Know Your Enemy

I don’t think anyone has any idea about the incalculable damage that the Nazi-loving El(on) Presidente and his fascist Musketeers have done already and will do in the future. The breaches of privacy and threats to national security are already beyond comprehension. The shuttering of agencies and impoundment of funding, and removal of government research and data will kill thousands and eventually millions. Lives, families, and businesses will be destroyed. Cutting off the sick and starving who rely on that aid today will not only result in more immediate death but also create the conditions for the emergence of resistant strains of various diseases from those cut off from medicines previously provided. The funding cuts to the NIH will shutter many research and teaching hospitals and, along with the cuts to the NSF, eliminate research that could prevent or limit debilitating diseases and pathogens.

The mass of granular government data that the criminal Musketeers have already amassed is also mind-boggling. It appears that there is no department that will be safe from their incursions. More importantly, a small cabal of males (and they apparently all are men or boys), none of whom could get a security clearance for most work in government, much less sensitive positions, have been given super-administrator access to virtually every government system. There is no clarity as to what changes they may have made to these systems, perhaps allowing backdoors and ways to restrict payments. It is almost guaranteed that whatever changes they have made are undocumented, making it far more difficult to unwind what they have done. Federal employees who have tried to restrict their access or even oversee their work have been locked out of their offices or essentially fired.

There are reports that unsecured servers have been connected to some these systems. Similarly, it appears much of this data is being fed into AI systems where again we have no insight into the security of those systems nor what happens to the data from there. The Treasury Department security section said the Musketeers control of payment systems “likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced”. One former head of cybersecurity at HHS worried, “The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases”.

All this is being done even before Trump and his hatchet-man Russ Vought have even really gotten started. And Trump’s revenge tour is just beginning. He has demanded a roster of CIA agents be passed to the White House in an unclassified email, potentially compromising those agents. He is looking to remove over 4,000 FBI agents, a number that comes to nearly half of the current total number of agents, for their investigations of his 1/6 coup, but has so far been restrained by the courts. He is siccing the FCC on media outlets that opposed him last term and using the DOJ to threaten those who refuse to submit this term while rewarding those who do.

The breadth of the lawbreaking and the speed at which any restrictions to Musk’s and Trump’s power are blown away is breathtaking. The courts can play whack-a-mole with at least some of the most blatant illegalities but they are no match for the constant illegal impoundments, unconstitutional agency closures, and unlawful firings, and the speed at which they are happening. And even if the courts temporarily restrain Trump and Elon, the administration will eventually find a “legal” path to get what they want, just like they did with the Muslim ban in the first term. Regardless of what the courts might order, there is no way that they can guarantee that the data Elon and his team have already illegally downloaded would be destroyed, other than taking their word for it (and why would we so that, based on Elon’s history of brazen lies and willingness to break the law).

Yes, every delay will be important, especially to give time for more organized resistance to build, but we have learned the hard way that the courts will not stop these guys. Already, there is substantial evidence that the administration is ignoring court orders and the DOJ, Elon, and now the Vice President are now openly floating the idea that the executive branch should not be bound by the judicial. Like the courts, recent history has shown that we can’t rely on congressional Republicans to contain this lawlessness either. Vought straight up told the GOP that he would usurp their most important power, the power of the purse, and every Republican said fine, some with that same false hope that the courts will save them. I will say it again – this will only end with us, the people, in the streets demanding it end. Or, God forbid, a military coup.

Until then, and perhaps beyond, as one expert of governance noted, “In a real sense, US democracy has died this month. It doesn’t mean it’s dead for the long term but at this moment the idea of an accountable representative system, as the framers of the constitution wrote it, is no longer present.” We are well beyond a constitutional crisis. We are effectively an authoritarian state, at least for now. In order to combat this new state, we need to understand what it will look like.

There are really three centers of power within this new Trump administration. There are the techno-statists, the Christian nationalists, and Trump himself. Each of those is supported by what I will call “enforcers”, those willing to attack any target set out by one of those power centers. Right now, there is significant crossover between these groups as they share mutual interests. The techno-statists are most powerfully represented by Musk but have support from Vance and advisers like Andreesen. Vought is the most powerful Christian nationalist but also gets support from the likes of Vance, Andreessen, Bondi, and Hegseth. Finally, there is Trump himself and his entourage of grifters. All of them are supported by enforcers like Bondi (at DOJ), Hegseth (at DOD), Patel (at FBI), and Carr (at FCC) who provide institutional enforcement in addition to the external forces that can be called on like Erik Prince’s mercenary army, Elon’s groyper twitter mobs, and the successors to what was previously known as the Proud Boys.

Of the three factions, Trump is the weakest, but he is the very useful idiot for the other two. His interests are simply finding ways to make more money for himself, exacting revenge on his enemies, and playing a reality TV version of the presidency where he makes proclamations, basks in the attention of the press, and plays golf. I imagine Susie Wiles job as Chief of Staff is to keep Trump limited to those areas and be a conduit for corporate contributions in return for governmental favors, aka bribes.

The techno-statists and the Christian nationalists are both driven by a common goal of destroying our current democratic governance and its institutions including the rule of law. Trump’s attacks on his enemies and the administrative state merely further that goal. The Christian nationalists want to turn this country into a theocratic state where Christianity is the state religion. Muslims and Jews are welcome to stay as long as they conform the goals of Christian nationalism. How that can possibly done always remains unstated. The state must be used to support Christianity and the state’s interpretation of its “values”, and any vestige of secularism must be erased. The primary civic value of Christian nationalism is the so-called nuclear family. The government is already refusing to acknowledge the very existence of trans people, and we know attacks on gay and lesbian rights are ongoing, foreshadowing an attempt to eliminate gay marriage. Restoring the primacy of the family also means restoring the patriarchy. Again, the government has begun to eradicate women’s accomplishments. The attacks on abortion, forced births, cuts in funding for research and programs supporting women, and the anticipated threats to contraception are all designed to relegate women to their subservient state in the home. The administration has already signaled its intent to funnel money to places with higher rates of marriage and births. The same process extends to education where the attacks on gender, race and sexuality studies are under assault at least at the state level. And states are now funneling government money to fund religious schools and attempting to co-opt public schools into Christian instruction.

