming. In the last few days, he has promoted Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, the AfD, and in the past has gone as far as promoting Tommy Robinson, the sort of far-right figure from the U.K. He has adopted not just sort of a tame language of democracy, as Vance tends to be using, but a language as he used in the rally that he zoomed into of “Germany for the Germans” and saying that multiculturalism must not be allowed to dilute the German people. So these are now proper tropes of the far right as such, and indeed tropes of the “great replacement” theory, which suggests that liberals have used welfare policy and refugee policy to buy voters, which can then swamp and dilute the native population. This has now become a common talking point.

The thing that I think is interesting and important, and perhaps a sign of rare optimism these days, is that Germans actually don’t like Elon Musk interfering in their politics. Polls have showed that, of non-AfD voters, you know, well over three-quarters thinks he has no right to butt in. And even among AfD voters, only about half actually wants him to be involved. So, I think what we’re seeing already is a bit of a backlash against his attempt to kind of, you know, play kingmaker in countries, another country that is not his own. The Left Party in Germany has had a surge in recent weeks. They have more people entering the party now than they have since 2009. That’s partially on the back of like a really full-throated anti-fascist call for the defense of democratic principles by the young leaders, the young female leaders of that party. So I think there is a chance here of his belief that he can just, you know, play puppet master globally actually having a boomerang effect and backlashing on his own attempts at manipulation.

AMY GOODMAN: Quinn Slobodian, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of international history at Boston University, author of Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. We’ll also link to your New York Review of Books headlined “Speed Up the Breakdown.”

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“Gum Up the Works”: David Sirota’s Advice to Democrats on Reversing Trump’s Power Grab
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 21, 2025
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/21/ ... transcript

We discuss the first month of President Donald Trump’s second term in office — and the response from the Democratic Party — with journalist David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever. He notes that despite Republicans holding all three branches of the federal government, Trump has mainly used executive orders and other decrees to impose his will instead of using legislation. “They’re trying to create a precedent that presidents cannot be constrained at all,” he says of the party’s strategy. He also faults Democrats for failing to effectively oppose the administration. “What is the Democratic Party for? What does it support? What does it advocate for? There’s not really much of an answer right now.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

One month into Donald Trump’s second presidency, he’s mostly governed through executive orders and carried out his agenda with sweeping cuts by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, the billionaire, and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, all of which has generated a slew of protests, lawsuits, judicial rebukes.



This week, Trump shared an illustration of himself wearing crown, with the headline “Long Live the King” — it looked like a Time magazine cover — as he cheered his administration’s move to end congestion pricing in New York.

“LONG LIVE THE KING!”: Trump’s Claims Power of Monarch in Bid to Halt NY Congestion Pricing
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
Feb 20, 2025
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/20/headlines

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has sued the Trump administration over President Trump’s new order to halt New York City’s congestion pricing program just six weeks after it began. The toll program aimed to reduce traffic in Manhattan while helping to fund mass transit. On Wednesday, Trump wrote on Truth Social, ”CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” The White House’s official X account then shared an image of a fake Time magazine cover of Trump wearing a golden crown, also with the headline ”LONG LIVE THE KING.” Separately, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich shared an AI-generated image of Trump wearing a crown and royal mantle.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul responded Wednesday afternoon.

Gov. Kathy Hochul: “I’m here to say New York hasn’t labored under a king in over 250 years, and we are not — we sure as hell are not going to start now.”

On Tuesday, Elon Musk defended his work to gut whole agencies across the federal government in a joint interview with President Trump on Fox News.

ELON MUSK: I think what we’re seeing here is the sort of — the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, a court filing from the White House Office of Administration lists Elon Musk as a senior adviser to the president who’s serving as an employee of the White House office, not DOGE, which the White House previously said he was leading.

To discuss this and much more, as Elon Musk holds up a chainsaw at the CPAC summit that just took place, we’re joined by David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, former senior communications adviser and speechwriter for Bernie Sanders. His recent pieces for The Lever are headlined “Trump Just Limited Your Payout for Airline Mishaps,” “Elon Doesn’t Want You to Know His DEI Past,” and “Musk Just Scored More Government Cash While Pushing Education Cuts.”

Well, you’re here for a big podcast convention. You were talking about climate. But talk about what’s happening right now and the level of resistance.

DAVID SIROTA: I think what we have to understand is that — and the question that we have to ask is: Why is Donald Trump behaving the way he’s behaving when his party already controls Congress and the courts? What is the point of trying to do what he’s doing without going through the normal process of legislating? Right? If you want to close down the Department of Education, if you want to close down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the way to try to do that is through legislation, through passing it through Congress, having the law upheld in court. His party controls those institutions. So why hasn’t the White House tried to do that through the normal process?

And I think if you step back, what you see is what they’re trying to do is create the precedent that a president can do whatever a president wants, that it’s not a coequal branch of government, that essentially it is a king, an elected king. And I think they’re relying on the idea that people, or at least their base, doesn’t necessarily know or care about what the difference between a president in a coequal branch of government is versus an elected monarch. They’re trying to create a precedent that presidents cannot be constrained at all.

AMY GOODMAN: And your response to Elon Musk saying, “We’re talking about the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy”? I mean, you watch Fox, and all they’re talking about is laughing about people getting “DOGEd.” They’re cutting the fat out. You’re not hearing about what the services are that are being slashed, sliced and diced across this country.

DAVID SIROTA: This is an old tactic. This reminds me of the Gingrich era. Newt Gingrich, when he rose to power in Congress, would come out and pick out one or two science projects that sounds, on its face, ridiculous. “Oh, the government’s spending $2 million to study cow flatulence. Oh, this means that the entire government is wasteful.” Meanwhile, there’s a reliance that there’s not an understanding of what scientific research ends up developing. And I think they’re applying that across the board.

