Within the first month of the new Trump administration, the federal government has already become nearly unrecognizable. Operating through the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been given carte blanche to wage war on every part of the government that stands in the way of the business and investment needs of the billionaire class.

ELON MUSK IS MAKING TECHNOFASCISM A REALITY BEFORE OUR EYES

Musk and DOGE are bulldozing the administrative state, and building a harrowing new reality for working people.

BY MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ

The ongoing attacks on the Treasury Department, the Department of Education, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are just the opening salvo of a broader, darker plan to remake American society and government to serve the interests of the largest corporations and most powerful oligarchs. On this week’s livestream, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez will speak with organizers of the emergency rally that took place on Monday outside of the CFPB building in Washington DC to protest the Trump administration’s moves to effectively shut down the agency. Then, we’ll speak with media critic and TRNN columnist Adam Johnson and tech critic Paris Marx about DOGE’s attacks on democracy, Musk’s agenda, and the grim future of technofascism materializing before us in real time.

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden, Adam Coley

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome to The Real News Network, and welcome back to our weekly livestream.

The Trump administration has effectively shut down the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the very agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage lending scandal. Since its creation, the CFPB has clawed back over $21 billion from Wall Street banks, credit card companies, and other predatory financial institutions for defrauded customers. Russell Vought, an unabashed Christian nationalist, founder of the far-right think tank the Center for Renewing America, a primary architect of Project 2025, and Donald Trump’s newly Senate-confirmed acting director of the CFPB, ordered all agency staff in an email Saturday to stop working and to not come into the office.

Hundreds of federal employees and protesters mobilized for an emergency rally in front of the CFPB headquarters near the White House in Washington DC on Monday. Democratic lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters spoke at the event, which was organized by progressive organizations Indivisible, the Progressive Change Institute, MoveOn, Americans for Financial Reform, and the National Treasury Employees Union Local 335, which represents CFPB workers.

Here’s Sen. Warren speaking to the crowd on Monday:

[CLIP BEGINS]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren:  This fight is about hardworking people versus the billionaires who want to squeeze more and more and more money. And now, now is our time to put a stop to this.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  On Tuesday night, just 24 hours after that demonstration, dozens of CFPB employees were notified over email that they had been fired. For his part, Elon Musk, richest man in the world and unelected head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, celebrated the shuttering of the agency, posting Sunday night on X, the platform that he owns, Musk wrote “CFPB RIP” accompanied by a tombstone emoji.

Now Musk, it should really be noted, has a big fat obvious conflict of interest here. Just last month, his site X announced a partnership with Visa to offer a real-time payment system on the platform. And yes, the CFPB would’ve been scrutinizing the whole thing in order to make sure that users weren’t scammed and didn’t have their sensitive information stolen. Now it won’t.

But the wrecking balls that Musk and Trump are swinging through the government right now are doing incalculable damage that goes far beyond the CFPB as we speak. Trump’s administration appears dead set on manufacturing a constitutional crisis if and when they openly defy court rulings, ordering them to halt their numerous illegal moves to shut down agencies, seize operational control of government finances, and to access everyone’s sensitive government data. There’s very much a Silicon Valley esque move fast and break things strategy that’s being applied here.

And the big tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley who threw their full support behind the Trump-Vance ticket have much more at stake here than just Musk’s payment system on X. Through Trump, Musk, J.D. Vance, and others, Silicon Valley and its technofascist oligarchs are waging a coup of their own right now, rewiring our government and our economy to serve their business and investment needs and to accelerate the coming of the dystopian future that they envision for all of us.

Over the course of this livestream, we’re going to break down this technofascist takeover of our government that’s unfolding in real time. We’re going to talk about what the consequences will be and how people are fighting back. In the second half of the stream, we’re going to talk with media critic, Real News columnist, and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast, Adam Johnson, and we’re also going to speak with Paris Marx, renowned tech critic, author, and host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.

But we’re going to start right now with the chaos at the CFPB and the protest action outside the DC agency headquarters on Monday. We’re joined now by Aaron Stephens. Aaron is the former mayor of East Lansing, Michigan, a senior legislative strategist with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and he was an organizer of Monday’s CFPB protest.

Aaron, thank you so much for joining us, man, especially with everything going on. Can you start by just giving us and our viewers an on-the-ground account of Monday’s action? How did it get organized? What did you see and hear on the day, and what were the real core rallying messages of the event?

Aaron Stephens:  Yeah, thanks for having me. So this is a really difficult time. I think that everybody’s dealing with a fire hose of news, the Trump administration taking actions, especially taking actions on Fridays, Saturdays to try and get away from the news cycle, to hide some of the worst things that they’re doing during the times when people might not be paying attention.

But we got news that some of the DOGE, those, I think, 20-something-year-old tech folks got into CFPB and started accessing some really sensitive data that the CFPB has and were looking to shut down the agency. You have to remember that Elon Musk, back when Trump first won reelection, tweeted that the CFPB was a redundant agency and one that needed to be deleted in the first place. So this is something that we were expecting to see, but of course we didn’t expect things to happen in the way that it did.

This is an agency that, DOGE, of course, is Elon Musk, is not an elected person. There’s been no act of Congress to authorize anything that’s been happening over at the CFPB, but we saw basically a takeover of the agency. People being told stay home, people being told don’t work.

And so we quickly mobilized with some of our congressional allies and some of our allies like Indivisible, MoveOn, the union folks, and Americans for Financial Reform to show that this was not going to be something that folks just stood by and let happen. We had about a thousand people there, maybe more, many, many members of Congress.

And I want to highlight the fact that it wasn’t just members that care and talk about consumer protection every single day. You had freshman members like Yassamin Ansari and senior members like Maxine Waters who are on the financial services committee, and Elizabeth Warren who, obviously, is the matriarch of this agency, but a lot of support from within the party here to really push back on what’s going on. The core message being that we’re not just going to stand by and let Elon Musk take over at this agency, and we’re not going to let what is really the financial cop on the street die in the darkness.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk a little more about that. For folks who weren’t at the rally or for folks who are maybe not fully up to speed on what the CFPB itself does or did, let’s talk a little more about what the CFPB does, why it was created. And as much as we don’t want to speculate, of course we can’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but if we have a shut down of CFPB, what is that going to mean for people?

Aaron Stephens:  I think you really have to look back at why this agency was created. This agency was created after the financial crisis in the late 2000s. This is an agency that is meant to hold banks and corporations and financial institutions accountable for malfeasance and advocates for consumers when they are wronged. This is an agency that, for instance, somebody who has been paying their mortgage on time, but the bank has been misapplying those payments as late and then their house got foreclosed on, they go to the CFPB. And the CFPB is the one that steps in and says, actually, you guys were in the wrong here. We’re going to keep this person in their house. They are the people on the street advocating for consumers. So getting rid of an agency like that is going to leave millions of Americans without somebody to go to.

I want to point out some of the numbers here. The CFPB has returned over $20 billion to consumers. It has a billion dollar a year budget and it has returned over $20 billion to consumers just on actions against corporations that have taken advantage of them alone. You have folks like Wells Fargo that have been taken action against, and they’ve had to pay back $2.5 billion for misapplying mortgage payments, like I mentioned before, and a lot of other actors that are, quite frankly, in the tech space, which Elon Musk is very, very related to, that are seeing action taken against them as well.

And so you can see the throughline there. Not having this agency protect consumers will mean that corporations will have a much, much easier time stealing from consumers and not having any kind of retribution against them.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I guess this is as much a disclosure as anything, because it’s very hard to sit here as a journalist, as editor-in-chief of The Real News Network talking about this, but I’m also someone whose family lost everything in the financial crisis. I’ve been open about this my whole media career. It’s where my media career started. We lost the house that I grew up in. This agency was created because so many millions of families like mine got screwed over in the 2008 financial crash, and now here we are, 15 years later, being told that shuttering this agency is a win for, I don’t know what, efficiency…?

Aaron Stephens:  For who? If you talk about efficiency, again, I’ll point out $20 billion returned to consumers, a billion dollar a year budget. That’s efficient to me. And we’re talking about an agency that is literally dedicated to protecting consumers. So the only thing that I could say this would be efficient for is helping big corporations take advantage of people. There is no other reason to go after an agency that is dedicated to making sure that people have a fair shake in a financial system that is usually difficult to navigate and sometimes, unfortunately, as we’ve seen many, many times in the past, takes advantage of consumers. There’s no reason to go after an agency like this other than to make it easier for those folks to do that.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that’s a really important point, and I want to build on that in a second and talk about what the attack on the CFPB tells us about the larger attack that’s happening across the government right now. But I would be remiss if I didn’t ask if you’ve heard anything from the folks at the CFPB who lost their jobs this week, or anyone that you were talking to on the ground on Monday. Our listeners want to know.

Aaron Stephens:  I want to couch this and make sure that the point of this really is to talk about the consumers that are affected by this, but there is a really important story that is not probably going to be as told, which is that there are civil servants that dedicated their lives to basically saying, you know what? — And many of them have very similar stories to you. I saw somebody get taken advantage of, my family got taken advantage of, and now I’ve dedicated my life to fighting for consumers, and this is the agency that I’m part of. All of those people got an email that said, your work’s not important, stop doing it.

