Trump and Musk attacked the bureaucracy without understanding what it actually did, doing much damage.
Musk could have focused on helping upgrade the government’s technology, something badly needed, instead, he just destroyed a bunch of stuff he didn’t understand.
While doing DOGE, Musk repeatedly made false statements. It seems like he had to be lying, but, Musk’s close friends claim that he never lies, meaning, Musk just easily deludes himself into believing a lot of false shit. Being a great businessman and technologist doesn’t mean you aren’t incompetent and massively deluded about other topics.
With the chaos DOGE caused, rather than saving money, DOGE cost the American people.
The bureaucracy is mostly filled with loyal law followers. If you want to break the law, it makes sense to destroy the bureaucracy.
Under Trump, datasets disappear. Rather than the government keeping data to help understand society and help inform decision makers and the American people, Trump has pushed the government to keep and create data for the purpose of making Trump look good.
Many public servants are there out of a sense of public spiritedness, and the Trump administration treats them not simply like employees who need to be cut for good reasons…but like the enemy and some of the administration seems to get enjoyment out of cruelty.
One DOGE guy went into DOGE to fix government, and then he took an interview with a journalist and said that government wasn’t as inefficient as he thought, then he was fired.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSpXE-iJUuo
On social media, people are most likely to spread sensational bullshit that sparks their emotions. People share a lot of stuff created by bots or foreign troll farms, but bots and troll farms don’t make stuff go viral…average people on social media sharing and liking such content does.
Trump said he thinks Iran unconditionally surrendered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlIqfe2pU1w
“Tariffs don’t conjure consumer demand out of thin air. Americans were buying plenty of washing machines, clothing, and steel before the tariffs. What changes is where some things are made. Production shifts from foreign manufacturers with efficiency or cost advantages to more expensive domestic manufacturers. American producers stand to gain, except when they must pay tariffs to import the materials they need (as is often the case).
But everyone who buys the product pays more. The extra $100 a family spends on a washing machine won’t instead be spent at the restaurant next door, the repair shop, or the shoe store. Real wages—what your paycheck actually buys—fall when the prices of most things rise.
…
When Americans buy less from China, it’s true, some of our overseas business competitors lose revenue. But what about the American households losing access to cheaper goods? Or the American producers losing access to cheaper materials and ingredients that make them more competitive?
Both countries take a hit. Serious analysts who favor targeted tariffs for strategic reasons generally acknowledge this tradeoff and argue that the benefits justify the costs. What they don’t claim is that such costs don’t exist.
…
Even when firms do absorb some of the hit, the money doesn’t disappear. These companies instead hire fewer people, pay lower wages, invest less or, in industries where profit margins are already thin, hike future prices. The burden just takes a different route to your wallet.”
https://reason.com/2026/02/26/the-4-economic-myths-powering-trumps-new-tariff-push/
We aren’t far from living in a dystopian world of false information, anti-science, and anti-truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmQ8UfEvxVI
‘Social media like Twitter/X isn’t free speech. It’s ultra-processed speech. It’s speech like how Doritos is food. It is toxic and designed as such.’
‘Conspiracy believers are not just asking questions. They question the narrative but not the counter narrative. Their questioning isn’t the problem, but their certainty.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44uC12g9ZVk
“When innocent people are falsely convicted of crimes and later freed, in more than half of the cases, misconduct by police and prosecutors played a contributing role.
That’s the primary theme of a new report, “Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent,” released today by the National Registry of Exonerations, which has been tracking all known exonerations in the United States for the past 30 years.”
…
“what happens when a person is ultimately exonerated and the truth of police and prosecutorial misconduct is revealed? Are the police officers or prosecutors disciplined for their behavior? Often the answer is no. The report analyzed what happened to cops and prosecutors who engaged in misconduct and found that some sort of discipline was imposed in only 17 percent of these cases. Prosecutors are hardly ever punished for misconduct, even though the report notes that they are equally culpable as cops. In only four percent of cases did they find prosecutors disciplined in any way for misconduct. Just two have been fired, three disbarred, and only two have ever themselves been criminally prosecuted and found guilty of misconduct.
Police officers, on the other hand, were disciplined in some fashion in 19 percent of all exoneration cases involving police misconduct. That’s still remarkably low, but police are far more likely than prosecutors to be criminally charged with misconduct in these cases. At least 30 officers have been convicted. That number may seem low, but the report notes that a single police officer may actually be responsible for several false convictions (most notably in Chicago, which has seen mass exonerations over police misconduct).”
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” The final quarter of the report is devoted to recommendations: record police interrogations; have forensic crime labs operate independently of police departments to reduce the pressure to fudge results; create special units in prosecutors’ offices to revisit old cases and look for errors; implement open-file discovery and better information-sharing practices with public defenders; and, obviously, institute actual consequences for officers and prosecutors who engage in misconduct that leads to the innocent being convicted.”