Queen of LOL wut, Goddess of Nomenklatura, High Matriarch of All Banality

“If the federal government is no longer run by civil servants fulfilling laws passed by Congress, then its interests might seriously diverge from yours.” This is a real sentence, written by a real human in a real publication. The federal government is run by civil servants, which is morally and politically proper. The Article II power is the bureaucracy, full stop. They are the highest and final authority. Try to guess who wrote that sentence before you scroll down, and where it was published, because I think it’s a pretty easy guess.

—

—

—

Did you guess? Let’s check your answer:

At The Atlantic, middlebrow heroine Anne Applebaum warns that Donald Trump is engaged in “regime change,” launching a coup d’etat against the true United States government.

This is museum-quality “do you hear yourself?” writing. Nut graf: “DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.”

America’s government is the civil service, full stop. The President of the United States is not to interfere with it. Government employees run the country, but now a new administration is shamefully trying to change our historically ordained political system: “The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service.”

In Anne Applebaum’s moral universe, civil servants are the camera’s eye: morally neutral, seeing only what’s there, relentlessly rational and analytical. The civil service is “supposed to measure objective reality,” and “maintain political neutrality.” They’re the umpire class, calling balls and strikes without regard to their own values.

And so, because they are utterly incorruptible and relentlessly grounded in a rigidly neutral system of pure empiricism, the bureaucracy is to be honored as the highest authority, the pure and essential Mandarin instrument. As I keep saying, show me that in the Constitution.

Applebaum, writing to the standard at The Atlantic, doesn’t toss evidence aside lightly — she hurls it with great force. Here’s her comparison to what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE: “Musk and others used a similar approach during the so-called Twitter Files scandal to discredit researchers and mischaracterize their work.” Why was the Twitter files scandal “so-called,” and how did it mischaracterize evidence? She is Anne Applebaum — she forgets to mention those parts. There is a significant cultural development that she didn’t like, so it is invalid, and may be presumptively discarded. So she’s arguing for the merits of a system that is “grounded in objective reality,” but she categorically rejects any piece of evidence that she merely dislikes. It’s very very difficult to be this obtuse, but this is an easy layup for her. She is a miracle.

At the same moment, at the same publication, David Frum explains “Why the COVID Deniers Won.” Again, this piece is a miracle. I would not have believed that human beings could hear themselves this little. Here, let David Frum explain the pandemic to you:

Why did so many Americans resist vaccines? Perhaps the biggest reason was that the pandemic coincided with a presidential-election year, and Trump instantly recognized the crisis as a threat to his chances for reelection. He responded by denying the seriousness of the pandemic, promising that the disease would rapidly disappear on its own, and promoting quack cures.

The COVID‑19 vaccines were developed while Trump was president. They could have been advertised as a Trump achievement. But by the time they became widely available, Trump was out of office. His supporters had already made up their minds to distrust the public-health authorities that promoted the vaccines. Now they had an additional incentive: Any benefit from vaccination would redound to Trump’s successor, Joe Biden. Vaccine rejection became a badge of group loyalty, one that ultimately cost many lives.

Trump minimized the disease, so Trump supporters chose vaccine denial as “a badge of group loyalty,” proudly dying for their Orange Hitler. A challenge: find the way Frum supports this claim. Find the evidence he uses.

He does this over and over again: [X] is true, because he said so. He’s almost magically averse to mere evidence, an artifact from the realm of little minds. No mention is made of the arguments that convinced me to not get mRNA injections — arguments from people like Ryan Cole and Peter McCullough. No mention is made of people like Peter Hotez warning against rushed vaccine development, then turning on a narrative dime to insist that vaccines couldn’t be unsafe. No mention is made of the scientific evidence that declining mRNA injections was a wise choice.

Frum is an Applebaumian writer, by which I mean that he sucks. He doesn’t even lie well enough to fool anybody who doesn’t want to be fooled. This may be the entire function of The Atlantic, which might as well be an elaborate prank. Imagine a meeting with all of this magazine’s writers and editors in one room — the moral and intellectual fog might actually be fatal to anyone who hasn’t built up a tolerance with decades of middlebrow narrative compliance.

But anyway, the President of the United States isn’t obeying the GS-10s, so we’re living through regime change. Imagine being this stupid.