And so that’s why so many workers showed up on Monday. And their message was very, very simple. It was, we just want to do our job. We just want to protect people, let us do our job. You’ve got hundreds of people that they’re probably not making as much as they might be able to in the private sector, and they’re doing their best to try and protect people, and they’re just basically being told this isn’t important anymore.

As part of a larger plan, we’re seeing the same playbook at different agencies. I’m not going to be surprised as Elon Musk goes and attacks Social Security, attacks the Department of Education. These are services that affect working families everywhere across the country, and you don’t see him having the same kind of vitriol to a large corporation that’s taking advantage of people. It’s very, very clear that what’s going on right now is they’re dismantling the agencies that are protecting people just to give tax breaks and give an easier time for billionaires to take advantage of consumers.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s tease that out a little more, because I would hope that that is the clear and obvious message that people are taking away from it. But you know as well as I do that, it’s not that easy, unfortunately. We’re going to talk about this in the second segment with Paris Marx and Adam Johnson, but this is as much a war over what Musk and Trump are doing as it is over the perception about what they’re doing.

And so I see people all the time, people I know, people I’ve interviewed, people in my family who are right-leaning or maybe politically independent, who are still very much buying the Musk and Trump line that this is all being done in the name of efficiency, rooting out longstanding corruption and wokeism and all that crap.

So I wanted to ask if, in good faith, if we want to talk to folks who are feeling that way and thinking that way, what does the attack on the CFPB, how does that fit into the larger project that you just described? How can people take that and what’s going on at the Treasury, and just what the hell is going on here and what’s the end game?

Aaron Stephens:  Let’s talk through some of their playbook, because what Elon Musk and Donald Trump will do is they will find one little line item budget thing that they know they can message on, and they will say, look at this inefficient spending, and it’ll be like $10 million in a budget of a billion. And they’ll say, look at this inefficient thing, this is the thing that we’re cutting. And they won’t talk about the millions and millions of dollars going to help consumers. But that’s the thing they’ll talk about so that way they can message to folks, no, no, no, look, we’re cutting. We’re cutting and we’re being efficient. But the reality is that they’re saying that publicly so that way behind the scenes they can cut the things that help people.

And so I think that the CFPB is, and one of the reasons why we are so passionate about it, is because there are so many stories of people being helped by this agency.

I’ll give another random example, although there are literally thousands. People that went to a for-profit college that was not accredited, took out large loans for this, and the CFPB helped state AGs sue that for-profit college, which led to not only money going back to those folks, but also loans being forgiven. Those are people that would’ve been in debt for probably the rest of their lives for a degree that wasn’t even accredited, and that’s the CFPB, that’s what they’re doing.

One of the reasons why I think centering this agency in this fight is a very, very good thing to do is because there are thousands of stories of people really going out there and seeking help from the CFPB and that agency doing the right thing.

One of the rules that they most recently announced, which is a great rule which is now being attacked by congressional Republicans, is their medical debt and credit reporting rule. You’re talking about folks that, for those who don’t know, when you have an amount of medical debt, it goes on your credit report and it can significantly impact your life in the future, not being able to get a mortgage or not being able to get a car. And sometimes those procedures are just not things that you can control. And the statistics have said it and the studies have said it over and over again: Having medical debt does not actually have any real determining factor on whether or not you’re going to be paying back car loans or house loans, and it really doesn’t affect anything. In fact, Experian has even said that publicly.

And the CFPB said, you know what? This should be something that we address. We should not have medical debt [be] something that is reported on their credit report. And there are thousands of stories of people saying, I had a procedure done in the ’90s. It was out of the blue, I couldn’t control anything about it, and now 20 years later, I can’t get a house. I have two kids and I can’t get a house. Those are the people that are affected by closing this agency.

And so I think centering those stories is really, really important in this conversation. And just talking about, really, who is Elon Musk and Donald Trump on the side of? Is it on the side of that person that is trying to get a home for their two kids, or is it on the side of the banks that just want to make sure that they can make every last dime out of these consumers? And I think the answer’s fairly clear to that.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s powerfully put. And we do need to center these stories, if only to get people out of the hazy miasma of Trumpian rhetoric and actually see the reality in front of them. We were talking about this two livestreams ago, a day after the horrific plane crash in DC where over 60 people lost their lives. But that was another clear-cut example where the government bureaucrats, the deep state, useless, evil, faceless folks in the government are actually air traffic controllers. They’re working people who are making sure our planes don’t crash when we come in and out of an airport. They’re also the people in the CFPB, the NLRB, talking to workers about organizing every day. If you just look at this in terms of big awful government but you’re not actually seeing the details, we’re going to be sleepwalking into even more dangerous stuff.

And I want to hover on that point for a second because for people who are not right in the middle of this, people who don’t live and work in DC, and even for people who aren’t employees of the government and they’re really only seeing this from the outside through the media and social media, I wanted to ask you, since you were there, you’re in it, how are people who work in government responding to this? What is the range of emotions that you’re hearing and seeing from your colleagues there in DC?

Aaron Stephens:  I do live in Michigan, so I go to DC fairly regularly, but I’m here on the ground in the wonderful, greatest state in the country. There’s folks that are there that are terrified. They get an email one day that says, don’t come into the office, you’re working from home. Get an email the next day that says stop your work entirely.

And I think it’s very important that we engage the union in this protest too, because those are real folks that have families, jobs, lives that are completely in limbo because there’s an unelected billionaire that decided that he wanted to tweet to delete the CFPB, and that’s a really scary reality to live in currently.

To your earlier point about people not really feeling or understanding what a government employee is, I want to point out, I was a mayor back in Michigan, and I think that people have different opinions about different levels of government involvement, but I’ll tell you, when the pandemic hit and you needed those folks out there making sure that people were getting access to vaccines or access to rental assistance or whatever else it was, those are government employees, they’re doing their job. And those backbone, really important things for society are what government employees do. I think we can have discussions about where we can direct policy or direct money more efficiently, but shutting down agencies that are dedicated to protecting people is not the way that we need to go about things.

Maximillian Alvarez:  There’s a larger complicated point here to be made, but I have faith that we can manage it because we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Two things can be true at once. What’s happening right now is a catastrophe, and plenty of government agencies have drawn justified criticism and ire from working people across this country. I’ll be the first to say it.

I talked to working class people living and fighting in sacrifice zones around the country, people in Michigan, people in Baltimore, people in places like East Palestine, Ohio, who have been polluted by private industry, government-run sites, all this crap. The point being is that that is what the Environmental Protection Agency was created in response to a half a century ago. The Cuyahoga River was on fire every other month, and toxic pollution was rampant, and people across the country rose up and said, the government needs to do something about this. And it was fricking Nixon’s administration who created the EPA and actually had an understanding that you need to have a level of enforcement there that gives people confidence that this agency is actually doing what it says it’s doing.

Now over the last 50 years, both parties have contributed in one way or another, either by just cutting the budget, vilifying the agency, or leaning more towards the interests of the corporations that the agency’s supposed to regulate. And so you end up with people like the folks I talked to in these sacrifice zones not trusting the EPA at all, because the EPA is telling them that they’re fine and they can stay in their homes while they and their kids continue to get sick.

And so that is the situation that we are in with so much wrought that has been created in well-meaning or established-for-good-reasons agencies. But that doesn’t mean you throw everything out with the bathwater. Again, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, otherwise we’re going to have nothing left at the end of this.

Aaron Stephens:  Right. And I want to put a fine edge point on that. What we’re not sitting here saying is that everything is perfect, but look at where they’re targeting. They’re taking the frustration that people have that’s valid with government or the way that things are happening right now, and they’re using that frustration to attack agencies that are just holding corporations accountable. Where is the energy from them going? It is not going to address people’s actual concerns about government. They’re taking the, again, valid concerns that people have about the way that things are right now, and they’re saying, great, my solution is to give away tax breaks to billionaires. And they’re doing it in a more couched way.

But the reality is if they cared about people being taken advantage of, then the CFPB would be enhanced, not taken away. And you see where they’re diverting their energy into cutting, and it’s for public services for working families. It is not that real angst — And again, real angst — From people that are just angry at the current situation and the way things are. So they’re taking advantage of folks’ fear, unfortunately.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That, in many ways, is the political difference here between this MAGA-fied Republican Party and what I guess we would tend to call the Democratic establishment, not the whole party itself, but very much the ruling side of the party.

Trump, for all of his lies and the scapegoats and fictive enemies that he creates, is still identifying and speaking to those touchpoints of neoliberal system failure that people feel in their real lives. What is our counternarrative? What is the opposite vision of the future and governance that is being offered instead of the wrecking ball that is the Trump administration? That’s a question that all of us need to sit with.

And it’s a question that leads into, we only got about 10 more minutes here before we move into the next segment, but I didn’t want to let you go without asking about what this all means for the Democrats who are still in office right now, this party that people are looking to as the core institutional opposition to what Trump and the GOP are doing right now.

