Revenge of the whiny pampered baby men
Trump's new tech supporters embrace shamelessness
Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.
Elon Musk and his Groyper minions have been trampling their way through the various federal agencies in DC this week, bullying career civil servants into giving them access to highly confidential information and throwing the lives of federal workers and their families into open-ended turmoil.
There was a modicum of relief when a judge forced the White House to agree to limit their access to the Treasury Department last night (not Donald Trump has a deep commitment to the law), but earlier today, they accessed the sensitive personnel data of millions of federal workers via OPM. I’ve been getting messages from federal workers via a Google form I set up (click here if you want to submit), and here’s one from a VA employee that stuck out to me:
This is destroying the Agency. People come to work terrified every day. I don’t know a single competent and qualified person who isn’t actively looking for work elsewhere and the only people who will be left to serve our Veterans are those with no other choices. The amount of sheer experience, knowledge, and brainpower being lost is irreplaceable, and the trust is already broken. We’ll never get it back. I am heartbroken that so many Republicans deeply, deeply hate us for doing our best every single day to serve Veterans. I will never forgive them for this.
It’s a nightmare for so many people right now, and with federal contractors no longer being paid, there is going to be an enormous ripple effect.
Today, I’ve got some state news and a piece about one of the most shocking things that has happened over the past few weeks.
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Minnesota: Democrats and Republicans have a deal, and all it took was the threat of losing a paycheck.
After a stand-off over the who should control the state House of Representatives that lasted more than a month, the two parties settled on a power-sharing agreement in order to avoid further litigation. The deal grants Republicans the speakership but will split committee chair positions once Democrats win the March 11th special election and tie the chamber once again at 68 seats apiece.
Democrats had been avoiding the legislative building since January, when they lost control of a safe blue seat because their candidate, who won in a landslide, was found to not live in that district. The state Supreme Court ruled that Republicans couldn’t open the legislature without a quorum, and after weeks of squabbling, they began legal proceedings that would have withheld absconding Democrats’ pay. That got them rushing back.
Florida: It’s already hard enough to get a constitutional amendment passed via the ballot in Florida, as abortion rights and legal weed activists discovered last year, and voters are none too happy about the proposal to make the process even more difficult.
A new poll from Fabrizio & Associates (Trump’s pollster!) found that an overwhelming 55% of likely Republican voters are against Gov. Ron DeSantis’s proposal to make it almost impossible to qualify and pass a citizen’s initiative. More broadly, 72% of GOP respondents said that initiatives should continue to exist.
In a state that has moved seemingly irrevocably toward the right, with lawmakers competing to be the most psychotic and uninterested in the actual law, even Republican voters want a chance to shape laws.
Washington: Unfortunately, while Republicans are much more broadly hostile to democracy and self-determination, any state dominated by one party tends to have politicians who land on leveraging that power over voters as the answer to problems. In the Emerald State, some lawmakers are discussing a bill that would require more information to be collected by petition signature-gatherers for ballot initiatives and referendums, and thus make it more likely that signatures would be rejected by the state secretary of state.
A proposed new bill would require signers to provide their address, date, time, and signature, with the secretary of state verifying that addresses match voter registration records. The signature-gatherers would also have to sign each petition asserting that the information is accurate, under penalty of law, which might make them hesitant to do the job considering the relative impossibility of certifying some random person’s address.
The impetus for this proposed change isn’t any loathing of democracy or autocratic desire to cut regular people off from the primary process, however. Instead, it’s a response to the growing trend of super-rich conservative activists and donors personally funding ballot initiatives to repeal progressive laws. There were multiple on the ballot in November, to repeal the capital gains tax — Washington has no income tax — and kill the big green energy law the legislature had passed.
I’m generally up for anything that protects democracy and keeps big money out of elections, but I think this is the wrong approach. There has to be other ways, from limiting PAC and individual donations to statewide issue campaigns to structuring certain laws in ways that fortify them for the long haul.
