Toxic Work Atmosphere

You know vaguely, if you're like me, about the DOGEboys who have been uploading huge amounts of data from the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and voter data from some states, and dumping it all into a "data lake" of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Servces at the Department of Homeland Security, where they keep records of interactions between immigrants and the USCIS, information that agencies like ICE, if they wanted to commit serious violations of the governments's privacy rules, could put together and use (for one thing) to geolocate undocumented immigrants and hunt them down, and you've probably heard vaguely about this week's whistleblower complaint from Charles Borges, chief information officer of the SSA, documenting how Social Security data had been illegally uploaded to a cloud server where it could possibly be hacked by who knows what kind of reprobates, though not necessarily any more malign than the Boys who are seemingly authorized to collect it.

Borges has now resigned, and it was his letter that got my attention; it was an "involuntary resignation", he said:

After reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens' most sensitive personal data, I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable....

I have been made aware of several projects and incidents which may constitute violations of federal statutes or regulations, involve the potential safety and security of high value data assets in the cloud, possibly provided unauthorized or inappropriate access to agency enterprise data storage solutions, and may involve unauthorized data exchange with other agencies. As these events evolved, newly installed leadership in IT and executive offices created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction. Executives and employees are afraid to share information or concerns on questionable activities for fear of retribution or termination, and repeated requests by me for visibility into these events have been rebuffed or ignored by agency leadership, with some employees directed not to reply to my queries.

We've seen bunches of resignation letters showing up on social media in recent years, in a pretty regular format ("it has been my honor..."). I've never seen anything like this before. This is the trauma Christian nationalist Russell Vought said last year he wanted to inflict on "the bureaucrats" 

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

and which he is now overseeing as head of the Office of Management and Budget and Elon Musk's replacement as unofficial leader of DOGE; he and the Boys are the newly installed leadership to which the letter refers, along with whoever he has managed to hire in the quest formerly known as Schedule F to replace qualified civil servants with certified Trump loyalists—

As Thousands Jeer

 

Via ABC News.

Via Axios:

Trump signed an executive order Monday that puts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in charge of training a specialized National Guard unit dedicated to "ensuring public safety" in D.C.

• "They say: 'We don't need him. Freedom, freedom, he's a dictator,'" Trump said at a White House event, suggesting deploying the National Guard in Chicago next.
• "A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator," Trump added. "I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person."

There's something there I don't think he's done before, and it's at least a little spooky. Nobody comes out and says, "Hi, I'm Donald and I'll be your dictator tonight." When Trump was saying during the campaign that he was going to be a dictator but only on Day 1, to "close the border and drill, baby, drill", it was reasonable to understand him as joking, or whatever that thing is he does when we're expected not to take him literally, because that's not how you apply for the job, in the first place.

You never announce your intention to be a dictator if that's your plan: you get some simulacrum of the vox populi to ask you to be the dictator and turn them down. Caesar got Antony to offer him a golden diadem three times at the Lupercalia (the Carnival-type festival held on the Ides of February) of 44 B.C.E., according to Plutarch, and he said no each time, understanding that the Senate and People of the city had absolutely rejected kingship centuries earlier, but he had already accepted an offer (from Antony's colleague Lepidus) of the official dictatorship in 49, which he held for just 11 days, long enough to stage an election making him one of that year's consuls, and was subsequently reappointed another 3 times, until his appointment early in 44 as dictator perpetuo, dictator in perpetuity, the thing that decided Brutus and Cassius and the other conspirators that they had to kill him right away, a month after the Lupercalia, on the Ides of March. Caesar's rejection of the golden diadem hadn't impressed them.

Anyway, that's what Trump is doing in the Axios story, "A lot of people are saying we like a dictator." He's saying I don't want it, but maybe you should make me an offer, because I am extremely qualified, by gender and sense both common and uncommon. That's the conventional way to put in your application.

Speaking of Farces

The secret of his success is that it's a secret.

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) August 17, 2025 at 4:23 PM

Speaking of farces, there's a story about the origins of the Trump-Putin Alaska summit that started circulating a week or so ago in the German tabloid Bild: in Steve Witkoff's August 6 meeting with Putin, he came away with the impression that Putin was proposing to have Russian troops "peacefully withdraw" from the territories they've partly occupied in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as part of a ceasefire agreement, in return for Ukraine leaving Russia in control of some territory they had held since 2014, maybe Donetsk: this would be the basis of Trump's claim on August 8 that there would "be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both."

Needless to say, this was not on offer; the best guess is that Putin said the Ukrainian troops could "withdraw peacefully" from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and the Russians wouldn't attack them as they left, and Witkoff heard it wrong. By the time Trump spoke on the 8th (one of his deadline days for dealing out the "consequences" that Putin was supposed to suffer if he failed to agree to a ceasefire), Witkoff had spoken with European officials that morning and understood that he'd been mistaken and there was no chance of a deal, but the invitations had already gone out and been announced on Russian media. 