Axios dropped a story, which I’m sure you saw, earlier this week, sparked a lot of justified outrage all over the internet. And this article said, “Members of the Steering and Policy Committee — with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in the room — on Monday complained” about pressure from activist groups, including ones that helped organize Monday’s action and are putting them. They’re really pissed about the pressure these groups are putting on them to get off their butts and do something. And there was a quote from this Axios article that said, “‘It’s been a constant theme of us saying, “Please call the Republicans.”’” And that was from Rep. Don Beyer from Virginia, basically throwing up their hands and telling their constituents, hey, we’re in the minority now. There’s nothing we can do, go call the Republicans.

Is this the pervasive attitude from Democrats on the Hill right now that you’re hearing? Who’s fighting back? And tell us more about the work that you’re doing with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee to be part of that fight back.

Aaron Stephens:  I think it’s important to note, I think everybody’s seen the responses to some of that article, but also the positive responses to our rally on Monday where Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren stood up and said, we’re not going to stand by. Or Maxwell Frost trying to get into USAID. People want to see Democrats fighting back. They feel like, at this moment, they are getting just hounded with news every single day from a different Trump administration action that is going to harm them in the long term or in the short term, and they want to know that their representatives are fighting back.

And so I think that some of that frustration is just going to manifest in people calling their Dem representatives and being like, what are you doing? And I think it’s important that Dem leadership hears that. I think that we as an organization are going to continue trying to channel our members to make sure that action is being taken on the Dem side and that we’re using every single tool in the arsenal, whether that be in the funding fight or whether that be pushing stateside, pushing on AGs and the courts. Whatever it is, people need to see Dems fighting back.

I certainly agree that this is a Republican agenda and we need to be holding them accountable for what they are doing. But again, people need to see Dems fighting back. And if they don’t see that, then they’re going to feel like they’ve been abandoned by the party that claims to be the ones that’s fighting for them.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Picking up on that, for folks out here who are watching and listening to this stream, what would be your message to them about why they should fight back and the ways they can? It could be calling your elected representative, but for folks who are maybe feeling like they’re not getting anything out of their representative right now, but we don’t want to leave folks feeling hopeless and powerless, that is never our aim. What’s your message to the folks around you, the folks you talk to these days about why they need to fight, not give up, and the different things that they can do to hold this administration accountable, preserve the things in our society, in our government that need to be preserved? What’s your message to folks right now?

Aaron Stephens:  My one big message is we need more stories being shared. There are millions of people in this country that have been impacted that are on Medicare and would be in a very, very bad situation if that was reduced, or Social Security, or again, had good action taken by the CFPB, or had their grocery store saved in their local community because the FTC stopped a merger. Those things, those stories need to be amplified.

And I think that it’s important that people are not just apathetic about the situation. I know that it’s difficult given just how much is going on, but show up to the town hall for your congressional member, stage a protest, do it in your own district. We need to be showing that, again, we are not going to stand by and let this happen.

And quite frankly, I think that Democrats need to see that when they do stand up and when they do take real action that they have support. I think they do just based on what the response was to this rally and what happened at USAID. But I think that we need to be also, while still calling out the folks that are maybe a little bit quieter, we also need to be celebrating the folks that are out there fighting the fight and make sure that folks know that if they do stand up, they’ll have backup. And I think that’s important to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. Well man, I want to have you back on soon because there’s so many other big questions to talk about here: What’s going to happen when we hit the debt ceiling crap again? What can we expect in the coming weeks, months, and years of this administration? We’re only one month into this thing, so we gotta pace ourselves, but we gotta know what’s coming ahead so that we’re not constantly immobilized by the onslaught of news on a given day. So having that long view, I think, is important for all of us. And I do want to have you back on to talk about that in more depth.

As we close out, I did want to ask if you had any thoughts you wanted to share on that, or if there were any other upcoming actions that you wanted to point people to? I’m hearing that there’s a national day of action that federal workers are going to be participating in on the 17th. Are there agency demonstrations that you know happening in DC? Just anything like that that you wanted to put out there before we let you go. And also tell folks about where they can find you.

Aaron Stephens:  Yeah, so feel free to find me on Twitter, @AaronDStephens — I’ll still call it Twitter — And go to boldprogressives.org, sign up for our listserv. We’ll send out action alerts on protests and different things that are going on there. We’re also going to be collecting stories from folks that are affected.

And I think, again, just because we have those connections in the Hill amplifying those of offices, so they have things to really push for, and they have a little bit more ammunition when they’re having these conversations on the Hill is important. And as you said, fortunately, it’s a marathon that feels like a sprint right now with everything going on. We just need to keep it going. I’d be happy to come back on. Thanks for having me.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you so much, man. We really appreciate you being here. I appreciate the work that you’re doing. We hope to have you back soon, man. Thank you again.

Aaron Stephens:  Thanks so much. Have a good one.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Alright, gang. So we’ve got another hour in our livestream today. We want to thank again Aaron Stephens, senior legislative strategist with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who was one of the organizers of Monday’s protest outside the CFPB. Thank you to Aaron. Please follow him on X, or Twitter, if you want to stay up to date with Aaron.

And now I want to bring in our next two guests here. They’re longtime friends of The Real News. We’ve interviewed them separately a number of times. I’ve had the honor of being on Citations Needed. Adam himself writes for The Real News. So I’m really, really grateful to see your faces and to have your critical voices here with us, guys.

And I just want to make sure, for folks who are watching, if you are living under a rock and you don’t know about Paris and Adam’s work yet, I actually envy you because you’ve got a lot of great work at your disposal. But Paris Marx is a Canadian technology writer whose work has been published in a range of outlets including NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, and Tribune. They’re also the host of the acclaimed podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, which everyone should go listen to, especially right now. Paris is also the author of the excellent book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, which was published by Verso Books in 2022.

And we are also joined by the great Adam Johnson. Adam hosts the Citations Neededpodcast, which everyone should also listen to. And Adam writes at The Column on Substack. He is a columnist for us here at The Real News. You should read every column he’s ever written for us because they’re all bangers and all critical media analyses. And he also writes for other outlets like The Nation.

Paris, Adam, thank you both so much for joining us today. We got a lot to talk about, and you guys are exactly the folks I want to be talking to about it. But I wanted to just, by way of transitioning from that first segment with Aaron into our discussion, if you guys had any comments on Musk, Trump, and votes attacks specifically on the CFPB, and any thoughts you had on why they’re going after the CFPB that maybe we didn’t cover in that first segment.

So yeah, Paris, let’s start with you, and then Adam, we’ll go to you.

Paris Marx:  Sure. Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that the CFPB is low-hanging fruit and something easy for them to take on. We know that the right has not liked this agency for quite a while, and then we can also see that an agency like that is going to hinder some of what Elon Musk and these other tech billionaires want to be doing. We know Marc Andreessen, for example, has been angry at this agency and blaming it for debanking people in crypto, which is probably not true, but is one of these conspiracy theories that he has embraced.

Elon Musk, of course, has ambitions of moving Twitter or X into payments and financial services and things like that. It is not a surprise to me that he would want to take on the CFPB right as he is getting into an area like that. And of course, as I understand, the CFPB has also looked into Tesla in the past and issues with Tesla. So yeah, it’s not a surprise to me that he wants to take on this agency, and I think we’re going to see him take on a lot of other ones as well and try to dismantle them too.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Adam, what about you? Were you surprised? You look surprised. You don’t look surprised at all [laughs]. Oh, wait, you’re muted, brother.

Adam Johnson:  My apologies. I want to start off by saying I thought that the intro, Max, you gave at the top of the show about 37 minutes ago was excellent. I don’t usually kiss ass to my host, but that was very, very well written, established the stakes. I thought that was really well done. I forget because you edit me, but you should do more writing. It was very good. It’s a complex thing to break down, and I don’t usually kiss the ass of the host, but I’m doing it.

But to answer your question, yeah, I mean, look, he’s obviously going after the liberal administrative regulatory state. These are all the Project 2025 wishlist, Silicon Valley wishlist of people they want to go after. He is going after it in a different way than previously. He is going after it in a way that is obviously not legal, which is another way of saying illegal. He is doing it in a way that is blatantly illegal, knowing that there’s not really any mechanism to hold him accountable. They are now openly and flagrantly violating judges’ orders, district judges’ orders. My guess is it’ll have to be escalated to the Supreme Court.

And again, as your previous guest mentioned, the fire hose element is because liberal good government groups and progressive groups only have so much resources, so everyone’s putting out fires. As you know as an editor at a progressive publication, that’s what these last three weeks have been, is just putting out a series of fires. That’s part of their strategy because they have far more resources. And of course, as you also mentioned as —

Maximillian Alvarez:  OK, so we lost Brother Adam for a quick second, but he’ll be back on. But yeah, I mean that is something — Oh, wait, do we have you back, Adam?

Adam Johnson:  Did I fall out?

Maximillian Alvarez:  You froze for about 30 seconds there, but go ahead and pick right back up.

Adam Johnson:  So sorry. I apologize. I said, while Democratic leadership in Congress has been largely a no-show, although that’s changed a little bit lately… Oh shoot.

