Wake up to the future. On Day 20, the shadow coups 2, 3, 4 of Trump 2.0 are emerging.
It goes far beyond the DOGE bros hacking of our Treasury and now, Energy department computers that also house our nuclear secrets. Parallel shadow coups are underway, promising profit and power.
One of a million public responses to the Musk-DOGE takeover.
NOTE: This post has been updated with additions of resources in the discussion of the section ‘The Shadow Coups’ relevant to breaking news about DOGE and Trump 2.0.- ac
Day 20 of the coup….
Where does one begin?
That’s the thought that comes upon waking, day after day. There’s so much that has happened the previous day, still so much unfurling-of-the-madness, as we think of the blitzkrieg assault upon, and dismantling of, our federal government and laws. I’m glad I have my other Substack, Resisting Project 2025, for reporting on the coup and especially the resistance. It gives me a separate place to write with focus on not only what we are experiencing and how we are moving to counter it, but to reflect on the impact of the daily actions and deeper agenda being implemented, and to consider the society we may inherit if the full scope of Project 2025’s vision of Christian theocracy is implemented. Very few writers or journalists are doing that – the long view reflection. We need that, very much.
But this page here is my more private political witness journal. And I’m glad I have it, because the moments we are living pack a wallop, emotionally. I can honestly say I have had a few equivalent body shocks, taking in the Trump 2.0 proposals. Meaning that, as much as I am prepared and quite aware of what is planned with Project 2025, in deep detail, the emotional intent and the ideology behind the executive orders (EOs) and terse administrative memos still penetrates, still lands a blow, still makes me stop and think, Oh my gawd, what the fuck. No, it can’t be possible. But yes, look, they fucking did it.
The latest item on that list of incredulity is an EO announced by Trump yesterday to invite white Afrikaners to migrate to the US on the grounds that they are experiencing reverse racism in South Africa. It’s such a mind-boggling declaration it just takes one’s breath away. Or took mine, metaphorically. I did actually stop in my tracks, doing what I was when I read it, and maybe breathed in my incredulity. He didn’t, I thought. He did. He actually sought to make white supremacy an overt government policy. How is that even possible? But he did – it's there in black letters on white paper and signed, an official thing. Not unlike what the 3rd Reich did to sanction its laws against Jews – a racial policy. We all know it’s because his sidekick Elon Musk, who’s taken the helm of the coup with mad vigor, put him up to it. But probably also Peter Thiel, a gay billionaire Silicon Valley libertarian, and several other white South African emigres. I read a little last night about how Musk was raised by Afrikaner parents who fled South Africa when it was forced to end its apartheid rule.
South African supporters of slain white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanchesalute his coffin as it is driven from the church in Ventersdorp in 2010. Photo: AP.
Like Trump, like many in the Project 2025 orbit, these white men have convinced themselves that white people – the most entitled, the richest, the group with power, historically, in every country they occupy – are actually victims. The intensity of the push to remove DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – policies from all aspects of our government is little more than a goal of stopping non-whites from having equal footing in society. It’s fundamentally a racist rebuke of the acts of social and political redress that America has engaged in for the past few decades to level the playing field for women, Black and brown and indigenous Americans, and the broad stripe of people who don’t identify as heterosexual.
Let me not digress too much. I was talking about what took my breath away, what continues to reverberate as a note of power, and hatred and historic whiteness that I’ve absorbed in the Afrikaner EO. Can you imagine? The gall. The absolute fucked-upness of this. Trump, a man raised by a father who admired the Nazis and reportedly kept a copy of Mein Kampf by his bedside desk, and whose butler kept Nazi regalia, and whose club, Mar A Lago, hosted a fundraiser for the January 6 insurrectionists that included an open Nazi sympathizer, Timothy Hale-Cusinelli, who sports a Hitler ‘stache and infamously told coworkers at a naval station that Hitler should have finished the job.