But it's not clear that anybody told Trump about that; he went through with plans for a festive breakthrough meeting in Anchorage, with the red carpet and military flyover, the tête-à-tête meeting between the two with only interpreters present (first time since Helsinki!), the luncheon "in honor of his excellency President Putin", and a nice tchotchke for the Russian leader, the "desk statue" of a bald eagle, and schedule featuring three Trump interviews for Fox News.

Farces All the Way Back

The always worth reading Greg Olear had a fine post up working critically through some of the classic definitions of fascism and coming to his own kind of diagnostic approach that can be applied to the ongoing emergency—which I might want to get back to at some point. But the thing that has me triggered at the moment is a minor quibble with a point that isn't even from Olear, but rather from a quotation he offers of Umberto Eco, the great semiotician, feuilletoniste, and novelist, in his own 1995 essay on "Ur-Fascism":

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing — far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.

I would maintain that the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country was that of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the first president of the Second French Republic, who got himself elected following the decidedly leftist Revolution of 1848, having made something of a leftist name for himself (as the author of a treatise calling for the "extinction of poverty" and the instigator of a number of anti-royalist coup attempts against the "roi citoyen" Louis Philippe), under the political aegis of his dead but still revolutionary uncle Napoléon, Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 or 1815, depending how you count; but in his presidential campaign quickly aligned himself against liberals, socialists, and radicals with the rightmost faction, of Adophe Thiers ("who believed he could be the most easily controlled," sound familiar?) and Victor Hugo, not yet the heroically progressive author of Les Misérables; and after the election, ordered an expeditionary force sent by the National Assembly to Rome to support the republicans under Mazzini and Garibaldi, to support the Pope instead.

And then, in 1852, about to be term-limited out of office by the Second Republic constitution, staged his own auto-golpe, naming himself Emperor Napoléon III (on the silly claim that the first Napoléon's son, the Duc de Reichstadt, had in fact been the Emperor Napoléon II), prompting Hugo to flee into exile in the Channel Islands (first Jersey, then Guernsey), and to refer thereafter to the newly minted Emperor as Napoléon the Little, and the occasion for Karl Marx's famous maxim according to which history always repeats itself, first time as tragedy (with the first Napoléon) and second time ( with the third) as farce.

I had a dream about this once, I'm not kidding, which I've never figured out a way to use, though it's maybe the best dream I've ever had from a literary point of view: not a dramatic dream about things happening, but a narrative dream about telling a joke, which I was either telling or listening to, which I now remember something like this:

Kashy Patel and the Room of Requirement

 

Hogwarts Level 7, with the Room of Requirement, by mvm5600/DeviantArt. 

Had a weird sighting of FBI director Kash Patel a week or so ago, in The New Republic:

Sources told Fox News Digital Wednesday that FBI Director Kash Patel had discovered multiple burn bags filled with sensitive documents stashed away in a secret room at the agency.

Stashed away in a what? The TNR writer flatly called it nothing but a "far-fetched attempt to distract from the president's ties to the alleged sex trafficker" Jeffrey Epstein, and moved on to making fun of Trump for talking about Epstein anyway, in response to a press question about Patel's discovery, but my impression was that he thought Epstein was really what the question was about:

“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable I think it will be shown and it should be shown, and I think [Patel] feels that way, and I think Pam feels that way,” Trump said....“But it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it’s great. I think it’s really great. The whole thing is a scam...”   

I think Trump doesn't, or didn't, know about Patel's secret room. Or at least didn't know enough to expect a question about it at the presser. I suspect it's a bit of Patellerie of a kind we've wondered about before that he hasn't seen a particular need for Trump to know about (yet), because it's not quite ripe. There are a lot of things Trump doesn't need to know about, like the outcome of the dinner with Bondi and Patel that was supposed to take place at the vice president's office to discuss the Epstein matter (publicity drove the dinner to the White House instead, but there's still no indication the president showed up for it). Patel has tried the story out, though, according to the New York Post version of the story, sometime in late June, on the Joe Rogan show:

 “When I first got to the bureau, [I] found a room that [former FBI Director James] Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building, full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of,” he said. “They [l]ocked the key and hid access and just said, ‘No one’s ever gonna find this place.'”

That's a fascinating detail about the hard drives. Is that going to be where the Hunter Biden laptop ended up? But the crown jewel of this chamber of secrets according to The Post is something else:

Total Victory

Satellite image by Planet Labs, food aid convoy in southern Gaza, via The New York Times.

This paragraph has been hanging out in the tabs for a few days already, but it's getting more bothersome as time goes by. From Tom Friedman:

This is the first Israeli-Palestinian war where the worst leaders on both sides are calling all the shots. The moderate Israeli opposition parties and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have no influence. And that is why I cannot tell you how or when it will end. Because Netanyahu still insists on “total victory” over Hamas, which he will never achieve, and the Hamas leadership still insists on surviving this war in order to still control Gaza the morning after, which it does not deserve.

