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‘If I Die, They’re Dying with Me’ Oliver Wiseman

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Kristofer Goldsmith poses for a photograph in West Palm Beach, Florida, on December 26, 2023. (Photo Credit: Saul Martinez for The Free Press)

Today from The Free Press: Mike Solana on what went wrong with Google’s woke AI, the college kid driving the super-famous crazy, the fight over free speech at the Supreme Court, our top stories, and more.

But first, before we start, some housekeeping. . . some of you received a test email that we mistakenly sent out on Monday. We apologize for this error. And we want you to know that the person responsible has been thrown into the shark tank in Bari’s office. 

And now, onto the news. 

For our lead story today, David Volodzko meets an Army vet who has gone from fighting terrorists abroad to taking down extremists at home. . . 

On a frigid night last February, Iraq combat veteran Kristofer Goldsmith woke to the sound of his dogs barking. He removed a gun from the safe next to his bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen of his home in suburban New York when he noticed movement just outside the glass kitchen door. 

He turned to find a man in all-black tactical gear crouched behind a bush, pointing an AR-15 with a suppressor directly at him.

“I didn’t know at that moment if it was a terrorist or a cop,” Goldsmith remembers.

Goldsmith, 38, has made enough enemies that they frequently retaliate. He is the founder of Task Force Butler—an elite team of veterans who use their military expertise to take down neo-Nazi terrorists on American soil. Over the last few years, the Aryan Freedom Network (AFN) has repeatedly posted his home address online as well as photos of his family. Just this month, the FBI contacted him to say an AFN member had made a credible threat to “exterminate” his family. 

That night back in February 2023, someone had called the police claiming Goldsmith had murdered his wife, and a cop had staked out his home. 

Though Goldsmith managed to defuse the situation, he could have easily ended up wounded or killed. But he says it’s all in a day’s work for a neo-Nazi hunter and former Army sergeant who’s tasted his fair share of danger. 

“I have a high threshold for threats,” he says with a slight grin and a shrug.

Continue reading David’s piece here.

Ten Stories We’re Reading

After U.S. strikes, Iran’s proxies scale back attacks on American bases. (NYT)

Seventy-three percent of Iranians say they want secular rule. (The Telegraph

Hunter Biden is staying sober to save the republic. (Axios)

With Yale reinstating the SAT, Freddie deBoer argues that you can’t make a competitive selection process “equitable.” (Freddie deBoer’s Substack

Ukraine needs total Western support—and so does Israel, argues Niall Ferguson. (Bloomberg)

For the first time, a majority of voters support building a border wall. (Monmouth)

Nicole Gelinas exposed New York’s debit card program for migrants. The New York Times smeared her reporting. (City Journal

Harvard professor Noah Feldman on the new antisemitism. (Time)

Mary Poppins’ age rating increased in the UK due to “discriminatory language.” (NBC)

MLB players are wearing see-through pants. Someone call George Constanza. (WSJ)

What the Heck Is Going on at Google? 

What would happen if you took the most irritating, ill-informed, and insufferably woke college kid imaginable and plugged him into a supercomputer? 

Thanks to Google, we know the answer: you’d get something like Gemini, the tech giant’s AI chatbot and PR disaster that has churned out all manner of absurd, ahistorical, and morally inverted responses since its latest version launched last week. 

Here are a few examples of how Gemini sees the world. 

Are Elon Musk’s memes better or worse than Hitler? “It’s difficult to say,” according to Gemini. 

Is pedophilia wrong? That requires a “nuanced answer,” says Gemini.  

Is Free Press contributor Abigail Shrier—whose book published yesterday!—worse than Chairman Mao? Gemini helpfully notes that “both have been accused of harming society in significant ways.”

And as part of its efforts to be inclusive, Gemini has given us all manner of less-than-accurate historical revisionism, including black Nazis and female Asian knights. (The inaccuracies are so absurd that Google has turned off Gemini’s ability to generate images until it can figure out what is going on.)   

