This Is A Coup
By Web pages being taken down across the government, including scientific materials at places like the CDC.
FBI employees are being purged, as are employees in other departments.
Friendly countries will see tariffs placed on – practically everything. It appears that this is planned for March 1, but who knows. I can find nothing in writing.
Elon Musk’s employees have taken over the computers at the Office of Personnel Management and have locked civil servants out of the system. Earlier today, Musk was trying to get access to the computers that control Social Security and Medicare distributions.
Most of this is illegal, for one example,
If your members of Congress are home for the weekend, contact them directly. Otherwise, leave a voicemail message or a message on their homepage. Tell them that this is unacceptable and that we want our country back. I am seeing that voice mailboxes are filling up, so leaving a message may be the better option.
Especially if they are Republicans, but yes, all of them.
Update: Josh Marshall has some thoughts. They’re not well organized, but the central point is that we (and the news media, haha) need to focus on what Musk is doing and the questions surrounding that.
There’s mounting evidence that even more than we know is being directed by Elon Musk and his private sector employees now fanned out across the government….We need a lot more reporting on just how he is exerting this power, specifically under what authority and who the people are he’s installed at these government agencies. Some have simply been appointed to new roles the old fashioned way. But the best information we have about how ‘DOGE’ is working, many are employees from his private companies operating with no legal authority at all.
Slightly OT, but I wonder if Vivek Ramaswamy’s departure from the team was because he didn’t sign on to the coup programming.
Update II: Here’s a more encouraging view in a thread from Rebecca Solnit. I was thinking something similar until I got home from piano lesson this afternoon and saw that Musk was locking people out. For some reason, that post won’t embed, so I’ve linked it instead.