What Elon Musk wants is worse than you think | Will Bunch Newsletter

They did it! The Philadelphia Eagles are the world champions of football, and their 40-22 (but not nearly that close) demolition of the two-time champion Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX was two things we’re not used to here in Philly: decisive and confident. The blowout made a mockery of pundits who thought the dynasty of Mahomes, T. Kelce and Reid would last forever, and — as Nora Princiotti wrote in a sharp analysis for The Ringer — even reflected on our “national mood...currently weighed down by [a] sense of general pointlessness...This Eagles win shook free a sense of possibility. The lesson of this Eagles Super Bowl championship is that nothing, and no one, is inevitable.”

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The newest dystopian thriller that everyone is talking about these days is a little hard to swallow, even by Hollywood standards. The supervillain is an almost cartoonish sort: The world’s richest man with a drug habit, 11 scattered kids, and a penchant for sleeping on couches (if at all). With his posse of young male tech groupies, he uses his billions to first buy the political discourse, then a greedy puppet president, and finally, through him, the levers of government.

It’s almost too late when the masses learn the villain’s real purpose: To replace the flawed humanity of democracy with machines designed by an unaccountable tech elite. And the heroes of our story — a gaggle of activists, outsider journalists and mid-level politicians who realize the truth — are running out of time.

This unbelievable plot line is our reality, now playing out in Washington, D.C., and coming soon to a closed federal office or downsized university near you. The blitzkrieg by Elon Musk and his small cult of 20-something dude-bro minions against the federal government — crushing foreign aid and consumer protection, threatening the Department of Education and seeking a chokehold over the entire federal payment system — has left everyday Americans dazed and confused. And we’re just three weeks into the Donald Trump presidency that has enabled the $400 billion man.

The rapid onslaught by Musk and his pseudo-government agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has happened in a scattershot, unpredictable way that has also left the Beltway media in the dust. Few, if any, seem to understand what Musk, DOGE, or their hands-off patron in Trump truly want. It’s true that massive cuts in the programs that empower middle-class Americans will mean more money for things that Musk, Trump and their allies want, including more tax cuts for the super-rich and a large deportation army. But a community of folks who pay attention to Silicon Valley — the new center of power, not Washington — says the bigger idea is darker and much more sinister.

“This isn’t a spontaneous coup — it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be ‘disrupted,’“ a veteran Silicon Valley executive, Mike Brock, wrote in a recent essay, The Plot Against America. He explained: ”DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes."

That’s dangerous, because most of us — voters, but also the media, Congress and other watchdogs — are much better at understanding a violent coup where cops are beaten and attacked, as on Jan. 6, 2021, than “backend migrations.” But longtime watchers say the dangerous techno-fascism behind Musk’s DOGE has a long-time patron in Musk’s ally and fellow South Africa-raised billionaire, Peter Thiel, and a key inventor: Curtis Yarvin.

A 51-year-old computer engineer and blogger with a following going back to the 2000s, Yarvin is unknown to most Americans but his radical ideas have grown deep roots in some MAGA circles. In many ways, his views are deeply problematic on issues like race — telling the New York Times last month that Black people were worse off in their freed years right after the Civil War than when they were enslaved, for example. But Yarvin’s bigger ideas about the failure of democracy and the need for a kind of monarch, or a dictator, with the value system of technological elites — cemented after the 2008 financial crisis — have gained admirers that include Vice President JD Vance.

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” Yarvin wrote under a pseudonym in 2012. Yarvin and a circle of “thought leaders” in Silicon Valley and other far-right communities believe that democracy is a kind of inefficient mob rule, broken beyond repair, but that a high-tech-flavored “creative destruction” could replace it with a notion of better government through computer engineering.

In explaining what Yarvin has also called “turbocapitalism,” Suzanne Schneider in the UK’s New European wrote: “The engineers...represent the triumph of instrumental reason in our new century. They fetishize efficiency and understand the democratic state as an impediment to the sort of ‘progress’ they desire.” Ultimately these ideas were adopted by billionaires with the power in an age of unlimited campaign spending to change America like Thiel, who notoriously wrote in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Ideas from this extreme-right intelligentsia spent the last 15 years morphing, remarkably, into reality. These include controlling the flow of information (Musk buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022), a Yarvin 2022 proposal called “RAGE” for Retire All Government Employees (thus, the DOGE-led push for mass resignations and firings of the federal workforce), and the more recent Silicon Valley embrace of cryptocurrency as a tool to disrupt the institutions of a comatose democracy. Now, Musk’s DOGE team is racing to replace the fired or locked-out civil servants with generative artificial intelligence in what a TechPolicy Press writer calls “an AI Coup,” because it “concentrates power with those who understand and control this system’s maintenance, upkeep, and upgrades.”

Normally, these fringe ideas would have stayed about 3,000 miles west of Washington, quarantined in their wealthy California bubble, but a perfect storm put this nightmare on the brink. For one thing, a majority of rank-and-file voters also lost faith in government as well as the institutions that support civil society, if perhaps for different reasons. Even more importantly, the anti-democratic ideas of Yarvin and Thiel found both an even wealthier ally in Musk and also a front man in Trump, the bridge with an ability to seduce MAGA voters, even as he agreed to cede enormous power to billionaires, in a Faustian bargain to gain four more years in the White House.