Maximillian Alvarez:  OK.

Adam Johnson:  Hello?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah. So little. Hey, man, it’s a livestream baby. So technical issues —

Adam Johnson:  I’m not sure why my wifi says it’s operating at full capacity. I’m not sure what’s going on. I apologize.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, you’re good, man.

Adam Johnson:  I was in the middle of my denouement, and now I’m interrupted. Now I feel —

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right. Give me the denouement, baby.

Adam Johnson:  Well, now there’s a lot of pressure to make it a good denouement. No, I was saying that governors had pushed back, but they are attempting to dismantle the liberal state that they know they couldn’t possibly dismantle through Congress or other legal means.

Because here’s the thing, and this is, I think, a dynamic people have to appreciate, which is that Musk can try to do a few dozen illegal things and then what’s the pushback? He gets some court order that says, no, you can’t do that, but he can’t lose anything. It’s not like he’s going to go to prison, and to say nothing to the fact that he’s obviously abusing stimulants and surrounded by a bunch of Nazi Zoomers who are egging him on. So he’s very much high on his own supply. But he can’t lose, he can only be curbed. And so from his perspective, he’s thinking, what are they going to do, take away my birthdays? He can illegally try to shut down whatever department he wants, Department of Education, Department of Labor, to get rid of the NLRA and the NLRB, whatever, name it, because what does he have to lose by doing that? Nothing.

The only limiting thing is two things: Number one, how much resources they have on their end, but two, it will ultimately be congressional Republicans, because it’s very clear, obviously, Trump can’t run again. Musk doesn’t give a shit if this harms the long-term Republican Party brand. The only real counterforce here, other than lawfare, which Democrats are doing and ought to do, which is suing them, as well as these progressive groups like Bold Progressives and others, is that Republicans do have to run in 2026. And if they’re running on putting grandma on cat food, that doesn’t sound as good as going after whatever woke chimpanzee, transgender studies or some other bullshit they make up.

So right now they’re doing this… This is the project, this is the Heritage Foundation’s wet dream, and this is what we’re seeing. We’re seeing these full-blown assaults on the liberal and administrative and regulatory state because it serves Silicon Valley, it serves non-Silicon Valley, the wealthy in general. Again, we’re getting $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. We’re doing the 2017 tax cuts on steroids. This is why most billionaire money went to Trump and Republicans, despite their faux-populist rhetoric and token attempts to make taxes tip-free for waiters or other such trivial nonsense.

And so they’re just going to go until somebody stops them, because why not? Again, what’s the downside? It’s Trump’s. It’s not like Musk is going to get arrested for violating the law.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, no.

Adam Johnson:  And even if he did, Trump would just pardon him. And this is why — Sorry, real quick I want to say one thing. This is why the Jan. 6 pardons were so key, because it’s a signal to every right-wing vigilante and every hardcore right winger that they can pretty much do anything they want that’s illegal so long as they are advancing the MAGA cause, and they can expect to not be held accountable so long as it’s a federal and not a state crime. So as long as they go from Kansas to Nebraska and commit a crime pursuant to Trumpism, Trump will pardon them no matter what, even if they have a record of all kinds of horrific crimes.

And so that kind of vigilantism and that kind of lawlessness is completely taking hold. That is an escalation from previous… The policies themselves are boilerplate Republican policies, but the extralegal, extrajudicial tactics are an escalation, they’re new. And we’re seeing some of the ways in which Democratic leadership either can’t or won’t be prepared to really address it on those terms.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And it’s even been, like you said, from the first time Trump was elected eight years ago to now, there has been a notable and concerted evolution of the MAGA movement to basically state sanction vigilantism. And you can see the examples of that, not just in Donald Trump and J.D. Vance cozying up to known vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse or the guy who strangled the poor man in New York on the subway.

That celebration of typically white men vigilantes, but also baked into the MAGA-fied legislation that’s been creeping through state Houses all across the country where you see the weaponization of citizens’ impulse for vigilantism as a necessary part of executing the policy. That’s why you get abortion laws in Texas that are encouraging everyday citizens to sue anyone who helps with an abortion, even the Uber driver who drives you to the clinic.

These types of policy points are making the point that Adam made there where you have a party that is not just pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists for their crimes against the country and their violent crimes, but also sanctioning this type of vigilantist mode of politics in other policy areas as well.

I do want to come back to that in a few minutes, but I wanted to, before we get too far afield, come back to the big question that I wanted to ask you both because it’s a question that I feel is at the center of your respective areas of expertise. It’s in that Venn diagram overlap, and it’s something that I’ve been getting asked from our viewers a lot about. So I want to ask if we could break what’s going down now from this angle, because this is as much a war over what Musk and Trump are doing in practice as it is a war over how people perceive what they’re doing and how they want us to perceive it.

I have seen plenty of right-leaning people that I’ve interviewed from sacrifice zones and unions from around the US sharing Newsmax posts that are framing this all as a heroic, historic moment. And Musk is out there rooting out corruption, and I’ve seen others sharing Musk memes with his resting rich face and the texts saying, “‘They’ Lied and Stole from you for Years, and now ‘They’ — ” All caps — “want you to be ANGRY at D.O.G.E. from PROVING it. LET THAT SINK IN.” So this is the war that’s going on right now.

Paris, I want to start with you, and then, Adam, kick it to you. How would you describe the difference between what Musk and Trump say they’re doing and what they’re actually doing right now?

Paris Marx:  Well, it’s a gulf, right? But I feel like it depends on what you’re looking at. These are people who are talking about making government more efficient, making it work better, but actually they are embarking on a major austerity program in order to gut the US federal government and, in particular, the aspects and the departments and the agencies within the federal government that they have personal distaste for.

And not just them personally. Certainly, Elon Musk and his companies will have certain agencies that they want to go after and certain programs that they want to go after. But Adam was mentioning before, we can see the outline for this kind of program in the Heritage Foundation and these other right-wing groups that have been wanting to, basically, launch this campaign against the federal government for a very long time, to remake it.

By bringing in the tech industry and bringing in someone like Elon Musk, you get the ability to frame this as something that tech is doing to give it this framing that it is modernizing the government rather than taking it apart. And in particular, as they are starting to try to do mass layoffs, people often point to what Elon Musk did at Twitter as a comparison for what they’re trying to do with the federal government, where Elon Musk came in, laid off a ton of staff, most of the company, and then kept it running.

And they want people to believe that the government is a ton of fraud, a ton of waste, that you can just get rid of all these workers and then you’ll still be able to provide the services that the US government provides, run the government as it is, because there’s just all these useless bureaucrats who are around. Which is a right-wing narrative that we have been hearing for ages. This is not a new thing.

But what they’re also doing as they embark on this project is to say, yes, we’re going to gut all of these workers, but also now we’re going to roll out these incredible AI tools that are going to be able to do all the work of these various workers to provide these services. Because look, AI has become so much more powerful over the past couple of years. They’ve been spreading these really deceptive narratives about how AI is reaching this point where it’s going to be nearly as powerful as a human being, and it has this understanding that it didn’t have before, and it’s so much more capable.

And a lot of that is bullshit, but it really helps with this larger program to say, we are going to gut the government. We are going to bring forward this massive austerity program, but it’s okay because technology is now going to fill the gap because technology has gotten so much better. To present this as inherently a technological problem, not so much a political one, where they are using technology as a form of power against all of these workers and against, really, the American public as they embark on this massive transformation of the government.

And so far it has been focusing on specific agencies, but we’ve already seen the suggestion from people like Elon Musk that they’re going to have to go after Medicare and Social Security and these other programs that so many Americans rely on. It’s not just going to end at these things that they perceive as only being about the culture wars and things like that. It’s going to expand much greater as they continue down this road.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I have so many thoughts on that, but Adam, I want to toss it to you.

Adam Johnson:  So from the beginning of this stupid DOGE narrative, I’ve been pulling my hair out because the way it’s covered is the exact opposite of the way it exists in reality. I often compare it to the Biden ceasefire talks. It’s just a fictitious alternative reality that has no basis in fact. And the media’s running with it because if you’re powerful, editorially speaking, you’re assumed always to have good faith, even if there’s facts that completely contradict reality. So any skepticism is seen as being too ideological, too outside the lane of mainstream reporting.

So about two weeks ago, I wrote an article criticizing the media covering DOGE as a “cost cutting” or to find waste and abuse, these ostensibly postideological, tech-savvy, as Paris said, and we can get into that, the use of the ways that we’re doing a whole episode on the ways in which AI becomes this moral laundromat where you say, oh, we’re going to fire a bunch of people, which sounds evil, because don’t they have jobs? Oh, don’t worry, we’re going to replace them with AI. But it’s bullshit. Everybody knows it’s bullshit. It’s a way of firing people so they can have more control. These so-called bureaucrats, which is to say those who are part of the liberal and administrative state they loathe because they want to be able to fucking pollute rivers without anyone giving them any flack.

