Elon Musk’s Technofascist Dystopia

How do you hold history's richest man accountable?

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

These are grim times, perhaps even more so than we anticipated due to the speed and fury with which Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their army of asbestos-brained social deviants have attacked even the most indisputably beneficial government programs and social institutions.

It’s been just over a year since I underwent major open-heart surgery, and this fall it became clear that I’ll likely need another one day. Sternotomies become riskier with every reentry, and the next would be my sixth, so it’s already a bit nerve-wracking when my doctors answer my questions by assuring me that the technology and techniques for these procedures are always rapidly advancing. The Trump administration just took a deep scythe to funding for the kind of academic medical research that produces those advances, so fingers crossed that I stay healthy for a while.

Cruelty is infused in every one of this government’s decisions, which is steering them towards the sort of self-defeating and society-crushing initiatives that go beyond what I think most people considered possible. The news comes so fast and thick that it’s hard to step back and assess the bigger Guernica-like picture that’s being assembled, so that’s what I’m hoping to do tonight. It’s not pretty, but not hopeless, either.

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Elon Musk’s Technofascist Dystopia

Donald Trump’s first four years in the White House was a kaleidoscope of stupidity and a crude modern iteration of domestic Reaganism, but I never fully bought into the popular online notion that we were on the verge of actual fascism. This second go-round, now informed by a cabal more likely to be found with a copy of The Turner Diaries than the National Review, has changed the equation entirely.

(Not that the word fascism is politically useful or effective these days, but it’s useful as a point of reference for what we’re facing.)

It was always naive to think that sclerotic institutions would save us — the Robert Mueller fandom is still embarrassing to remember — but the White House’s aggression and the triumph of ideology over independence means that checks on power are now increasingly irrelevant. Federal unions and state’s attorneys general have won a raft of temporary injunctions, but they neither reverse the damage that’s been done nor temper the pace of new assaults on government employees, agencies, and whole segments of the economy.

Consider: A federal judge early this morning ruled that Elon Musk and his dorm troopers could no longer access the Treasury Department payment system, but they’ve already taken the data. Another judge put a hold on the 2,000 layoffs coming to USAID this weekend, but relief work has already stopped, there are 8,0000 employees still on administrative leave, and contractors have begun letting go of staff and closing up shop.

The wrecking ball process they’ve created means that they will always be a few steps ahead of the courts that don’t rule in their favor. Last night, a federal judge allowed DOGE to access sensitive records at the Department of Labor, which has personal information about millions of Americans. Those are of particular interest to Musk, whose companies have been at the center of countless worker complaints at the NLRB, EEOC, and OSHA.

This is how Mussolini’s fascism functioned, merging the state and corporation, and the plundering recalls the oligarchs of the post-USSR. As Musk installs loyalists in every cabinet and agency, he makes himself, his businesses, and his friends impervious to consequence, ending any hope that workers, consumers, competitors, or anybody else they’ve wronged could ever find justice.

What’s unfolding is a techno-fascist spin on Project 2025, adding a layer of vindictive improvisation to the careful planning of the institutional right. USAID, for instance, was gutted by an angry DOGE administrator who felt undermined and was empowered to launch an inquisition, then unilaterally push out long-time civil servants and exacerbate global famine.

The agency’s name was scraped off the facade of the Ronald Reagan building yesterday, while private security blocked Democratic legislators from entering the Department of Education, physical assertions of dominance that suggest that the capital has been captured and laws no longer apply.

This does not respect the filibuster

That it was gleefully celebrated by the world’s richest man further adds to the sense that it was a significant escalation in this hostile takeover.

Tightening the Vice, Stifling Dissent

A human truffle pig for narcotics, Musk is very clearly delighting in his newfound power and the pain that he can so freely inflict on so many vulnerable people. Instead of seeking to simply destroy government, as the Heritage right wants to do, Musk wants to automate and weaponize it against regulators and ideological enemies. For both of them, the endgame goes beyond power; they each want to be the unquestioned center of the universe.

When he bought Twitter, Musk ordered its remaining programmers to reengineer the platform to further amplify his posts, which were landing with a thud, and promote those who shared his demented Cartman-esque worldview. Trump too revels in his own information bubble — it’s no coincidence that they both own their own social media platforms — and they both throw tantrums when inconvenient outside realities reach them.

