My Name Is Greg, and I Eat Paste

but please stop looking over there

Elon found the slush fund. Can a single week be a significant inflection point?

A DOGE-centered discussion has broken out around USAID, which suddenly has no website and an empty office as the Trump administration moves to shut it down. It’ll be a huge loss for America, because now who’ll fund the Ecuadoran drag queens and Peruvian trans comic books? When you crowdsource a “let’s dig through the funding database” effort, the discussion quickly becomes…interesting.

But the other interesting discussion is how much of American “foreign aid” leaks and spreads and passes through, leaving crumbs in the domestic NGOcracy and the narrative control apparatus. The single thing I’ve done here over and over again for several years is show how the “mainstream” news media, which hasn’t been in any way attached to the actual American mainstream for a long time, constantly fictionalizes in extraordinarily obvious ways. For a recent example, see my discussion a week ago about the New York Times and its urgent warning that Donald Trump is breaking with American political norms by using executive orders and hiring loyalists. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY, oh no.

My great recurring theme has been that we live in an information landscape of invented reality, fakes and misdirection and distraction and…steering. A whole lot of steering.

So.

Imagine spending $32 million on that. We’ve had a funded opposition, supported and rewarded for cutting trail in the preferred direction. How interesting to ponder the implications.

I’ve been writing about pieces of this problem for years, and wrote a long series of posts a couple-three years ago about the degree to which the National Science Foundation was funding leftist storytelling and institutional narrative control. See, for example:

Among the fascinating things to watch, this week, is the complete impotence of the Democratic opposition in the face of this informational juggernaut. There are dozens of easy examples to pull up, but this one is my favorite. This is a screenshot, but click the link to watch the whole amazing thing.

I’ve written about Greg Casar before, and he’s about a third of a Zoolander. But note that he talks here for a minute and a half without ever saying anything that sort of begins to kind of make any sense at all. Elon Musk is breaking down the federal government to sell it off. He’s going to…sell USAID? How? “Funding agency that pays for Ecuadoran drag queens, serious offers only.” He’s planning to market some FBI agents and laid-off assistant US attorneys? What on earth does it mean to claim that Elon Musk is going to sell off the United States government?

Note also how Casar warns America that the Trump administration is firing all the practitioners in the federal agencies, laying off the health care providers in USAID and dumping all the teachers in the Department of Education. I’ve asked him for a number on the last thing — how many teachers work in the federal Department of Education, how many classrooms do they staff, and how many children do they teach — but let’s not go on a hunger strike waiting for an answer. That was a Greg Casar joke, by the way.

So we’re experiencing an unusually significant burst of noticing, and the people who would prefer that we return to the condition of not-noticing don’t really seem to have an answer or a maneuver that will suit the purpose. I’d throw a party, but our living room is pretty small.