And the way the media covered this was, again, this is someone in Elon Musk who, if you follow his Twitter activity, which everybody in media does because mostly they don’t have a choice, he jams it in front of your fucking face. He posts right-wing white nationalist memes all day from 4chan. White genocide is a huge, “hashtag white genocide is a huge part” of his worldview. He’s obsessed with knockout game type lurid, VDARE, straight up white nationalist propaganda, has been doing this for years. Inauguration day, does a goddamn Sieg Heil three times, clear as day, non-negotiable, not even ambiguous, not well, maybe — No, no, clear as day does a Sieg, Heil — Oh no, it was just a troll. Oh, it was a Roman salute. Again, you can’t ironically murder someone. You can’t ironically do Nazi propaganda. You either do it or you don’t do it, OK?

So you would think this would be, OK, let’s interrogate what he means by waste and abuse. Is this how some bean counter at the OMB sees it? Is this someone, one of these admittedly right-wing think tanks like a center for tax fairness or one of these Peter Peterson Foundation? No, to him, waste is an ideological assertion. Fraud is an ideological assertion. 

Keep in mind, he’s been lying for weeks about fraud, citing public fucking databases that are already online as if it’s some great revelation that he’s found, oh, they did this, they spent this so-and-so USAID or State Department or whatever. And it’s like, yeah, it’s a public database and it’s not fraud, it’s just how government spending works. So he’s been overtly lying for weeks.

And yet, as I wrote on Feb. 3, this is how it was covered. The New York Times, they referred to DOGE as, “finding savings”, “budget cutters”. In a later article, they wrote “cost-cutting effort”. They called it “an efficiency panel”, “a cost-cutting project”. The New York Times wrote on Jan. 12, 2025, “DOGE is a cost-cutting effort to seek potential savings.” Washington Postdid the same thing. “Government efficiency commission”, “non-governmental fiscal efficiency group”, “the efficiency group”, “proposed savings”. So here’s someone with overt neo-Nazi ideologic — OK, maybe that’s too hard for you. We’ll say far-right tech billionaire, whatever, someone who’s overtly ideological, and he’s consistently treated like someone who’s genuinely concerned with finding efficiencies.

Now, finally, after weeks of this shit, again, spreading outright lies about USAID — As much as I’m not particularly a fan of them, but just lying about them outright, completely making shit up out of context, accusing congresspeople of getting money from these organizations for some outright lurid conspiracy theories that, if he wasn’t the richest man in the world, we would say, this guy’s just an anonymous crank on Twitter, just completely made up horseshit.

They’re finally — They being the media — They’re starting to finally publish articles that commit the ultimate sin of reportage, which is the I word: Ideology, mentioning ideology. That this is not some postideological, postpartisan attempt to find deficiencies, but is, in fact, a right-wing attack on the liberal and administrative state for programs and departments that have been duly funded by the federal government. And a lot of these programs, of course, were begun under or continued explicitly by the Trump administration, but we can talk about the first one, we can talk about that later.

So here, finally we have The Washington Post — This is Aaron Blake — “Trump and Musk can’t seem to locate much evidence of fraud”. So now we’re finally pointing out that there’s no actual fraud, that them just calling everything fraud is like the Michael Scott “I declare bankruptcy.” You can’t just say it’s fraud. That’s a legal claim.

And so for weeks they’ve been saying there’s this fraud, and Musk uses this word all the time, fraud, fraud — OK, well, if there’s all this widespread fraud, Musk, then why has the Trump DOJ not arrested anyone? Because there’s no fraud. There’s just spending they don’t like, which they’ve now rebranded fraud. And then Reuters says “Musk’s DOGE cuts based more on political ideology than real cost savings so far”. So finally, after weeks of taking this at face value and in good faith — Which, again, is the holiest of holies, especially if you’re rich and powerful — Not if you’re, by the way, an activist, then you’re, as I note in my piece your ideology is…

I compared it to an article written about Democrats as part of a police reform panel, they referred to them four times as progressive, five different times as activists. So their ideology is put on the forefront. But if you’re a megalomaniac billionaire who shares white genocide all day that you took off white supremacist websites, ideology is just not mentioned. It’s not mentioned why you’re going after programs. They can say DEI — As long as you say DEI, not the N word, you can get away with anything, even though clearly this is racially motivated. Clearly it’s about chaining women to the stove. Clearly it’s about hating people with disabilities. Clearly it’s about hating gay and trans people. He fucking loathes trans people, posts antitrans shit all day.

So just now, I’m not in the business of complimenting the media, and it’s still obviously not nearly sufficient, but we’re just now seeing a pivot from people being like, oh, well maybe this isn’t about efficiency. Well, OK, it would’ve been nice had you done that before he destroyed several different federal programs. But we’re now seeing people realizing that indulging this premise of efficiency, which morons like Ro Khanna consistently do, boggles my mind. I mean, I know why. He’s got terminal lawyer brain and he fundraises with a lot of these Silicon Valley billionaires, so he has to play stupid –

That we’re like, OK, clearly this is a right-wing attack on the liberal and administrative state. It is entirely ideological to the extent to which you can even do efficiency nonideologically. Even that premise is suspect. But for someone who does a Sieg Heil on national TV, again, had you told me a month ago, well, Musk is going to do a very clear Sieg Heil on national TV and nothing’s basically going to change, and the ADL is a fucking shakedown operation, who he paid off a few years ago, is going to come to his defense, I’d say, now, clearly there has to be some limit to this. He can’t get away with anything. No, he’s got half a trillion dollars, he can pretty much get away with anything.

So we’re just now seeing, finally, people being like, oh, maybe his ideology is actually what’s motivating this rather than this… Again, I could go on and on. I have all these articles just in The New York Times cost-cutting panel, cost efficiency panel, reducing waste, fraud, abuse. It’s like this guy is sharing the most manic fucking right-wing chud conspiracy theories, completely misrepresenting how you read government spending documents and misrepresenting how you read RFPs, accusing Reuters of — By the way, he did that after Reuters wrote that article. I think that’s why they did it — Because an unrelated company owned by the same corporation did a defense contractor RFP on, I think, data protection or something. Not related at all to anything sinister. Completely takes it out of context, just consistently fucking lies all the time. Just straight up Alex Jones shit.

But because, again, because he’s so rich, he’s so powerful, people kept deferring to him as some kind of neutral expert, and it was literally driving me fucking crazy because sitting there watching this going, are we going to mention that he’s a white nationalist? Isn’t this kind of relevant since he’s going after specifically groups related to racial justice, civil rights, and, of course, anyone who, as you noted, anyone who undermines his bottom line ,just as a person who’s extremely rich?

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, I got three quick things I want to say, then, Paris, I want to come back to you real quick. But the first is I would read the crap out of an Adam Johnson tongue-in-cheek weekly Low Bar Award where Adam Johnson rewards a publication for doing its basic-ass job of reporting the facts about something [laughs]. I would read that.

Second is just a note on the fraud thing and speaking, again, if we’re talking here as media critic, tech critic. In a former life, I was a trained historian, and so, for obvious reasons right now, I’ve been going back to my bookshelf and pulling all of the big history books that I have on the McCarthy period and the Red Scare, and I can’t help but hear what I feel are the very obvious and hackneyed echoes of the McCarthy period, when Sen. McCarthy’s there saying, I hold here in my hand a piece of paper with the names of communists in the government. And then you got this dickhead Musk out there saying like, oh my God, you won’t believe all the fraud I’m finding. I’ve got it all written here.

Adam Johnson:  He keeps doing these lurid, vague, conspiratorial appeals to some secret list he has, and it’s like, where? What are you talking about? And the evidence they share is just shit that was published already. It’s been online, been online because of good government sunshine law liberals, by the way. He’s just doing Alex Jones shit. He’s doing Alex Jones shit, but he’s so rich you can do it and no one cares.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and Paris, I have a question for you about that because, like I said earlier, this is a real struggle here over what the great Cory Doctorow would call seizing and controlling the means of communication. We’re not just talking about, like Adam said, not just rich billionaires. We’re talking about people who control the infrastructure and platforms upon which we communicate and commerce every single day.

And so, as much as this is the 21st century new digital politics that we’re all swimming in now, who controls the means of communication and who controls the means of public perception is really critical. And I bring this up because I can’t help but notice that, as we’re talking about here the narrative that Musk, Trump, Vance and their donors from Silicon Valley are trying to spin about this, I think your average person with a basic common sense can see the bullshit — But so much of them are not seeing it because they’re getting news on platforms that aren’t showing it. Or the algorithms are keeping them locked into echo chambers that are going to keep the points that we’re talking about here out of sight, out of mind.

I wanted to ask if you could talk about that side of things, as ridiculous as the top-down narrative about DOGE, about the government takeover that’s happening right now, what should people be considering about how these big tech overlords and their accomplices in the government are trying to also adjust our variability to see the truth for what it is here?

Paris Marx:  Yeah, it’s a frustrating one, and I feel like it’s not a uniquely social media discussion. If we look at news, we can see how, whether it’s cable news or radio, has been taken over by the right for years, and then they unleash similar strategies to try to shift how social media works, these narratives that cable news was too liberal and conservative voices were not present there or not as well represented. Meanwhile, you had Fox News pushing out these right-wing narratives. And good —

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, keep going. Sorry. Sorry. Keep going.