Then there is Elon Musk, who apparently suffers from a case of megalomania so extreme, per a story I read this week, that he not only views whites as superior, but views himself as the most superior individual on the planet. Don’t forget the global brouhaha that broke out over Musk’s’s now-infamous double salute to the crowds at Trump’s inauguration. (Was it a Nazi salute? Or more Mussolini-fascist?) I’ll just point to the picture above, which shows where a young Elon may have learned his outstretched-arm pledge of allegiance.
I’m hardly the only one wondering if and when the competition for being King will lead to rupture in two men who both want to be crowned boss geniuses. If they weren’t such dangerous individuals, given their positions in power, we might laugh, but this is such ugly business, this EO on the Afrikaners. It gives a clear inside view of the mindset of the white racists who have taken power and their goals of erasure. Not only have they moved to arrest, detain, and forcibly remove a hoped-for 11 million immigrants, including some they hope to denaturalize in the future (that, courtesy of Stephen Miller, another master planner advancing the cause of white supremacy) but they now invite the unrepentant Afrikaners here.
This is a neat one-two punch of racial cleansing.
I hope everyone sees this as clearly as I do: this is a neat one-two punch of racial cleansing. Trump and Musk and their kind envision America as a land of whites – by and for whites, even if JD Vance has a wife who’s born Indian and is brown-skinned, and Kash Patel is also a brown man. (They are advancing white supremacy, so they get to stay in the party.)
This is fake news: a satirical sketch of Trump’s possible grand designs for Gaza.
Source: News Thump.
Let’s not forget the other shock-take-a-breath-already statement Trump made this week, as a precursor to the Afrikaner one: his startling statement on Gaza. The one in which he proposed that the US take ownership of the bombsite that happens to be a site of the ethnic cleansing itself. That happens to be the spiritual homeland of Palestinians long sought by settler Jews including the Netanyahu regime. I was almost surprised that Trump didn’t mention that he could foresee some beautiful golf courses he would operate being built upon the land he hoped to own -- er steal – for the US. The proposal to turn Gaza – a prime location, Trump reminded us – into a resort strip is not his, but his son-in-law’s. Jared Kushner, married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and son of a convicted felon billionaire father, Charles Kushner. Some pundits tried to write off Trump’s brazen proposal as if he was just thinking like a real estate guy, not the white supremacist he makes no bones of hiding now. I mean, c’mon. What in god’s name! Seriously?!
It chills us to the bone, or should. I mean, I had no illusion that Trump was an old-school racist, in the same vein as many of the very tanned older men and women I grew up around in Florida. They were raised to be racist; they remain racist in their belief that America belongs to whites and that too many brown and black people have now encroached on that vision-dream ideology. I was raised to think America was run by whites and white men too: It was, it is. Read our older history books. That’s what DEI sought to correct, and had made great strides to correct. And that is what Trump and Co. so stridently hope to reverse.
I hadn’t planned to write this treatise on racism and white supremacy. But it has emerged so powerfully and deeply as one of the through-points of Trump 2.0 policies, I see now that I’m reeling from it, despite knowing that Trump was an OG racist, and his clan were also raised to think they were and are the white ruling class. But I had not anticipated an invitation to give the children of apartheid special visa privileges to emigrate while turning Gaza into prime real estate. I suppose I should be surprised Trump didn’t go further, and invite the aggrieved white South Africans to just resettle Gaza, once he’s convinced the Palestinian survivors of genocidal violence to move to Egypt or Iran or another Arab neighbor where they have not been especially welcome and would remain second-class refugees. I mean, seriously?
It boggles the mind, it does. And yet, it’s real. It’s there, in black and white. An actual Executive Order. Amazing and beyond odious. My word of the day.
Let me move on to another subject. I wanted to talk about how my friends are feeling, how we – the collective we of my friends and social-political circle – are feeling, are reacting. I wrote a few days ago about how I had made the final shift to calling the blitz takeover a coup, and I see I was not alone. My friends made the same shift, internally, at a deep level. Gone is the question of whether we are in a true coup: it’s an accepted statement, and they are grappling with the reality. Me, too. I’ve been steeped in this for over 15 months; they are still feeling their way, looking more deeply at Project 2025 now. They call me, late at night, to ask about this or that thing Trump has said, and how it does or doesn’t reflect Project 2025, and what does it mean already?
