If not coup, why coup-shaped?
This is not an audit, it's an administrative coup. Plain and simple.
I had a couple posts on Facebook really blow up in the past couple of weeks.
I’ve been more or less hammering exclusively on one singular issue since January 20th of this year. And that has been the administrative coup that is currently unfolding in our federal government.
This was the first post that got a lot of attention:
(You can click the images to be taken to the original posts.)
Nothing noteworthy happened with it for a day or so, until I realized that Facebook was promoting my page for me, primarily in the feeds of people who don’t follow me (more on this later).
Then I made this post:
And then, this:
I’ll be honest, there have been multiple times I’ve stopped and double checked my own thinking here. But every time I do, I come to the same conclusion. It’s clearly a coup.
Here’s a quick summary of the most popular replies I received from people who disagreed:
It’s just an audit! They’re uncovering fraud and posting it on the DOGE Twitter account!
I’ll refer you back to the first post of mine I linked above. If it was an audit, they would have hired trained auditors. They wouldn’t have hired hackers who are barely out of college and have little to no real-world experience. One of the hackers was previously fired from a cybersecurity company for leaking proprietary secrets. What could go wrong with a team of teenagers and 20somethings who have access to your and my bank info, social security number, address, and who knows what else?
They’re also not finding fraud. What they’re “finding” is funding previously approved by Congress. You know, because Article I of the Constitution gives Congress that job. It does not give the Executive Branch authority to override this after the fact. Doing so usurps the authority of Congress, consolidating power in the Executive branch. Like what happens in a coup.
Trump won a mandate! Besides, a coup is violent! This is not violent!
This is complete bullshit.
While it’s true Trump got the most votes of any presidential candidate, most people voted for someone else instead of Trump. That’s just basic math, folks.
Even if Trump had gotten more than 50% of votes, that line of argument is still irrelevant. The Executive branch does not have the authority to make funding decisions; the power of the purse resides with Congress.
Consolidation of authority into one branch of government, with one person in charge of it all, is literally a dictatorship. In Federalist 47, James Madison wrote that this was the very definition of tyranny:
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system.
Not that I care much for the current-day opinions of dudes who lived 200+ years ago, but again, if not coup, why coup-shaped?
Really? Who would be the party to stop him? Who gets to decide what is/isn’t legal? You’re so close to understanding what’s happening, if only you took your thinking to the next logical step.
People who are 150 years old were getting social security payments!
As I posted about last week, the system uses a dating standard called ISO 8601. If there is an issue with the date, it will default to 5/20/1875.
If they were auditors, this would tell them "hey there's an issue with the data here" and they'd get the data issue resolved. But because they're not auditors, and this isn't an audit, they immediately pretend it's fraud.
From Wikipedia:
(If you really like to party, you can get down with the full original text on the International Organization for Standardization’s website.)
First of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect.
When I was younger, it was the Republican Party who never trusted anything the government said. Now, all it takes is a tweet from Elon about “$50 million spent on condoms for Hamas in Gaza” and people lose their minds over it.
They then get really confused when you point out the truth, that the funding was actually going to Mozambique, which has a province named Gaza, not Hamas. When confronted with this information, Elon literally said “first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect.”
I encourage you to take a moment to take a deep breath, close your eyes, and think about this statement. “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect.” Profoundly telling.
Elon isn’t interested in cutting government waste or anything noble; if he was genuinely interested in the betterment of humanity, he wouldn’t be the world’s richest man. He would be spending his money on companies and other NGOs that actually make the world better. Instead, he’s hoarding wealth and helping the most powerful man in the world consolidate power.
So what do we do?
Truth matters, now more than ever. We have to continue countering bullshit with facts. We have to remember that the people who are saying these things aren’t enemies or evil people, they’re victims of this just like the rest of us.
I have been doing my best to be better about how I engage these people, coming from a place of compassion and adhering as close as I can to facts without editorializing them. It’s also important to remember that for each person who engages a post on social media, there are dozens more who read but don’t engage. Those people are your target audience because those are the people who will be the most likely to change their thinking. It’s incredibly unlikely you’re going to change the mind of someone who is spamming replies with inane memes about liberal tears, but if you look like a calm, rational, smart person responding to a lunatic, the fence-sitters are more likely to be influence by you than Chadwick von McMemeface.
You also need to call your representatives. Even if they’re like my senators (Todd Young and Jim Banks) and don’t answer their phones, leave a message. Let them know that you think what is happening is not acceptable and that they need to get back to doing their job. Even if they are Republicans (like Young and Banks).
Apathy is not an option.