And we have to ask the question: Well, why? The richest man in the world is also one of the largest government contractors. So there’s an inherent conflict of interest — or, in the case of the Trump administration, I guess, an alignment of interest. The more you cut public services, the more it creates, essentially, the impetus to hire private contractors. And the guy who’s doing the overseeing of the cutting happens to be one of the largest private contractors.

AMY GOODMAN: You recently said on social media, quote, “It’s not really a political party at this point. It’s better understood as a country club, with status perks for its emeritus leaders,” and referring to the Democratic Party, in response to news that former VP, presidential candidate Kamala Harris had signed with CAA to represent her on her post-White House initiatives, including speaking engagements and possible book deals.

DAVID SIROTA: Look, the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to be interested in changing, at least not yet. They reelected their same leaders who oversaw the policy and party positioning that led to Trump’s reelection. That’s the same leadership that led to Trump’s first election in 2016. The party doesn’t seem interested in changing how it approaches its own voters or its own effort to win elections. There’s some lip service to the middle — to the working class, but there’s not really a change in policy.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of Senator Sanders now going around the country and speaking in red districts that are most vulnerable? He says, “If we can turn around three,” he says, they’ve ended their extremely narrow lead in the House.

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah, look, I think Bernie Sanders is doing the right thing. It’s an example of what the Democrats at large should be doing, which is actually going into and trying to speak to the disaffected working class, that used to be the base of the Democratic Party.

The problem is that the Democratic Party, its leaders, are caught between the demands of their donors and the demands of voters, which is why so often the Democratic leadership sounds incoherent. If you’re trying to address what voters want, but also trying to enrich or appease your donors, you often sound like you stand for nothing. I mean, can we actually explain or answer the question: What do the Democrats stand for right now, other than, in theory, rhetorically being against Trump, even though they’re giving votes to confirm some of his nominees? Like, I think the average person has trouble even articulating: What is the Democratic Party for? What does it support? What does it advocate for? There’s not really much of an answer right now.

AMY GOODMAN: You had a recent piece on Elon Musk’s previous support for DEI policies at Tesla.

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah. Well, look, only a few years ago, Tesla was touting itself as weaving DEI into its DNA. That’s a quote out of a large report that came out from Tesla. Obviously, the politics have shifted. Donald Trump is trying to demonize DEI as a way to appeal to the working class, and the Democrats haven’t made an effective argument on economics to also try to appeal to the working class. And right now if both parties aren’t really making an economic appeal, then Trump is relying on making an identity appeal.

AMY GOODMAN: In this last 20 seconds, what do you think is most important right now?

DAVID SIROTA: The most important thing is for the Democrats to try to gum up the works, to stop what’s going on. They don’t have a lot of power. And it’s also important to understand that if Donald Trump is going outside of the institutions of government, then the Democrats are going to have to rely on different kinds of tactics that don’t just rely on just press conferences in the U.S. Senate.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it’s possible Republicans in the House and Senate will turn on Trump?

DAVID SIROTA: I don’t believe it’s going to happen. I just — there’s no historical precedent for the Republicans to bail out on their own president.

AMY GOODMAN: David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, we want to thank you so much for being with us, and we will link to your articles at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

[admin]

“Will Universities Surrender or Resist?” Scholar Slams Trump’s Threat to Defund Universities over DEI
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
February 21, 2025
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/21/ ... transcript

-- "U.S. Department of Education's 14-Day Ultimatum on Equal Opportunity: Will Universities Surrender or Resist?"

The Trump administration has issued a two-week ultimatum for schools and universities across the United States to end all programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion — DEI — or risk losing federal funding. The Department of Education has already canceled some $600 million in grants for teacher training on race, social justice and other topics as part of its crusade against “woke” policies. This comes as President Donald Trump has said he wants to abolish the agency and tapped major Trump donor and former professional wrestling executive Linda McMahon to carry out that goal; she is expected to be confirmed by the Senate with little or no Republican opposition. Education scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig, who teaches at Western Michigan University, says Trump’s moves are part of “an attempt to privatize education” in the United States, with DEI used as a wedge to accomplish a larger restructuring of social structures. “Higher education hasn’t faced a crisis like this since potentially McCarthyism.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The Trump administration has given K-through-12 schools and universities a two-week ultimatum to end DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — initiatives or risk losing federal funding. In a letter sent on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, one week ago, to school administrators, the Education Department barred schools and colleges from, quote, “using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies and all other aspects of student, academic and campus life,” unquote. The Education Department has already canceled some $600 million in grants focused on training teachers on critical race theory, social justice and other related topics. Meanwhile, the department’s Office for Civil Rights has also declared race-based scholarships, cultural centers and even graduation ceremonies illegal.

The president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities, said in a statement, quote, “There’s nothing specific enough for us to be able to act on in 14 days unless we just wipe the slate clean.” He added, “Overcompliance, anticipatory compliance, preemptive compliance is not a strategy. The strategy needs to be much more considered, much more nuanced,” unquote.

This comes as Trump’s pick to head the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, cleared a committee vote Thursday, and her nomination now heads to the full Senate, where it’s expected to be approved. Trump has told reporters he wants McMahon to dismantle the Department of Education.

REPORTER: Why nominate Linda McMahon to be the Education Department secretary if you’re going to get rid of the Education Department?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Because I told Linda, “Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.” I want her to put herself out of a job, Education Department.

AMY GOODMAN: Linda McMahon is the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and a major Trump donor. During her confirmation hearing earlier this month, she was questioned by Democrat Chris Murphy on Trump’s order banning diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI.

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: My son is in a public school. He takes a class called African American history. If you’re running an African American history class, could you perhaps be in violation of this court order — of this executive order?

LINDA McMAHON: I’m not quite certain, and I’d like to look into it further and get back to you on that.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by education scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig, professor of educational leadership, research and technology at Western Michigan University. His new piece is headlined “U.S. Department of Education’s 14-Day Ultimatum on Equal Opportunity: Will Universities Surrender or Resist?” He also helped organize the coalition Defending the Freedom to Learn and served leader — with the NAACP on education and other issues.