Over the past week, I got preoccupied that the young racist who’s been give write-over privileges to our federal financial payment system was also accessing our defense system and nuclear codes. I now understand with a greater long view what Musk and Thiel and their tech bros are after with their AI takeover of the system. I understand that whoever owns the code being installed on our government computers will also become the contractors to run the system and make billions and will also control the country.
I understand that we are glimpsing and experiencing the deeper plan that has lurked within Project 2025: the tech coup, the one waged by a weapon, artificial intelligence, few of us own the patents for, or deeply understand. The technological weapon Musk promised Trump he would use to wage war on “woke,” and replace so many human jobs with AI and bots, and set up the US to mint money – well, bitcoins -- unlike anything Trump could even imagine. And I do imagine it’s beyond powerful stuff for Trump, who probably is quite an OG luddite like me, and can’t even pretend to keep up or understand what self-proclaimed mad Musk is capable of doing with the AI programs he’s installed to capture power.
What does it mean already? It means we have lost our democracy – unless the AI can be reversed and removed, which I suspect is unlikely. We know they’ve copied all our personal data and all the government systems. They have what they need to make huge profits, in any case.
But let me get back to the nuclear codes. It shook me, it did. The thought of some kid the same age as my youngest daughter, and one who is a real Silicon Valley bro, meaning he lives and breathes code and has absorbed a hefty dose of white supremacy beliefs, too… the thought of that kid revising the mainframe of the National Nuclear Security Administration that houses the Gold Code, which is the launch code for nuclear weapons…well it forced me to take a deep breath. It’s too scary to contemplate, and yet, we must. It’s likely happening. Maybe not the Gold Code, maybe not a nuclear thereat today, necessarily, but already a step toward the sought-after AI upgrade of the NSSA computer system, to make it smarter, in the words of a tekkie. To make the US have an upgraded topline intelligent space and satellite weapons defense system and shift its foreign policy away from historic deterrence to a first-strike capacity, as Project 2025 has proposed.
That’s what had and has me worried. We sense what that kid is doing, hacking the system and putting in Musk’s preferred AI programs, and the surveillance system pioneered by Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies, along with Alex Karp and others. What AI programs have been funded by venture capitalist Marc Andreeson and Ben Horwitz at their company, A16Z. The duo penned a now-infamous “little tech agenda” last July that’s now the Trump 2.0 battle cry for government deregulation of tech startups, particularly AI and cryptocurrency. David Sacks and Brian Armstrong are also prominent billionaire bros within the shadow tech Cabinet, as some view the outsize role being played by Silicon Valley tech titans.
Don’t forget, AI agents are systems or programs that can autonomously perform tasks on behalf of a user or anther system to design its workflow or utilize available tools, per an IBM definition of AI. Eliza, for example, is a lightweight AI framework that provides a foundation for building and deploying AI technologies and collecting intelligence – as in data. We’re talking about the personal data of the federal government as the source dataset here, and beyond it, all of America’s data, because we’re all connected to our government given the services it provides us. And the world: we’re interconnected. This hack is global, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
What does it mean already?
Does this feel like the movie Matrix nightmare coming into view?
Hell yes.
It means the Silicon Valley circle may have secured a real degree of secret digital access, and thus ownership of our American lives, and we haven’t even grasped the full implications of this breach. Maybe you’re just glimpsing that bigger picture too, as you’re reading this now. Or maybe more pieces of the puzzle began falling into place as they did for me these past two weeks, making frightening sense beyond what I’d already grasped in the arcane minutiae of Project 2025’s dense policy blueprint. It was only when the young DOGE kids broke into the mainframe of the Treasury department that I spied the farther horizons of what may be at stake.
I never read about the Gold Codes before because it had never been a believable enough closer threat to me to need to do so. So I googled the term. I learned that a president keeps a plastic card on their person called a ‘biscuit’ with a set of codes in a column that changes daily. And these codes include some fake codes that have no meaning. So a president has to remember the location of the correct code, most importantly. That’s scary too, when it comes to Trump, who has shown clear signs of aging that have led a growing chorus of critics to speculate about early dementia, as they did Biden.