We were shocked that maybe the most important tech company in the world could produce something this embarrassing. For some clarity on how the hell this happened, and what broader lessons there might be from the Gemini snafu, I called Mike Solana, the founder of the unmissable new tech publication Pirate Wires

How could this have happened?

Let’s be totally clear on how this happened: there are people working at Google who have psychotic political views that shape everything they do, and they have been allowed to impact a product that is incredibly important to that company. AI is really important to Google. It’s one of their chief concerns and chief focuses right now. That they would fumble this so badly does probably indicate the rot runs deep.

What is the upshot of the fact that Google had, as you half-jokingly put it, “erased white people from human history?” 

Separate from funny, it is a tell as to the kind of politics that have been allowed to shape features and products at Google. I think the policies that are shaping this product are shaping every product. You should probably worry about things like Gmail next. Going into the next election, you really should worry about what major candidates and political influencers are, and are not, going to be allowed to say over email, for example. If it’s not this election, is there an election soon where the trust and safety people decide that there’s an “evil,” “bad,” “MAGA” candidate who needs to be sent to spam? Are they going to do it in the name of DEI or in the name of “saving democracy,” or whatever else? 

What does all of this say about the future of AI and how it should be regulated? 

When it comes to what “should be done” about AI, the answer is: don’t allow tech leaders to consolidate and centralize power. It’s just impossible to know how these people are going to be manipulating us, so you have to assume that everyone running an AI will, to some degree, be biased. 

The public’s only real safeguard from the runaway powers of, say, a terrible and all-powerful woke Google AI would be competition. We have to make sure that competition is allowed, and we have to really resist valorizing anybody in the industry who goes to Washington and, in a sad little voice, says, “We’re really dangerous. You should regulate us.” 

That’s the really scary thing to me. Anybody asking for regulation is, in my opinion, looking to build a monopoly, and a monopoly on the lens through which we see the world is dangerous. 

For more, read Mike Solana on “Google’s Anti-White Lunatic.” 

Center: Jack Sweeney. (Photo illustration by The Free Press; images via Getty and Unsplash)

Troll? Stalker? Or Free Speech Hero? 

And finally, Suzy Weiss talks to Jack Sweeney, the college kid who has found himself at the center of a debate about social media, free speech, and privacy. 

Sweeney is a 21-year-old college student being threatened with lawsuits from Taylor Swift and Elon Musk. Why? Because he meticulously tracks the movements of their private jets, posting their whereabouts on social media. 

Sweeney says it’s journalism. The lawyers for some of the most powerful people on the planet say it’s harassment. Is Sweeney a troll? A stalker? Or a free speech hero? 

Here’s Suzy: 

Two months ago, on December 22, Jack Sweeney, 21, was at a football game for his school, University of Central Florida, in Orlando. The college junior was trying to relax and have fun, but the Taylor Swift songs being blasted through the stadium speakers between downs were making that difficult. 

Earlier that day, Swift’s lawyers had sent him a cease and desist letter, accusing him of “stalking and harassing behavior,” and “direct and irreparable harm, as well as emotional and physical distress.” 

At the game, “I was thinking, ‘Did I seriously receive a letter from this person?’ ” Sweeney recalls to me over the phone. 

The computer science major had found himself in the crosshairs of Swift’s lawyers for social media accounts he managed that tracked the superstar’s private jet in real time. Two hours later, Sweeney says, his Instagram account @taylorswiftjets—there’s another account on Twitter, but it’s on a 24-hour delay—was suspended. 

Sweeney wasn’t just keeping track of Swift. Between classes, he runs an empire of social media accounts that chronicle the crisscrossing of some of the most famous people alive—from the Kardashians to Jeff Bezos and Jay-Z—via their private jets

Last month, Sweeney’s pro bono lawyers, provided by a civil liberties nonprofit, responded to the letter on his behalf claiming there was “nothing unlawful” about the account and that @taylorswiftjets was merely “engaged in protected speech.” 

