Weird American families are in the news this week, like Fargo, North Dakota’s Bill and Emily Brooks, a geographer and an “artist who helps run the family’s pinball machine business” (??) respectively, who spent December racing to consume all fifty two of their Applebee’s Date Night Pass meals before 2024 ended according to Heather Haddon in the Wall St. Journal. As a service-oriented newsletter that is unafraid to ask the tough questions and relentless in performing a single Google search for “brooks north dakota pinball what,” Today in Tabs can exclusively reveal that Fargo Monthly recently revealed that when they’re not eatin’ good in the neighborhood or geographing, Bill and Emily Brooks run Fargo Pinball, which operates pinball machines in Fargo-area businesses, so that’s what the pinball thing was about. The Brookses seem goofy but relatively harmless and to be fair Applebee’s is probably the best restaurant in Fargo, North Dakota. But unfortunately like America itself, the families in the news only get worse from here.

Because next we have Justine Harman’s Vulture #longread that dares you to imagine a couple so annoying that a super-exclusive club only for Disney Adults still can’t tolerate them. The obligatory surprising-but-unexplained capsule bio in this one is: “As a onetime assistant to disgraced former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert…” and it’s somehow not describing the worst person in the piece. I have used up my Google searches for the day so I won’t be investigating that any further.

For years now, one of America’s worst families has been the “pro-natalist” media grifters and public child abusers Simone and Malcolm Collins. If you don’t recognize the names immediately, I bet you recognize their terrible faces:

Slate’s Nitish Pahwa has written what is thankfully not a profile of the couple but an evisceration of the entire concept of profiling them:

Nothing further ever needs to be said in public about these two losers, we’re done.

And no family will ever be more weird or American than the Kennedys. As RFK Jr. draws closer to his inevitable confirmation as health secretary and guzzles fish tank juice on airplanes, now is as good a time as any for Brian Beutler to ask: “Does RFK Jr. Even Lift, Bro?”

I don’t know what methylene blue is, but testosterone therapy is gender-affirming healthcare. “Why,” asks Beutler, “would you participate in tormenting defenseless strangers, just because the way they feel alienated from their bodies is slightly different from the way you feel alienated from yours?” Why indeed.

Those last two weird American families, particularly in their roles as outlying Trump world sub-grifters and phony-ass bullshit artists, lead me to my main question today which should also be the main question in the Discourse right now, and that is: Is any of this real?

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Is any of this real?

Like any American with even a rudimentary or vestigial conscience, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last few weeks spiraling over what appears to be the end of the Constitutional order. But is it, actually?

Take the “Fork in the Road” so-called “delayed resignation” offer that one of Elon Musk’s epic teens recently emailed to every federal employee including the judge with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench who is now hearing a lawsuit seeking to shut down the unsecured email server he used to send them. The arbitrary deadline to reply has been delayed by legal action until at least Monday afternoon, and OPM’s “Legality of Deferred Resignation Program” memo has people asking a lot of questions already answered by their memo. So the fork may not happen at all, and if it does it is almost certainly not legal, but aside from those minor issues, how many federal workers have even agreed to take the offer? In the New York Times, Emily Badger, Alicia Parlapiano, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Ethan Singer report that OPM currently claims 65,000 workers have turned in their resignations under the program. “For perspective,” they write:

So Musk has accomplished five months of normal employee turnover for just the cost of seven months of normal employee turnover. Magnificent gambit, sir. My point is that amid all the bad news, it’s important to remember that Elon Musk is a liar. Or, to be totally fair and accurate, Elon Musk is an abject and compulsive liar with the physical build of a Rob Liefeld drawing who locked himself in his office and cried after he was booed off the stage at a Dave Chapelle performance.

One of Musk’s elite haxxors at Treasury, 25 year old Marko Elez, has already resigned because of Tweets that were somehow too racist even for the Trump administration, a thing I genuinely didn’t think was possible. And here’s a story making the rounds online about another of them, 21 year old Akash Bobba:

This is meant to be complimentary but the anecdote only reveals that no one involved knew how to use source control, an extremely basic programming tool that, among other more important and less obvious things, makes it impossible to delete the entire codebase by accident. Propublica has a good roundup of other DOGE employee biographies that demonstrates they’re a mix of 40 to 50-something yes-men and 19 to 24 year old recent Musk company interns. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb in saying that I don’t believe this crew of nitwits is capable of deleting the U.S. federal government. These are not immortal geniuses, any more than Musk is. “A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s” goes the saying in tech, and judging by what we’ve seen so far, Elon Musk hires Z’s.

What have they accomplished so far? No one can seem to agree whether they ever got write access to the U.S. Treasury payment systems, but legally that does not matter since the President alone can’t freeze payments from those systems anyway. So far the only thing they’ve actually done, aside from opening potential backdoors and compromising the security of many federal IT systems, is to interrupt the operation of USAID. This has caused and will continue to cause harm to people around the world who rely on US foreign aid and to the US foreign aid workers themselves, but it’s also very far from a done deal. Yesterday two federal employee unions filed suit in Washington, DC district court seeking:

Hey, it sounds like they’re saying these actions were illegal and, separately, unconstitutional. Where have I heard that before? You may not be in the habit of reading district court filings but this one is a banger, I really recommend it.

So the alleged wood chippering of USAID has been greatly exaggerated, and the Republicans are just starting to find out that most of that “foreign aid” money was actually being spent on American workers and American farm products. The fork in the road is more like a farce in the road. Grampy Trump is busy talking about his big “Gaza real estate deal” and canceling his Politico subscription. The surge of online reports about ICE raids is fake. Along with running the State Department, Li’l Marco Rubio has now had the USAID mess dumped in his lap, and may be in charge of the National Archives too? Eggs are still so expensive that they’re getting heisted from trucks, and Tesla stock is down almost 25% from its December 17th record high.

I‘m not saying these aren’t bad times, I’m just saying it still remains to be seen how much of the stuff we think is happening turns out to be bullshit. Meanwhile Andrea Long Chu just roasted the hell out of Pamela Paul in New York Magazine, so there are still good things happening, if you know where to look.

Today in Crabs:

Today in What To Do:

Janus Rose in 404: “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism.” Maybe you can’t, but I’m built different.

Sandy Ernest Allen in What’s Helping Today: “To Cis People Who Feel Despair.”

And if you’re a Congressperson, listen to Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo: “…there is only one hard lever of power currently available: that’s the help the White House needs from Democrats on a budget and the debt ceiling.”

Today’s Song: Rage Against The Machine, “Bulls on Parade”

Weapons, not food, not homes, not shoes
Not need, just feed the war, cannibal animal
I walk the corner to the rubble, that used to be a library
Line up to the mind cemetery now

P.S.: “Sigma Boy” is a Russian psyop.