What have they done? That’s the question that had me up late this week and early on a Sunday morning, needing to unload and share all this mishegoss. (A Yiddish word most New Yorkers know means craziness. Often it’s a joke. Not here.)
Photo Illusration: © amagnawa1092 / shutterstock.com
It’s important to call the DOGE hacking a criminal act. Totally illegal, which is why a federal judge issued a middle-of-the-night block order a day ago on DOGE’s access to the system, in response to a lawsuit by 19 attorneys general, led by NY Attorney General Letitia James. US District Judge Paul Englemayor, based in Manhattan, issued the emergency request, and also ordered Trump’s Treasury officials to require the DOGE bros to immediately destroy all information and copies they installed or took from the Treasury system. The case now goes before US District Judge Jeannette Vargas, a Biden appointee like Englemayor.
I so wish I had the skill of an Anonymous cyberhacker to dig more deeply into what have they done? Instead, I wrote an email two nights ago to a journalist at Talking Points Memo who helped expose the payment system hack to inquire if he and his team might look into how far DOGE has penetrated the NSSA mainframe, since I began to be very concerned about that. I want to know what Palantir or Space X or Eliza AI software they may have sought to install as a first step of Trump’s desire to upgrade the US military and space defenses.
Don’t forget, Musk owns Starlink, a fleet of satellites across space. They could be loaded to carry the laser weapons Trump dreams of having as part of a US version of Israel’s protective missile defense system Iron Shield. That’s what worries critics of Musk and insiders monitoring what could also be cybersecurity coup unfolding in real time.
I saw Ross Anderson published a warning story in The Atlantic on Feb. 5 warning about the DOGE team accessing Dept of Energy and Defense computers. And that Senator Mark Warner, ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, had already written to Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles about the committee’s concerns about DOGE accessing top security systems and intelligence files, as well as the unclassified data that includes information about American taxpayers and organizations. Warner and others worried about a breach of the Department of Energy (DOE) system, which oversees the NNSA, which operates as a semiautonomous agency within it.
On Thursday, while I went to DC to cheer on activists protesting the cuts in global aid in a protest at the State Department, I did get message relayed to someone inside the DOD (who hasn’t yet been fired yet) to ask what they might know. They had not heard of Musk’s DOGE team gaining entry.
But they had.
We now have various reports from Newsweek and US News & World Report, among others, that Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old programmer and former intern at Space X who graduated from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, was given access to the DOE’s database which houses information on nuclear weapons, including locations and codes. They are controlled by the DOD’s Strategic Command. Farritor (and others in DOGE) had not been subject to a top-security clearance, either – the very issue Warner and others have been screaming about.
Apparently Farriter was seen entering the building this past Wednesday, while the DOE general counsel and others objected to Farritor being given a greenlight to access the computers. Under fire, new Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Farritor was only given basic access – just to DOE IT services like email and Microsoft 365. He confirmed that three DOGE staffers had been placed at the DOE, but did not access the nuclear secrets. Wright compared them to “young gun management consultants coming in to take a critical look at how things are run,” and told CNBC’s Brian O’Sullivan, “Nothing to be worried about here.”
Muskrats? Dogebros? Editorial cartoonist Steve Brodner invites us to consider what to call Musk’s juvie hackers.
Image: Steve Brodner. Source: The Great Quiet Substack
Seriously? And why should we believe you? Are you kidding me?!
Let’s add that Farritor was a member of the select group of Thiel Fellows in 2024. Thiel set up his foundation to invite and reward young people interested in computers who could be persuaded to NOT go to college but enter the field instead. Thiel is avidly anti-higher education, which infuses the Thiel Fellows program. To get in, you have to have left or agree to leave your university or college program.
That viewpoint infuses Project 2025 and the chapter on the Department of Education too. It promotes young people eschewing “elite” colleges and universities to do apprenticeships and trade schools instead. Never mind that the majority of Project 2025 authors attended the very Ivy League and top-ranked schools they now dismiss. I investigated their academic bonafides last year, the hypocrisy irked me so much. The hypocrisy that courses through Project 2025 is as odious as its promotion of white supremacy, misogyny, Christian nationalism, and a 1950s view of gender roles and status in which men rule over women and children, and wives defer to their husbands. Meanwhile, gay people are just Other, meant to be erased from federal protections and the social conversation – especially trans and nonbinary folks.