Operating with the emotional maturity of a seventh grader and driven by the desire to obliterate critics of any kind, Musk and his boss are both being rhetorically aided by the DC media, even as they escalate their war on it.

The past decade has been shaped by the struggle between remarkable works of journalism exposing Trump world’s perfidy and corruption and the day-to-day coverage that either covers up or normalizes it. The same dynamic is playing out right now, as expert reporting on the inner-workings of the DOGE shit show lose their edge when they sit side by side with stories that legitimize the illegitimate. Reporting that Trump is prepared to abolish the Department of Education and that Musk killed the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is fundamentally untrue and telegraphs its inevitability to the public.

Here’s what the Washington Post wrote about Trump and Musk’s approach to governing in a major story published earlier today:

Meanwhile, White House officials have begun preparing budget documents that seek to cut some agencies and departments by as much as 60 percent, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal deliberations. It's unclear whether Trump will feel compelled to ask Congress to approve those cuts. Though the Constitution specifically invests spending power in Congress, Musk and Trump budget chief Russell Vought have argued they should have authority to slash spending unilaterally.

Who cares whether Elon Musk and Russ Vought, two far-right extremists, think that the president ought to be able to ignore the Constitution? That shouldn’t be presented as a viable option, and any story about this ongoing calamity should be framed around its illegality.

Disney CEO Bob Iger’s decision to settle with Trump over his specious lawsuit against ABC News late last year was framed as a peace offering of sorts, intended to buy favor with the famously transactional president. Instead, as many suspected, it opened the floodgates to escalated legal action and attacks on the free press.

This week, Trump forced CBS to release the unedited transcript and footage of the network’s October interview with Kamala Harris, which he erroneously accused of being doctored to favor the former vice president. In addition to the $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed in November and is still pursuing, he’s also now openly musing about having the FCC revoke the broadcast license that the company has held since 1941. It’s not an idle threat, either, as the FCC is now investigating a San Francisco radio station for reporting on ICE’s mass raids.

“We have sent a letter of inquiry, a formal investigation into that matter, and they have just a matter of days left to respond to that inquiry and explain how this could possibly be consistent with their public interest obligations,” Brendan Carr, the deeply conservative FCC chair, told Fox News this week.

Print media is in deep trouble, as well. DOGE has also declared war on publications and databases subscribed to by federal employees. This week, its hounds elevated the government’s various subscriptions to PoliticoPro into evidence of a supposed bribery scandal in which Joe Biden paid the publication to write positive reports about Democrats. Clearly, he does not read much Politico.

Nonetheless, all of the government’s media subscriptions have been very publicly canceled, further delegitimizing a press that conservatives have been denigrating and eroding trust in for years.

Steve Wynn, the conservative billionaire casino mogul and the only white man more tan than RFK Jr., added to the fuselage by petitioning the Supreme Court to consider overturning NY Times vs. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 decision that provides libel protections for journalists when reporting on public figures. Such a decision, which is distinctly possible under this court, would obliterate press freedom (and, incidentally, make life hell for conservative media outlets).

As a journalist, it’s frightening to think that I could be in legal trouble for criticizing public officials, but it’s even scarier to consider what happens to a society when information is filtered and infused with approved rhetoric. The rise of right-wing media has already warped national discourse and the minds of millions of people, but there’s no illusion that a network like Fox isn’t conservative, even among its viewers. The greater danger is when the lies pervade all media, to the point that nobody recognizes the bias and partisanship.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a quote from William Shirer’s book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a controversial book that still has its instructive elements.

It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda.

It occurred to me only while proofreading this piece that I haven’t even mentioned the ICE raids, which are terrorizing communities, breaking up families, and taking innocent Americans into custody. We don’t hear much about those, but here in New York, Mayor Eric Adams has already dropped resistance to them as part of his desperate attempt to curry favor with Trump and get the various criminal charges against him dropped.

The raids are now a fact of life, treated as inevitable and unfortunate new reality.