Paris Marx:  Yeah, sorry. Meanwhile, you had Fox News pushing out these right-wing narratives and all the liberal media adopting these framings and starting to talk about the issues that were being pushed by the right. What you had, very clearly, the right saw the opportunity to do this on Facebook and other platforms, where they kept saying that conservative voices were being silenced on Facebook or on Twitter, or because people were being moderated when they were posting hate speech, and things like that. And it was no real surprise that people on the right were being moderated much more for those things because they were much more likely to be saying them.

But even still, think years ago, you had Mark Zuckerberg going on this tour of America to talk to conservatives and all this kind of stuff to show that he was not going to give into censorship, and the types of things that he’s talking about in a much more animated way today. I feel like we have this narrative that there has been this shift in the social media landscape in the past little while with Mark Zuckerberg getting rid of the fact checkers and getting rid of everything that he considers woke at Meta, which I think was more of just an opportunity for him to get rid of a bunch of things that he didn’t want to be doing and to lay off more workers, which they’ve already been doing for a while now.

But we’ve seen social media companies already abandoning those sorts of things for a while before the election, up to a year or more ago. And there was a brief moment where they were doing some additional moderation during the pandemic in that period.

But for a very long time, these companies have been quite committed to these right-wing notions of free speech. Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, who is now in an even more powerful position at the company, a Republican operative, they stopped Alex Jones’s initial banning on the platform for ages, kept pushing it off. They didn’t want to see Donald Trump be banned, all these sorts of things.

Social media is positioned as this place where we can all post what we want to post, and anyone can publish what they want on there. But the reality is that these are environments that are shaped in order to ensure that right-wing narratives are the ones that are being encountered most often by people, that the algorithmic recommendations are ensuring that you’re in that kind of an ecosystem unless you have explicitly tried to opt out of it. But even then, you’re still going to see a lot of this stuff.

And they are platforms that are premised on engagement in order to get ad profits. And what you do in order to make your ad profits is to piss people off a bit and serve them more extreme content so that they begin interacting with the world in that way. I think we saw that very clearly during the pandemic, when you saw people’s brains basically get fried. And it’s not solely because of social media that happened. There are many different reasons that these things have occurred.

But I think even just recently, if you think about before the holidays, people were losing their minds over all these drones that were like in the sky in the United States. This was a huge thing, and it was a big conspiracy theory, and even the mainstream media were covering it as though it was a real thing that people needed to be concerned about and not some bullshit that they needed to debunk. These are not just right-wing platforms, but platforms that spread a whole lot of bullshit that people end up believing because of the way that the information is presented and the ways that average people don’t have the media literacy that those of us who are constantly engaging in these things might. And even then, I would say that we occasionally fall for some bullshit as well. We occasionally see things that we might want to believe and then need to check into it and say, ah, damn, that was bullshit as well.

But anyway, that’s just a long way of saying that I think that these platforms, I called Facebook a social cancer recently, and that’s not just because of the recent changes that Mark Zuckerberg has made, but I think that these platforms have been very socially detrimental to the discourses that we have. And that’s not to say that traditional media is the most amazing thing in the world. Adam has a whole show where he discusses why that is not the case. But I think that we’re living in this media environment that is very polluted, that has a lot of problems with it, and the independent one that has been set up as the solution to it is often very much funded by these right-wing billionaires as well. And if you want to maximally succeed in the new media environment that’s being set up, you’re encouraged to be a right-wing piece of shit instead of to really hold power to account.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Adam, I know you got thoughts on that. Hit me.

Adam Johnson:  So here’s a fundamental problem, which is that the right wing embraces populism in the most superficial and aesthetic sense. They’re good at $50 million of condoms in Gaza, all these little thought memes, they’re extremely good at that, disseminating that to everybody. This idea that, again, Musk speaks in these demagogic or pseudo populous terms about he’s taking on the bureaucrats and the establishment — Again, he’s fucking worth $450 billion, but he’s taking on the man. Trump does this, obviously, very well.

And establishment Democrats and liberals run and are allergic to any form of populism. So naturally they’re going to fail in a media ecosystem where that kind of thing is currency, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. It is a party run by PR hacks and lawyers and eggheads, and they don’t speak in those terms, they don’t speak in that language, they don’t know how to fight back. And when someone within that milieu who’s better at speaking in those terms, whether it be Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, tries to defend the liberal administrative state, it can work, but it’s so rare.

And then meanwhile, you have people like Chris Murphy and talking about how, oh, actually Biden’s going to deport more people, and USAID is how we destroy China. And it’s like, well, that’s not a very populist framing, that’s just ratcheting up the racist machine.

And so there’s an asymmetry of what kind of rhetoric you employ. And again, Democrats, I think by design, just don’t have those kinds of [inaudible] talking points, the $50 million in condoms to dollars or whatever. They are talking about gutting $880 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. They’re talking about raising the retirement age. We’re talking about doing a lot of extremist right-wing shit.

And for a variety of reasons, liberals and Democrats have been unable to really message around that. They are a little bit better over the last week or so. But there hasn’t been a way of framing this as an elite attack on the liberal administrative state because liberals, for 30 years, have run away from the idea of government as something that’s good, something that actually protects you, that keeps your water clean, that makes sure that these fucking speed-addled billionaires don’t wreck every part of your life.

And I think what you see in the messaging asymmetry, the media ecosystem asymmetry, people did all this lamenting about why is there no liberal Joe Rogan? Why is there no Democratic media ecosystem? And it’s like, because the media ecosystem on the right embraces its extremists because they know, ultimately, it doesn’t really undermine their bottom line, whereas liberals’ fundamental project is disciplining, managing, and marginalizing the left, and partisan liberal content is just inherently going to be fucking boring. How many times can you spin for various unpopular policies rather than having a genuine space where you attack them?

And I think that plays into a similar dynamic here. So when we talk about why Musk has been good at messaging this, again, he goes on Joe Rogan, Rogan’s been doing a fucking six-month-long Musk puff fest about how great he is. This is someone who does have a huge working-class listenership. And they’re reframing themselves again, as Trump successfully did. And the cognitive dissonance of all these people being multi-billionaires is just something you put aside in your fucking brain somewhere. These are the rogue billionaires who are actually out to help you.

It’s what I call the, I dunno if you saw that Jason Statham film [The] Beekeeper. It’s this distorted vision of who’s fucking you over. It’s liberal bureaucrats and other billionaires, but not the good billionaires. And there’s also some cops, but some cops are good, and it’s really actually the deep state, but it’s USAID that’s really running the show behind the scenes, not the DOD or the CIA.

It’s obviously this warped vision because people, again, as you note, Max, in your intro and elsewhere, people have a vague sense that there is a system fucking them, and they need it to have a name and a face. And liberals don’t do that. They do this facile Republican billionaires — Oh, but they can’t reject billionaires because when the guy who just won the DNC said, we’re going to find the good billionaires, so we are going to take $50 million from Bill Gates, we’re going to take $50 million from Michael Bloomberg. So we can’t really have populist politics, so we have to turn it into this partisan schlock.

And I keep going back to Norman Solomon’s definition of neoliberalism, which is a worldview of victims but no victimizers. There’s never a fucking bad guy. And the extent to which there ever is a bad guy, it’s just this, again, it’s this particular billionaire here. It’s not a form of class politics. So it’s all very frustrated and limp and half-assed and doesn’t really resonate like the faux populism of the right.

To say nothing of the fact that they just have more control over social media, more control over, obviously, billionaires run the media, so there’s going to be a natural asymmetry that you can’t really do much about just by virtue of who funds things.

But you’re seeing that play out, and they are winning the messaging war to a great degree. Liberals have a liberal sort of elite media, your centrist media, New York Times, Democratic leadership in Congress. What’s the first thing they did after Trump won? You had Joe Scarborough go on TV and say, we’re going to work with Trump. We’re going to do bipartisanship. You had Hakeem Jeffries say, we’re going to work with Trump, we’re going to do bipartisanship, the minority leader. And there wasn’t a sense of, oh, we’re going to resist this time.

New York Times did a profile about how big liberal donors, Reid Hoffman, all these guys, Michael Bloomberg, are pulling back. They’re not really donating to the so-called resistance because, unlike last time, it can’t be filtered into this neoconservative project like Trump is.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I’ll say though, maybe one small bit of grace that we’ve gotten compared to the last time Trump was elected is we don’t have to suffer through year after year of mainstream media pundits saying today is the day Donald Trump became [crosstalk] [laughs] —

Adam Johnson:  Oh, well, yeah, that’s where a lot of the money went. They went through the conspiratorial Milleritism — Or as I ironically call it, Muelleritism. He’s going to come and he’s going to rescue you, and we’re all going to be saved at the 11th hour, and here’s an AI picture of Trump in prison clothes, and we’re going to get him.