What does it mean already?
It means we need to learn to think the worst, even if you’re not a doomsday worrier like some of my friends, nor a conspiracy theorist. I have proudly remained a positivist, as my friends label me, sometimes irked by my ability to champion hope amid bleakness. I remain a positivist, but I’m also a realist, and these are not in opposition. I’m cheered as you likely are by the deluge of rising rebuttal and resistance to the action and statements of Trump 2.0. The first court victories are cause for cheering. But I’m not going to put my head in the sand and act like Secretary Wright and pretend we’re over-worrying the hack of the defense system. I see my and our marching orders as the very opposite of looking away from the threat. I think we need to look deeper and make huge noise now about the existential threat that a small group of tech-obsessed white men – racists to boot – represent with their actions and their vision.
It's the vision that we also need to focus more attention on. The longer-term vision of what is afoot with this tech coup, one some have labeled a techno-fascist coup. What is the big picture vision? What can we say about the vision for the US Iron Shield. Who will be charge of its computer codes? Elon’s Musk lil bros?
What does it mean if we follow the thread of the policy proposals and big-picture dreams of Project 2025’s architects and Musk and Thiel and Palantir surveillance developers including Marc Andreeson -- and yes, Trump? Our elderly president is rubber-stamping their moves because he likely can only sense like I can the unimaginable power that AI may unleash to whoever controls the code.
On Thursday, the day after Farritor was apparently slinking into the DOE to begin this power grab, I also started researching the top investigative journalists who report on nuclear power and the nuclear arms race, and those who are cybersleuths. I wrote to one of them, asking to chat. I know this is someone else’s major story to break, but I can help get them going, if they haven’t started.
What does it mean? It means we have started a new arms race, and will imminently, and are positioning ourselves to be the belligerent leader, chasing China and others who may have better AI they’ve put in place, too. We being the US, but not me. It’s just going to be done in my name. In our name.
Image: Clay Jones.
Source: Claytoonz on Substack
So. It’s 10 am. A Sunday. I woke up at 7 and turned on my computer, words flooding out. The DOD hack is only one of so many things we are right to be very worried about. In the big picture, we have experienced not one, but two coups, or maybe three, tucked into each other, the latter two more hidden.
The big coup is Trump 2.0 and Project 2025, the second inner coup is the AI takeover of our government by a private group of billionaires for their future profit and power, and the third is the financial coup that other billionaires are advancing.
Leaders of the third coup include Catholic activist and judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo, who used billions in dark money in 2022 and 2023 and 2024 to fund Project 2025 and line the pockets of over 100 of its advisory groups so they would advance its judicial, Christian nationalist agenda of a future theocracy. He and other billionaires who helped elect Trump. They gave billions to Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America, and Stephen Millers’ American Legal First, and other think tanks whose directors are now Cabinet members leading the coup.
Leo recruited Peter Thiel and set up the Teneo Network as a new Silicon Valley younger group of donors to back Trump, in exchange for promises he would unshackle AI. And now they’re inside, at the mainframe terminals. Going for broke, as we see.
The dark money is part of the third coup. It is the privatizing of the US government, with unelected private hands and money acting on behalf of the government. Marc Andreeson is helping to recruit for DOGE; Palantir is going to make billions. So will Space X and Musk, who hopes to control lower space with Starlink before he goes on to capture and claim Mars. Musk has already pushed Trump to reverse course and stop blocking H1B visas for workers in specialty occupations so he can recruit more talented tekkies for his and his friend’s companies.
And there are other layers to the cake of the coup.