There is not an insignificant number of non-white Christian nationalists, but the overall movement is largely infused with white supremacy, and it is the white supremacists like Stephen Miller that will be driving the agenda in the second Trump term. There will be attempts at mass deportations that will probably be worse than we can imagine, considering we are already seeing shackled deportees sent back to countries where we know they will be killed. The larger project is to use maximum fear to provoke self-deportation. The same erasure of women in work and education noted above applies equally if not more to Blacks, Indians, and other “foreigners” who do not submit to the nationalist agenda. The executive orders to repeal any DEI considerations in hiring is merely a cover for only considering white male applicants. And the closure of the CFPB is an open invitation to resegregation, a point which Trump just made obliquely.

The dangers of white Christian nationalists are not new. The difference this time is that they have much more power than they did in Trump’s first administration. Much less is understood about the techno-statists. They believe that democracy and the rule of law are not only incompatible with technological progress but that technological progress makes democratic collapse inevitable. According to Mike Brock, the current techno-statists reflect a merger of two schools of thought. One branch was focused on the concept that technological competence and private power should replace democratic governance and public authority. The earliest examples of this would be social media’s destruction of the press and the creation of Bitcoin as a replacement for fiat money. The second strand is focused on using technology to build a parallel governance structure that allows the emergence of the network state. As defined by its primary theorist, the network state is “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states”.

The techno-statists have used their experience building parallel governance structures so that they now feel capable of replacing the components of our current democratic ones, but ensuring those structures exist under the private control of those with technological competence. In other words, a form of techno-fascism. At present, those digital governance structures will probably include crypto and the blockchain, just as Elon suggested. They will largely rely on AI and AI relies on data. Elon’s efforts to seize as much government data as he can is primarily about feeding as much that data as possible into proprietary AI systems that are, as Brock notes, “optimized not for justice or equality, but for efficiency and control”. The data alone has value beyond comprehension – to the techno-fascists, to foreign governments, and to any firm that wants to sell to Americans. But what Musk is doing right now is building the new digital infrastructure, and his minions are installing the proprietary AI models that will replace democratic decision-making. The technocrats will be the ones who write the code and provide the weightings that drive the algorithms and then tell us decision the model has provided. There will be no need for the usual negotiations of democratic governance. The optimal answer will be provided to us. And the added bonus for the anti-government forces is that this will require far fewer government workers than today.

There is a reason that all the tech-bros like Thiel, Vance, Musk, and Andreesen latched on to Trump, and why Bezos and Zuckerberg came late to the party on fully-bended knee. They understand that the people who control those AI systems will control the government and the people and have almost unlimited power. In addition, Musk’s perpetual dream has always been to build the “everything app” and his incursion into government is already paying dividends. The NTSB recently announced that any updates to the plane crash in DC would only be provided via X, and X has recently made a deal with Visa to create a digital wallet and move funds like Venmo. Having control of all this new granular government data brings him far closer to realizing his dream than he has ever been. I’m sure he imagines using X as the vehicle for every interaction you have with the federal government, from filing your taxes to governmental communications as with the NTSB.

Right now, Vought is only too happy to let Elon create this vast digital database of the federal government. It will allow him to target his efforts at building the Christian nationalist state he envisions. He’ll be able to send the money where it will support Christian nationalism and its goals the most, restrict it from areas that don’t, and eliminate those in government who still believe in the separation of church and state using the existing democratic structures. Eventually, however, Vought’s work will be unnecessary. The racial supremacism and fascism of Thiel and Musk will merge with the white Christian nationalism of Vought and Miller and be included in the AI algorithms that will rule us.

This is their end game. Right now they have unlimited resources and the power of the state behind them. Whether they actually get there or not is still an open question. Our existing democratic and federalist structures may thwart them (although I myself am skeptical they will as I’ve noted above). The chances of Trump or Musk making a catastrophic error that crashes the economy is relatively high, as are the odds of another pandemic or climate-change-driven food shortages. The ability of AI to do what the techno-fascists want is highly questionable. The people involved have a highly inflated view of their own capabilities, always underestimate the complexity of what they are trying to accomplish, appear to have some serious drug problems, and frankly aren’t always that smart. There will be an incredible brain drain, as talented people and those with resources flee this country for more accepting environments. None of this will concern Trump, the techno-fascists, or the Christian nationalists. They will use the federal powers they already have control of to crush any opposition. In their ideologically-driven minds, social and/or economic collapse will only provide the opportunity to accelerate their plans. Finally, and this is the most important to understand, none of them have any interest in the rule of law or another election that isn’t already rigged in their favor or where they can’t just declare themselves the winner.

One last note – this probably all sounds a bit far-fetched and fantastical, just another crazy conspiracy theory. It very well may be. God knows, I’d be happy to be wrong. But it seems like it accounts for much of the insanity we’ve seen over that last three weeks. The chaos that we see today is not an attempt to cut spending or flood the zone with BS to control the news cycles. It is not the scattershot incompetence of the first Trump term. It is part of a carefully orchestrated plan, a plan to erase democratic governance and replace it with an entirely new structure. It certainly appears that congressional Democrats are totally oblivious of this plan, and I doubt many Republicans understand it either. But knowing the plan is the first step in stopping it or, at worst, surviving it, and that will be the subject of my next post.