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Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority. The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after refusing to hand Musk’s team the keys to the government’s entire payment system and the $6 trillion in payments the system processes annually, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits. Musk and his team have also seized control at the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, key institutions that function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government. “In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it,” says Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who writes in a new blog post that Elon Musk is staging a coup. We also speak with Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, who warns that Musk could be laying the groundwork for major tax cuts Republicans have promised that will disproportionately benefit corporations and wealthy people like him. “Elon Musk is going to pay for his tax cut with your Social Security,” says Owens.
There is a coup occurring now
Content Warning for Ya’ll, Transphobia-
Hey I went digging and I found that one of the speakers at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) in 2023, a prick named Michael Knowles, said “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
And then he got all mad and demanded a bunch of retractions because he claims that saying you want to eradicate transgenderism is somehow different than saying you want to eradicate transgender people and went on to say some extremely upsettingly stupid things about how it can’t be calling for genocide because “It’s not a legitimate category of being.”. Out of the two links, that one at Human Rights Campaign has a lot of other instances of assholery, so it’s a good link for this conversation.
So it seems (unsurprisingly) like chuds are trying to move the goalposts on, “it can’t be genocide if they’re not really people,” which is actually way, way more disgusting than anything else I’ve read. Glad I went looking for supporting documentation, sad I found so much of it so quickly.
And for any chuds who want to argue these points as if this is distinct from the Trump administration, please actually read that second link. There are exact quotes from Trump, from Reps, from former advisors. They did a great job collating info for us.