Yeah, I mean Musk has literally tweeted that DOGE is "dismantling the radical-left shadow government."[0] This is not about efficiency or rooting out corruption, it's about persecuting political enemies and purging wrongthink.
Which was something people here screamed bloody murder about when they accused Biden of doing it, just by asking Twitter to moderate content, but I guess this is all fine now.
> just by asking Twitter to moderate content, but I guess this is all fine now.
It's never wrong when it's something you agree with, and that's as far as Musk's belief in free speech goes. Allowing posts he agrees with, it's free speech. If it's something that sheds bad light on something he is, owns, or believes, it's bad and must be stopped. It's a classic as old as time
Hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t exist. It’s like me coming over to your house and saying that I’m going to root out the ghosts in your home by dismantling it.
Would you let me proceed because you don’t like ghosts?
He’s telling what he’s doing, but the reason is a made-up pretext.
I assume this is a prevalent mindset of a big chunk of Trump supporters. "I love it when half of my state government is at war with the remaining half, and I want the US government to be like that, so that it can't get anything done."
Well, I guess that's better than being outright neo-Nazi ...
You're asking when did this happen: "the left dismantling the shadow right"
here, when the IRS under Obama discriminated against conservative and Christian groups for applications for tax exempt status
> The consent order says the IRS admits it wrongly used "heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays" and demanded unnecessary information as it reviewed applications for tax-exempt status. The order says, "For such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology."
In late September 2017, an exhaustive report by the Treasury Department's inspector general found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny, blunting claims that the issue had been an Obama-era partisan scandal.[1][2] The 115-page report confirmed the findings of the prior 2013 report that some conservative organizations had been unfairly targeted, but also found that the pattern of misconduct had been ongoing since 2004 and was non-partisan in nature.
What's going on today with doge is what exactly? They're accessing payment systems, as advertised openly in a democratic election. You want analogies of a scrutinizing funding and then viciously calling for its retraction? Because pretty much all colors and creeds have done that.
Going line by line through payments to look for things that look politically affiliated with the opposing side’s viewpoints with the stated goal of ending those payments?
The argument 'but the right dismantling the shadow left, and the left dismantling the shadow right hopefully provides some balance' is merely a symmetric balance principle.
The person pretending to ask questions used an underhanded socratic method to assert what was happening about line-by-line and then demanded analog for their own premise as if it were mine instead of theirs. Youve fallen for a trick.
My claim is that symmetric behavior is balanced. You went on the goose chase dismissing the first example of your entirely different demand, then pretended I never said it. Your argument is a disingenuous fraud.
No I frankly have never heard of anything like this, and it doesn't appear the dozens of federal budget experts, Constitutional law experts, political historians, or policy legal analysts I follow closely have heard of anything similar either.
I don't think anyone at any location on the political spectrum would describe what's going on right now as "business as usual," but apparently you believe that's the case. So please share evidence. Definitionally, it should be abundant.
But uhhh… Isn’t that process actually going on currently in Congress, where/when/how it normally happens, and this process is going on separately, very atypically, and already changing government outflows prior to any congressional decisions?
I don’t think “every year a totally different branch of government argues over the budget” is analogous at all, and I don’t think you do either.
Im suggesting doing different non-analogous things can provide balance. At no point did I assert they must be analogous nor am I obliged to prove your own assumptions.
Got it, so the other party may some day eventually do something similar to what is happening today, and at that point, the two would be equal and symmetrical.
And if this were Congress passing a budget then people would be upset but wouldn't be calling it illegal.
There's a huge difference between Congress passing a budget (within its constitutional powers) and the Executive just killing anything and everything that seems "woke" them with no legislative authorization.
The unlawfulness is the part that is newsworthy and incredibly frightening. That's the part that matters.
If the executive can unilaterally decide to allocate funds to wherever it wants while ignoring Congress, then Congress is no a coequal branch and our constitutional order is dead.
> Every year's appropriation bill, there is a line by line partison fight over funding
And who normally does that, a billionaire with grudges loosely appointed by the executive branch mostly doing it on his own in secret or the representatives in Congress?
No it's not normal. What is normal is say congress and bankers meeting in secret under assumed identities on an (Jakyll) island to create institutions like the federal reserve that 'eases' massive inflation in while purposefully firewalled from democratic representation, and jammed through by their own admission before popular will can stop them.
So doing what was actually advertised is far less secret than much of what congress does.
They are illegally accessing information for who knows what, and fire everyone who attempt to stop them and make them respect the law, for starter.
They aren't "calling for retraction" of fundings (which is normal in democracy, but then this call have to be listened by Congress for the retraction to happen), then are cutting funds on their own, without a democratic mandate and are doing so in spite of the laws and the constitution. That's unprecedented in any Western democracy.
What Musk is describing is a deranged conspiracy theory, that "shadow left" doesn't exist except as a modern meme-driven equivalent to right-wing fears of communist infiltrators and Jews in academia. It turns out this generation's totenkopf is an AI generated shiba inu.
And there isn't a "shadow right" either, but only because they're acting completely out in the open.
It’s in-group/out-group narrative. In order to claim to be the good guys you have to invent a bad guy. It’s a power/ego game played by people who are abusive. Both parties play it.
The "bad guy" invented by the right isn't real. The "bad guy" of the left is real. There is no "radical-left shadow government" but there is clearly a radical-right shadow government forming and acting as we watch.
There can't be a "shadow left" anything in the USA because the US, by popular request dragged its systems of leftist organization out into the street and executed them decades ago.
When Reagan narc'd on his coworkers for having "communist sympathies" he became such a national brand he got elected in one of the best election outcomes for the right basically ever.
That's why the US "left" is reduced to whinging about how democrats don't do socialism (from a position of zero power in the government) and therefore you shouldn't vote for them. They don't seem to notice it has been 50 years of only making the problem worse.
Which was something people here screamed bloody murder about when they accused Biden of doing it, just by asking Twitter to moderate content, but I guess this is all fine now.
[0]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886840365329608708