Kentucky: Voting rights activists are back in the capital, trying to convince Gov. Andy Beshear to re-enfranchise more former nonviolent offenders. In 2019, Beshear signed an executive order that gave the right to vote back to around 140,000 Kentuckians, but there are around 160,000 people former nonviolent offenders waiting for re-enfrachisement.
Utah: Some annoying (putting it lightly) news out of Salt Lake City, where public sector unions and Republicans could not reach a consensus “compromise” on legislation intended to destroy public sector unions. So, instead of a bill that would require workers to re-certify unions as their representative negotiators before every contract fight, it looks as if the GOP Senate will simply vote on the initial proposal, which was to ban public unions from participating in collective bargaining.
Arkansas: How about we end this section with some good news? Lawmakers are moving forward with a bill that would create universal school breakfast, state that has been trying to cut down the social safety net wherever possible.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Sen. Jonathan Dismang, likened it to schools purchasing laptops and other equipment for students to use.
“To me this is no different,” he said. “Let’s let them start out on the right foot. Let’s let them have the option and let’s do something about the food insecurity problems we have here in the state.”
The Hypocrisy is the Point
Trying to decipher which part of the far-right’s frictionless coup most disturbs you is almost overwhelming, like choosing from an all-you-can-eat buffet of antisocial violence and rampant lawlessness. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their small army of off-putting teenagers, ideological sociopaths, and oligarch narcissists have wreaked havoc and horror: unleashing ICE raids into schools and churches, illegally shuttering entire agencies, freezing essential funding, codifying rampant bigotry into law… these dolts represent metastasizing cruelty.
What sticks most with me, though, is something that happened in that new hub of right-wing megalomaniacs, Silicon Valley.
On Tuesday, the storied tech venture capital fund Andreessen-Horowitz hired Daniel Penny, a 26-year-old former Marine from Long Island. Befitting firm co-founder Marc Andreessen’s very public disdain of DEI programs, Penny boasts his impeccable credentials: he choked a homeless Black guy to death on the NYC subway and got away with it.
Penny became a cause célèbre for the conservative media soon after he was arrested in May of 2023 for killing Neely, a 30-year-old performer who was struggling with mental illness and exhibiting reckless behavior in the subway car. Neely’s actions and suicidal rhetoric frightened some fellow passengers, so Penny sprung into action, wrestling him into a chokehold and holding it for six full minutes, long past the point at which Neely had gone limp and people urged Penny to let him go. The NYPD at first let Penny go before he was ultimately arrested and charged with criminally negligent homicide.
He was found not guilty in December after a contentious trial in which the judge dropped one of the two charges against him while the jury was deliberating, a controversial decision put an asterisk on his acquittal. The right-wing media rejoiced, and soon after, he accompanied Donald Trump to the annual Army v. Navy football game.
When Penny was hired by Andreessen-Horowitz, the firm wrote in a note to employees that he’d “acted with courage” when he snuck up behind Neely and crushed his windpipe, and that the firm would teach him about investing once he joins its “American Dynamism” unit. They could make no argument that he offered anything but intangibles, including admirers on the right who are just a little too self-conscious to embrace Kyle Rittenhouse.
A movement of big stupid babies
In one recent rant to civil rights icon Jordan Peterson, Andreessen went off for close to 10 minutes about why pressure to employ a diverse workforce led to total chaos across his businesses and a decline in productivity.
“Any performance metrics are just totally out the window because you just have to promote everybody identically and that's sort of the slide into the complete removal of merit from the system,” Andreessen, who just made a former architecture student best known for killing a Black guy as the newest employee of his DEI-free tech investment firm, complained.
Andreessen, a man worth around $2 billion and owner of $255 million worth of property and mega-mansions in Malibu, has been complaining about this particular hardship for a while now, citing it in various interviews about his radicalization to conservatism.