Thanks so much for being with us. It’s great to have you here. Professor, can you start off by talking about the response a week ago, on Valentine’s Day, when university and college presidents across the United States got a letter that said, “End DEI” — and I want to ask you exactly what that means — “in two weeks” —

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — “or lose all of your federal funding”? We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars across the United States.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Right. Well, first of all, Amy, thank you so much for having me on your show. Just glad, glad to join you.

First, you know, I want to say that I think that the higher education community, also the K-12 community, understands that this letter from the U.S. Department of Education doesn’t carry the force of law. We do know, of course, that what’s happening in Washington, D.C., is that there is uses — they’re using resources, finances, as a lever. So, we’ve seen, for example, funding from the NSF, from the NIH, IES — at Western Michigan University, for example, we’ve lost $20 million in grants in the College of Education and Human Development. And so, they’re really using the power of the purse to try — to attempt to enforce these different — you know, abolishing the Department of Education with this letter.

But I think it’s been really bewildering to K-12 and higher education, which, my understanding, is the goal. I mean, the Office of Management and Budget, the director there has said that that’s really the goal of this blitzkrieg, is for all of these requests to be bewildering. And I know in higher education, it’s been very difficult. And so you have cabinets, presidents, provosts trying to understand what are going to be the impacts of this. You could see six-figure, seven-figure, eight-figure reductions in research funding. Our attempts to find the cure for cancer, to solve the teacher shortage, to create more efficient energy, all those things are under threat, because over the last hundred years or so, higher education has seen large investments from the federal government, and historically, those investments, that search to solve the teacher shortage and create more efficient energy, etc., they didn’t come with strings attached. And now institutions, higher education institutions and K-12 districts are facing millions of dollars in reductions if they don’t pause DEI.

Now, you mentioned in your lead-up, “Well, what is DEI?” And I think it’s important to talk about what DEI is, actually. DEI is not reverse discrimination. What DEI does is, as educators — and I taught fourth grade. I taught ESL. I’ve taught college students, doctoral students. What DEI does is it helps us to create more success for historically marginalized communities. So, we want to ensure that African American students, that when we bring them to our campus, that we graduate them — Latino students, students with disabilities, veterans. It’s a wide spectrum. And so, I think it’s important to understand that DEI is not reverse discrimination. It’s our attempts to ensure success for all students on our campus, close those gaps, those equity gaps, in graduation rates, in retention rates. That’s what DEI work does. That’s why we have Black graduation ceremonies or Mexican American graduation ceremonies. We want to create the climate. We want to create the opportunity for students when they come to us in higher education, when they come to us in our K-12 schools. We want them to be successful. We want all students to be successful, whether they’re Jewish or have disabilities, etc. That’s what DEI is, and so it’s not about reverse discrimination. It’s about student success, faculty success, staff success.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a 2023 video on Donald Trump’s campaign platform website in which he proposes taking, quote, “billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, finding and suing excessively large private university endowments” to create what he calls the American Academy.

DONALD TRUMP: Whether you want lectures on ancient histories or an introduction to financial accounting or training in a skilled trade, the goal will be to deliver it and get it done properly, using study groups, mentors, industry partnerships and the latest breakthrough in computing. This will be a truly top-tier education option for the people. It will be strictly nonpolitical, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed. None of that’s going to be allowed.

Most importantly, the American Academy will compete directly with the existing and very costly four-year university system by granting students degree credentials that the U.S. government and all federal contractors will henceforth recognize. The Academy will award the full and complete equivalent of a bachelor’s degree.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is very significant. Julian Vasquez Heilig, that Trump is proposing an alternative American education system. We already know what happened with his Trump University. He was successfully sued for this for-profit college. But talk about what he is proposing, the American Academy.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: So, first, I want to say — and then I’ll directly address the question. First, I want to say that universities are not ideological. So, do we have folks on our campus who are on the right or on the left? Do we have students who are on the right or on the left? Do we have students who are apolitical? Absolutely. But universities are not ideological. They’re places of learning. They’re the places where the difficult conversations happen. So, I think that’s the first thing to say.

All of the politicians that you see making pronouncements about universities, they all attended universities, some of them the elite Ivy Leagues — the president and vice president, for example. So, I think that’s important to say.

I think the second important to say is that this is expected. I want to take you back in history, OK, be a scholar for a moment here. If you think about the dictator Pinochet and what he did after he took over the country of Chile, he understood that as a part of the autocratic playbook, that you have to privately control and privatize education. And so you see a push for this in K-12 education right now with school vouchers, which is that we want education to be privatized. It’s not a public good. And so what you see here, I believe, is an attempt to privatize education. And I’m sure it will be for profit. And, you know, he didn’t speak to that. And so, this is a part of that sort of classic playbook, because when something is in the public realm, it’s a public good. And so, what you see here is really an attempt to privatize education, by all indications.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, who was architect of Project 2025, the radical playbook to seize executive power, radically reshape federal agencies. Last year, undercover reporters with the Center for Climate Reporting recorded Vought discussing his plan.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: I am opposed to the Department of Education because I think it’s a department of critical race theory.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Vought speaking on television.

I want to go now, in response to the threats to DEI programs and LGBTQ outreach from the Trump administration, to the president of Mount Holyoke, Danielle Holley, who recently said, “To basically comply with things that are not within our values simply because we feel a threat of investigation is something that we should not be doing as the higher education community. Instead, we need to just say 'No! Here's what we stand for. We will continue to stand for this. And if you believe that you can legally challenge our mission or our values, that’s up to you to try to do,’” the president of Mount Holyoke said, who herself is African American.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, if you can tell us what is happening right now across the country?

