He’s pretty transparent in his conflict of interest. He wants a SpaceX contract for a Mars mission. In the same tweet he said the ISS needs to be deorbited, he also said “let’s go to Mars instead!” This is him trying to make that happen. In a better world, this kind of blatant cronyism would be immediately punished.

You’d think it would be easy to avoid doing this, but watch as the MAGA scum come out of the woodwork to rush to the defense of another guy who totally didn’t mean it, honest.

No matter what, Musk will never ever eliminate 2 trillion in spending. I would bet every last dime I have that in 4 years he won’t even come close to that number. Reason? First, corruption within the government does not want to eliminate spending because then it makes it harder for them to skim off the top. Trump just filled the government with lickspittles and lackwits who have no scruples that would prevent them from engaging in behavior like taking bribes or embezzling funds. Second, special interest groups, and most notably the largest special interest group of them all - defense contractors, will absolutely whip their bought-and-paid-for congressional representatives into shape if Musk even goes near the defense budget, which is the majority of where the wasted tax dollars go anyway.

But it doesn’t matter that he won’t come close to that number, even when he cooks the books to make it looks like he’s saving 8 billion and not 8 million, he’ll just declare that any savings at all is still better than it was before even if he fell short of his laughably optimistic target. And the morons will eat it up and pat themselves on the back for gutting the government and exposing the nation’s most sensitive payment information to teenaged hackers.

The problem is that idiots are eating up these numbers. I have a few low information coworkers who just hear the stories about DOGE saving all this tax money on “wasteful” programs on right wing news outlets and are convinced, full stop. Now, they parrot all the information they hear and are “glad that someone is finally doing something about government waste”. They don’t look into whether or not the numbers that Elon Musk spits out are truthful, let alone whether or not those tax dollars were actually having a positive impact.

We live in a post-truth society, and the Republicans have been abusing the people’s willingness to give authority figured the benefit of the doubt. No amount of untruth can ruin their credibility, because all it takes is a tiny kernel of truth to make it seem like it wasn’t actually a lie.

Suggesting that this is RFK’s “best idea” implies that this set up addresses the problem of drug abuse better than existing established rehab programs.

If that’s what you think my post is saying, then I’m not sure how you came to that conclusion. His best idea is still a bad one, but it’s at least built on a foundation that has been proven to work, which is rehab. When I said it was his best idea, that wasn’t me praising him or implying that it would actually do anything more for drug addiction than current state sponsored or private rehab programs do. It’s just closer to hitting the mark than his other schemes would be to making Americans healthier.

Where exactly in my post did I say this solves the problem?

I could see someone who is addicted to hard drugs finding success with a program like this, and the phrase “if they want to” implies that going to one of these is voluntary and not compulsory, but the real question is once they are there, can they check themselves out at any time if they feel like the program isn’t working for them? Or did the government just trap them in a taxpayer funded insane asylum for the rest of their lives because they now won’t give them any psychiatric medication to help treat the antisocial symptoms?

Of all the RFK stuff I’ve heard about, this one seems like it would be his best idea and one that most liberals could get behind if it weren’t for his regressive views on psychiatric care. Getting people off drugs and back onto their feet should be a worthwhile societal goal. Getting people off of SSRIs and Adderall and other psych meds seems like it would be counterproductive.

I also don’t buy Crapple products either, but that’s a personal choice.

I stopped using everything Google. Fascist collaborators won’t get a dime of my money, won’t get my eyeballs on any of their ads, and won’t get a single kilobyte of data from me to sell for profit.

I’ll keep my gmail account open because all it really does is accumulate spam which probably costs them money.

Likewise, lol. A little friction keeps the chaff out.

Trump’s cult can’t coalesce around anyone but him. He’ll be a martyr, but sanity will be restored long enough to get some adults back in the room and rebuild the guardrails of democracy once more.

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Guarantee I’d be sabotaging shit on this side to help you guys win. Every sensible American loves our Canadian neighbors and respects their sovereignty.

It’s amazing how so much of our wealth is tied up in “assets” as opposed to liquid cash. I probably have just slightly less in assets than AOC at the moment, but I also don’t own a home, so if I ever managed to buy one my net worth would skyrocket beyond hers but I’d be housepoor and most likely living paycheck to paycheck. I’m not even close to being considered conventionally wealthy, and the distance between me and a billionaire is almost literally unfathomable.

That 500k net worth of hers isn’t sitting in a bank account waiting to be spent, moron.

We live in a country where black men gained the right to vote before any woman did.

Misogyny is the original prejudice.

His ethics disqualify him from taking the spot meant for a career neoliberal corporatist.

He didn’t build Tesla from scratch.

This guy is so fucking allergic to hurdles he pays other people to play video games for him so he can claim he’s in the top skill brackets.

Being rich does not make you smart, it just insulates you from the consequences of failure. A lot of really fucking stupid people also happen to be filthy rich. Elon Musk is no exception, regardless of the mythology people have built around him.

It appears to be real. The federal government is currently in the midst of the most comprehensive purge in the history of the nation, and many career civil servants are being asked to retire early with a severance “or else”. The worrying part should have come when Project 2025 laid out the groundwork for what is happening right at this very moment, back when it was first revealed. Trump intends to replace all of these government workers with yes-men and cronies who will be loyal to him and him alone, and not the constitution or the American people they are meant to serve. The damage being done right now will probably never be reversed in our lifetimes and will pave the way for absolute executive control - in other words, a dictatorship. This is not alarmist, this was the plan all along and nobody listened.

If you don’t have a plan to GTFO in case things get even worse, I would start making one right now. You have to set an uncrossable line yourself and be prepared to act on it, because other people are going to continue to go along with this until the very end, so you can’t count on other people to be giving you signals on when to bail out.

The main question I have is that I’ve been hearing from Americans for decades now how gun ownership means you have a 2nd amendment based militia ready to go to protect the constitution and yet in the face of what is completely obviously the initial stages of a coup, I see no signs of that militia. Where are you?

This was always posturing. It was a dumb fantasy invented by the right to mythologize the country’s origins, skew the intent of the framers, and most importantly, give them plausible deniability in the gun control debate.

If gun owners truly believed in the myth of the “people’s militia” being a necessary apparatus to prevent government oppression or tyranny, they would have picked up their rifles and stopped the insurrectionists attacking the capitol building on January 6th, 2021. A literal violent coup and they sat back and did nothing. No - worse than nothing, they agreed with the people trying to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power!

The idiot masses won’t stand up to tyranny with force or strength of arms, ever. The propaganda machine will convince Americans to shoot their neighbors long before they ever even think to shoot at their ruling class.