We’re going to bend to the spirit of efficiency here and give you the short answer, the tail that wags the DOGE is a long standing, mostly Republican, but sometimes bipartisan, racialized, nativistic, labor cancelling, balanced budget agenda that seeks to reduce (and potentially obliterate) the Administrative State and its New Deal entitlement structure in the hopes of placating the white working/middle class’s tax anxiety, while at the same time covertly guaranteeing the majority of National Debt service falls on them. Whew, that was a mouthful. And now, they expect us to swallow; then, before we’ve even wiped their ball sweat off our chins, to thank them; praise them even.
We’re sure you must be thinking, Nation, you gotta be crazy, who would want to fellate any of those fat, weird, old fucks in the first place, let alone thank them for it. Well friends, we’re sad to say that a line has already formed, it started in Congress, goes out the door to Fox News and other corporate media outlets, winds through the suburban gated communities, and ends in some church parking lot in Florida. Granted, it’s less like we’ve described it and more like a human centipede1 with Trump at its head, but it’s a real thing. And as much as we’d love to continue this metaphor and take down these anal sucking sycophants and rubes, we should probably unpack this DOGE thing a little more thoroughly, so we all can see what’s really at hand.
On his first day of office the president signed an executive order creating the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which despite its name is not a department, but a temporary advisory body led by Elon Musk and staffed by an assortment of techie acolytes, anarcho-capitalists, incels, and white supremacists2, set to expire in July 2026. Ostensibly their main task was to upgrade the Federal Government’s information technology to increase efficiency. Sounds pretty innocuous on its face, but its overall goal was much more multifaceted and nefarious. Notwithstanding its stated agenda, a decontextualized financial program of reducing government waste, it served to carry out a long-standing MAGA conservative wish list of entitlement cuts, isolationist policy, union busting, bureaucratic reduction and realignment, cultural retribution, further upward redistribution of wealth, and an expansion of executive power. Much of its activity to this point has been chaotic, illegal, cruel, and seemingly unscripted.
For one thing, its head may not be the poster child for efficiency the world has made him out to be, nor the humanitarian bent on saving mankind with electric vehicles and plans for Martian colonization. His utter lack of probity and coherence makes him difficult to finger, let alone psychoanalyze. His Nazism3 and ketamine addiction4 don’t necessarily preclude efficiency, but we would argue that wasteful behaviors like sending cars into outer space5, blowing up countless rockets pursuing childlike fantasies6, live testing driverless features on uninformed customers, and handing out millions of dollars to people simply to register to vote may stand as marks against this attribute. Personally, we wouldn’t put him in charge of constructing a Lego model of the Death Star, though he’s probably more suited to it. He’s not a genius, or visionary, or even an engineer. He’s just rich, which apparently is the most important thing to be in America (that, and white). It’s what confers value to a person, and simultaneously justifies actions that seem to contradict that value.
Wealth reinforces the American mythology of meritocracy; Musk’s and Trump’s origin stories are fictions meant to bestow upon their owners a pulling up of the bootstrap type work ethic, an individualistic rags to riches tale to be internalized and celebrated, and repeated, if only psychically, by the countless masses of unrepresented nobodies in the working class. American Politics and American Capitalism hinge on fear, they turn on a Hobbesian naturalism “where every man is Enemy to every man”7, where capitalism is a zero-sum rationale that banks on the alienation and isolation of its participants to ensure its power. The very beginning of Leviathan was about as far into Hobbesian metaphysics as we got during undergraduate philosophy, so our understanding of the total scope of the work is about as incomplete and uninformed as your average libertarian tech bro’s. We’re not here talking to you America because we want you to think we’re geniuses, but what we’ve figured out over the years, and what we had expected America to have figured out by now, was that seventeenth and eighteenth-century enlightenment thinkers, autodidacts much like ourselves, were mostly full of shit. They had no scientific evidence for much of what they extolled as absolute truth, but transacted in anecdote, and gut feelings, and common sense as a basis for their philosophy. Immanual Kant for example wrote the Critique of Pure Reason without ever once, in his life, stepping foot outside of Konigsberg (We’re not sure that’s actually true, but you get the point).