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: This whole idea of obeying in advance, and, you know, because of the very real threat —

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — of losing so much money and funding, that will hurt the very people that these university presidents are trying to protect.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah, yes. First, let me just address Vought. So, you know, he also said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work, because, increasingly, we want them viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. We want them to be put in trauma.” So I think that helps us understand the blitzkrieg from political actors right now, is that they really want to put higher education in trauma. That’s almost a direct quote from from Vought. So, I think that helps sort of contextualize.

Now, we have some difficult decisions to make as higher education leaders, as K-12 leaders, some very difficult decisions, because, as I mentioned, over the last hundred years, universities have become very dependent on solving the world’s issues through research, and so that means there’s millions of dollars that the federal government has been providing without strings attached. Well, now there’s going to be strings attached.

But who’s to say that diversity is where these conversations stop? So, what if, after diversity, the question is, “Well, we don’t want you to have unions,” or “We don’t want you to have a College of Fine Arts, because we don’t think that that’s appropriate”?

And so, when there’s strings attached — so, universities have to make two decisions. One, there will have to be courage, like the president of Mount Holyoke or the president at Wesleyan in Connecticut, or, two, patronage. So, in talking with some folks, some scholars at the University of Michigan, yesterday, there’s really those two choices for higher education institutions. And so, there’s a side where we’re going to have to innovate and rethink how higher education is funded, or we’re going to have to succumb to a system of patronage where the federal government — you know, in four years, a Democrat might come in as president and say, “You won’t receive federal funding unless you have DEI programs.” So, that’s really the road we’re headed down.

And then, I think one — just one final thought, which is that when we hire leaders in higher education, we typically look at their pedigree. Did they go to Harvard or Berkeley or Stanford? Were they department chairs or deans? But now we have to have additional criteria when we’re selecting our leaders, our deans, our department chairs. It involves courage. It involves morality. It involves empathy. So, we need special kinds of leaders in this very difficult time. I would argue that higher education hasn’t faced a crisis like this since potentially McCarthyism. And so, we need a different kind of leader to address these modern challenges also.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, are there lawsuits being planned? There’s one week to go after this letter.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah. Well, there’s already multiple lawsuits. For example, my understanding is that the NIH funding has been paused in court, from a report that I read from President Ono.

AMY GOODMAN: The freeze has been paused.

JULIAN VASQUEZ HEILIG: Yeah, the freeze has been paused. Yeah, exactly. So, there is. I know that the APLU and the AAU — so, these are the conglomerates of the different kinds of institutions — that they’re involved in litigation, too. I suspect that you’ll see litigation from the civil rights community. And I think that’s part of the strategy for educators. And, you know, I think it’s important for us to understand that academics, educators, we have to create alliances with students and engage in political and legal advocacy, and research and document and publicize how these things are actually impacting our institutions and who they’re impacting.

And then I think it’s also — one final thought is that we have to leverage our professional associations or organizations, accrediting bodies. There’s a reason why accrediting bodies are also being targeted, because accrediting bodies set the standards for universities. So, it’s very important that we create these coalitions, and so that as this pressure continues on higher education and K-12, that we can respond, because the number one priority of our institutions is student success. And I don’t believe — my argument is that none of this is in the best interest of students.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Vasquez Heilig, we thank you so much for joining us, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, professor of educational leadership, research and technology at Western Michigan University. We’ll link to your new piece, “U.S. Department of Education’s 14-Day Ultimatum on Equal Opportunity: Will Universities Surrender or Resist?”

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https://cloakinginequity.com/2025/02/16 ... or-resist/

Cloaking Inequity: U.S. Department of Education’s 14-Day Ultimatum on Equal Opportunity: Will Universities Surrender or Resist?
by Craig Trainor
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights
United States Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20202
February 16, 2025

Dear Acting Assistant Secretary Trainor,

I write to you today to critically examine the claims made in your February 14, 2025, letter regarding race-conscious policies in education. Your letter, purportedly presented as a reaffirmation of nondiscrimination obligations, instead fundamentally misrepresents the critical need to improve access and graduation rates for minoritized students. It disregards decades of legal precedent supporting diversity in education, unjustly targets the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and promotes a regressive agenda that undermines student success. It is alarming that the Department of Education, an entity tasked with ensuring educational success, chose a lawyer and member of the Federalist Society as an Acting Assistant Secretary, to dismantle programs that seek to increase the success of historically marginalized communities in higher education.

Mischaracterization of Race-Conscious Policies

Your assertion that American educational institutions have engaged in “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences” is not only misleading but reflects a deep and purposeful misunderstanding of race-conscious admissions and equity initiatives. The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) indeed placed restrictions on the explicit use of race in admissions, but it did not, as your letter suggests, render all equity-based initiatives illegal. Programs designed to mitigate the effects of societal barriers—such as targeted outreach, mentorship, and holistic review processes—remain lawful and essential to fostering diverse educational environments.

At every institution in which I have served across four states Texas, California, Kentucky and Michigan, we have implemented successful race-conscious policies that have demonstrably increased success for underrepresented students and maintained our high academic standards. Our targeted outreach programs have helped ensure that students from marginalized communities are aware of and prepared for higher education opportunities. Additionally, mentorship programs connecting students with faculty and professionals have significantly improved retention and graduation rates among students of color. By dismantling such initiatives, the Department will reverse meaningful progress and undermining efforts that have directly contributed to closing achievement gaps.

Your letter further states, “Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.” However, this sweeping declaration ignores the lawful and necessary efforts many institutions undertake to ensure historically underrepresented students have access to the same opportunities as their peers to improve their retention and graduation rates. By conflating race-conscious strategies with discriminatory practices, the Department deliberately distorts the purpose and impact of these initiatives and will cause great harm to student success.