DEI, in his conception of reality, is a government-enforced mandate on captains of industry like himself, who were for many decades lauded for their heroic contributions to humanity but over the past decade suddenly turned on by young communists and a radical liberal government. Here’s how he summed it up in a recent New York Times interview, during which he also repeatedly insisted that his and other CEOs’ number one concern was “being a good person.”
My only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq…
You also have a family. And if your kids are in college, I mean, God help you, they’re coming for you. Then you’ve got your radicalized employee base, and you maybe could have nipped the radicalization five years earlier, but now you can’t, because it’s now 80 percent of your work force.
By the way, you also have your shareholders, and this is where things get really bananas. A big part of the tipping point was when the major shareholders turned and became political activists.
So you’re in this sandwich from all of your constituents, and then you’ve got the press coming at you. You’ve got the activists coming at you, and then you’ve got the [federal] government coming at you
Like so many Trump supporters, Andreessen was driven by social grievance, at the core of which was the devastating reality that after a lifetime of operating with impunity and being treated like a hero, he was suddenly expected to listen to other people and navigate shifts in society.
No longer were the young employees at his firms eager to work for 20 hours at a time and ignore the social consequences of their work. Instead of being tapped for fundraisers and given tax breaks by the government, Andreessen was confronted with regulators who told him that perhaps his latest project (A.I.) might not be good for the planet and accept that there needed to be guardrails. He also faced the prospect of the government regulating cryptocurrency, which meant that he was no longer being allowed to fully manipulate the economy for his own benefit. Worst of all, his own children had developed minds of their own!
Feel the hater flow through you
Instead of even begrudgingly acknowledging the changing tide, Andreessen got bitter and deployed his mammoth wealth in service of electing Donald Trump. And once he did that, he embraced the malevolence that so frequently accompanies that conversion.
For as reasonable and measured as he wants to present himself, Andreessen has been deliriously giddy since Trump’s victory, posting supernaturally unfunny “comedy” “sketches” about DEI, woke, and people who don’t have his privileges.
I don’t really care what Marc Andreessen stews over while nursing the emotional wounds that come having to listen to young people, and I certainly don’t care about who works at his company. What does stick with me, though, is the callousness and cravenness of hiring the comically unqualified Daniel Penny at his high-powered tech firm.
Whether you believe that Penny should have been found guilty or that he really was acting in defense of others and technically wasn’t at fault, tens of millions of people saw him choke Jordan Neely to death on video. They saw this unfazed young man squeeze the life out of an unwell fellow New Yorker as other passengers begged him to stop. Daniel Penny is the latest avatar of the delusion that conservatives are persecuted, and more quietly, that white people are the real victims in our new culture.
It’s not that I ever thought was actually a good person — this is a supposed avowed YIMBY who has fought tooth and nail to keep multi-family housing away from his mansion in the ultra-expensive town of Atherton, and is one of the major donors behind California Forever. But after more than two decades of the media presenting him as a thoughtful and accessible leader, I thought Andreessen might be smart enough to keep his support for Trump limited to campaign checks and vague business reasons once he got what he wanted.
Before this election, no company that occupied a semi-respectable place in society would want to be associated with Daniel Penny, much less leak the news of his hiring to Bari Weiss, who operates the world’s leading publication for rich people with contrived senses of victimhood. What Andreessen is doing is exalting in the total lack of public standards and the death of shame, displaying just how people like him are so insecure that without universal praise, they declare war on the world.
Trump’s victory has allowed the monsters to crawl out from inside the walls and from behind the masks, to embrace what right now feels like pure lawlessness. Assuming the federal government doesn’t collapse entirely, these kinds of people will try to buy their way back to respectability. Don’t let them.
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we need a tax strike! Stop with-holding your taxes. Apply for an extension for this year. Call your Senators/Rep. and tell them you will not pay taxes until Musk and his baby storm troopers are arrested and prosecuted for their crimes.
Interesting it does not occur to them that people are rising up because they are greedy assholes …hmmm