In a way, that can create space for a genuine resistance where you do try to reorient a party that does address people’s root issues and economic issues and these genuine issues rather than the Liz Cheney brand. But I think that the point is that we’re going to work with Trumpism. Because whenever they say bipartisanship, nine times out of 10, or 99 times out of 100, they’re not talking about saving the spotted owl or preserving a natural — They’re talking about punishing Gaza protesters, increasing militarism against China. They’re talking about antiwoke stuff. That really was a bipartisan thing. Much of what Trump is executing is just an extreme version of what The Atlantic magazine and New York Times opinion pages have been advocating since, frankly, #MeToo, to some extent, George Floyd, which is like, oh, the wokes got too cute. They got overaggressive. We need to put them back in their place. And they view Trump as someone that could instrumentalize to do that.

So then Musk comes in and does this. And again, a lot of these austerity things Musk is doing is just kind of Bull Simpson on steroids. These are things that a lot of rich Democrats and rich Democrat donors wanted anyway, they just didn’t want it to go this far. And so to the extent to which Democratic elites and the media and Democratic leadership in Congress, again — Less so governors — Are responding now and actually are defending the liberal state, not just spooky stuff at USAID, but the very idea of a liberal state, I think it is coming from bottom-up pressure. I think it’s coming from these, not partisan hack groups, from genuine protests. I think you do see a liberal resistance, in a true sense, liberals.

There was a point where hardcore Democrat pundits on social media, total hacks, people that defended the genocide for 15 months would come on and be like, so are they going to do anything about this? And it’s like, yeah. And so they began to alienate even some of the more hardcore MSNBC set, and I think that’s why you’re seeing the shift now a little bit more.

Not to, God forbid I’m positive, but I do think, again, the lawfare stuff has always been there. A lot of the governors have been there. I hate Gavin Newsom, but he’s been suing, defending trans rights, the attorney general of California, Pritzker. These guys have been suing. It’s not like people are doing nothing.

But actual Democratic leadership has had no consistent message. They have no little $50 million in condoms to Gaza meme stuff. They have nothing to really counter the narrative that Musk is somehow taking on the deep state or elites of nebulous origin, even though he himself has $20 billion in government contracts. So he’s not the elite. It’s unclear.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I want to hone in on that point, actually. I wanted to underline this in red pen, and I know folks in the live chat are asking about it, and it’s on all of our minds, but definitely worth noting here. In rapid pace, I’m going to read some quotes from other outlets that make this point. The Lever reported this week, “Elon Musk’s [Department of] Government Efficiency was reportedly canceling Department of Education contracts in the name of frugality.” As that was happening, “Musk’s rocket company was [this week] cementing a NASA contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency. […] The new ‘supplemental’ contract dated Feb. 10 adds $7.5 million to SpaceX’s NASA work, according to the Federal Procurement Data System records. The overall transaction obligated $38 million to Musk’s company, as part of its overall deal with NASA.”

This is to say nothing of Musk’s other companies like SpaceX, which, Reuters reports, “SpaceX provides launch services to the Department of Defense, including the launch of classified satellites and other payloads. SpaceX’s CEO Gwynne Shotwell has said the company has about $22 billion in government contracts.” But it’s also important to note that “The total value of Musk’s companies’ contracts with the DoD are estimated to be in the billions [of dollars],” but we don’t know because a lot of them are classified. But you could go through, again, the obvious, what should be the obvious conflicts of interest here, is Musk is going in there like a bull in a China shop, saying he’s rooting out corruption and waste while he’s still securing contracts for himself and his companies.

And the other story there that folks were talking about this morning was, as The New York Times and first the news site Drop Site reported, that apparently the State Department had plans to buy $400 million worth of armored Tesla Cybertrucks, which caused a massive uproar. As of right now on Thursday, Musk has denied those reports and is calling Drop Site fake news, doing the standard like, oh, I’ve never heard of this, that never happened thing, even though it was written on the State Department’s procurement forecast for the 2025 fiscal year, including $400 million of “armored Tesla cars”.

So there’s a whole lot more we could say about that. But Paris, I wanted to come to you because there was another quote that I came across that I think people should really recall right now, and this was a quote from Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, who said that DOGE is a “revolution”, one that will be “very good for Palantir in the long run”. And this was something that Alex Karp said on Palantir’s fourth quarter earnings call.

And so this brings us back to the question of, again, the Silicon Valley oligarchic network that birthed J.D. Vance’s political career, that threw ungodly sums of money behind the Trump and Vance ticket, that are embodied in the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, that were sitting there in the rotunda on Trump’s inauguration day. You had Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Musk all there.

I wanted to bring this back to you, Paris, because, could we describe this as a capitalist coup by the big tech oligarchy? Are they trying to essentially force society and the market to become more dependent on their version of AI? Are they trying to force us to become dependent on crypto even though no one fucking wants to? How do people navigate that question? Is it that concerted? Are they using not just Musk, but Trump and the whole administration, to effectively take over our system of government so that they rewire our whole society to fit their needs?

Paris Marx:  Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t think that’s a big surprise. I think that that has been a project that they have been engaged in for quite some time now. It’s just they have an enormous amount of power and wealth that they can use to further force this onto everybody. And it’s not that this kind of tech oligarchy is unique in that way. I think that if we look at the United States, we can see that powerful capitalist interests have always been very influential in shaping government policy and what the government has been doing, and also what the wider society looks like in order to benefit themselves and their industries.

My book that I wrote was about the transportation industry, certainly looking at what Silicon Valley has been doing recently, but also going back to the early days of automobility and where you see these auto companies and these various interests working together to ensure that communities in the United States become dependent on automobiles because it’s great for the oil business and it’s great for the auto business and so many of these other industries that are associated with it. As we develop this mode of suburban living that is very consumer oriented, there was a concerted effort to create a particular kind of society that was going to be very beneficial to a lot of capitalist interests.

And right now what we see is these capitalists in Silicon Valley making sure that they are trying to remake the United States in their interests, in the way that they want to see it, and it looks like it’s going to be a total mess because they don’t have a very good understanding of how society actually works. They think that because they can code, or even just understand code to a certain degree, that they understand everything, and that is not the case. They’re very narcissistic people.

But you mentioned Palantir and Alex Karp. I was listening to an interview with an executive at Palantir just the other day where they’re talking about how they think it’s very essential for the Department of Defense to increase competition in the development of arms and weapons, because not just does that take the defense primes, the major companies that currently provide weapons to the US government and the US military, down from their current pedestal, but also opens the way for Palantir, Anduril, for these other more tech-framed startup companies to get in on some of those Pentagon dollars.

That is one of the things that they are very focused on in that sector of the tech economy. And a lot of these major tech companies are also reorienting to sell more AI to also develop more defense products so that they can tap into all of this money that the United States spends on defense.

And of course, they will promote that as a savings because one of the things that they always point to is SpaceX, to say, look, SpaceX reduced the cost of launching, and now the United States has this much easier ability to get things into space. And when you note that the United States is becoming dependent on SpaceX in a way that actually has people really concerned, that’s not a worry to them because they just say, oh, well, other companies could compete on cost, but they’re not. So the problem isn’t with SpaceX, it’s with everyone else.

And that is something that we’re also seeing, as you mentioned NASA, is NASA is going to be a focus of Elon Musk and the DOGE agency. There were reports today that DOGE people are now going to NASA to look through the books, and the acting NASA administrator is welcoming them to do that. And it seems quite clear that they are going to seek to remake NASA around Elon Musk’s priorities and SpaceX’s priorities in particular, potentially even the cancellation of the space launch system, which Boeing, and I can’t remember the other company that’s working on that, but essentially to cancel that and to make sure that SpaceX is going to get more business out of it.

So everywhere you look, they are trying to remake things in order for them to benefit from it. David Sachs, who is the AI and crypto czar, says that stable coin legislation is their first big priority. So to try to legitimize the crypto industry and to make sure that it’s easier to roll out crypto and these products throughout the US economy and financial system, despite the fact that we saw how scam laden this whole industry is and how these venture capitalists benefited from it.

We have reporting that Marc Andreessen, despite the fact that he’s not very public facing, he does a lot of interviews and stuff, but he’s not out talking a lot about what he’s doing with the administration, but reportedly he also has a lot of influence in the policies that are being pushed forward.

So a lot of these tech billionaires are trying to make sure that the changes that the Trump administration is going to bring forward are going to be in their interests, and that the things that are going to make them money and increase their power are things that are going to be pushed forward in the next little while.

That is not a big surprise, but we need to be aware of those things if we’re going to be able to push back on them properly and try to ensure that the tech industry isn’t able to remake American society in the way that it would want to see it, regardless of what that means for everybody else. Because I can guarantee you that, just as people have been increasingly waking up to the harms that have come of this industry and these tech companies over the past few decades, despite the fact that they were long positioned as increasing democracy and freedom and convenience and all this stuff, that actually there are a whole load of issues that have come of the transformation of the economy with these digital services because these people don’t really care about average people or the consequences of what they do. They’re capitalists. They’re just trying to make their money and increase their power.

Adam Johnson:  That’s what makes this whole deep state framing so goofy. These are all defense contractors. Palantir was co-founded by the CIA through its In-Q-Tel fund in 2003. Peter Thiel was on their original board of directors the year before he put the first big money into Facebook. This is someone who’s deeply into the so-called deep state Pentagon contract, CIA. It’s all fucking a show. It’s all an act. This is this victimization link of the deep state’s after them, and it’s like, you are the fucking deep state. And this is what they want. They want control over the government.