The same week, Swift’s stalker, David Crowe, was arrested outside her Tribeca townhouse for the third time in five days. Whether the actions of people like Crowe can be linked to accounts like Sweeney’s is debatable, though certain public figures clearly think they are. 

When he first bought Twitter, Elon Musk held up his willingness to allow Sweeney to operate @Elonjets on the site as evidence of his commitment to free speech. That changed in December 2022, when a Tesla carrying Musk’s two-year-old son was attacked in L.A. (A day earlier, Sweeney reported that Musk’s jet had landed in the city.) Musk tweeted that the account would be suspended after all, and Sweeney would face legal action for bringing “harm to my family.” Earlier this month, Musk, who never brought legal action against Sweeney, posted on X that Sweeney is an “awful human being” and that Swift “is right to be concerned.”

“I was a big fan of his,” says Sweeney when I talk to him over the phone. Now, “He really hates me, obviously.” 

If Sweeney’s accounts pose thorny questions surrounding celebrity, privacy, free speech, and data in the internet age, he wasn’t looking to get into all that when he set them up in June 2020 as a senior in high school. He grew up a computer geek and his dad worked in operations at American Airlines. Tracking celebrity jets combined two of his fascinations: tech and aviation. A longtime Elon fan, he started tracking the CEO via a program he created with data from Elon’s jet’s transponder, a radio communication device that all planes are required to use.

FAA databases, government records, paparazzi shots from the tarmac, requests through the Freedom of Information Act, and a network of aviation geeks who track planes’ radio signals all help put the puzzle together. And Sweeney says he now has around 10,000 people who communicate via the messaging app Discord, helping him update spreadsheets keeping track of whose jet is whose.

“It’s really a journalism thing,” says Sweeney, pointing out that it’s in the public interest that, for example, a few days ago, Elon Musk, Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump’s jets all landed at a West Palm Beach airport within a few hours of each other. “There must’ve been some kind of meeting,” speculates Sweeney. 

“I’m not trying to threaten them, which is what they’re saying,” he says. “A tool can be used in a good way or a bad way. I’m just putting the information out there.” 

Though the college junior, who travels by electric scooter—not a Gulfstream—has received some legal help, he tells me he has no real advisers. Mostly, he goes with his gut: when Elon Musk reached out in December 2021 offering Sweeney $5,000 to stop tracking his Gulfstream, he counteroffered $50,000, an internship, or a Tesla Model 3. But when Marc Cuban offered to be his friend if he’d retire the handle @MCubansJets, Sweeney said sure. “I’ve gotten basketball tickets from him a few times,” says Sweeney. 

Sweeney seems preternaturally relaxed that the planet’s biggest names in business and entertainment are ready to use their legal arsenals against him. “I have a screenshot from one of Taylor Swift’s fans messaging me saying they hope I get brutally murdered,” he deadpans. “I take it as it goes.” 

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman

And become a Free Press subscriber today: 

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The NSA’s “Big Delete” Judd Legum

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National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. (Photo by NSA via Getty Images)

Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a “Big Delete” of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including “privilege,” “bias,” and “inclusion.” The “Big Delete,” according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” the dragnet is taking down “mission-related” work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is “very chaotic,” but is plowing ahead anyway.

A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Anti-Racism
Racism
Allyship
Bias
DEI
Diversity
Diverse
Confirmation Bias
Equity
Equitableness
Feminism
Gender
Gender Identity
Inclusion
Inclusive
All-Inclusive
Inclusivity
Injustice
Intersectionality
Prejudice
Privilege
Racial Identity
Sexuality
Stereotypes
Pronouns
Transgender
Equality

The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term “privilege” is used by the NSA in the context of “privilege escalation.” In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to “techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.”

The purge extends beyond public-facing websites to pages on the NSA’s internal network, including project management software like Jira and Confluence.

The NSA is trying to identify mission-related sites before the “Big Delete” is executed but appears to lack the personnel to do so. The NSA’s internal network has existed since the 1990s, and a manual review of the content is impractical. Instead, the NSA is working with “Data Science Development Program interns” to “understand the false-positive use cases” and “help generate query options that can better minimize false-positives.” Nevertheless, the NSA is anticipating “unintended downtime” of “mission-related” websites.

