Deviant Rambling

It has become impossible to choose the worst thing that has happened on any given day and yesterday was a prime example.

The Senate confirmed Linda McMahon as secretary of education and she almost immediately posted a foreboding message on the Department of Education website. The message said she was in charge of the department’s final mission. In one long missive, she used language to describe how the department would be wound down and see its scope foisted upon the states to handle.

They are going to eliminate the Department of Education. They are going to give all of the power and responsibility to the states to administrate schools as they see fit. They are going to allow parents to insert themselves between students and faculty and this is a Pandora’s box waiting to explode open. They are going to begin indoctrinating children from a young age about how great our country is and completely whitewashing history, removing all mentions of the horrors of our checkered past. They are going to reignite the fires of hatred by stoking the eternal embers of racism, sexism, and discrimination that we had hoped to contain decades ago.

And this was one headline.

The administration also announced that tariffs on our three largest trading partners would be enacted on March 4, 2025. This sets up a trade war and consumers in all four countries will comprise the bulk of the casualties.

My concern is that both of these headlines are just distractions for something even more insane that hasn’t been announced yet. Or more likely, hasn’t even been concocted yet because the president has no plan. He just intends to shoot from the hip for all four years, or eight, or until he dies. It all depends how many of our checks and balances he can knock down and set on fire in route to dismantling and reorganizing the government to serve him. I can see nothing and no one that will stop him on his warpath.

I consume the news now as a way to gauge how far along we are in comparison to authoritarian regimes of the past. So much has been done and undone and we are only entering the second full month of Trump’s second and final term. I don’t believe the two term rule will remain in place and we are at the beginning of the end of our little experiment in self-governance.

This constant feeling of dread is just the norm now, as we all brace for whatever comes next. We genuinely have no idea what it may be because although the Heritage Foundation has a plan, Trump will just do whatever he feels like anyway. Eventually, he will sour on them too. When it inevitably happens, a war will break out within the conservative side, and the craziest among them will win. The party will fully transform and what we thought might be a fad will become normalized. The Overton Window will shift hard to the right and anything considered left of center will be eliminated or worse, converted.

There is no way out of this without needless suffering, and the people we have elected are useless. As is tradition, there is a lot of hemming and hawing but no real action. I understand the futility the Democrats are currently experiencing with the Republican trifecta in place, but that is no excuse for the “NO, YOU!” elementary school behavior. These people will only respond to genuine threats, which will involve screaming as loudly as possible from as many stages available that none of this is alright. If it takes nonstop obstruction and footing the blame for Washington getting nothing done, then do that and fucking own it. You’ll be doing a service for your country in a show of what many of us consider to be true patriotism.

Patriotism isn’t obedience to some anthem, flag, or meaningless line on a map. It is defending our institutions and people from threats of all types, foreign and domestic. Our democracy is in grave danger, and the time for finger-pointing and lamenting is over.

I’ve spent the past few weeks moving and I’ve had to put a pause on all of my creative endeavors to get settled in our new location.

The world has not stopped moving and there are so many things to talk about it is hard to know where to even begin. We are close to a few different cliffs constitutionally and there have been multiple protests with more to come. All of our worst fears about an overpowered executive under the second Trump administration are coming true and then some.

It has gotten to the point that Trump is just openly daring courts to act against him and appealing all lower court rulings with the objective of forcing the Supreme Court to take up all of the cases. In the meantime, Trump is blatantly disregarding orders issued by lower courts and trampling over the Constitution in the process. Watching it happen is horrifying but I feel completely powerless to do anything about it other than point it out when I have the chance to do so.

Now that things have started to fall into place in our new home and I feel myself able, I am ready to get back to talking about all of this. As daunting as it is, discussing it helps me feel like I have some kind of power against it, minuscule as it is.

(Well who doesn’t love a pet cause… This order is in reference to the diversity, equity, and inclusion practices that became the law of the land in recent history. These were an early target of the Trump campaign and as promised, here’s one of the orders to remove the programs and language.)

Section 1 – Purpose and Policy

This section specifically calls out the Biden Administration for putting these programs into place, calling them illegal and immoral. The rest of the passage says that it’s all canceled now and that the Trump Administration will serve every American with equal respect and dignity.

(As is tradition, the bulk of this section is railing against the Biden Administration for trying to do something that might be considered almost progressive.)

Section 2 – Implementation

Section 2(a)

The Implementation section commands the relevant authorities to do the heavy lifting of removing all of the DEI language and procedures from the machinery of the Federal Government. It sets out the task of scrubbing the policy from the government completely.

Section 2(b)

The following orders are to be carried out within 60 days of this order:

Section 2(b)i

Terminate offices and positions with such labels as “environmental justice”, “equity action plans” and the like.

