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4 hours ago
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Oh, my Doge
Say what you like about the Trump administration – it’s got big balls. Unfortunately, I mean this quite literally: a 19-year-old called Edward Coristine, whose online history includes a LinkedIn account where he called himself “bigballs”, appears to be one of our unelected overlords.
Coristine, as you may have guessed, is part of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge). A more accurate name for Doge would be the “department of doing whatever the hell Elon feels like with zero regard for the law”, but then its acronym wouldn’t be a silly meme from the 2010s that makes Musk chuckle. (The truest thing that has ever been said about the South African billionaire is a tweet noting “elon musk is like if the ghost of a 19th century oil baron and a 14-year-old who died in 2012 possessed the same body”.)
The devil works hard, but Doge has been working even harder. The Trump-Musk administration has been in power for less than a month and the group has already reshaped the government. It has slashed contracts related to diversity, equity and inclusion and declared war on USAid. In an extremely concerning move, it has also been granted access to the federal payment system. This means Musk and his crew have access to the sensitive personal data of millions of Americans as well as information about public contractors who compete with Musk’s businesses.
Until recently, it wasn’t exactly clear who, apart from Musk, was involved in Doge. Last weekend, Wired broke the news that it is staffed by exactly who you’d expect: a ragtag crew of people whose main qualification appears to be the fact that they worship the ground Musk walks on. Wired identified six young men, between the ages of 19 and 24, with little government experience, who are now playing critical roles in Doge.
“What we’re seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told Wired. “We really have very little eyes on what’s going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what’s happening because these aren’t really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”
The young Musketeers, who apparently have your personal information at their fingertips, aren’t just inexperienced – they appear completely unqualified. In a normal administration, it’s highly unlikely they would have passed the background checks typically needed to get security clearances. On Thursday, Wired (which has been doing brilliant reporting on Doge) noted that Coristine (AKA “big balls”) founded a company called Tesla.Sexy LLC in 2021, which controls at least two Russian-registered domains. Normally, this would be a red flag in a security-clearance review. Coristine has also been linked to a Telegram channel focused on distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyberattacks. Again, this is a guy who may have access to your social security number.
Coristine isn’t the only Doge worker to be in the spotlight this week. Marko Elez, 25, has already resigned because a number of racist posts he made last year were made public. Elez, who has worked for Musk’s SpaceX, tweeted things like: “I was racist before it was cool”, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and “normalize Indian hate”.
I’m not sure why Elez resigned – in our brave new world, bigotry tends to get you hired rather than fired – but his time-out was pretty short: he was reinstated by Musk on Friday, who declared that “to err is human, to forgive divine”. JD Vance (whose wife and kids are Indian American) also tweeted in support of Marko “normalize Indian hate” Elez.
Meanwhile, it looks like Doge is gearing up to take on even more work. On Wednesday, Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation (and former reality TV star) tweeted: “Big News - Talked to the DOGE team. They are going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.”
What does this mean? Well, it seems to mean that Musk and his band of little boys, most of whom can’t rent a car in the US without paying the “under 25” fee, have now put themselves in charge of making safety upgrades to the air-traffic-control system. Are they even allowed to do this? It’s unclear. What is clear, however, is that Trump and Musk seem to think they have the power to do whatever they like now – and the spineless Democrats certainly don’t seem to have what it takes to stop them. Nor do there seem to be many inbuilt safeguards stopping Trump and Musk from de-railing democracy. The US would be fine, we were repeatedly told in 2016 at the start of Trump 1.0, because the country has inbuilt checks and balances. Some people still seem to be holding on to that idea – all the while the checks seem to be going straight to Musk and the only balances that seem to matter are those of the Maga crowd’s bank accounts.
Hundreds of women raped and burned to death after Goma prison set on fire
A horrendous story that comes shortly after a UN expert said sexual violence was being used as a weapon of war by rival armed groups in the Congolese city of Goma. The conflict is, the Guardian has noted, “a disaster with many makers”. But many analysts believe Rwanda is backing rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo because it wants to seize territory rich with valuable minerals used for smartphones and electric vehicles. The EU signed a strategic minerals deal with Rwanda last year, and is now being urged to reconsider the partnership.
School named after Prince Andrew will rebrand
It’s not a great look when your school is named after a man who palled around with a convicted pedophile. The school, located on the remote British overseas territory of St Helena, is now looking for a more “neutral” name.
Female prisoners in England banned from putting their underwear in washing machines
A survey of women in prisons in England found that “astonishing gaps” in basic services are making it hard for the women to cope. There’s a bizarre ban on using washing machines for underwear, strict time-limits on contact with children and a lack of prison clothing designed for women. The Guardian notes that “across women’s prisons, the self-harm rate is 5,785 incidents per 1,000 prisoners, which was more than eight times higher than in men’s prisons”.
Searches for ‘abortion’ on CDC website prompt suggestion to look up ‘adoption’
Reproductive health workers told the Hill the change was a “clear attempt” to shift how conversations around pregnancy are approached.
It’s Bisan and she’s back in Gaza
Beware: this video from the unbelievably brave Bisan may make you cry.
NFL star Jalen Hurts explains why he has an all-female management team
I know absolutely nothing about football, but since I live in Philly I am legally obliged to support the Eagles (go, Birds!). Not only do they have a Princess Diana-approved colour scheme, they have a pretty great quarterback. Jalen Hurts has an all-female management team because he’s a fan of meritocracy. “It’s something that happened organically,” Hurts has said. “I was seeking out the best, and that’s how it happened. And honestly, it’s an eye that I don’t have that I’m able to lean on in certain situations. That’s something I value heavily.”
The week in pawtriarchy
An Italian doctor is under investigation after taking his cat for a Cat scan before giving her a life-saving operation. The cat is fine now but the doctor is facing charges of wasting public money. Methinks the authorities are being a little bit petty.
