DAVID BROOKS, NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, I’m not sure it was wreckage. There was wreckage if you’re at NIH. There are wreckage at certain agencies, but the guy only saved $65 billion out of a multitrillion-dollar budget.
So, as a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven’t gotten over. And so there’s folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That’s true.
But according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That’s just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that’s 300,000 dead, and we’re four months in.
Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Tung, Stalin. We don’t have anybody on the list from America. And I don’t think it’s the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably by the end of this hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that’s Elon Musk’s legacy.
And the people who work at Tesla and SpaceX may want to think about that.
Welcome to the resistance you partisan fucking hack.
No shit right.
If it weren’t for the decades of sane washing liberal and conservative talking heads have offered the mind of bullshit narratives they push, none of this would have ever been able to be come established.
Did anyone think that wasn’t the plan? Survival Of The Fittest is basically bullshit, but it’s also the main driver of Conservative philosophy.
Well, it’s selfishness, but they frame it that way.
Survival of the fittest doesn’t meant the individual. I cannot build a barn by myself nearly as well as I can in a group. I cannot farm as easily alone as with a commune. The fittest are communal.
Hey David — if you’re so smart, do you have any idea how we got here?
“We don’t have anyone on the list from America.” [citation needed]
We don’t have anyone from America on that list because we only started counting after they massacred the native nations. It’s also harder to point to an individual who specifically was responsible as no one has absolute power there.
To what extent can the results be attributed to Musk vs Trump?
Sure, Musk’s DOGE was particularly incompetent, but was there any way of implementing Trump’s intended policies that wouldn’t have been similarly disastrous?
Trump vs Musk damages is a distinction without a difference. It’s like asking if either Hitler vs Himmler were more responsible for the Holocaust. At the end of the day they were the ones in power, they made the decisions, either had the power to stop, and they didn’t.
There’s a difference if Trump and his supporters use Musk as a scapegoat to distance themselves from the fallout.
