The Fascist Attack on the Federal State Isn’t About “Government Waste”
The “Sieg Heil-ing” near-trillionaire who shitposts white supremacist conspiracies theories every day, pines for the return of the apartheid of his youth, and now effectively controls the executive branch of the US government is — hear me out — not actually concerned about “cutting waste” to make the federal government and its various agencies more “efficient.”
Elon Musk and his cult of misogynist zoomers wants to destroy any semblance of the welfare and regulatory state because, as white nationalists, they are ideologically driven to do so. The point isn’t to “make government smaller” or “identify fraud” in the system. Musk, the world’s richest person, doesn’t much care about the size of the American government when his own companies received over $20 billion in taxpayer funds in contracts, tax breaks and other subsidies. Nor does he care when its military invades and occupies other countries, or when its Congress, State and Defense Departments funnel money and weapons to client states to commit crimes against humanity and genocide. The point is to dismantle laws and services that could materially improve the lives of Black and brown people, help poor people feed their families and ensure workers stay safe.
Yet, if you listen to much of the mainstream media and Democratic Party, you’d think the deliberately lib-trolling “Department of Government Efficiency” is a “government efficiency commission” (Washington Post, Dec. 21, 2024; CNN, Nov. 12, 2024) dedicated to “savings” and “cost-cutting” (The New York Times, Nov. 27, 2024; Dec. 6, 2024; Jan 12, 2025) and “combating waste, fraud and abuse” (CNN, Nov. 12, 2024), rather than what it actually is: an full-scale assault on workers, women, communities of color, trans people, disabled people and elderly people via an illegal purge of services Musk dislikes for far-right ideological reasons.
As media critic and my “Citations Needed” co-host Adam Johnson has written, we must immediately stop “indulging the premise that DOGE is being carried out in good faith.” Johnson, writing in In These Times last month, explained:
Trump actively campaigned as a venal philanderer and bullshit artist. We live in a post-irony world. Ideological battles need to be openly fought. Democrats, especially progressives, need to be banging home the message that DOGE is a cat food commission on steroids and talking about what the Trump administration has in store: the death of worker protections, poisoned food, crumbling schools, no more OSHA, and gutting Social Security and Medicare — not doing convoluted Hypocrisy Gotchas with the world’s most odious liars who are openly and proudly horrible people in any event.
Johnson has also written about the media’s credulous capitulation to the false premise of Trump and Musk’s propaganda, and we covered this on our podcast earlier this month, as well. Check it out, if you’re so inclined.
Every time we defer to hand-wringing jargon or good faith, anodyne language, appeal to finding “common ground,” and fail to call what’s happening a far-right, fascist coup, we’re helping to increase Musk’s power — narrative, political and personal — and diminishing our own. Let’s stop doing that.
This blog post was originally published on February 19, 2025, as part of the Disinfo Defense League‘s “Narrative Takes.” DDL is a distributed national network of organizers, researchers, scholars and strategists dedicated to disrupting online racialized disinformation infrastructure. Spitfire has supported the work of DDL since its inception in June 2020.
The “Narrative Takes” newsletter for DDL members features keen insights, errant thoughts and brief reflections on our ever-evolving socio-political landscape from narrative strategists and cultural thinkers who sit on the DDL Narrative Council. Below is a slightly edited version of my latest entry.