So, color us skeptical when we’re told by some rich dumb fuck what to believe about our true nature. Capitalism ensures our continued insecurity and competition, it divides us in order to allow vast fortunes to accumulate in the hands of individuals, families and corporate persons like Trump and Musk, Amazon, Google, etc. Democracy and jurisprudence, and even to some extent bureaucratic institutions like the CFPB, SEC and what all are supposed to, in some small way, protect us from the predatory behavior of the aforementioned capitalists. Perhaps laughably they are supposed to level the playing field. Ironically, these very institutions are complicit in the mythology, their imaginary plumbing (sic) provide cover for the exclusion, extraction, exploitation and outright thievery of the American economic experiment. Property is a legal construct, but first it was a spoil of conquest and genocide. Our forefather’s rationalization for relieving Native Americans of their land was firstly a matter of their improper use of it, and secondly a matter of divine right.8 Both rationales were in fact intertwined, the book of Genesis prescribes fruitfulness, multiplication, subjugation and dominion over the earth. The “Indians” clearly weren’t living up to European (and Christian, and God’s) standards, and thus, were consequently punished by God and removed through pestilence and disease. They of course hadn’t entirely vanished, but when they clearly were not interested in putting themselves to use, as defined by their white neighbors they were subsequently forced off their lands by legal and/or violent means.
This may seem like we’ve taken a few giant steps into the weeds here, but we think it’s important to draw a comparison between these first white Christian settlers and the type of capitalists we’ve been discussing above. Musk, like Theil and Andreesen and a host of other tech billionaires and hedge fund managers are not unlike those first colonists, in that they have a number of heretical beliefs that they would like to express and proselytize, but feel confined by the strictures and norms of the dominant society of the day. For the most part they’ve given up the Christian faith, and who can blame them, but are happy to pay it lip service when politically expedient and cling to some of the protestant parts that reinforce capitalism, like hard work, thrift, diligence and responsibility. These parts, while not entirely evident within their own characters, are perfectly acceptable notions upon which to justify their behavior towards us, their underlings. Capitalism, as we all may have felt since 2008, has been going through somewhat of a crisis of late, in that, it can’t exactly bring about our fidelity to it entirely on its own merits. It was easier when “Communism” was around, but even then, capitalism required additional help from racism, nationalism, sexism and the pervasive dread of atheism to bolster its clear advantages in breakfast cereal selection, appliances, and convenience. Notice that we haven’t mentioned ‘the vote’, or freedom, or liberty, etc., here because capitalism does not necessarily require those things to be successful. And maybe that is the attractive part for these billionaires. Democracy, i.e. a form of government where we the people chart a course for our own destinies, may, they think, be too much for our tiny savage brains to handle. Collective action through representative government clearly isn’t working out for a lot of us right now, but there are still democratic remedies for our dissatisfaction. That aside, most of us would agree that a lot of political decisions are based on superstition when they ought to be grounded in fact and sound judgment that prioritize the common good. We know that’s not how our political system works, and these billionaires benefit from our disorganization and division, but also feel that they’d win bigger in a “Dark Enlightenment”9 where the whole pretense of democracy were discarded.
So, what do these billionaires believe in besides money and power. How have they chosen to justify their enormous wealth and influence aside from being merely superior in every way to us? If you aren’t already familiar with transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism (known collectively as TESCREALism), it’s worth spending an afternoon going down that rabbit hole on the internet.10 What we can say about these -isms for you here, in summary, is that they are at best dystopian science fiction, and at worst, the end of humanity as we know it. Basically, transhumanist advocate the use of technology to augment and ‘improve”, and presumably, replace the human organism with some sort of immortal cyborg (see also longtermism). An extroprian position is more meliorism, but with abstract ‘technology’ as the divining light and engine to human advancement, which also appears to lead to a post-human state. Singularitarianism strives to achieve the apex of AI hype and either create a God to which we will bow, or a weapon to which we will fall. Cosmism is pretty straight forward, our destiny is among the stars. Rationalism doesn’t really belong in this list because nothing about this techno-optimism seems particularly rational or realistic. And effective altruism gives justification to the accumulation of wealth as a means of servicing these other aims in a grand gesture of planetary salvation.