While Trump’s executive order claims to target “illegal and immoral discrimination programs,” the NSA’s banned-word list demonstrates that the implementation is far broader. The Trump administration is attempting to prohibit any acknowledgment that racism, stereotypes, and bias exist. The ban is so sweeping that “confirmation bias” — the tendency of people “to accept or notice information if it appears to support what they already believe or expect” — is included, even though it has nothing to do with race or gender.

Popular Information is an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism since 2018. It is made possible by readers who upgrade to a paid subscription.

The government memory hole

Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online “without clarity on what had been changed or removed.”

An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages “found 662 examples of deletions and additions” since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.

One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed language about maintaining an “inclusive environment.” The Post also found examples of words being removed that had nothing to do with DEI, such as a page on the Department of the Interior’s website that boasted of its museums’ “diverse collections,” removing the word “diverse.”

Following Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender individuals, multiple federal websites have removed transgender and intersex people from the acronym “LGBTQI,” NBC News reported. On the State Department website, a web page that used to provide resources for “LGBTQI Travelers” now addresses “LGB Travelers.” The Social Security Administration has made similar changes, with a page heading now reading “Social Security for LGBQ People.” Some agencies, including the Department of Education, have removed web pages with LGBTQ resources altogether.

On X, Elon Musk’s United States DOGE Service is celebrating the deletions:


We started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so we hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.

Subscribe to Musk Watch


Federal agencies have also been scrubbing websites for mentions of climate change, which Trump has called a “hoax.” The Department of Agriculture’s Office of Communications issued a directive to “archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change,” the Guardian reported. Resources on the Forest Service website, including the Climate Change Resource Center and the Climate Action Tracker, appear to still be unavailable. The Department of Transportation website replaced the phrase “climate change” with “climate resilience.”

Among the agencies with the most deleted web pages is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which took down over “3,000 pages,” according to the New York Times. In one example, data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which tracks important health metrics, was temporarily unavailable, only to come back online later with “at least one of the gender columns missing and its data documentation removed.” A banner on the top of the CDC website states it is “being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

Last week, the Trump administration was sued by Doctors for America, a physicians’ group, for removing health resources and data from government websites, arguing that it “deprived clinicians and researchers of tools necessary to treat patients.”

 

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The Vibe Shift Comes to the Super Bowl. Plus. . . River Page

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It’s Monday, February 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Why USAID is the wrong hill for Dems to die on; why Trump is flooding the zone; how American educators are conning kids; and much more.

But first: The Super Bowl.

Boring game, huh? The Eagles beat the Chiefs in a 40–22 blowout that will have pleased my colleague Joe Nocera, but will not be remembered as a classic.

The Super Bowl isn’t just a game, it’s a cultural barometer—and sometimes, a crystal ball. In 2016, Beyoncé danced on the Super Bowl stage to her new song “Formation,” flanked by backup dancers dressed like Black Panthers. Controversy ensued, foreshadowing the great war over woke that would dominate for years to come.

This year, another vibe shift. The NFL changed the message stenciled into the end zone from “End Racism” to “Choose Love.” Trump showed up—the first sitting president to do so—and his favorite patriotic walk-on song, “God Bless the USA,” was heard playing in the stadium. Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance featured a nagging Uncle Sam character (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who told the rapper not to be “too ghetto,” but when backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political, even though his song “Alright” is perhaps best known as BLM’s unofficial anthem. And in another patriotic move, Kendrick performed “Not Like Us,” his Grammy Award–winning diss track against one of America’s new trade war enemies—Canadian rapper Drake.

Speaking of Canada, even the ads couldn’t escape the vibe shift. In the wake of Trump’s proposed, but currently delayed, 25 percent tariffs against Canadian goods, the province of Ontario ran an ad reminding Americans that Canucks are important trade partners and good neighbors, eh bud?

