Go, Elon, and Never Darken Our Doors Again
Musk is one of the most malignant people ever to hold a position of influence in American politics. His actions, without exaggeration, have devastated the health and security of American society and directly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people all over the world, with millions more to follow given the course that he has set.
Musk’s DOGE, which is more or less a conspiracy to destroy constitutional government in this country, has wreaked untold havoc. Perhaps 10 percent of the already badly understaffed federal workforce has been laid off en masse, with no regard to institutional knowledge or experience, much less the constitutional separation of powers. Basic systems foundational to American life, like weather prediction, air traffic control, and disaster relief, are starting to crack.
America’s world-leading system of scientific funding has all but ground to a halt. DOGE, along with Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., has frozen the pipeline of grants that fund a huge portion of scientific research, including new treatments for cancer and other major diseases.
Basic enforcement of the nation’s laws has been abandoned, with Musk gleefully hobbling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because it might have interfered with his plans to offer banking services on his X app.
But the worst damage has been done to foreign aid. USAID has been essentially shuttered (fed “into the wood chipper,” as Musk gleefully boasted), and various programs providing medication and food aid around the world, particularly in Africa, have been halted indefinitely. Huge warehouses are full of rotting food that American taxpayers already paid for but that can’t be handed out. Millions of people are seeing their cases of HIV, tuberculosis, and other diseases rage out of control.
Simply halting PEPFAR, which provided about 20 million people with HIV antiretroviral drugs at a microscopic cost, has already killed an estimated 54,500 adults and 5,800 children. Many, many more will follow. Roughly 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, because Musk cut off their mothers’ medication.
Tech bros like Musk and his DOGE minions are unshakably convinced that everyone but themselves is an idiot, government is useless, and any system can be easily transformed or rebuilt from the ground up by a couple of engineers hacking together solutions on the fly. This extreme arrogance, combined with contempt for expertise, is amusing when it leads tech companies to repeatedly reinvent the bus. But applied to the federal government, the result is a Stalin-scale humanitarian catastrophe.
https://prospect.org/power/2025-05-30-go...ors-again/
Musk is one of the most malignant people ever to hold a position of influence in American politics. His actions, without exaggeration, have devastated the health and security of American society and directly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people all over the world, with millions more to follow given the course that he has set.
Musk’s DOGE, which is more or less a conspiracy to destroy constitutional government in this country, has wreaked untold havoc. Perhaps 10 percent of the already badly understaffed federal workforce has been laid off en masse, with no regard to institutional knowledge or experience, much less the constitutional separation of powers. Basic systems foundational to American life, like weather prediction, air traffic control, and disaster relief, are starting to crack.
America’s world-leading system of scientific funding has all but ground to a halt. DOGE, along with Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., has frozen the pipeline of grants that fund a huge portion of scientific research, including new treatments for cancer and other major diseases.
Basic enforcement of the nation’s laws has been abandoned, with Musk gleefully hobbling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because it might have interfered with his plans to offer banking services on his X app.
But the worst damage has been done to foreign aid. USAID has been essentially shuttered (fed “into the wood chipper,” as Musk gleefully boasted), and various programs providing medication and food aid around the world, particularly in Africa, have been halted indefinitely. Huge warehouses are full of rotting food that American taxpayers already paid for but that can’t be handed out. Millions of people are seeing their cases of HIV, tuberculosis, and other diseases rage out of control.
Simply halting PEPFAR, which provided about 20 million people with HIV antiretroviral drugs at a microscopic cost, has already killed an estimated 54,500 adults and 5,800 children. Many, many more will follow. Roughly 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, because Musk cut off their mothers’ medication.
Tech bros like Musk and his DOGE minions are unshakably convinced that everyone but themselves is an idiot, government is useless, and any system can be easily transformed or rebuilt from the ground up by a couple of engineers hacking together solutions on the fly. This extreme arrogance, combined with contempt for expertise, is amusing when it leads tech companies to repeatedly reinvent the bus. But applied to the federal government, the result is a Stalin-scale humanitarian catastrophe.
https://prospect.org/power/2025-05-30-go...ors-again/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