The Fallacy of “Reverse Discrimination”

Your letter implies that white and Asian students are being systematically discriminated against in favor of Black and Latino students. This argument echoes the rhetoric of those who weaponized the concept of “reverse discrimination” to dismantle affirmative action. However, your claim that “an individual’s race may never be used against him” ignores the reality that for centuries, race has been used against Black and Brown individuals to limit their educational and professional opportunities and we live with that legacy today. It still happens extensively and on purpose, take a look at the literature on the disparities in school finance and educational opportunities authored by economist Bruce Baker. Equity policies are not about disadvantaging one group but ensuring that historically marginalized communities have fair access to educational opportunities and achieve success in higher education.

Your claim that “a school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students” is an attempt to intimidate institutions into eliminating holistic review processes that recognize the complexity of a student’s lived experience. To argue that race must be ignored in all contexts ignores the profound and documented impact that racial identity has on a student’s educational journey and access to resources. This statement clearly attacks the US Supreme Court’s Chief Justice. As John Roberts noted in the SFFA decision, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” His statement directly contradicts the Department’s rigid and overly broad interpretation, making it clear that race can still be a relevant factor in an applicant’s personal story and experiences.

Diversity as a Compelling Interest

The letter erroneously asserts that “nebulous concepts like racial balancing and diversity are not compelling interests.” This stance contradicts decades of precedent, including Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), in which the Supreme Court recognized the educational benefits of diversity as a compelling government interest. The Court affirmed that diverse educational environments promote cross-racial understanding, reduce racial isolation, and prepare students for a pluralistic society. To dismiss diversity as “nebulous” is to ignore the wealth of research and practice supporting its benefits in both education and the workforce.

The benefits of diversity in higher education extend beyond the classroom. Studies have shown that students educated in diverse environments are better prepared for the modern workforce, exhibit stronger critical thinking skills, and demonstrate greater civic engagement. Research by Sylvia Hurtado, my former mentor at the University of Michigan, has extensively documented how diverse learning environments enhance educational outcomes by fostering deeper cognitive engagement, promoting leadership skills, and reducing racial biases. The assertion that diversity efforts are merely political in nature disregards these well-documented positive outcomes. Moreover, the Department’s attempt to erase diversity efforts ignores the fact that a lack of diversity has serious consequences for educational institutions, workforce readiness, and national social cohesion.

The Misrepresentation of DEI Initiatives

Your letter claims that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs “preference certain racial groups” and “teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens.” This characterization is not only false but represents a deliberate effort to discredit educators committed to fostering equitable learning environments for ALL students. DEI initiatives are designed to address persistent disparities and create spaces where students of all backgrounds—regardless of race, gender, or socioeconomic status—can thrive.

The claim that DEI programs “stigmatize” students misrepresents their purpose and ignores the fact that minoritized students have long endured systemic stigmatization—well before DEI initiatives existed. The stigma you reference is not a product of these programs but a continuation of racism itself. For example, slavery is not Black history; it is white history—an essential truth that must be acknowledged in education. Teaching about historical oppression and systemic inequities is not about assigning moral burdens but about fostering an accurate and honest understanding of our shared past.

Conclusion

We recognize the strategy being employed here. As one Polish minister aptly described former President Trump’s approach, the tactic being used is what the Russians call razvedka boyem—reconnaissance through battle: pushing forward to see what resistance arises before adjusting the approach accordingly. The Department’s effort to curtail diversity initiatives appears to be a similar attempt to gauge the response of institutions before proceeding with further restrictive measures. We must not only recognize this maneuver but also respond with unwavering commitment to equity and inclusion.

The Department’s arbitrary 14-day compliance ultimatum is an aggressive overreach intended to intimidate institutions into immediate submission. This threat of federal funding loss is a coercive tactic designed to suppress dissent and discourage thoughtful institutional responses and constitutional freedom of speech. I urge universities and colleges to resist this unlawful directive and stand firm in their commitment to diversity and inclusion.

I fully understand that some universities will immediately comply with your demands. However, these institutions lack the courage to challenge your problematic tendencies and defend the fundamental principles of academic freedom and equity. The institutions that yield without resistance betray their mission and the students they serve.

I implore the higher education community to recognize this moment as a test of its resolve. This is a time for courage and support of policies and practices that improve our students’ success, not capitulation.

Julian Vasquez Heilig

[x]

[admin]

Bomb Threat Made at Principles First Summit; Will FBI & ATF Conduct The Necessary Investigation?
by Glenn Kirschner
Feb 23, 2025

I had the pleasure of speaking at today Principles First Summit. During the conference, a "credible bomb threat" was made that required the premises to be cleared out while law enforcement with bomb-sniffing dogs secured and cleared the scene.

An email was received explaining the motivation for the bomb threat and listing a number speakers at the conference who "deserve to die", myself included.

The question now is: will the FBI and the ATF - with Kash Patel serving as the director of both of those organization - conduct the through, aggressive, professional investigation necessary to hold accountable the person or persons who issue today's bomb threat?