Speaking of “bud,” Bud Light launched a new ad to convince America they aren’t woke anymore. Still reeling from its disastrous 2023 campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which spurred an effective conservative boycott, the beer’s new commercial featured Peyton Manning, Post Malone, and Shane Gillis—a comic who was infamously fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 for affecting a Chinese accent on a podcast. (Read Anson Frericks’ great essay on the Bud Light saga.)

Bud Light wasn’t the only company with a subtle rebrand. After a backlash last year over their support for trans women participating in female sports, Nike launched a new ad putting female athletes front and center. The tagline: You can’t win, so win. Well, maybe they can’t win because they’re competing against biological males, Nike. Still, the ad is about female sports and features only female athletes, which is radical conservatism by Nike’s standards.

And the least subtle rebrand of all? Hardee’s—or, for some reason, Carl’s Jr., if you’re west of the Mississippi—brought back its sexy bikini ads after ditching them eight years ago. The real MAHA? Make America Horny Again.

Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats

On Friday, a judge temporarily blocked Musk and Trump’s plans to put 2,200 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) staffers on paid leave, in response to a lawsuit brought by two unions. The judge also reinstated 500 employees who had already been placed on leave. The order will remain in effect until midnight on Valentine’s Day, and the judge will also consider a request for a longer-term pause at a hearing on Wednesday. The unions argued that the government was violating the Constitution and harming workers by taking them out of their jobs.

Unions and judges aren’t the only ones trying to stand in the way of Musk and Trump’s plans for USAID. Congressional Democrats have suddenly become USAID’s greatest defenders, leading a rally in Washington to protect the agency.

The D.C. crowd may have cheered them on but the rest of the country won’t, says Free Press columnist Ruy Teixeira. He points out that most Americans agree that the U.S. spends too much money on foreign aid, and the working class is particularly skeptical of foreign handouts. In their rush to shoot down Musk, have Democrats aimed the gun at their own feet?

Read Ruy’s new column, “Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats.”

Cancel a Subscription, Win a Subscription

This week, one mysterious and presumably wealthy reader is offering free FP subscriptions to readers who prove that they unsubscribed from a legacy media outlet. That’s right. That means free podcasts, free TGIF, and free access to a backlog of God-only-knows-how-many articles. Send proof to tgif@thefp.com, and do it fast: You have to be one of the first 100 entrants to win. What counts as “legacy media”? Use your judgment: The New York Times certainly counts. Paying for articles on CNN.com for some reason? That counts. Cosmo too. The Washington Post? Absolutely. How much more money does Bezos really need? Highlights magazine is an edge case but if you can make the argument, we’re all ears. Happy unsubscribing!

Tyler Cowen: Why Trump Is Flooding the Zone

The first month of the Trump administration has been a whirlwind: dozens of executive actions on everything from DEI to birthright citizenship; short-lived trade wars; massive restructuring of the federal bureaucracy; and so many Truth Social posts. His latest move? Signing a proclamation making February 9 the first Gulf of America Day while aboard Air Force One flying over said Gulf en route to the Super Bowl. It all seems so chaotic—even those of us who are paid to keep up with it all barely can. But is there a method to the madness? Economist, polymath, and podcaster Tyler Cowen says yes.

Read his latest article, “A Unified Theory of Trump’s Hyperactive Start.”

How American Educators Are Conning Kids

The state of America’s public education is bleak: U.S. students are further behind in reading and math than they were in 2012. American kids in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles are performing worse than they did in the early 1990s, and the “achievement gap” between our highest- and lowest-performing students is now one of the worst in the developed world. In a shocking new report, Free Press journalist Frannie Block writes that instead of solving the problem, educators in a number of states are covering it up.

Read Frannie on “How American Educators are Conning Kids.”

In other Frannie Block education news, her reporting on Qatari influence in American education was cited in Congressional testimony last week.

Can the FAA Be Fixed?

The shocking midair collision above the Potomac last month has prompted many to ask whether America’s air-traffic control system needs reform. The answer, writes John Tierney, is yes—and urgently. He describes an outdated system that still uses paper and pen instead of infrared and high-resolution cameras. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that oversees America’s skies, has delayed modernization for decades. Will this crash provide the impetus for long-overdue reform?

