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- The "That Funny Feeling" Coup
Ryan Broderick wrote the newsletter explaining the ongoing American coup that I spent yesterday struggling and failing to write, so I don’t have to do it anymore:
These are the demagogues, oligarchs, and literal teenage boys tearing apart our government right now. They are fueled by Silicon Valley’s dream of a monarchist network state and blood and soil white nationalism and they want to replace our money with the speculative cryptocurrencies they’re already holding, replace the country’s digital infrastructure with X, an online platform they invested in, and route all federal power to Trump, a president they’re actively bribing. They did not plan any of this in secret. They know this their moment and the coup is underway. They are serious. And every day they’re in power means more years, if not decades, of our lives that we will have to dedicate to trying to piece the country back together when they’re gone.
I’m glad I don’t have to explain anything coherently because all I have inside me right now is that funny feeling.
There it is, again.
This is the second time I’ve used this gif in Today in Tabs. The first was almost exactly four years ago, a couple days after a military junta deposed Myanmar’s democratically elected government. I guess it’s coup season. How are we coping? Shauna Dewit has “decided I’m tired to find ways to heal. Instead of that, I will just go completely insane.”
What else can we do but go insane? I guess bullying works, so maybe that. In TNR Meredith Shiner has reluctantly announced an exploratory effort to run against her useless 80 year old senior Senator, Dick Durbin. Did you know that was allowed? Apparently anyone can just do that! I mean, maybe not by 2026 but for now, while Congress still technically exists, you could also primary your useless Democratic Senator or Congressperson. “All it takes is not accepting or spending $5,000, not saying outright that you’ve decided to run, and a dream that we can break through to some of the most feckless, dense politicians history has ever seen,” writes Shiner. Heck, that’s easy. I’ve already not accepted or spent $5,000 just today.
I don’t know what’s happening, no one knows what’s happening, but it seems like most people don’t know anything is happening, so for background purposes here’s Liz Lopatto on the general outlines of Elon Musk’s ongoing illegal takeover of the Federal financial apparatus:
…based on the events that have transpired so far, it seems the clear goal here amounts to a coup over the administrative state. My editor reminds me that many of you were not paying attention in civics class and so: our government’s famed checks and balances system relies on Congress controlling spending. Musk’s job was originally framed as making recommendations for programs that Congress could cut.
The present Trump administration, which also did not pay attention in civics class, either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about checks and balances. First, it tried to freeze spending with a legal pronouncement. That was quickly halted by several courts. Then Musk decided to bust into the bureaucracy and start ripping out wires — a technical solution to a legal problem.
There is some debate about whether Musk and his ramen-haired J.V. lacrosse team are actually in control of the federal payments infrastructure. Politico reported that “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent privately reassured Republican lawmakers Monday that Elon Musk and his team do not have control over a sensitive government system that manages the flow of trillions of dollars in payments…” while both Wired and Josh Marshall are saying actually they do. Here’s Wired’s team of Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman reporting late last night:
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.
Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.
Wired has absolutely owned the digital coup beat, by the way. If you want to know what’s going on, a Wired subscription is cheap and more than worth it. Meanwhile, at the New York Times:
“One citizen’s power over government?” “Breach the law?”
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is sweeping through the federal government as a singular force, creating major upheaval as he looks to put an ideological stamp on the bureaucracy and rid the system of those who he and the president deride as “the deep state.”
Wow! That sounds heroic. Quick question: what the fuck are you talking about? The whole story is fascinating reading. Bylined by Jonathan Swan, Theodore Schleifer, and Maggie Haberman (derogatory), but also Kate Conger, Ryan Mac, and Madeleine Ngo, it’s a shambling zombie of a piece, with a skeleton of solid reporting of the scariest facts you’ve ever heard in your life draped in the rotting flesh of the Times politics desk’s signature “horny for power and spectacle” tone. There it is again, that funny feeling.
In May 2021, about a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, Youtube comedian Bo Burnham’s self-filmed Netflix comedy music special “Inside” included a gentle strumming folk ballad called “That Funny Feeling” which captured the pandemic era’s pervasive sense that everything was both perfectly normal and utterly broken at the same time.