Image: ABC News
Look at the Gaza scorched-earth resort plan. Look at the talk of taking over Greenland and Panama. Trump has been bellicose in his imperialist goals for such a pronounced nativist. Why Greenland? For the vast gold and rare minerals under the ice, some needed for computers and AI systems in the fever dreams of Musk and Palantir and rising technoligarcy. Why Panama? For free US navy warship access, for great military control. Yes, and for profit. To prevent China from accessing markets, labeled “predatory economic activity” by Trumpers. China, which shocked the world and has outshone the US with its one-year-old startup, AI DeepSeek Large Language Model (LLM), which operates at a fraction of competitors like Open AI, or models by Google or Meta. Right behind DeepSeek is Alibaba, and Moonshot and ByteDance – all releasing AI reasoning models. The DeepSeek news plunged US stocks overnight, panicking tech investors.
This is why we must – urgently - look much further and deeper at the actions of the DOGE shadow private Cabinet and billionaire backers. Project 2025 offers a clear blueprint for the policy goals and conservative ideology, but masks the profit. The kleptocracy -- the possibilities for corruption and lining of private corporate pockets, all in the name of radical free market governance. The coming to power of a US pluto-oligarchy, as fellow journo and author Katherine Stewart has labeled it. They have hacked our government. They are here.
If they manage to hack all our data, available to sell to private bidders, then what? What exactly does this mean? Let’s spell it out. What does it mean for America and the world?
The shadow coups:
There is a much darker anti-democratic vision for the future that the Musk-Thiel-Adreeson-Horwitz circle has been putting forth, along with JD Vance, and right-wing tech disruptors including Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin. The last two are radical right tech libertarians who call for destroying our democracy — all democracies — which they view as declining, to be replaced with self-governing corporate mini states they call “network states.” These are conceived as gated mini-cities called “state sectors” financed by crypto, and run like free trade zones in Taiwan, and guarded by AI-surveillance systems.
The crypto will help them buy physical land that will operate under the sovereignty of the US — but under different economic rules. Looking to Trump 2.0, they envisage managing the US as a corporation, with Trump as the CEO and the bros as a board of directors — supplanting a traditional advisory Cabinet.
If this all sounds very conspiracy driven, it’s a real vision, report journalists who’ve been tracking the tech bros. They include Gil Duran, whose newsletter,The Nerd Reich. covers Silicon Valley and tech authoritarianism as a specialty beat. Duran is a former opinion writer at The Sacramento Bee who was comms director for Kamala Harris when she was California attorney general. I newly follow Joanna Richard, of the popular Substack The Silly Serious.
Both warn that the DOGE clan’s latest moves at the Treasury are starting steps to destroy our current system and set up the alternative corporate model, and closely following Project 2025’s policy goals. That’s why Trump launched a US “Sovereign Wealth Fund to create wealth for the government, reportedly open to digital assets, namely bitcoin. The big plan, Richard states, is to transfer our US taxpayer Treasury account into that sovereign account, generating wealth for Trump’s government.
That sovereign future cities plan is also why Trump and Vance are so obsessed with acquiring Panama and Greenland — to be set up model deregulated economic zones like “mini” states — precursors to network states, the long dream. Who knows, maybe the same wild vision is fueling Trump’s disturbing Gaza resort proposal. The driving vision is corporate autocracy.
There’s an awful lot to unpack in these future shock visions, so I’ll point you to a Richard’s latest You Tube video on this topic, which has links to Duran’s articles about the various bros and their roles. The Uber-right future cities sound like true dystopias, created by and for rich white people, mostly, and where the poor will certainly not be welcome.
Who will own what and who will control what and who will profit and who will lose?
On that last point, I am already clear: the 99% will lose. The American people and global public who are not techno-plutocrats will lose. We have arguably already lost an unknown portion of our democracy in three short weeks that only represents the start of a much bigger power and money grab. We’re experiencing the launch of an economic coup, with its eyes on the future and digital economies. That’s also why we see Trump and Melania launch their own bitcoins, along with the DOGE bitcoin. It’s a mad scramble for profit.
The world has also been dealt body blows with the move to eliminate global aid, including funds to fight cancer and HIV and pandemics-in-waiting, like H5NI, known as the bird flu virus, already jumping from birds to cats and a few humans. On Friday, the CDC published – then quickly deleted – a Morbidity and Mortality Report (MMWR) report with three studies on bird flu while highlighting two cases of cats contracting bird flu from humans. Critics quickly accused the Trump CDC of hiding the bird cases which suggest the bird flu could spread from birds to cats and cats to humans.