(Most of this stuff sounds made up but since they put it in quotes I have reason to believe it exists.)

Section 2(b)ii

Provides the director of the OMB with:

Section 2(b)ii(A)

All of the relevant positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures that were in effect on November 4, 2024. It must also determine if any of these items have been rebranded to avoid elimination.

(This is the nuts and bolts of how the OMB will carry out the elimination. Not very provocative reading to be sure. Another reason I don’t believe for a second Trump wrote all of this.)

Section 2(b)ii(B)

All federal contractors who have utilized any of these programs.

Section 2(b)ii(C)

All grantees who received federal funding as a result of any of these initiatives.

Section 2(b)iii

Directs the deputy agency or department head to:

Section 2(b)iii(A)

Assess the operational impact of the previous administration’s DEI, etc. programs and;

Section 2(b)iii(B)

Recommend actions to pursue.

(This sub-sub-sub-section is a word salad. It makes zero sense and that might be intentional or it’s just filler. I don’t honestly know. I just know that my mind went numb about halfway through the passage.)

Section 2(c)

Requires the relevant parties to inform the President so that he may formulate an appropriate and effective civil-rights policy to replace DEI.

(I’d love to hear his plan on this one. Just kidding, I think we all know he doesn’t have one.)

Section 2(c)i

Covers the meetings that agency heads will have to sit through about these programs.

Section 2(c)ii

Discusses the barriers to complying with this order.

Section 2(c)iii

Language to provide monitoring and tracking to determine if further action is required from the Executive.

Section 3 – Severability

If any portion of this order is made invalid, the remaining sections will still be enforced.

(Typical legalese bullshit.)

Section 4 – General Provisions – Available through the source link below.

(All I could think of as I read through this order was “DEI BAD!” “ME MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” It’s a time-honored tradition of undoing everything the last administration has done through executive actions.)

Source:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing

(There will be a lot of these that have titles that make your eyes gloss over so hang in there. I read through the text of them all 100% so you don’t have to.)

The introduction to this order lists the relevant codes of United States Title V.

Section 1 – Policy

This section describes the need for a streamlined and efficient process to hire new federal employees. It dismantles the attempts by previous administrations to take representation into account when making personnel decisions. There is language that seeks to strip all diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from every department within the Federal Government.

(This is one of many instances of the new administration systematically dismantling what they consider to be “woke” practices of hiring from a diverse list of candidates. They are attempting to install and retain a meritocracy from top to bottom, where the highest merits will be loyalty and obedience.)

Section 2 – Federal Hiring Plan

Section 2(a)

Within 120 days, the relevant agencies and corresponding leaders will submit their Federal Hiring Plan that promotes only the most “highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests”.

(Sometimes I’d rather just quote it directly to show you how pompous the wording is. The American ideals, values, and interests in question are those of the administration and it’s benefactors.)

Section 2(b)

The Federal Hiring Plan shall:

Section 2(b)i

Prioritize recruitment of individuals who are efficient and passionate about the rule of law and the Constitution.

(There will be a test for these qualifications.)

Section 2(b)ii

Prevents hiring for DEI reasons. Race, sex, and religion can’t be taken into consideration when making hiring decisions. It also prevents hiring candidates who refuse to defend the Constitution or faithfully serve the Executive Branch.

(You’ll see faithful service to the Executive Branch repeated. It is the loyalty pledge that will now come with any federal hire.)

Section 2(b)iii

Seeks to implement the Chance to Compete Act of 2024, which seeks to provide promotion through relevant experience and skills.

(Nothing wrong with this on it’s face.)

Section 2(b)iv

Decrease government-wide hire times to under 80 days.

(This must be the efficiency they are referring to… Just under 3 months for a hire. Really pushing the envelope, guys.)

Section 2(b)v

Increases the amount of communication to applicants to make them aware of their progress in hiring status.

Section 2(b)vi

Integration of technological platforms to expedite the process.

(Something tells me DOGE will be involved in this and Elon Musk will become a direct beneficiary. He will propose the architecture to do it all and have another government contract.)

Section 2(b)vii

Ensures that all agency and department heads are in the loop on all relevant communications.

(This has been left in to allow micromanagement by everyone above the aforementioned heads. It is a way to further vet candidates that may have got in under the radar and that don’t pass the necessary loyalty requirement.)

Section 2(c)

This section is meant to improve allocations for hiring senior Executive positions within Cabinet-level entities like the EPA, OMB, SBA, SSA, etc.

(Who gets what jobs will be determined by the “Plan”, which will be crafted by loyalists and sycophants.)

Section 2(d)

Grants DOGE oversight across the HR departments of much of the Federal Government.

(Seriously, what could go wrong?)

