While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:
https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/

Journalists like Wired's Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are absolutely crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:
https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/

And Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoop after scoop:
https://www.crisesnotes.com/

But for me, it was Tkacik – as usual – in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):
https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/

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Raw Story:

Adding to reports that billionaire Elon Musk is making the lives of Donald Trump’s inner circle a living hell with his freelancing, Wired’s Jake Lahut reported on MSNBC that some are looking to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to step in and right the ship.

That would be the same Susie Wiles who, when her boss spoke this week of the U.S. ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip to occupy and develop the prime beachfront property, looked like this:


Lahut spoke with MSNBC’s “Way Too Early” this morning on the tensions Elon Musk’s Agents of DOGE are generating inside the White House.

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Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast: “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, but the Pacific Northwest. And it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day and uh, I opened it up. It wasn’t that easy to do. But I opened it up and it’s pouring down.”

It’s actually raining right now so I guess he’s turned the valve on and pointed it up at the sky?





Where are the farmers whose water has been wasted and which they’ll need next summer? Well…

Agriculture is a form of legalized gambling here in California, our land is prone to deluge or drought. Our farmers, relentlessly adapting, are as innovative as any set of suits in Silicon Valley, learning new ways to grow more food with less water. As sure as the sun, our farmers have always shared their views of California politics as they relentlessly pursue the water necessary to grow much of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

Yet now, an eerie silence has begun descending over California farming. A candidate many of them undoubtedly supported for president, Donald Trump, has shockingly wasted some of their water in a downright dangerous stunt unlike anything in memory.

When I spoke last week before two water conferences in two different states filled with Central Valley farmers, the first question I confronted in Sacramento was basically how to make all this Trump stuff go away. When I theorized at the second conference in Reno that Trump may not know what he’s doing out here, I got no eye contact from more than half the room as we all exited.

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Elon Musk’s destructive ransacking of our government should remind us of what previous generations of Americans understood intuitively: that "we may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both,” as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it. Yet in all the commentary about how to survive the Trump regime, almost no one mentions the single most proven constraint on oligarchy and autocracy: unions.

There’s a reason that taking out unions is one of the first pages in the oligarchic coup playbook – as in Chile, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Indonesia, Spain, Myanmar, and more. It’s the same reason Trump has fired the first Black woman member of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox—clearly violating labor law and denying the board the quorum it needs to conduct business and protect employee rights; fired two commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and asserted in an executive order that he can fire any member of the Senior Executive Service, which includes regional directors at the NLRB who run union elections and investigate and decide whether to prosecute corporations’ unfair labor practices.

It’s the same reason that Project 2025, which has informed the lion’s share of Trump’s early shock-and-awe actions in office, would effectively dismantle union power nationwide by banning public sector unions, eliminating overtime protections, and making collective organization nearly impossible.

And it’s the same reason Musk—who wants to make the entire NLRB unconstitutional and whose companies have been fined for millions of dollars for labor or workplace safety violations—is reportedly targeting the Department of Labor for the next round of DOGE sabotage. (Of course, Musk’s aims are twofold: defending his coup, and his very real interests in protecting Tesla and Space X from ongoing investigations into their anti-worker efforts.)

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Marko Elez, a former SpaceX, Starlink, and X engineer who was granted deep access to a critical US Treasury payment system by the Trump-blessed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has quit that team after he was linked to a racist Twitter account.

The 25-year-old DOGE operative resigned today after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection, if any, with the posts on the social network.

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"Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool," @nullllptr reportedly said in July.

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The engineer's previous employer Elon Musk now also heads up DOGE, the President-approved team that has been rifling through US federal government systems for personnel, programs, and contracts to cut that the Tesla tycoon have doesn't approve of. The billionaire's businesses, which are regulated by the same federal government, continue to have commercial dealings with Uncle Sam.

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This followed earlier reports that Elez at least had been given administrator-level access. This reportedly allowed him to modify code within the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which handles a significant portion of federal disbursements. ®

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Microplastics are accumulating in human brains at alarming rates, with concentrations rising 50% in the past eight years. Researchers found plastic fragments as small as 200 nanometers, possibly interfering with brain function.

Researchers at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences have found microplastics in human brains at significantly higher concentrations than in other organs. Their study also reveals that plastic accumulation in the brain has increased by 50% over the past eight years.

Microplastics—minute fragments of degraded polymers present in air, water, and soil—have been accumulating in the human body for the past half-century. These particles have been detected in various organs, including the liver, kidneys, placenta, and testes.

Now, University of New Mexico Health Sciences researchers have found microplastics in human brains, and at much higher concentrations than in other organs. Worse, the plastic accumulation appears to be growing over time, having increased by 50% over just the past eight years.

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The addled, dementia patient in the White House is misinformed, as usual, Nieman Lab unpacked the “scandal.”

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Youngblut and Bauckholt are two members of a loose group of people who have now been linked to at least six deaths that span three states and two U.S. coastlines — including a double homicide in Pennsylvania and the murder of a landlord in California.

Many of the people appear to be highly educated and have ties to Bay Area communities of rationalists, a movement of philosophically-minded people who prize logical reasoning and are often interested in artificial intelligence and software engineering.

But members of this particular group — dubbed by some “Zizians,” for their following of a blog written by an individual named Jack LaSota under the pen name “Ziz” — appear to have taken those rationalist ideas in an unorthodox and extreme direction.

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Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial philosophy when he acquires a company is to immediately shut down everything and then restore a few once they get the lay of the land and determine what he thinks is necessary. We saw that at Twitter when he came in and fired everyone, determined that any kind of moderation was unnecessary and it’s now overrun with bots, disinformation, foreign propaganda and Nazis. He likes that. He fired the disaster team that made Twitter an important resource during those times, getting out information you could rely on as real. As we found out during the LA fires, it’s completely useless for that purpose now.

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There are very serious consequences for the impulsive, wrecking ball mode of government that Project 2025 and Elon Musk are carrying out. They don’t care. Musk is a sociopath and Russell Vought (who is clearly guiding this behind the scenes as well) is a racist white nationalist religious fanatic who no doubt thinks that people with HIV were asking for it. Neither they, nor Trump, care at all if 20 million people die. In fact, I suspect they think it’s probably a good thing since the sick are a burden on the rich people (producers) who are responsible for everything good in this world.

Three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine remains sovereign and independent, with strengthened security and political ties to Europe and the United States. But its defensive war and Washington’s support for Kyiv stand at a turning point: Ukraine faces challenges on the battlefield, and President Donald Trump has vowed to bring the war to an end while pursuing a broader foreign and trade policy agenda that is rattling the trans-Atlantic alliance.

On Feb. 24, at 10 a.m. ET, the Brookings Center on the United States and Europe and Lawfare will hold a discussion on the war in Ukraine, looking at the path of U.S. and European relations with Ukraine before and during the conflict as well as what lies ahead in 2025 and beyond. The discussion will feature Brookings experts as well as the co-hosts of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo’s new limited series narrative podcast “Escalation,” which chronicles the surreal twists and turns between the United States and Ukraine through the lens of the journalists, diplomats, spies, and ambassadors who crafted the relationship between the two countries.

This event will be open to attend in person or watch online. Register for the livestream here. Online viewers can submit questions via e-mail to events@brookings.edu or on X/Twitter at #Escalation.