from the every-accusation dept
There’s that old saying that every accusation is a confession. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Musk/Trump administration, everything is projection. While claiming to champion free speech and fight government censorship, they’ve become the most aggressively censorial administration in modern history.
After years of performative outrage about campus speech restrictions, they’re systematically dismantling academic freedom.
They’re “rescuing” what they called a terrible Biden economy (which was actually remarkably strong) by… implementing policies that have economists screaming about an inevitable recession (or worse).
But here’s where the projection becomes almost perfectly aligned: DOGE is the deep state. Wired’s Brian Barrett made this crucial observation last week and I can’t get it out of my mind. For all the talk during the last decade of the supposed “deep state” of unelected bureaucrats controlling the government, which was never actually true, DOGE has become the very deep state they falsely claimed existed previously.
The “deep state” is a top-tier conservative bogeyman, right up there with DEI and George Soros. But it seems fair to ask: If a bunch of shadowy, unelected figures, many with shared business interests and connections, took over government functions at the highest levels and directly contravened the will of Congress, what might you call that? How about … DOGE?
After years of alarm over unelected bureaucrats pulling the strings, what better example can you find than this moment the US government is in? DOGE is the thing it claims to fear the most. Elon Musk is the problem he purportedly wants to solve.
Secretive? The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has never provided an org chart, did not have a publicly documented leader until last week, and refused to reveal the identities of its young staffers in early internal meetings. Check.
Unelected? Self-evidently so. Check.
A web of connected interests outside of government? DOGE is inarguably the Elon Musk extended universe. Current and former employees from X, SpaceX, the Boring Company, and Tesla currently control or are deeply embedded in countless government agencies, including the ones they’re ostensibly regulated by. (How many of them? Hard to say exactly, so score another point for “secretive.”)
It goes on. This is more important than just depressingly stupid irony. It’s effectively a peek into their own way of viewing the world and how they will continue to act.
They have no actual governing philosophy beyond power and control. They nihilistically believe that because they would abuse power for personal gain and to silence criticism then everyone else must be willing to do the same. They simply can’t fathom that some people actually go into public service to actually… provide important services to the public.
And, thus, all of the complaints they had all along were never actual complaints. They were revelations about what they think the point of governing is, and why they assumed that anyone in power must be doing what they’re currently doing.
Barrett notes that Musk recently whined about the deep state, while he could have quite clearly been describing himself:
“If there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have,” Musk said at a recent Oval Office visit. And then, moments later: “We have this unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected representative. This is … This is not something that people want, and it does not match the will of the people.”
Sounds bad. Also sounds like DOGE.
To be clear, I’m quite sure that Musk would claim that there is now a “good feedback loop from the people to the government,” but what he means is that people can yell about things he’s doing on his private social media platform X, and because he tweaked the algorithm to flatter his own addled ego, he sometimes responds to deeply unserious superfans, and then tells one of his lackeys to change something in response.
But that’s not actually a feedback loop for the people. It’s a narrow feedback loop of dipshits to a deeply unserious power-hungry whack job who has no intellectual curiosity and no concern for any harm he might cause.
You can’t effectively fight what you can’t properly name. DOGE has emerged as the genuine embodiment of the “deep state” we were warned about — except instead of civic-minded career officials, we now have nihilistic power-mad adrenaline junkies running the show.
This matters because DOGE isn’t just another example of hypocrisy in action — it represents a fundamental threat to the systems and institutions that actually make government work for people.
Of course, DOGE’s defenders claim they’re just “cutting red tape” and “eliminating waste” — as if they discovered government employees whose sole job was to light taxpayer money on fire. In reality, they’re dismantling the systems that protect us from everything from food poisoning to financial collapse.
When you replace expertise with ego and public service with personal enrichment, you don’t just get bad policy — you get the systematic dismantling of the infrastructure that supports innovation, protects civil liberties, and maintains the guardrails that keep power in check. The deep state they imagined never existed. The one they’re building is all too real.
So here we are: the people who spent years warning us about an imaginary deep state have built an actual one. The people who claimed to fear unaccountable bureaucrats have installed literally unaccountable bureaucrats. The people who insisted they would drain the swamp have filled it with their own particularly toxic sludge.
Their accusations weren’t warnings — they were spoilers.
Filed Under: deep state, doge, elon musk, unelected bureaucrats
