Deviant Rambling

(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.

Among the many uncertainties that come with the second Trump presidency, reproductive rights will be near the top of the list. There is cause for concern given how proudly the man strutted around the country during the campaign talking about how he single-handedly got Roe overturned.

Republicans want to outlaw abortion completely and this includes every form and under every circumstance, without exception. The conservative wet fever dream includes banning birth control, the family planning and reproductive health services provided by Planned Parenthood, and making privileged information about women’s health public. All of this is under the guise of protecting the sanctity of life, represented by the unborn in this case.

This will include an attack on the FDA’s approval status of mifepristone and misoprostol, the cocktail typically administered to perform a medical abortion. The idea here is to revoke the approval so that the drug will no longer be manufactured, and hence, one avenue will be effectively closed for good. Or at very least until sanity is restored or states use the right forced onto them by the Supreme Court in its decision to overturn Roe. Many states have already seen the writing on the wall and gone to the necessary lengths to codify abortion rights. I commend these states and envy living in a place that allows ballot initiatives in the first place. I do not live in such a state, so the odds of codified abortion rights here are essentially non-existent.

In the same way that women in the past had to resort to insane means to terminate a pregnancy, the women of today will also have options. There is already a section of the illicit drug scene that will happily cater to the needs of women who might not be able to find a prescription where they live to terminate their pregnancy. The dark web has markets selling generic versions of both mifepristone and misoprostol that are shipped in from overseas. The countries of origin for these medications consider them to be over the counter, so they are fairly easy to source. The premium is substantial over what a person might have to pay domestically for these drugs. But when foiled against the cost of raising a child to adulthood that you simply do not want for whatever reason, it is money well spent. We are talking about a few hundred dollars versus hundreds of thousands to squeeze out a human and raise them.

The difference between what was available to women in the past and now is night and day. Abortions by medication now account for roughly 63% of all abortions in the United States every year. These medications have been proven safe and effective in producing the desired results with minimal side effects. The horror stories of clandestine surgical abortions at shady practices can be an urban legend from the past. Modern women can have the medication delivered right to their home and enjoy the privacy they deserve and peace of mind that they might not have otherwise.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and we may soon find ourselves in such times. Women should feel empowered to use whatever means necessary to tend to their health, and if they live in a state that has taken away those rights, they should have the option to cross the Rubicon of criminality and take back those rights.

It has never been the government’s business what women do with their bodies, and that will always be true. When the law is wrong, fuck the law.

We have never been more divided as a nation than we find ourselves in 2024. I do not come by this observation lightly.

Instead, I have felt the tension rising steadily over the past 8 years until it became a part of every day life. This year brought the most contentious election cycle I have ever seen. Instead of staying within the confines of the party machinery and the diehard supporters, it spilled out into the general population. It could arguably be traced back to at least 2020 when the combined forces of an election and a pandemic caused unprecedented tension and hostility.

We have now become so entrenched on our sides of the divide that we address the opposition with open hostility. This is a completely untenable situation that can only end poorly. We all have the ability to stand down but everyone refuses to.

I am guilty of this 100%. I have felt a visceral anger towards Donald Trump since 2016 when his victory undermined any faith I might have had in our institutions. This has evolved into a general sense of contempt for anyone who openly embraces the cult of personality that follows the man. It has names like MAGA and Trumpism, and it represents every value I disagree with in one movement. The people who have been swept up by this behave like members of a cult. This includes but is not limited to a series of handy, easy to remember mantras, a uniform that is unambiguous and immediately recognized, and a blind, unyielding faith to their glorious leader. These people have placed their future in the hands of one of the worst human beings to exist. They have gone so far as to pledge their service to him in an attempt to undermine an official proceeding and steal an election on January 6, 2021.

Now, every time I see the uniform in any configuration, I make a mental note and the person registers as a threat until I’m no longer in their presence. This used to be confined to seeing people online on videos and whatnot but as the Trump contagion spread, all of the swag started to show up in my hometown. Flags started going up, red hats galore, ridiculous slogans on shirts sported proudly, and I began to take notes to myself. These people were proud to support what may turn out to be the first candidate to run on an openly autocratic playbook.

It’s more than that now, too. I feel sick when I see houses flying the American flag or people wearing overtly patriotic clothes.

We are not a country worth bragging about or celebrating any more. At this point I struggle to remember a time when we were. But I don’t struggle at all to remember the attempted indoctrination we all experienced growing up. The pledge of allegiance, god included in every classroom. The “yay America” feeling around national holidays. None of it stuck with me. I had my suspicions from a young age that none of it made any sense.

I have since determined that I am very much anti-patriotic. To me, it is obvious. If a country is to be revered enough to be patriotic to, it should inspire reverence. My country deserves suspicion at best and contempt at worst. The best I have ever felt about the United States is indifferent or neutral.

The events of my late childhood, early adulthood, and through midlife have proven to me that my assessment was correct.