Transcript

so friends today Sunday I spoke at the
principal's first summit in Washington
D.C and while I was there there was a
bomb threat and there was an email that
was sent explaining what motivated the
bomb threat the email said among other
things that some of the speakers at the
conference including myself quote
deserve to die
well guess what
friends the people who are fighting for
the rule of law for the
Constitution for a healthy American
democracy will not be
intimidated because
Justice matters
[Music]
hey all Glen kersner here so friends
this is not the video I thought I would
be making
today I was invited to speak at the 2025
principles first summit in Washington DC
what is principles first well it's an
organization made up of conservatives
Republicans former Republicans an people
who now identify as unaffiliated to any
political party even though they are
conservative because they feel like the
Republican party has left them behind
many of them feel like the Republican
party is
dead and this is an organization that as
its name suggests believe we have to put
principles first regardless of party or
ideology and so when they invited me to
come speak to this conservative
organization I jumped at the chance you
may remember not too long ago I posted a
video and a written piece on substack
explaining why I left MSNBC it was
because I felt like I was preaching to
the converted and I wanted to begin to
speak with more conservative audiences
go on conservative media Outlets if they
were would have me to talk about the
importance of the rule of law to a
healthy democracy not from a place of
politics or ideology
so I happily accepted the invitation to
speak at today's principal's first
summit and while I was there a bomb
threat came in and there was an email
that was sent explaining what the bomb
threat was all
about let's start with the new reporting
this from the Independent anti-trump
Summit in DC evacuates after receiving
credible bomb threat
and that article reads in part A
Gathering of anti-trump conservatives in
Washington DC was evacuated on Sunday
after receiving what officials with the
organization called a credible bomb
threat quote hotel security private
security and MPD the Metropolitan Police
Department have made the decision to
evacuate Summit floor so that the area
can be secured we intend to reconvene
and continue with the summit once the
area has been secured read the statement
from the summit's organizers on Sunday
afternoon and we first learned about the
email that was sent explaining the
motivation behind the bomb threat when
Jim aosta posted it here's what Jim
posted here is the bomb threat at the
principal's first summit in D.C I'm told
by a source familiar with the situation
that this is the threat below C email
attached it mentions Michael fenon and
his mother as well as other attendees at
the
conference and here's the email that Jim
references to honor the j6 hostages
recently released by Emperor Trump I've
constructed four pipe bombs out of 1x8
in threaded galvanized pipes end caps
kitchen timers some wires metal clips
and a homemade black powder I recently
placed one in inside of a room I rented
at the JW Marriott at 1331 Pennsylvania
Avenue Northwest Washington DC which is
where the summit was being held it is
rigged to explode as soon as the door
next opens I also shoved another pipe
bomb down the toilet in the bathroom
nearby where the principal's first
summit is being held Mark cubin Chris
Christie John Bolton George Conway J
Michael ludig Adam kinzinger Michael
steel Jeff Duncan Bill Crystal Frank
fusy Glenn kersner Steven reer Norm
Eisen and especially Mike fenon all
deserve to
die in that Spirit the third device has
been placed inside Michael phone's
mother's mailbox which is rigged to
explode when the mailbox opens currently
I am nearby John Bolton's home by the
time you've read this email the final
device will have been deposited inside
of his mailbox and rigged to explode in
the same way to my family I simply did
what needed to be
done
Maga so friends I just want to say two
things about today's
events first of all this kind of a bomb
threat would typically be investigated
jointly by the FBI and the ATF the
Federal Bureau of Investigation
and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco
firearms and
explosives who's the head of the
FBI cash Patel who's the head of the
ATF well Donald Trump just said he wants
cash Patel to head up the ATF as
well well friends let me tell you given
that I am one of the named targets of
this you know email alleging that
they're were bombs placed at today's
conference I will be keeping up on the
nature and the
progress the existence of a federal
investigation into today's
events and the second thing I want to
say
friends is not only will this not deter
me deter us from fighting for the rule
of law fighting for accountability
fighting for
justice it will energize us it will
motivate us it will inspire us to keep
going we will never
stop because
Justice
matters friends as always please stay
safe please stay tuned and I look
forward to talking with you all again
tomorrow
[Music]

******************************

Anti-Trump summit in DC evacuates after receiving ‘credible bomb threat’: DC Marriott hotel evacuates convention floor as building was swept, event organizers said
by John Bowden
Washington, D.C.
UK Independent
Sunday 23 February 2025 17:20 EST
https://www.the-independent.com/news/wo ... 03227.html

A gathering of anti-Trump conservatives in Washington DC was evacuated on Sunday after receiving what officials with the organization called a “credible bomb threat” they said was sent in by an account claiming to represent Enrique Tarrio, former leader of the Proud Boys.

Video of attendees being evacuated was posted to Twitter along with a statement from summit organizers. An initial version of the statement identified Tarrio — who’d been at the summit on Saturday “harrassing” families of officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, per organizers — as having sent in the threat.

“Hotel security, private security, and MPD have made the decision to evacuate Summit floor so that the area can be secured. We intend to reconvene and continue with the Summit once the area has been secured,” read the statement from the summit’s organizers on Sunday afternoon.

It was edited within a few minutes to say that the threat was sent by an account “claiming” to represent Tarrio, who was also arrested this weekend at the Capitol after allegedly assaulting a counter-protester.

The Independent has reached out to convention organizers for more information on the account where the bomb threat originated. In a second tweet, the Principles First summit organizers said that the threat was emailed by an account with the name “Enrique T,” and continued: “we do not have definitive proof of the email’s origin at this time and so cannot say with certainty who sent the email.”

[x]
Tarrio himself responded with an apparent threat to sue for defamation in a tweet: “They literally edited their tweet. Too late you f---ing scumbags. You don’t get to retract now. PRESERVE YOUR F---ING DOCUMENTS.”

The summit was attended by numerous high-profile opponents of Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. It’s also known as a sort of “CPAC alternative”, given that it is held the same weekend as the three-day CPAC gathering in National Harbor, just across the river from downtown DC.

Guests this year included hosts and writers from The Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative publication, including Sarah Longwell, J.V. Last and Tim Miller, as well as the remnants of the Republican Party’s anti-Trump circles. Other speakers included George Conway, attorney and ex-husband to Kellyanne Conway, and former RNC chairman Michael Steele, now an MSNBC host, as well as billionaire Mark Cuban.

Former CNN reporter Jim Acosta posted an image of the alleged bomb threat to Twitter; the image names Cuban, Fanone, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and other attendees, whom the author says “deserve to die.”

[x]
Jim Acosta @Acosta

Here is the bomb threat at the Principles First summit in DC. I’m told by a source familiar with the situation this is the threat below (see email attached). It mentions Michael Fanone and his mother as well as other attendees at the conference.

To honor the J6 hostages recently released by Emperor Trump, I've constructed four pipe bombs out of 1x8-inch threaded galvanizesd pipes, end caps, kitchen timers, some wires, metal clips and homemade black powder. I recently placed on inside of a room I rented at the J.W. Marriott at 1331 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C 20004. It is rigged to explode as soon as the door next opens. I also shoved another pipe bomb down the toilet in the bathroom nearby where the Principles First Summit is being held.