Well, wait a minute, Tom. Not disagreeing with the basic premise that the Netanyahu coalition and the Hamas thing are the worst, as bad as political leadership gets, but "insisting on surviving this war" is not a good illustration of how bad the latter are. It's not crazy if they don't like a deal where they let go of the hostages and then IDF kills them all, which is why they keep insisting that the release of the hostages must  be accompanied by the end of the war. You may well feel that death is what they deserve, but it's not surprising that they feel different. This is actually normal. Good people and bad people alike object to being killed. You can bothsiderize the parties on some parameters but rejecting peace is not one of them.

Another Casualty of the War on Reality

Via 5 Calls Civic Action.

There's a hint of rationality in Trump's violent reaction to the July jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when he accused the BLS of "rigging" the numbers in an attempt to harm him ("ME"), and abruptly fired the commissioner, Erika McEntarfer:

Though the history is virtually all fiction: the October 2024 jobs report, issued two days before the election on November 1, was dismal for the Democrats, counting just 12,000 new jobs for the month, effectively zero, and a downward revision of 112,000 jobs to the August and September numbers; there was no report issued on November 15 (it always comes out on the first Friday of the new month); and in the next report, issued on December 6, listed a gangbusters gain for November of 227,000 jobs and significant upward revisions of 56,000 for September and October—so if it was rigged to affect the presidential election it must have been rigged against the Harris campaign and in Trump's favor. (Of course it wasn't rigged at all.) The 818,000-job downward revision referred to in the "Truth" was announced in August 2024, well before the election, and covered the previous 12 months, so that would have favored Trump too. Has anybody but me bothered to check any of this out? 

More Spaghetti on the Wall

This, discovered by @plankysmith.bsky.social, took me aback. What? Who makes fun of weeping police officers? Why would he do something like that? We all have our issues with NYPD, but that just sounds gratuitously mean. Leave the poor guy alone, you know. Who knows what he might have been through, what violence he might have witnessed, what pain he might have been forced to inflict, what sufferings he might have endured in his private life? A policeman's lot is not a happy one! (Happy one!) As a general rule.

And it's not like the Zohran we've come to know and love! Funny, but never cruel, and more likely to laugh at himself than some defenseless third party. What's up with this?

And then the other thing was that nobody seemed to know,  or even to be interested. Planky, and Roy Edroso, mocked the story from a literary standpoint, as it well deserved, but the Bluesky commentators mostly seemed to be most interested in denouncing Politico's morals and those of its right-wing German owner, which was understandable, but not very informative, while at the ci-devant Twitter, they just denounced Zohran, and nobody was wondering what had happened:

And finally, long story short, Mamdani's original tweet, to which Politico helpfully linked, didn't seem very informative either:

Umm what pic.twitter.com/DhIcZxOQRb

— Timbo (@TimboNotes) July 29, 2025

At least until you looked at the timestamp, which was pretty clarifying. Mikey had observed the troubled officer shortly before noon on November 7, 2020; Zohran offered his gnomic comment just an hour later. What was November 7, 2020? Four days after the 2020 election, and the day enough of the absentee ballots had been counted that the media outlets were able to call it for Joe Biden, which they did around 11:30 AM.

In other words, that cop wasn't upset because he'd seen somebody getting shot, or had to make a difficult arrest, or gotten a breakup text from a girlfriend, he was overcome with grief because he had just learned that Trump had lost. Or that's how Mikey evidently saw it. And how is that not funny? And how is Zohran's remark "mocking a crying cop"? (Whoever the cop was, it's totally unlikely he ever saw the tweets, let alone had his feelings hurt.) If you were scrolling a lot that afternoon you'd get what it was about, but by the next morning its meaningfulness had to be reconstructed out of the metadata, as I just did. I still don't really know myself what Zohran exactly meant, either, I may as well admit.

There's a lesson there, I think, on the current media climate: that it's not just vicious, but also profoundly stupid. Axel Springer Politico's purpose, no doubt, is to make trouble for Mamdani, not even necessarily to get Andrew Cuomo or whomever elected, just to make things difficult for the Democratic nominee, maybe focusing on trouble with the NYPD, which is kind of a given for a New York mayor of the progressive or left variety, given how right-wing the cops are especially in the upper echelons—remember how fraught the relationship was with de Blasio. I wouldn't be surprised if Politico was explicitly dredging the data for examples: feeding Mamdani's Twitter feed into the chatbot and asking it to find instances of him disrespecting the police, and this is what it came up with.

But they didn't have any clear idea what it might actually mean,  and weren't curious enough to try to find out. They didn't quote it in the article, or describe it to any degree, just linked it and hoped for the best, that the right people would accept that it was a real scandal without looking into it too closely, and that's pretty much what they got—though it's less a proper scandal than more spaghetti on the wall. But you can't learn anything from it if you don't look at it a little more closely, and that wall is getting really fithy. It's just more moral denunciation, all the damn time.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.