Not surprisingly these positions (we can’t in good conscience call them philosophies) have all been put forward mostly by white males who have either been rich or tech adjacent, or both, and are likely involuntarily celibate. Put down the game console bro and go touch grass. Jesus, you know!? Pierce your dark digital bubble and go meet some people who aren’t rich or tech bros. We think it would do you some good. But yeah, Elon Musk is this type of person. And he’s essentially saying to us, we’re not using our lives properly, we’re not working hard enough to bring about his sci-fi vision of what the world and human kind should become. He and his ilk know that we will probably not swallow any of this bullshit unless it is rammed down our throats by some fascist apparatus, so they’ve hopped aboard the Trump train to see if they can get their ideology out of the station.
So far, a lot of Americans are buying it. At least, they are cheering on the evisceration of the Administrative, or ‘Deep’ state as they have been taught to see it. This they believe will lead to a smaller, less intrusive, and better functioning government. One that will be less prepared and less inclined to get in the way of their cult leader’s hateful objectives. One that will stop persecuting Christians and discriminating against white people. This is what they are told on Fox News and through various other right-wing media outlets. The meddling that Elon is doing is for our own good, and the laws he’s ignored and/or disdained are portrayed as minor infractions, like if he’d come into our house and ripped the tag off our mattress without permission. It’s all part of that Silicon Valley move fast and break things mentality that has made our society sooo much better. How can we lose? And maybe, it turns out, we’ll even get some money out of it. There’s been a lot of talk recently about a DOGE dividend11.
Turns out some libertarian buddy of Elon’s messaged him about it on his social media platform, and Elon said, ‘Interesting’, let me ask Daddy Trump if he approves, and Daddy Trump said, Yeah, why not, it’s not my money, I don’t pay taxes. So, Elon said, Hey buddy, my Dad says it’s cool if we give some of the money away so write us up a proposal and we’ll run it by Congress. Congress is like the Mom in the relationship, maybe more like a mashup of June Cleaver and Roseanne, a little trashy at times but mostly subservient, but also, she’s the one that sees the grocery bills, and was like, what, give the money to who? Well, we have to balance the check book first. Or something like that.
Honestly, the chain of events leading up to the idea wasn’t far from our depiction of it. It’s still kicking around, but the payoff keeps getting smaller, and the people who will qualify keeps reducing, and the budget hawks don’t seem willing to part with whatever meager savings they end up with. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, was not very enthusiastic about the DOGE dividend at all, and reportedly rolled his eyes like a teenage girl when he first heard about it.12 Yes, obviously it would give their party some political capital, but what about all the capitalists who are expecting their interest payments and principle on the National Debt, huh? We can’t forget about the real patriots, our bond holders, some of whom are the Chinese Communist Party, Japan, and the UK, all of whom have their own national debts to think about.13 (Does anyone else feel like the entire global capitalist financial system is a Ponzi scheme?) Besides, we won’t have to worry about political capital for much longer anyway, wink wink.
The point has never been to reduce the tax burden on the working class, because both parties seem determined to spend beyond our means. What the Republicans are really after, and what the centrist liberal Democrats, i.e. most of them, will agree with, is a necessity for continued dollar hegemony, and a reassurance to our lenders that we are partly serious about controlling our debt. Maintaining the dollar as the worlds reserve currency is not quite a given, but the feeling is that it’s dominance will continue regardless of any domestic political upheaval, because the world is up to their ass in greenbacks and can’t exactly pull the plug on this investment without seriously harming themselves. To prove our commitment to controlling our debt some of our citizens will have to suffer. By gutting the administrative state, the executive will not directly save this money, but will accomplish an end around Congress, and hamper or close those institutions thus making it difficult or impossible to distribute the entitlements that are due. The DEI part is just icing on the cake for the Republican trolls and their white nihilist flunkies. Busting public sector unions and firing federal employees doesn’t seem quite as sexy if you aren’t harming blacks and queers and women in the process. The perception of Washington bureaucrats is not unlike the Reagan era tropes about lazy black welfare moms, they live off the dole, are beholden to the state for their survival, and are motivated by this dependance to reproduce their own kind. Bureaucrats are perceived as undeserving of their jobs, and the unions seen as corrupt institutions that are in place to protect lay-abouts, bad apples and radical leftist ideologues.