The surgeon general's pop-up shop, Robert Iger's face
Discount Etsy agitprop, Bugles' take on race
Female Colonel Sanders, easy answers, civil war
The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door
The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show
Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go
Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul
A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall
First of all, Bo, what did you mean by “seven more to go.” What did you mean by that, Bo? What happens in 2028, Bo?
But leaving that question aside for the moment, this song has been stuck in my head since Friday because so far, this is still a “That Funny Feeling” coup. It’s both more and less than it seems, and as alarming as the facts are, I can’t find any evidence that anything permanent has been done yet. It’s a coup that’s only happening on the computer so far, which is real but it’s not… entirely real, you know?
A couple of real things have happened. They’re attempting to shut down USAID, because it was instrumental in helping to end apartheid in South Africa, which Elon Musk and his mother are still mad about because they are literally apartheid South African white supremacists, notoriously the Worst People In The World for all of recent history. He’s also going after South Dakota Lutherans? The reasons for that one are less clear to me, but as the old poem goes, “…Then they came for the midwestern Lutherans, and I said ‘Ope!‘“ That poem was actually written by a Lutheran, so maybe that’s the connection. At this point who knows.
Here’s a website clarifying what will be lost if USAID is actually shut down, but right now, USAID is a still a Federal Government agency chartered by Congress, and it still exists by law. Whoever is preventing it from carrying out its Congressionally mandated work is breaking the law. Not “breaching” it, whatever that might mean New York Times, but breaking it. Every coup has a period where the people perpetrating it are breaking the law, and either they will succeed in taking over the apparatus of the state and change the law, or not. Right now we’re in the period of uncertainty, as we have been for at least five days, and the longer that uncertainty stretches out, the more exposed these criminals are.
In the first Trump administration we learned that Trump is a coward who folds at the first sign of resistance, when his signature “Muslim travel ban” was whittled down to a largely toothless 90-day agency review process after sustained public outcry and legal action. So far in the second Trump administration we’ve learned that Trump is a coward who folds at the first sign of resistance, as he has so far to Colombia, Mexico, and Canada in trade disputes that he initiated. Donald Trump is a gutless bully, a bloated home-pooper who has never experienced love or contentment or true human warmth, and never will, and that’s a fatal weakness. Today in her new newsletter Meditations In An Emergency Rebecca Solnit wrote:
[Trump and Musk are] miscalculating the reactions from foreign nationals, from politicians, from federal workers, from ordinary people; they're underestimating solidarity, courage, principle, and misunderstanding power itself. They do not understand people, and this may be their downfall.
…Remember that underneath what we're furious about is what we care about, that our deepest feeling in this moment isn't necessarily anger, but protectiveness for what we love that may feel like fury. And that love is very, very powerful.
Finally here’s a collection of recent “what can we do” posts. It’s not enough yet, but it’s a start. There will be more we can do, soon.
Tuck Woodstock, “Literally what can we do” (mainly to support trans people or to exist as trans people, right now in America).
Kelly Hayes, “A Brutal Beginning: Orienting Ourselves Amid the Shock and Awe.” Also read Kelly on Collective Survival, Adaptation and Direct Action.
Dan Sinker, “Write it down.”
Garrett Bucks “How parents can support educators right now.”
A thread by The Questionable Authority on “dealing with worry, dealing with feeling helpless, and focusing on limited available paths to productively help.”
The CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual has been very popular lately. Page 18 of this PDF is a banger.
And here’s Luke O’Neil on “Going into battle despite great odds”:
All I have been saying for the past ten years or so is please please just try to fight. And on top of that make sure everyone knows you are fighting. Even if it's a hopeless battle. People love that shit. People are inspired by that shit. That is one of the singular myths that we have at the foundation of our entire culture. Going into battle despite great odds. Swinging until your last breath.
Today’s Song: Bo Burnham, “All Eyes On Me”
Are you feeling nervous? Are you having fun?
It’s almost over, it’s just begun…
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