Do Something For Fuck's Sake

Democrats: have you considered something besides just posting through this?

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

If you’ve been following the news the past few days, you may have noticed a little development out of Washington: the entire federal government is being put through the shredder by a bunch of little boys.

That’s not really an exaggeration. As Wired reported on Sunday, six Elon Musk acolytes, some of them barely out of high school, have seized control of much of the government’s infrastructure:

WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.

The engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran.

[…]Already, Musk’s lackeys have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA), and have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, potentially allowing him access to a vast range of sensitive information about tens of millions of citizens, businesses, and more. On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The AP reported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material.

Did anyone vote for these children to infiltrate their lives like this? I’m guessing no. But that’s how things are going in Donald Trump’s America. His method appears to be a) terrorize trans people, immigrants, and anyone else who he thinks stands in the way of his fascist project, and b) let his people run a tank over every part of the government they don’t like (today, for instance, Musk announced that the administration is “shutting down USAID,” which is something they are absolutely not allowed to do unilaterally) while daring someone to stop them, or even to point out that what they’re doing is flagrantly illegal.

So, could somebody, at any level of the government, with any kind of influence, y’know, make some kind of stand about any of this? Or even try to? It doesn’t feel like a lot to ask for at this moment. And yet it appears beyond some of our most powerful Democratic politicians, who seem content to post through this whole thing rather than mount any kind of coherent opposition to either a fascist terror campaign against marginalized people or a wholesale takeover of the government by unelected maniacs, some of whom are, I stress again, random little boys.

Let’s take a depressing turn through some of the reactions to this mess from top Democratic senators, shall we? The common theme running through them is “hey it would be great if someone did something about this.” Memo to these people: you are someone! Do something for fuck’s sake!

Here’s a post from California’s Adam Schiff—a classic of the form, really.