DOGE may in fact increase government efficiency, but we’ve always interpreted that word differently than the mainstream, viewing it as a capitalist code for extracting more surplus from the working class. Undoubtedly, DOGE will create more precarity and immiseration for workers, for minorities, the elderly, persons with disabilities, veterans, trans people, the unhoused, and the poor, and they will do it all in the name of efficiency. A lot of us will be fooled by this tactic. We’ll see the stripping of jobs and the rolling back of DEI as a righteous elimination of waste. We’ll work our two jobs and carry a balance on our credit card, and live paycheck to paycheck, all the while internalizing the braggadocio of billionaires as they tout their 120-hour work weeks, and scold us for not doing the same. Meanwhile, Congress will pass a new tax bill and budget made up mostly of fairy dust that will ensure that an ever-bigger slice of the pie travels upwards. They will promise us that if we’re lucky and work hard enough, a couple of crumbs of its crust may fall our way.
Of course, there is no guarantee that this administration is competent enough to pull this all off. We don’t want to simply add our voice to the rising chorus of doom here, and so, thought it might be heartening to point out that the Republican congress has proven its ineffectiveness time and again. They may all line up to kiss Trump’s ass, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good at their jobs. Take for example the recent government shut down fight. Out of the twelve appropriations bills the Republican congress needed to craft and ratify they completed a total of zero. Their dysfunctional nature as a party of ‘NO’ has left them incapable of constructive governance, and while that may look by design, they were still unwilling to shut it all down, deciding instead to put forward a surprisingly clean Continuing Resolution (CR) that would fund the government at the same levels (minus some cuts and some recissions) as 2024. Remember, the last budget was written by Democrats, passed by a Democratic Senate and signed by a Democratic President. So, it’s a little strange to us that the Democrats would act like this CR was again, some apocalyptic fight that we all needed to shit ourselves with fear over. It didn’t eliminate any of the offices that DOGE was trying to shutter, and it didn’t legitimize DOGE by even mentioning or empowering them to act.14
Was it in fact an act? Was this just more political theatre? We think it was, and we think it accomplished two things, one, with staunch Democratic opposition the Republicans could claim that the CR was conservative legislation (flawed as it maybe), and two, their Democratic colleagues could posture and speechify to their constituency to the effect that they were willing to pull some nuclear option, assured mutual destruction, to protect them from this toxic bill.15 If only it weren’t for those spineless Democratic Senators, the Dems in the house could have blown us all up to prove they were capable of doing something!
Two more things real quick before this post begins to resemble a piece of legislation.
First, what we were saying about incompetence in the administration, coupled with our feelings about Musk and his general intelligence, should give everyone some hope that they will be incapable of fully forming a fascist state. There have already been a number of missteps and miscalculations in this regime’s push for absolute power that lend credence to this assessment. Trump’s recent knee capping by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was an instructive example of Trump’s weakness on diplomatic relations (as if we needed more evidence of that), and his unwillingness to really prosecute some of the more onerous threats he’s been making about annexation. All we have to do is look at a transcript of any of his interviews to know that he’s not playing with a full deck, and that the average packet of ketchup has more brains. In fact, we can’t locate one evil genius among the coterie of condiments he’s polluted his cabinet with. Clearly this isn’t Camelot or the third Reich, and we should all be heartened by that fact. That is not to say that there aren’t evil impulses, and that we won’t feel some of that going forward, but we find it doubtful that the vibe they are so desperately trying to mainstream will persevere.