“Never Musk”. Argentines at the anti-Millei protests that drew millions. February 1, 2025. Photo: Valen Iricibar
What does it mean?
We need to find out. We need to dedicate ourselves to that task. We need to look calmly at the Gold Codes and H5N1 and the Teneo Network and dark money and who is investing in Kushner’s Gaza imperial dreams and make the connections so that the American people and the world can better grasp what too many reporters still prefer to label overwhelming chaos. It’s intended confusion, yes – the autocrat’s tool. It’s intended to make us react with alarm to yet another wild idea like ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to build a resort on the graveyard of GAZA to profit… who? Kushner and Co. Trump and allies in the Middle East. Here, Netanyahu has even protested, wanting Gaza to develop for Israel.
We can’t let them do that. We have to sort it out. We have to call forward our progressive scholars and experts and engineers and whiz tekkies, some reeling from academic DEI purges, and urge them to this task of digging deep, and exposing the plan. To step up. We have to give money – fast and more – to support the independent journalists and fledgling progressive newsrooms and watchdog monitors of right-wing forces that are providing so much of the intel on what’s afoot. The coup is targeting the media. Musk has launched a doxing campaign against Katherine Long, the Wall Street Journal reporter who exposed the past racist social media tweets of DOGE bro, Marko Elaz, who resigned when her story came out. The new watchdog site Musk Watch, by Todd Legum and others, is tracking all of this.
Musk has now pressured Trump to rehire his golden boy Elaz who has continued to have access to the federal computer systems, per watchdog Nathan Tankus, reporting on Day 7 of the hack at Crises Notes on Substack. Meanwhile, Musk also wants to buy MSNBC while Trump may buy X. They know they need to control the message. AI will allow mass disinformation, which Musk already piloted via the Grok and Eliza AI models to help skew the election to Trump, according to a Jan. 7 whistleblower report on Substack by a former X tekkie with an H1B visa who regrets their actions. Their online nom de plume is The Concerned Bird. The report is titled “Elon Musk and X’s Role in 2024 Election Interference.” (The Concerned Bird also claims that “…State-backed groups from Israel, Iran, and Russia were running their own influence campaigns,” on X, while Musk looked the other way. “Even when they broke the rules, we didn’t stop them,” warns the Concerned Bird.
I can’t vouch for the veracity of the Concerned Bird’s report, and I warn everyone about AI’s disinfo and fake post capacity. We have to be aware of agendas at play behind everything online. That said, the post has had over 4000 views on Substack, and over 2000 restacks, so it’s spreading there, and probably on many other social media channels. While many comments are harsh, condemning the Bird for participating in Musk’s disinfo attack on our democracy, others acknowledged they risked exposure, deportation, and possibly jail for speaking out. Others have done deep dives into a linked Eliza doc provided as evidence to back these explosive allegations. I await more revelations.
We need progressive billionaires and the private sector and donors – whoever has any means to do this -- to give money to our side now, to realize how they, too, are deeply threatened by the agenda of the pluto-oligarchs. Not only our democracy but global democracies are being threatened here.
The Dems raised millions: what are they doing with that money? Not fighting strategically enough, with gloves off. I’m glad some are supporting the resistance litigators at Democracy Forward and the ACLU and CREW – all in the hub of Democracy 2025: that’s well-directed money. Donate there. Now, not later. I also urge people to support the independent press who also aren’t cowed, aren’t muzzled, but need resources to do this type of work. We are doing our all to sound the alarm, to make the connections. Help us. Substack is a hub of media resistance.
Knowledge=power. I will leave you with that mantra, which served the AIDS movement and serves us still. That and the battle cry: resist!
Perhaps there is a fossil fuel connection with Gaza? 1.6 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas is enough to consider the population above it, a mere inconvenience??
https://www.eia.gov/international/overview/country/PSE
https://unctad.org/news/unrealized-potential-palestinian-oil-and-gas-reserves