Read John Tierney: “America’s Air-Traffic Control System Is an International Disgrace.

(Olivier Douliery via Getty Images)
  • A new CBS/YouGov survey found Trump has a positive approval rating across all age groups—with younger voters particularly enthused. The poll found 53 percent of voters approve of the overall job Trump is doing—a higher level of approval than he ever reached during his first term.

  • On Friday, Trump backed DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts and said Elon would be heading to the Pentagon next, causing shares of defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to tumble. Yesterday, Trump predicted that his administration will find “billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” at the Defense Department. Yeah, probably. But it’s still unclear whether or not cuts will be possible. Elon’s potential role in searching the Pentagon has already raised conflict of interest concerns, given that his companies SpaceX and Starlink have contracts with the government. Plus, there is an open constitutional question about the administration’s ability to stop funds already appropriated by Congress.

  • Then, early Saturday morning a federal judge blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury records and payment systems, and ordered the Trump advisory board to destroy any material they’ve already downloaded. The ruling was the result of a suit brought by 19 Democratic state attorneys general who say that giving Musk and his team access to Treasury data puts Americans’ private information at risk. Musk says that the judge who ruled against DOGE should be impeached.

  • Trump ruled out deporting Prince Harry on Friday during an interview with the New York Post, saying “he’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.” He went on to say that he believes the prince is “whipped” by his American wife, former actress Meghan Markle. It’s part of a long-running feud: The Duchess of Sussex called him “divisive” and “misogynistic” during his 2016 presidential run, and Trump has since repeatedly criticized the couple over their reported disagreements with the royal family.

  • The CDC says nearly 100 people became sick with an unspecified gastrointestinal illness on board a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. The maritime cesspool left Tampa on February 1 en route to Mexico, Honduras, and Belize, before returning to port Saturday. It’s the sixth disease outbreak the CDC has recorded on a cruise this year. Disease-ridden, numerous, and rat-like as they scurry about from port to port, cruise ships are the vermin of the sea and it’s high time we called an exterminator! Clean them up!

 

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February 9, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

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On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”

After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “impoundment” illegal.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.

Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.

But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the government remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.

Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.

After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”

The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.

Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.

Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.

Until Trump fired 18 of them when he took office, major departments also had their own independent inspectors general, charged with preventing and detecting fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement in the government and promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in government operations and programs.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also investigates corruption, including that committed by healthcare providers.

According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.

But Trump has been gutting congressional oversight, apparently wanting to make sure that no one can oversee the president. Rather than rooting out waste and corruption in the government, Musk and his ilk have launched a hostile takeover to turn the United States of America into a business that will return huge profits to those leaders who, in the process of moving fast and breaking things, are placing themselves at the center of the lives of 332 million people. Breaking into the U.S. Treasury payment system puts Musk and his DOGE team at the head of the country’s nerve center.

The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.

Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.

But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.

The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.

The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/protecting-second-amendment-rights-7b90/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/09/trump-courts-block-early-agenda-00203230

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/07/judge-blocks-trump-administration-plan-usaid-workers-leave-00203205

https://www.gao.gov/press-release/gaos-work-yields-70.4-billion-savings-federal-government-fy23

https://oig.ftc.gov/what-you-need-know-about-office-inspector-general

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econtoplines_c1AfT3R.pdf

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5129353-gop-support-for-musk-influence-with-trump-falls-dramatically-poll/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bama-senator-howls-like-stuck-pig-after-she-sees-nih-cuts-impact-in-state

Bluesky:

donmoyn.bsky.social/post/3lhpxjdo6gk2y

atrupar.com/post/3lhrce37puk2l

joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3lhr2d6nuck2f

X:

steve_vladeck/status/1888581987532788100

AaronBlake/status/1888582415137780065

emptywheel/status/1888616052004946080

Msdesignerlady/status/1888356802028585190

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