Secondly, we think that with each manifestation of the fascist impulse there is a larger more constructive counter impulse towards justice. This we think is evident in the Tesla Resist movement, the dogged efforts of a myriad of nonprofit organizations who are litigating on behalf of the American people, and the proliferation of information and community that seems to be budding across the internet and public media sphere. People are calling these frauds out on their bullshit. People are ready to throw down. And not for some cold calculus of personal gain, but because they sincerely believe in the American experiment, as fucked up and grotesque as it can be sometimes, we still love it. We don’t want to just watch it get vacuumed up by this vulgar bunch of ketamine junkies and blowhards.
So yeah, it’s not all doom and gloom for now.
2009 Horror film directed by Tom Six https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Centipede_(First_Sequence) “According to the director, the concept arose from a joke he had made with friends about punishing a child molester by stitching his mouth to the anus of a ‘fat truck driver’.” Italics ours. Note the budget of the film and its box office gross. We believe this administration is likely to pursue policy with similar results.
These characterizations are based on our own personal conjecture, and formed from various reports that detail opinions, positions, and actions of various DOGE team members. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency under the heading Workforce. Note also that team members were not necessarily vetted, and their identities guarded from public scrutiny, though their right to access our sensitive information was taken for granted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/world/europe/elon-musk-roman-salute-nazi.html Much of American media gave this blatant white power salute editorial cover, treating it as a gaff, or a misinterpreted gesture sending his heart out to an adoring crowd. Joe Rogan spends a considerable time excusing it, even dredging up historical photos of all white American children doing pre-Nazi salutes during the pledge of allegiance.
Thanks Joe for that image, but your and your cohosts dissection of right arm gestures, while pathetically puerile and tiresome does not erase a lot of other evidence of Elon’s beliefs, nor does it excuse America’s own sympathy toward the Nazi movement in the early thirties and forties.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/18/tech/elon-musk-ketamine-use-don-lemon-interview/index.html There are some seeming inconsistencies in Musk’s testimony about his ketamine use, and while he may own a legitimate doctor to prescribe it to him, we’re doubtful that his story would wash with any reasonable narcotics officer.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/world/spacex-elon-musk-tesla-roadster-five-years-scn/index.html Better uses maybe possible for our dwindling resources. Capitalism does indeed allow for some wanton destruction of property as a reinforcement of the legal construct. Money and wealth confer upon one the ability to dispose of one’s possessions in the manner one sees fit, especially if this disposal can be shown to turn a profit, or prove a means to that end. The public’s welfare, and the environment’s long-term health are of secondary importance, if they are considered at all.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/elon-musk-mars-colony-spacex-5843bb7a , https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/mars-attacks-how-elon-musks-plans-to-colonize-mars-threaten-earth/ We are skeptical of our ability as a species to enter into this interplanetary phase. The technology may exist to allow for colonization of planets within our solar system. True, but we feel this would be merely a distraction during our species decline, and wouldn’t necessarily guarantee an indefinite continuation of ‘consciousness’. All evidence suggests that the planet earth is our home, and origin, and that our best chances at continued survival are here. This may mean some day succumbing to extinction as our sun dies out. We suggest that you come to terms with this eventuality, and work to realize it, rather than hasten a premature end to our planetary life support system by unnecessarily committing resources to trying to escape this fate.
Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan [Chapter 13]. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2H_4_0114
National Humanities Center, (March 24, 2009), The Taking of Indian Lands, views of colonists, Indians, and the king, selections, 1707-1764, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/growth/text7/indianlands.pdf
https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/dark-enlightenment/ Also note that the Vice President JD Vance has name checked Yarvin as an influence. He may have been doing that to sound cool to his tech bro friends, but he may also have been sincere, which would be a disturbing admission from the guy who stands one heartbeat away from the presidency.
Jennifer Briney of Congressional Dish does an amazing job explaining and exposing the shenanigans inside the House of Representatives in CD313: Democratic Deception (Uncensored), March 24, 2025. https://congressionaldish.com/cd313-democratic-deception/ We are shamelessly stealing from her here.
Thomas Massie pulls back the curtain on this one. This is in no way an endorsement of this representative or his platform, but an acknowledgement of his honesty on this matter. https://www.facebook.com/freeandequal/videos/-thomas-massie-sounds-off-on-the-battle-for-government-funding-/1458037161839264/ See also, the above citation, because we stole this from there as well.