Mark Cuban, Chris Christie, John Bolton, George Conway, J. Michael Luttig, Adam Kinzinger, Michael Steeler, Geoff Duncan, Bill Kristol, faggot Frank Figliuzzi, Glenn Kirschner, Stephen Richer, Norm Eisen, and especially Michael Fanone all deserve to die. In that spirit, the third device has been placed inside Michael Fanone's mother's mailbox at [DELETE] which is rigged to explode when the mailbox opens.

Currently I am nearby John Bolton's home of [DELETE] by the time you've read this email, the final device will have been deposited inside of his mailbox and rigged to explode in the same way.

To my family, I simply did what needed to be done. MAGA.

11:50 AM · Feb 23, 2025

The statement posted by Acosta refers to multiple explosive devices. Police have not yet authenticated the threat, and the image does not mention Tarrio or any social media accounts by name.

Police officers who gained national prominence for speaking out about the assault on the Capitol and what they witnessed that day, including Michael Fanone, Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell also attended the conference. They testified in the wake of the attack to hearing racist and extremely violent rhetoric hurled at them by protesters — including the hundreds pardoned by Donald Trump after his inauguration — while battling rioters in the halls of Congress.

On Friday, they traded insults with Tarrio as he followed them through the lobby of the Marriott in downtown DC, where the Principles First summit was held this weekend.

“You’re a traitor to this country,” an angry Fanone told Tarrio as the former Proud Boys leader attempted to instigate a verbal showdown.

DC has been slightly on edge all weekend, thanks to the arrival of the MAGA influencer sphere for the CPAC conference. Protesters hurled abuse at partygoers attending a DOGE “appreciation party” in northeastern DC on Saturday, while some January 6 rioters/social media stars were thrown out of CPAC itself, clashing with host Matt Schlapp in the process.

[admin]

Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE: Twenty-one civil service employees have resigned from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they're refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
by Brian Slodysko
Associated Press and BYRON TAU Associated Press
February 25, 2025, 9:02 AM
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireSto ... -119165963

WASHINGTON -- More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump's administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.

The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president's tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.

In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was dismissive of the mass resignation.

“Anyone who thinks protests, lawsuits, and lawfare will deter President Trump must have been sleeping under a rock for the past several years," Leavitt said. "President Trump will not be deterred from delivering on the promises he made to make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers.”

As one Polish minister aptly described former President Trump’s approach, the tactic being used is what the Russians call razvedka boyem—reconnaissance through battle: pushing forward to see what resistance arises before adjusting the approach accordingly. The Department’s effort to curtail diversity initiatives appears to be a similar attempt to gauge the response of institutions before proceeding with further restrictive measures. We must not only recognize this maneuver but also respond with unwavering commitment to equity and inclusion.

The Department’s arbitrary 14-day compliance ultimatum is an aggressive overreach intended to intimidate institutions into immediate submission. This threat of federal funding loss is a coercive tactic designed to suppress dissent and discourage thoughtful institutional responses and constitutional freedom of speech. I urge universities and colleges to resist this unlawful directive and stand firm in their commitment to diversity and inclusion.

I fully understand that some universities will immediately comply with your demands. However, these institutions lack the courage to challenge your problematic tendencies and defend the fundamental principles of academic freedom and equity. The institutions that yield without resistance betray their mission and the students they serve.

I implore the higher education community to recognize this moment as a test of its resolve. This is a time for courage and support of policies and practices that improve our students’ success, not capitulation.

Cloaking Inequity: U.S. Department of Education’s 14-Day Ultimatum on Equal Opportunity: Will Universities Surrender or Resist?, by Julian Vasquez Heilig

The staffers who resigned worked for what was once known as the United States Digital Service, an office established during President Barack Obama's administration after the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov, the web portal that millions of Americans use to sign up for insurance plans through the Democrat's signature health care law.

All had previously held senior roles at such tech companies as Google and Amazon and wrote in their resignation letter that they joined the government out of a sense of duty to public service.

Trump's empowerment of Musk upended that. The day after Trump's inauguration, the staffers wrote, they were called into a series of interviews that foreshadowed the secretive and disruptive work of Musk's' Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors' badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics. Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk — not improving government technology.

“Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the staffers wrote in their letter. “This process created significant security risks.”

Earlier this month, about 40 staffers in the office were laid off. The firings dealt a devastating blow to the government's ability to administer and safeguard its own technological footprint, they wrote.

“These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services,” the resignation letter states. “Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and American’s data less safe.”

Those who remained, about 65 staffers, were integrated into DOGE's government-slashing effort. About a third of them quit Tuesday.

"We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services," they wrote. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”

The slash-and-burn effort Musk is leading diverges from what was initially outlined by Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. DOGE, a nod to Musk's favorite cryptocurrency meme coin, was initially presented as a blue-ribbon commission that would exist outside government.

After the election, however, Musk hinted there was more to come, posting to his social media site, X, “Threat to democracy? Nope, threat to BUREAUCRACY!!!” He has leaned aggressively into the role since.

Last week he stood on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference gathering outside Washington, where he boasted of his exploits and hoisted a blinged-out, Chinese-made chainsaw above his head that was gifted by Argentinian President Javier Milei.

"This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” Musk bellowed from the stage.

Still, Musk has tried to keep technical talent in place, with the bulk of the layoffs in the Digital Service office focused on people in roles like designers, product managers, human resources and contracting staff, according to interviews with current and former staff.

Of the 40 people let go earlier this month, only one was an engineer — an outspoken and politically active staffer name Jonathan Kamens, who said in an interview with the AP that he believes he was fired for publicly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, on his personal blog and being critical of Musk in chats with colleagues.