Trump’s “red Caesar” techno-monarchy is actually just high-tech tyranny. Government by AI isn’t more efficient, just inhumane, and it’s also a lie, because the real decisions aren’t actually being made by computers, but by the corrupted humans who program them. And their unbridled faith in Silicon Valley elites is often an excuse to govern America with the same foundations of white supremacy and misogyny that thrive in the tech world. The humans who pretend in the ethical purity of AI really just want more obscene wealth for themselves and the same impunity for their crimes that Trump has granted himself.

The masses of American people need to understand that we are already pawns in their experiment, and that a small band of billionaires and their disciples played the cruelest hoax of using a democratic election on Nov. 5, 2024, to push the start button on their program to end democracy. Humanity needs to fight back quickly, before their AI algorithm decides that on Nov. 7, 2028, your vote doesn’t matter at all.

Question: How should we best prepare for Civil War...if the courts don’t hold and Republicans refuse to stop this incompetent criminal freak and his administration of rapists, miscreants, and psychos? — lilychrystie.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: That’s melodramatic, and yet that does seem to be where we’re at right now. The pattern has clearly emerged: Trump and Musk are breaking laws in their anti-democratic race to reinvent the federal government. Opponents have had no other outlet for stopping them except in the courts. Almost every judge has issued orders to stop or curtail their activities. And we are now waiting to see if Trump will simply defy them. Those of us who want to save democracy would then have no option left other than taking to the street in massive numbers to protest. This can work — remember the recent example of South Korea? — but it also could be an invitation for Trump to call out the military and cement his dictatorship. Probably not the answer you want, but that’s the situation.

Last week’s question about Elon Musk’s ongoing coup in Washington brought an all-time record number of responses, which I believe shows both the depth of voter anger over what is happening and a determination to do something — anything! — about it. “Citizens should email their representatives, go to their town halls, and seek to set up Zoom meetings to loudly and forcefully state their opposition to Musk’s actions,” wrote David Wiedner, who added: “We may not be able to win, but we can slow them down, humiliate them, and demonstrate publicly that there is a much better alternative.” Added Ronald Jones: “We’re in the very early stages of what will, I believe, very rapidly become the biggest outbreak of protests since Vietnam.” We can only hope.

📮 This week’s question: After a quiet inauguration, scattered protests against both the Trump regime and his ally Elon Musk are breaking out. Are you planning to protest, or do you think marching has been proven futile? Please email me your answer and put the exact words “Protest Trump” in the subject line.

In 1972, when a top official in the FBI named Mark Felt went rogue and wanted to expose more of the truth about then-President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal as “Deep Throat,” he found a pipeline in a young journalist he knew named Bob Woodward who had a daily forum in the capital’s largest newspaper, the Washington Post. The scoops about a thoroughly corrupt White House from Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein eventually echoed with other heavyweights of a monopoly media such as CBS News, showed America that watchdog journalism mattered, and even became the stuff of Hollywood drama.

A half-century later, another president is running amok, and with the legacy media — including sadly, the once-great Post itself — in a state of both financial and moral collapse, the question screams out: Where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins who can help save us in 2025? Less than a month into the nightmare of Trump 47, it turns out the sequel to All the President’s Men will more likely be filmed in a cluttered Brooklyn apartment then a Washington newsroom, and the stars might be computer-savvy tech reporters who’ve never met a source in a parking garage.

Big Media may be compromised beyond repair by its billionaire or corporate owners, but it just takes one journalist still committed to truth to break a big story. That’s how Marisa Kabas, working in her sweatshirt and leggings from her Brooklyn abode and publishing an independent newsletter called The Handbasket, scooped all of Washington with the massive story of the federal funding freeze imposed at Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, among a couple of major stories she’s broken this year.

“Many outlets aren’t equipped to handle this moment because they’re still so worried and they are clinging to traditional norms taught in journalism schools or traditional media institutions,” Kabas told Columbia Journalism Review. “They are not comfortable with breaking the rulebook, even in the face of clear and present fascism.”

As the work of billionaire Elon Musk and the young techies of his DOGE team take center stage, much of what we know about their efforts comes not from the Post or CBS or the New York Times but from WIRED, the leading tech magazine which was launched in the 1993 dawn of the internet boom. Under the leadership of editorial director Katie Drummond and her star reporters like Vittoria Elliott — who specializes in covering disinformation, not traditional politics — WIRED is the reason you know that a young posse including a 19-year-old college freshman is seizing control of the government’s computers. WIRED is totally inside the head of Musk, who said the magazine “went from being about technology to being an unreadable, far-left wing propaganda mouthpiece.”

Journalism in the Trump era is dead, but long live journalism. It’s somewhat exhilarating to watch the vacuum created by the decline of traditional newsrooms filled by this new breed of outsiders who refused to be bound by the old guardrails, in order to hold a criminal government accountable. In today’s climate of threats and intimidation from an American president and his allies, the heroes of this New New Journalism are taking enormous risk to bring you what’s needed to save this country: The truth.

It’s been a long road from the heady and all-too-brief heyday of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault to a world where alleged abusers like Pete Hegseth and Pennsylvania’s own Sean Parnell are running the Pentagon. A major turn in that road came on this date seven years ago when a Trump 45 White House aide named Rob Porter was forced out for alleged violence against two ex-wives and a girlfriend, causing Trump to express his deep regret — on behalf of Porter, not the women. I wrote: “There are many ways that Trump has blown up the contract to be a president of all of the American people, but this mindset that leads the president to offer his well-wishes to a credibly accused wife-beater is particularly abhorrent.” Read the rest: “Donald Trump became president of the United States of Men today.”

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