Section 3 – Accountability and Reporting

Section 3(a)

Charges the Director of the Office of Personnel Management with maintaining performance metrics and reporting results on a recurring basis.

Section 3(b)

The Office of Personnel Management will be overseen and report to a host of federal agencies, labor organizations, and other stakeholders as part of their duties.

(Section 3 was all bureaucratic horse shit meant to make rank-and-file employees accountable to the maximum number of superiors. You know, the big government they fight so hard against.)

Section 4 – General Provisions – Available through the source link below.

(Cards on the table, this order was hard to stomach. It was full of what can only be described as red tape on steroids. It was one of the first mentions of the role that DOGE will play in the coming administration, which makes for an uneasy feeling considering who will be running that department.)

Source:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/reforming-the-federal-hiring-process-and-restoring-merit-to-government-service

Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second time yesterday and spent the better part of his first day signing dozens of executive orders. The text within the orders reads like the conservative fever dream they are, utilizing legal verbiage and lots of collegiate-level vocabulary. There are bits of Trump’s demanded language peppered throughout, but it is clear to me as an uneducated layperson that he didn’t write any of these orders.

These are the executive actions outlined in the Mandate for Leadership, colloquially referred to as Project 2025.

To be as informed as possible during the coming years, I have tasked myself with reading through these orders and summarizing them. I will do my best to maintain objectivity in my summaries, but I make no promises. If I feel the need to editorialize, I will do so in plain fashion in the form of a footnote highlighted for clarity. Since the drafters of these proposals didn’t bother leaving out all of the rhetorical content, I don’t see why I should either.

From what I have scanned so far, these orders are everything that the Heritage Foundation had in mind. They want to restructure the federal government to consolidate nearly limitless power to the executive branch. They have accepted Trump as the first iteration of the strongman that will head the newly emboldened executive. He surely wasn’t their first choice, but I’m sure he was easy enough to manipulate through bribery and flattery that it made him a perfect choice. If he failed, he could be laughed off as an unserious candidate who should stick to reality TV. When he succeeded, they saw the opportunity to get their agenda onto his desk on day one.

The orders he signed on day one were that agenda, and it was the first day of what may be the final years of American democracy. So long as free speech still applies to all of us, I will continue to speak truth to power. It is incumbent upon all of us to do that now more than ever.

On Tuesday evening, a 1,500 page continuing resolution proposed to fund the government through March of 2025. As is tradition, rather than sit down and hash out the direction we might be heading for the long-run, it was yet another panic to avert a shutdown.

Our oligarchic overlords, the billionaire class, cried foul at the contents of the continuing resolution. Shortly after, the soon-to-be president Donald Trump chimed in to agree that the legislation should not pass. By Wednesday afternoon, the continuing resolution was dead, and by the end of the weekend, we will be facing yet another shutdown.

Elon Musk was the catalyst for this shutdown, and it was then exacerbated by Donald Trump so he could look tough to his favorite oligarch. All the while, they painted it as some wild spending spree proposed by Democrats, when it had a good deal of bi-partisan support, including from the speaker of the House. But Johnson got railroaded once again, and the confidence in him is at a new low, even within the party. His days as speaker are numbered, and the next one will be a 100% loyal plant of the MAGA faithful.

Democrats immediately pinned the shutdown threat on the Republicans, and we are once again back to business as usual in Washington. Nothing gets done, but they want a raise and a pat on the back for doing so much for all of us. Fuck all of these people.

The 2024 election cycle showed all of us how broken this system is, and that we shouldn’t place our trust in either one of these parties. As someone who spent the entire cycle on the left of the aisle, I saw how quickly the principles went out the window when it looked as though they might lose. When they did lose, they turned on the progressives for fracturing the vote and avoided the conversation about how the establishment plan was terrible. The establishment buddied up to the centrist Republicans in an attempt to sway them to the left, but it garnered nothing but a complete waste of resources. There was no way to win this one. The American public was concerned with the status of the economy, and they pinned every single one of their woes on the Democratic Party. Replacing Biden with Harris but offering no solutions for working-class people’s problems doomed the campaign and that is solely on the establishment.

The memory of this fickle population is incredibly short, and they couldn’t bother to remember that just four years ago, we had a world-stopping pandemic. The inflation that peaked in 2022 was a direct result of this pandemic, and the party that was in office at that time was going to feel the full brunt of it. If Donald Trump had won in 2020 and had to be saddled with the highest inflation in decades, he’d be out now and it would be a moratorium on the Republican party for an entire term. It would have been a blood bath. But that isn’t what happened.

Instead, Biden ran in 2020 and won and adopted a timebomb that would go off in 2022. He could have been fiscally conservative and even bordered on a traitor to his party and it still would have blown up in his face. The fuse was lit when the country shut down in 2020.