"I believe that Elon Musk is up to no good. And I believe that any data that he gains access to is going to be used for purposes that are inappropriate and harmful to Americans," Kamens said.

U.S. Digital Service veterans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, recalled experiencing a similar sort of shock about how government processes worked that Musk and his team are discovering. Over time, many developed an appreciation for why certain things in government had to be treated with more care than in the private sector.

“‘Move fast and break things’ may be acceptable to someone who owns a business and owns the risk. And if things don’t go well, the damage is compartmentalized. But when you break things in government, you’re breaking things that belong to people who didn’t sign up for that,” said Cordell Schachter, who until last month was the chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

USDS was established over a decade ago to do things like improving services for veterans, and it helped create a free government-run portal so tax filers did not have to go through third parties like TurboTax. It also devised systems to improve the way the federal government purchased technology.

It has been embroiled in its fair share of bureaucracy fights and agency turf wars with chief information officers across government who resented interlopers treading in their agency’s systems. USDS’ power across government stemmed from the imprimatur of acting on behalf of the White House and its founding mission of improving service for the American people.

AP video journalist Rodrique Ngowi contributed from Boston.
Contact AP’s global investigative team at [email protected] or https://www.ap.org/tips/.

[admin]

Trump FIRES Top Military Lawyers - The Army, Navy & Air Force JAGS. This WILL Backfire on Trump!
Glenn Kirschner
Feb 25, 2025

Donald Trump apparently thinks he can fire his way through ethical leadership in the United States armed forces. He is wrong.

This video discusses what all military Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG) officers are taught, and why Trump's attempts for fire his way out of ethical legal military leadership will fail.



Transcript

well friends, it looks like Donald Trump
must think he can fire his way out of
ethical military leadership he fired the
Judge Advocate General for the Army for
the Navy for the Air Force here's the
thing Donald Trump doesn't know anything
about the Jag
Corp let's talk about that because
Justice matters
[Music]
hey all Glenn kirschner here so friends you
probably saw the new reporting about
Donald Trump firing the three top
lawyers in the military services what we
call the
tjs T just for the word the the Judge
Advocate General for the Army the Judge
Advocate General for the Navy and the
Judge Advocate General for the Air Force
the top lawyers in the military services
who are there to make sure our military
services our secretary of defense and
our commander-in-chief the president of
the United States are acting
lawfully so of course Donald Trump felt
compelled to get rid of them let's start
start with the new reporting and then
let's talk about why from this old Jags
perspective I was active duty Army Jag
for 6 and a half years as a prosecutor
first in the trial courts handling Court
Marshal cases and then in the appeals
courts handling things like death
penalty and Espionage cases from this
old Jags
perspective Donald Trump's move is a
dramatic miscalculation and we'll talk
about why that is in a minute but let's
start with the new reporting this from
the
hill headline heg SE fired military
lawyers were potential roadblocks to
Trump's
orders and that article
begins defense secretary Pete heg said
Monday that the three fired judge
Advocates General Jags were potential
roadblocks to president Trump's orders
and the hill notes the Jag's job is to
provide independent legal guidance to
senior Military Officers in the Pentagon
and on the battlefields to avoid
potential legal issues with us or
International laws surrounding armed
conflict okay friends so let's talk
about what JAG officers do JAG officers
give legal advice to commanders all the
way way up and down the military chain
from the platoon Commander to the
company Commander to the Battalion
Commander to the division Commander to
the regiment commander and all the way
up to the top of the military leadership
and indeed to the civilian leadership as
well Jags give advice on things like law
of War Rules of Engagement the Geneva
conventions and perhaps most importantly
given where we are in this Lawless
presidential Administration Jags give
advice on what orders constitute lawful
orders and what orders constitute
unlawful
orders you know in the Army alone there
are about 2,000 give or take active duty
JAG officers trying to keep the Army on
you know the straight and narrow when it
comes to acting lawfully not doing
anything that would violate the law
would violate the constitution across
all of the military services there are
about 5,000 active duty JAG officers
give and take in the reserves there are
thousands more Jags these are the folks
who try to keep the military acting in a
way that comports with the law civilian
law military law um the law of war the
Geneva conventions Rules of Engagement
Etc and friends this is perhaps the most
important thing to know about military
JAG officers there is one Bedrock
principle about the rule of law that we
are all taught I was first taught it as
an rooc Cadet when I was in college I
was next taught it in officer basic
training I was taught it again at the
Army's Jag School
after you go to law school you graduate
you pass a bar exam then you enter Army
law school and you learn about military
law before you are posted up for your
first assignment I was taught this
lesson over and over and over again as
is every other Jag officer across all of
the military
services we must obey lawful orders but
even more
importantly we must we must
disobey
unlawful orders that is a Bedrock
principle every Jag knows it the
thousands and thousands of active duty
and Reserve Corp JAG officers and if
Donald Trump thinks he can fire his way
out of ethical Jag leadership across the
military services he is out of his damn
mind and he knows even less about the
military than we suspect he knows we
know how he regards folks who decide to
join the military and serve a cause
bigger than themselves he thinks they're
suckers and losers he says why would
anybody ever do that and he of course is
the original Captain bone
spurs which prevented him from serving
doesn't seem to hamper his golf game at
all
but if he thinks he can fire his way
through the thousands of
Jags until he gets to you know judge
Advocates General that he can appoint
that will support him in the event he
issues
unlawful orders through his secretary of
defense Pete hegf he's got another thing
coming that ain't going to happen at
least not in the estimation of this old
former Jag officer because you know what
I agree and stand with General Millie
when he said we in the military don't
pledge loyalty or fty to a dictator to a
tyrant to an autocrat to a
man we pledge loyalty to the
Constitution and we are Duty bound to
disobey unlawful orders including from a
commanderin-chief from a president
because we all know as Army Jags and Air
Force Jags and navy Jags we all
know that
Justice
matters friends please stay safe please
stay tuned and I look forward to talking
with you all again tomorrow
[Music]