people are genuinely so weird about 4chan. it’s just a website. do you think other websites don’t have giant festering communities of nazis and pedophiles because if so i have an x the everything app to sell you
āYouāre gonna eat āem cold, and youāre gonna like āem cold. Every meal. Donāt even think about trying to gussy them up with pickle relish. The only way you make it through these next few years is filling every shelf in your pantry with little canned wieners and knocking back the leftover hot dog water with a smile on your face. Buckle up, America. You live in āthe wiener timesā now.ā At press time, millions of Americans reportedly realized they could no longer afford the canned wieners.
In my first ever article for a print magazine, Iām analyzing Elon Muskās DOGE from the perspective of contractor capture: the notion that for-profit contractors like Musk desire not only money from the government, but also control over government itself.
You can read the full piece below, or pick up the April 2025 edition of The American Prospect at a local bookstore once itās available!
DOGE has been marketed as an organization aimed at cutting wasteful spending and increasing government efficiency, but it has quickly become apparent that this is not its primary function. Instead, DOGE has spent the first weeks of Trumpās second presidential term haphazardly dismantling the civil service, politically targeting spending that Musk and Trump dislike, centralizing decision-making power in the White House, and causing major disruptions to government operations that will decrease their overall efficiency. Still, one important aspect of this strategy has gone largely unexamined: the elevation of government contractors like Musk into government policymakers.
Musk has acquired much of his tremendous wealth from the government he is now dismantling. Tesla Motors relied on significant support from the Department of Energy, which was criticized as government waste by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. SpaceX continues to receive billions of dollars each year in contract awards from NASA and the Defense Department, representing one of the companyās largest streams of income. Overall, Muskās business ventures have benefited from more than $38 billion in government support, not including a new contract from the Federal Aviation Administration to upgrade its information technology systems.
To hear Musk describe it, he is part of the solution, not the problem. He has argued that āthereās a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the ā¦ president and the Cabinet,ā and thus that there is a need for a āthrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people.ā In this understanding, Musk is not a money-motivated billionaire riddled with conflicts of interest, but rather a selfless entrepreneur bringing private-sector efficiency to a sclerotic, wasteful government and āthe Parasite Classā that depends on it.
This view of government efficiency is impressively backwards. The civil service that Musk is attacking consists of millions of regular workers doing their best to transform the complexities of government into positive outcomes for the American people. The only parasitic class benefiting from government inefficiency consists of for-profit government contractors like Musk, who grow rich off of taxpayer dollars by providing overpriced services to compensate for a lack of state capacity, all while using their billions to rig the system in their favor. Allowing contractors like him to decide how the government spends money is both an affront to democracy and an open invitation to further corruption.
Only 90s kids remember that feeling when the eyebrow truck would drive around the neighborhood on a hot summerās day playing that familiar jingle and all the kids would recite the classic rhyme: āI browse, you browse, we all browse for eyebrows.ā
Reblog if you remember swimming in raw sewage
*wistfully* I remember this like it was tomorrowā¦
Do NOT give in to despair. Yes, the response isnāt always perfect. But the perfect is the enemy of the good.
People are standing up.
i also need it said, this is 37 of the 100 seated senators. That may not seem like a lot, but when you consider 51 senators are perfectly happy to let the country burn down, 37 of the remaining 49 senators participated here.
Thatās 75% of the people you would expect to stand up who did in fact participate.
I swear to God, if someone were to trap 2 million animals, deprive them of food and water, and kill 50,000 of them, the world would be shaken by this catastrophe and brutality.
What’s happening is unbelievable, illogical. We are human beings… human beings!!
“I’m in my late 20s and I’m scared I’ve already peaked” just don’t peak then, idiot. what do you mean like you’re going to just stop trying to think harder and build taller and learn more and get luckier and read deeper and dress better and fuck weirder and run faster and draw crazier and smoke danker and dance bigger and steal better and stun everyone with your cunty charm and zeal because, what, you think those are the rules? get real. get up. you have another 50 years and you’re not going to use them??? give them to me.
Our evil governor proposed four constitutional amendments that were all horrific and each one lost overwhelmingly in a state-wide referendum, so now he’s blaming George Soros for bribing Louisianans which has pissed off the evangelicals who overwhelmingly voted against the amendments (in part bc one of them would remove their tax exempt status), who are deeply insulted by the idea that they’re capable of being bribed by a “leftist” or, even worse, a Jew
Wild that they would attack the Church in the first place, considering that’s most of their voting bloc.
Just a day earlier, Justice Department lawyers admitted in a court filing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had mistakenly arrested and deported Abrego Garcia, despite being aware that he had been granted a form of protected legal status called āwithholding of removalā in 2019 after an immigration judge found he would likely be targeted by gangs for persecution and torture if sent back to El Salvador, the place heād fled when he came to the U.S. in 2011.
According to court documents, Abrego Garcia has no criminal record in the United States and is married to an American citizen with whom he has a 5-year-old special needs child.
But this lack of criminal history in America didnāt stop the Trump administration from grabbing him up and putting him on a plane to the exact place the government had been forbidden from sending him.
Trump administration lawyers claim the deportation of Abrego Garcia and his subsequent incarceration in El Salvadorās CECOT prison was the result of an āadministrative errorā that canāt be remedied because the government is powerless to get him back from the Salvadoran government despite a close relationship between Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele and President Donald Trump.
You might have missed this, but the Trump regime is actively taking money out of the pockets of hardworking people across the country.
According to @economicpolicy: Overturning the current law will take away pay increases from about 390,000 low-wage federal contract workers who earned the right to at least $15/hour under the Biden administration. If the Trump administration fully overturns this rule and does not replace it, federal contractors will revert to the minimum wage level last set for them a decade ago in 2014, of just over $10 an hour.
