Friday Round Up! 1/31/25

Yes, it's a coup.

OK, deep breath. A lot has happened in this past week, too much to digest or make sense of, at once. The tragic plane crash at Reagan National Airport has also hijacked the news cycle, helping to obscure the rapid dismantling of our government bureaucracy in D.C. taking place as I write.

To this end, I have added a new section to my Substack, called “The Nerd Reich.” Yes, it is tongue-in-cheek but I needed to find a way to balance the ramifications of this political moment with the absurdity of who is actually executing it. (For more, see the recommended reading by Garret Graff, below.) Until now my Round Ups have been under the tab called “Indictment Watch” — you can still find older Round Ups there, but I think it’s pretty obvious that there aren’t going to be many indictments to watch anymore (at least not any legitimate ones — let’s only hope that the “enemies” who get targeted will actually get due process and not tried in a kangaroo court in the middle of a soccer stadium). So beginning with this post, future Round Ups, as well as posts analyzing the hostile takeover of our democratic institutions, will be found under The Nerd Reich tab.

So let’s turn to it. Right now there are too many rapid-fire actions being taken, which is the point - it’s a blitzkrieg designed to overwhelm and disorient you, the citizen, as well as our legislators or anyone else who might have any power to stop or slow it down. I think there are three big “buckets” that we can put these actions into, which may be helpful as an organizing principle:

1. The purging of civil servants and “hollowing out” of democratic institutions, in order to eliminate and/or privatize large swaths of government, or to create space for them to be filled with loyalists. This is happening at every executive branch agency, but most alarmingly (that’s a relative term) at the Justice Department and FBI

2. An attempt to create the infrastructure to assert police and military authority over people within the United States, including, potentially, American citizens. This is happening with the designation of the U.S. facilities at Guantanamo Bay as a “detention facility” (a.k.a. concentration camp) for those seized in the raids and round ups of migrants currently occurring across the country. Simultaneously, the Justice Department is ordering rank-and-file prosecutors to the border, which seems like an unusual move until you notice that immigration is being characterized as a “terrorist attack,” which is important legally as “terrorism” triggers a number of standby executive branch authorities that allow increased government powers that can be used against American citizens, including surveillance and detention, and possibly military actions.

3. I’m not sure even how to describe the third bucket, because it is so extraordinary that it’s not clear to me that our legal system has a way to address it. This bucket includes the apparent takeover by Elon Musk — an unelected individual, and foreign national — of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and, it seems, the sensitive payments systems at the Treasury Department, which gives him single-handed control over the financial levers of our government as well as the personal data of millions of Americans.

In the coming days, I will write pieces detailing what is happening in each of these buckets and the potential consequences of these actions. It is unfortunate that our mainstream media appears unequipped to cover these above buckets in the way that they deserve, considering that any one of them standing alone would constitute a full-blown constitutional crisis (last I checked they are still interviewing the families of the figure skaters killed in the plane crash). Our legislators, as well, are not rising up to meet the urgency of this moment. However, I believe that we, the People, still have agency and I will report on actions steps each person can and should take in the coming days, weeks and months. The most important thing is: Don’t panic.

In the meantime, here is my and Renato’s pod from last week, which focuses on the operationalization of Bucket #2:

Articles worth reading this week:

• This piece by Garrett Graff on how developments this week would be covered if they were happening in a foreign country

• My interview with

  The Contrarian
  on what can happen to the FBI and the intelligence community under Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard

  Upcoming events:

• NEW! Zoom Office Hours on Tuesday, February 11, at 6 p.m. ET. We’ll discuss actions steps and responses to what is happening. Zoom link will be sent three hours before the discussion. This will not be recorded.

• Freedom Academy Book Club, Date/Time TBA (sometime in March). I’m so excited that the Freedom Academy Book Club selection for this quarter is Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History by Ben Mezrich. You are likely already familiar with Ben’s work, as his book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook was the basis for the hit movie The Social Network, and his more recent book, The Antisocial Network, was the basis for the hit movie Dumb Money. I am fortunate to get to hang with Ben and his wife, Tonya, up in Quechee, Vermont, and we are very lucky to have him join us (sometime in March) to discuss Elon, Twitter, social media, and billionaires more generally! (I am actually also reading his other book, Bitcoin Billionaires, because I’m now kind of obsessed with the rise of the broligarchs.) The Freedom Academy Book Club discussions are open to all paid subscribers and recordings of the talks are posted after in case you can’t make it live!

Hang in there, everyone — we will make it through this.