The attacks are coming from everywhere

Our federalist system has always provided some feeling of remove for those of us who live in blue states and big cities, at least when it comes to the gun epidemic and the culture wars that are increasingly restricting people’s personal freedoms. The opening few weeks of this administration have also eroded that sense of security, in some places by explicitly contradicting Trump’s own campaign promises.

For two years, Trump insisted that he would leave abortion laws up to the states if he returned to the White House, but it took newly minted Attorney General Pam Bondi all of two days to suggest otherwise. During an appearance in New Orleans this week, Bondi said that she’d like the federal government to work with states like Louisiana to prosecute doctors in blue states who ship them to places where they are illegal.

Louisiana’s AG recently filed charges against a doctor in New York, who is protected by state shield laws. Bondi could override those laws without an act of Congress by reinterpreting the Comstock Act, and there’s no reason to think that she wouldn’t find support from the Supreme Court.

Trump, meanwhile, promised at the National Prayer Breakfast to root out governmental and societal “anti-Christian bias,” which is code for promoting religious public education and fighting to legalize the sort of bigotry that now permits bakeries to refuse LGBTQ+ customers.

While chaotic and frequently disastrous, there was also a sense during Trump’s first two years in office that at least some of the damage could be reversed or curtailed so long as we made it to the midterm elections. Now, it’s increasingly hard to imagine that Trump, Musk, and emboldened state Republicans wouldn’t try to interfere with competitive elections in one way or another.

Just look at the debacle around the North Carolina Supreme Court race. Multiple recounts affirmed that it was won by Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, but the election continues to be appealed in laughably specious grounds by Republicans who believe that the very conservative majority on that same court will ultimately knife their colleague for partisan gain.

He exalts in your anger

Where there is hope

It’s tempting for me to tell myself that I’m stringing incidents together in a way that creates a distorted reality, and a Saturday spent sitting at home in my apartment unbothered, writing and chasing my toddler around, could be cited as a solid counterpoint to the assertion that we are veering toward the death of the modern liberal state and emergence of a dark capitalist autocracy. Then again, nobody really knows it when they’ve officially crossed the threshold into a failed state.

Regardless of which stage of American decline we’ve reached, the response must remain the same, starting with internal reform.

The nation is hobbled by a pathetic opposition party leadership that files useless protest bills and insists on its powerlessness, then skips town to fly to Silicon Valley in a pitiful effort to stave off further donor defection. If Democratic leaders had it their way, they’d remain silent for two years, support disastrous crypto policy to placate the tech narcissists, and then run a milquetoast midterm campaign about “restoring trust” or something similarly meaningless.

Fortunately, for the first time since Trump took office in 2017, I’m gaining some faith that Democratic voters see through the performance and are ready to reject and punish their representatives for their spineless preemptive surrender. The Capitol switch line has been inundated with phone calls from angry Democratic voters who are demanding action from the party’s leaders, “DO SOMETHING” breaks through Musk’s rigged Twitter every day. Polls show deep dissatisfaction with the current pushback. Primary challenges are already beginning to surface.

Organizing through partisan politics is only one necessarily temporary part of the solution. There are anti-ICE protests happening in every state, even if they’ve been given little media coverage (and disproportionate police responses). And organized labor is stepping up, both in the fight to protect federal employees and to preserve the systems that protect workers all across the country. Keep an eye on social media on Monday for more on this front.

I wouldn’t anticipate these protests or actions to have any deep immediate effect, and I’d urge you to take note of whether your representative takes a real stand against this creeping fascism, because primaries will be necessary. As I’ll cover more in tomorrow’s newsletter, what I think is most likely to happen is that the defenestration of government is going to begin rippling out to the rest of the economy, causing job losses and declines in business that people like Elon Musk could never anticipate.

Medications will become less available and more expensive, and university hospitals will be able to see fewer patients. Here’s a note I got from somebody who works for the National Institute of Health:

People are feeling terrorized. Everyone I work with is on edge. I work with transplant patients - there was so much confusion in the first week that one patient who had just been admitted for treatment had everything stopped the night before bc of the purchasing freeze. She was later able to receive the treatment, but every day it is a new question/roadblock: can we order more supplies? Can we ship specimens with dry ice? No one knows anything.

More and more people will feel this, and that’s when the real consequences will start to cascade. Let’s just hope the damage can be limited.

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