No one is to blame for the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless of the origin of the disease, the world-shattering effects will resonate for decades through our politics domestically and internationally.

The most alarming aspect of the pandemic was not the death toll or the economic instability that still exists. It is the explosion in the wealth acquired by the highest net-worth class on the planet. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode during the pandemic, and with this explosion, the wealth inequality that followed became insurmountable. It was already a sickening gap between the haves and the have-nots, but now it’s hard to even comprehend the math at play. The ten wealthiest people on the planet have fortunes totaling just under $2 trillion dollars.

2,000,000,000,000 fucking dollars just in the top 10. The rest of the billionaire population push this number to 14,000,000,000,000. This is more than the individual GDP of every country on the planet except China and the United States. It would account for the full GDP of Japan, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom. Around 2,700 hundred billionaires are worth about 14% of the global GDP. They have the power to control more than they ever have before, and now the guardrails have been removed to give them direct access to the levers of power through bought and paid-for politicians.

Revolution isn’t optional now. Our hands have all been forced into action. So much so that we all celebrate when a vigilante guns down the CEO of one of the largest companies on the planet because he represents an evil we all know in this country. Luigi Mangione is hailed as a hero for executing a man, and no amount of browbeating by the equally bought and paid-for media on both sides is going to make us feel guilty about it.

A war is being waged against 99.9% of us, and this many people can only be trampled on for so long before using violence to solve problems. If we’re going to get treated like classless savages, then we should act accordingly. We aren’t influential enough to win through the legal or political system, but anyone can pull a trigger if they’ve reached their limit. Money doesn’t stop bullets.

It is time for an expanded class consciousness in this country. People need to see how insane the divide is between the bottom 99.9% and the top 0.1%.

As the most severe example, we will take Elon Musk’s ludicrous net worth into consideration and compare it to the average working class American.

Elon Musk is worth around $440 billion on December 14, 2024. To put this absurd number into context, it is best to list it as a full number:

$440,000,000,000.00

I know that actually does nothing to contextualize such an insane sum, so we can look at it from a different angle.

If you are a wage earner, you’re familiar with the concept of an hourly wage. The average hourly wage across the United States is around $35 an hour. In most of the corners of the country, this is considered a pretty good hourly rate. Where I live, it puts you among the educated high earners. I live in the rural Midwest, so it’s mostly dead-end retail and the like.

Elon Musk makes $650 per second. This equates to $2,340,000 an hour. This is equivalent to 66,857 average hourly workers.

Now imagine the work you do for a living. If it’s a 40-hour work week, you can expect around $1,400 before tax at $35/hour. Elon Musk’s 40-hour pretax total is 93,600,000.00.

1.1 million to 3 million is the average LIFETIME earnings of folks in the United States. In one week, he made more than anywhere between 30 and 90 people will make their entire lives.

So potentially everyone in your family for several generations could work their whole lives and still not make what this man will make in a single 40 hour week. All of the work they do, all of the things they helped to create, all they build, improve and tear down. Do you honestly believe that Elon Musk puts more good into the world in one week than everyone you have ever known or will know for their entire lives? Because you can’t make that scenario make sense and it is all a fact based on current averages. This level of wealth should not exist and it should not be aspired to.

You have literally nothing in common with the billionaire class. You enrich them with your worship and further widen the divide we can never hope to close. It is the largest case of Stockholm Syndrome ever.

It feels like a symptom of some greater social contagion. Like the majority of people will willingly give up their autonomy for the most remote chance at the spillage of the riches of their captors. It is the worship of wealth without doing the math to see they will never experience what they are so devoted to promoting.

The average person can’t hope to make a fraction of one percent of what any one of the Forbes 400 currently owns. The average person would have to work between 300 and 900 lives just to join the list of over 2,700 billionaires across the world. These numbers don’t take into account paying anything out to live, you’d have to save 100% from every lifetime.

2,700 billionaires in the world that currently has a population of around 8.025 billion.

1 in every 2,972,222 people are in this club, accounting for a fraction of 0 percent of the global population.

99+ percent of us are on the wrong side of this equation and can do very little to improve our chances because we weren’t born with the winning genetic lottery numbers.

Revision:

As of 12/17/24, Elon Musk is now worth $460 billion. He has gained $20 billion dollars in three days. In three days, his net worth has gone up as much as 6,666 to 18,181 lifetimes of average peasants. To put that into focus, he has gained enough that he could pay the entire town I live in a lifetime’s worth of average income and have money to spare. The work that he may have done in those three days is not more valuable than the people who live in the town I call home. These are boring, ordinary people with boring, ordinary jobs and lives, but I will defend their work over his literally any day of the week.

I honestly feel we are living in an alternate universe where the bad guys win and we are just starting to realize it even though it’s been happening for decades.