The propagandists on X and in the broader right wing media are working to convince Americans that multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism are ackshually foreign and nefarious forms of cultural Marxism that seek to destroy "our western civilization." It's fascism 101. bsky.app/profile/seth...

This was Andrew Breitbart's fundamental insight--he taught the right to believe that "politics is downstream of culture." So if you wanted to build a politics of exclusionary, hierarchical, & bigoted illiberalism, you needed to seed a culture that affirmed those values. Not an easy thing in the US.

What Norman Lear didn't fully take on board was the possibility that the future could belong to the theocratic bigots of the moral majority with the Pat Buchanan-ite white nationalist bigots who were very much on the back foot in the 1970s, but whose forces were gathering steam for the fight ahead.

I sure hope so, because I read your Thanksgiving poem yesterday between dinner and dessert, and everybody loved it.

Before we were fired, we were interrogated. This had a very Office Space "so what would you say you do here" vibe, appearing to assume that government employees are ineffective, our systems broken.

They kept announcing things like "performance standards" as though we didn't already have them:

18F was liquidated at midnight and our website deleted at the same moment, apparently to end our leftist conspiracy. In general DOGE appeared quite preoccupied with the idea that websites, mass emails, etc controlled by longtime government employees would be used to conspire against them.

My group's firing appears to have been a consequence of a right-wing article from 2023 calling us, and I quote, "a cabal of perpetually triggered leftists obsessed with politics and pronouns"

The article echoed around Twitter until Musk saw it, tweeted we were "deleted" which DOGE then implemented

Partisan messages like this violate the Hatch Act and, as nonpartisan civil servants sworn to uphold the law, we would never do this.

But conspiracy-brained people don't know we truly uphold the law, and in this case probably don't even know the law at all.

They thought we, being radical leftists apparently, would put a "DOGE sucks" type of message onto government websites or into government communication systems

My evidence for that: the right did exactly this to government websites. So they were projecting what they planned to do onto us.

One possible motivation to demand access was to steal data, and I think that was a part of it, but also I think DOGE (or Musk, anyway) was motivated by a conspiracy theory:

The belief that government workers would conspire to use the government's computer systems against them.

Musk's people infiltrated the GSA technology arm early on and demanded root-level access to computer systems, trying to circumvent normal security procedures. Here's one example where they pushed so hard they forced someone to resign rather than give in.

Why did they do this?

Whole lotta that needs to be unpacked, set alight, and the ashes buried.

Too many of whom are media elites.

Yeah, it takes all kinds.

Fascinating article debunking a particularly important case of a conservative claiming that academia is ideologically unwelcoming to conservatives.

lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

I've taken a deep dive into the DOGE bro's open source software code commits to verify they never wrote (or even oversaw) any code beyond culture war messaging. It's all trivial stuff like this: taking out the "nonbiary" option on some form.