Focus on the Coup

Focus on the coup
 
Imagine if it had gone like this. 
Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”
Historically, that is what coups looked like. The center of power was a physical place. Occupying it, and driving out the people who held office, was to claim control. So if a cohort of armed men with odd symbols had stormed government buildings, Americans would have recognized that as a coup attempt. 
And that sort of coup attempt would have failed. 

[Timothy Snyder. Author of On Tyranny; Twenty Lessons from The Twentieth Century]
Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.
A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.
That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed.
In the third decade of the twenty first century, power is more digital than physical. The buildings and the human beings are there to protect the workings of the computers, and thus the workings of the government as a whole, in our case an (in principle) democratic government which is organized and bounded by a notion of individual rights.
The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights. 
In gaining data about us all, Musk has trampled on any notion of privacy and dignity, as well as on the explicit and implicit agreements made with our government when we pay our taxes or our student loans. And the possession of that data enables blackmail and further crimes.
In gaining the ability to stop payments by the Department of the Treasury, Musk would also make democracy meaningless. We vote for representatives in Congress, who pass laws that determine how our tax money is spent. If Musk has the power to halt this process at the level of payment, he can make laws meaningless. Which means, in turn, that Congress is meaningless, and our votes are meaningless, as is our citizenship.
https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/the-logic-of-destruction?
 
It is a coup.  Focus on the coup.
 
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS.  Feb. 5, 2025.

FEB 5
From the beginning, the idea has been to overwhelm you. To flood the zone, as Steve Bannon promised, with so much stuff that the media would not be able to process it in time—like a butcher saddled with too much meat for the throughput of a single grinder.
But you do not have to consent to being flooded. Do not participate in the fragmenting of your attention so far and so wide that you cannot prioritize, you cannot see bigger patterns, you cannot identify the merely unwise policies from the flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional ones.
Of all the things going on—including other baldly unlawful actions such as attempting to gut birthright citizenship and to fire people who did their jobs investigating insurrectionists—the single thing we should be most focused on right now, the first among equals of this corrupt and boorish new administration, is this:
The handing over of the keys to the American Republic by a mendacious president to a megalomaniacal oligarch. Elon Musk is a wealthy private citizen who, relatively late in the game, happened to become a Trump supporter when he saw which way the wind was blowing. Now he has burrowed his way into the bowels of the federal government and is waging what can only be called an anti-constitutional coup.
He is deep in the systems of the United States Treasury Department, including payment systems related to your taxes. He is within reach of the most sensitive and private information you have—information you may have always trusted was safe and should not trust anymore. He is rampaging through other federal agencies, claiming the authority to fire people. He has attempted to shut down the federal aid agency USAID, boasting of feeding it to the wood chipper.
There are now fevered speculations about where he and his young coder minions will go next: the Department of Labor? HR records of every federal employee?
What Musk is doing right now, along with Donald Trump—but also usurping Trump’s at least elected authority—is waging a coup against the Constitution of the United States. Undermining the basic distribution of power within the American constitutional order. Usurping the power of Congress for a private citizen who happens to be very rich.
You may have voted for whoever you voted for; you may have done so for whatever reasons you did. But surely the desire to be ruled by Elon Musk was not one of them.
https://open.substack.com/pub/anandwrites/p/icymi-focus-on-the-coup?