Subhed of the Day

None of This Would Have Been Legal If They’d Sent Competent Adults. But the Fact That They Sent Smirking Little Sh%$s Makes It So Much Worse.

—Liz Dye at Law and Chaos, describing how the DOGE bros comported themselves when forced into sworn depositions. (%$ mine) 

Yeah, these smirking assholes make it much worse.  (BTW, the hed is, "DOGE Bros Had More Fun Burning Down Government Than Testifying About It."

In the spring of 2025, the Elon Musk’s DOGE slashed and burned through various congressionally-created and -funded federal agencies, systematically destroying them as part of an effort to … well, who the hell knows. Something-something deficit. Blahblahblah waste, fraud, and abuse. Eradicate DEI!

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On March 12, the code monkeys descended on the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent agency established by Congress in 1965 to “foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”

Which is a little on the nose, to be honest.

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None of that interested Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, the 20-something tech bros dispatched to raze the agency. They’d never worked in government or the humanities, and they didn’t know didn’t know the First Amendment from the Administrative Procedure Act.

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Fox and Cavanaugh instructed NEH staff to rate the agency’s active grants for the presence of DEI, “gender ideology,” and “environmental justice.” When this failed to yield enough cuts, Fox and Cavanaugh turned to ChatGPT, feeding it the database of grants and instructing it to flag anything that relates to DEI.

A $349,000 grant to replace the HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina was DEI because, according to ChatGPT, it “enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences.” A documentary about the Colfax Massacre — the 1873 slaughter of Black Louisiana freedmen, one of the bloodiest atrocities of Reconstruction — was canceled “because it focuses on exclusively anti-Black violence, which is a race.” A project to digitize local newspaper archives was nixed because digital accessibility “aligns with DEI goals of inclusivity and representation.” A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust was flagged as DEI because it focused on gender and religious oppression.

In short, every bit scholarship or art involving anyone who wasn’t white, male, and able was cut.

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If all this sounds wildly illegal, that’s because it is.

I really hope that the DOGE Bros get prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law, and that they then get sent to a Federal PMITA prison.