And a lot of progressives have said, why has DOGE not gone after the Defense Department? And I think that’s a little bit of a trap because I think they will go after the Defense Department in a very particular way, in the same way Josh Hawley holds up DOD bills because he wants to rename bases after Confederate generals. I think they’ll go after it for anti-“DEI” stuff to go after trans people, Black people, they’ll do that. They’ll call it efficiency, but they’ll do the racist disciplining aspect. But they’ll also just get rid of defense contractors that aren’t them.

Again, they’ll put it under the auspices of modernization, AI, all this slick dogshit to make it seem like it’s, oh, they’re just streamlining things. But it’s because they want to pay back a lot of their buddies in Silicon Valley. And some of these companies they perceive as dinosaurs, whether it’s Boeing or Lockheed Martin or whatever, will probably lose out on contracts to some of their Silicon Valley. They have a ton of money in defense contractors.

So I think they’ll do that. And maybe that’ll shave off, at the end of the day, a couple billion. But ultimately it’s just a power grab. It’s got nothing to do with genuinely taking on the power of the deep state or power of the CIA or power of the Pentagon. These guys are not interested in that. They are interested in the raw exercise of American imperial power, just like every other capitalist. They want to do it their way. If anything, it’s maybe a civil war within the defense contracting world, but it’s not going to meaningfully push back on the Pentagon.

So when people like Ro Khanna, and to some extent even Bernie Sanders, they get all cute saying, why don’t you defend, go after the Defense Department? I’m like, man, be careful what you wish for, because what they’re going to do is they’re going to purge it of fucking Black people and give their contracts to their buddies. So again, because all this is just in bad faith, it’s got nothing to do with efficiency, obviously. Clearly, in case it wasn’t obvious [laughs].

Paris Marx:  No, I think the thing to always remember is you think about the history of Silicon Valley, and when we think of Silicon Valley today, we think of the internet companies and digital technology and all this stuff, but Lockheed Martin and missile manufacturers and all that stuff have always been there. They were where the first microprocessors went, to go into these missiles. This relationship has always been there, and we’re seeing it very much come to the fore at the moment.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Guys, this has been a phenomenal conversation, and I could genuinely talk to you for two more hours, but I know I’ve got to wrap up and let you go. And so by way of a final, not a question to answer right here, but just maybe looking ahead to the next stream when we can get you guys back on to talk about this, let’s not forget that the world does not stop and end with the United States.

What happens here is also going to depend on what technology from China and other parts of the world do. And we’ve been seeing that there are plenty of companies, governments, people around the world who are salivating at the chance to make American capitalists and America itself pay the price for all of our bullshit in past years, decades, and centuries.

So I wanted to ask if you had any leading thoughts for things that people should keep an eye on when they’re also trying to get a handle on this subject? What outside of the US, particularly when it comes to China, should we also be factoring in here?

So let’s make that a final note. And also tell folks where they can find you and take advantage of your brilliant work after we close out this stream.

So yeah, Paris, let’s go back to you, and then Adam, we’ll close out with you.

Paris Marx:  Sounds good. Yeah, absolutely. China is the big competitor at the moment when it comes to technology because it has been able to actually develop a proper industry because it’s protected a lot of its companies, so it was able to do that. We recently saw the AI market get this big scare when a Chinese company called DeepSeek developed a more efficient generative AI model that had all these very energy intensive American companies running and getting nervous. I don’t think it’s ultimately going to change a whole lot.

But I would also say in this moment where you have Trump flexing the power of the American government and making it so that the exercise of American power is very short term and very transactional, that you have a lot of countries that were previously aligned with the United States that are still aligned with the United States getting more and more pissed off, I would say, with the US and the American government. I’m in Canada, so obviously I’m thinking about that a lot these days as we hear about major tariffs being put on Canada and Mexico and talk of Canada being a 51st state.

But you also hear what Donald Trump has been saying about Panama, about South Africa, about different parts of Europe, Greenland, Denmark, not to mention his new plan to take over Gaza, apparently, and turn it into a wonderful resort or something.

As the United States says more of these things and turns off countries that have been its allies, I think that there’s also an opening there, as we see the relationship between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley and these tech billionaires, for other countries to come together and to say, not just fuck the United States, but fuck Silicon Valley as well. And we can develop our own technologies to compete against this and increasingly try to reduce our dependence on American digital technology and these tech companies that we were told we had to be dependent on because of this moment and how the internet was supposed to work in this new neoliberal era that increased American power.

So I guess maybe it’s more of a hope. We see the Europeans getting increasingly frustrated. I know Canada is very frustrated, and I’m sure a number of other countries are as well. And I hope that that becomes actually some sort of a broader movement, for these countries to try something different rather than just keep being dependent on the United States. But we’ll see where that ultimately goes. I think China right now is obviously the one to watch in this area, but I hope it will expand beyond that as people get fed up with the US.

And on that, of course, Tech Won’t Save Us podcast is where I am most of the time. Usually I tweet or post on Bluesky these days. And I also have a newsletter called Disconnect.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Which everyone should subscribe to. And I can’t stress enough, go listen to Tech Won’t Save Us. You’ll learn a lot that you’re going to need right now to understand what the hell is happening.

Adam, let’s close out with you. Any final thoughts on that? And where can folks find you?

Adam Johnson:  This is, again, this is an example. What is fascism? It’s imperialism turned inwards. I think they are so high on their own ideological supply. They’re getting so greedy, they don’t understand that the liberal state, such as it is, all these DEI programs — The actual ones, not the racist canard — This is all to preserve capitalism. It’s an HR device. They’re trying to help you.

But Musk and these right-wing oligarchs, they’re so in their own world, they truly have developed what Cass Sunstein refers to pejoratively as a crippling epistemology. They’re so warped in their mind. It’s like going after USAID. It’s a soft power. It’s a regime change [laughs] like [inaudible]. Yeah, it does important work, but that’s not really why it’s there.

And I think that this level of myopia, I think we’re seeing this play out, and they’re so used to just consuming and consuming and consuming that they will let the world burn if it can get them an extra 5%. The smart billionaires, the ones who don’t really see much difference between $100 billion and $150 billion, who understand that, who donate to Democrats, who understand that they’re a fundamentally conservative force, are just losing the day. And they’re not really, they don’t have that much skin in the game, and they just will keep consuming and consuming until there’s nothing left to consume.

Even if, again, they blow up the very — It’s like when they talk about AI. The way they talk, you would think they don’t need consumers or people. It’s humanity without humans. It’s a very dark vision of the world. And Musk really does exemplify this. He is the epitome of this. He views everyone as an NPC. He’s the main actor. People either work for him or they’re in his way.

And this is a general pathology in Silicon Valley. It, again, it’s not everybody, but it’s a lot of ’em. This kind of Randian dark vision of the world of dog eat dog. And they don’t understand that savvy capitalists know how to adapt and throw the little piggy some slop, and they don’t even want to do that. So I think they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction in certain ways. And the question is, what force will emerge to counterbalance that dark vision? And right now, I don’t see that happening.

Maximillian Alvarez:  But I think the question itself is one we all need to sit with because we need to be the authors of that counter story. What is it? How are we telling it? How are we fighting to make it a reality? That is our task, but we know the story that these oligarchs want to tell and the role that they want us, as minor characters and cannon fodder, to play in their story.

And so we want to end on that note, as a call to action to all of us. What is the story that we are telling to counteract this technofascist takeover that ends with the potential destruction of civilization as such, the planet that we live on, if not checked. What is the check? What are we prepared to do? What are we going to do to fight for a better future that’s still worth living in for ourselves and our children? We need to answer that question in a hurry.

And I really cannot thank enough all of our incredible guests today on the stream: the great Aaron Stephens, Paris Marx, and Adam Johnson, who have contributed to making this a phenomenal conversation. I hope that you all learned as much from it as I did.

Please give us your feedback in the live chat. Reach out to us over email. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Become a donor and a community member today, because your support directly translates to us getting to do more shows like this, doing more weekly reporting on workers in the labor movement, on the people victimized by the prison-industrial complex, people victimized by the police, and this gross system of inequality and endless war. We are on the front lines holding a microphone to the folks who are fighting the fight there in the middle of the struggle.

And so we can’t do that work without you and your support. So please let us know how we’re doing. Please let us know what you’d like us to address on future livestreams, and other guests that you want us to have on.

But we do these streams for you. We do them to hopefully empower you and others to act in this moment, because if we don’t act and we let this all happen, we are headed towards a very, very dark place. We’re in a dark place right now, but things can still always get darker. So please fight however you can for the light, and hold it up, and we’ll be right there with you.

For The Real News Network, this is Maximilian Alvarez thanking you for the whole team here, everyone behind the scenes who is making this stream happen. We are with you, and we thank you for watching, and we thank you for caring. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

[Outro] Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

https://therealnews.com/elon-musk-is-making-technofascism-a-reality-before-our-eyes

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Edward Theodore Gein (/ɡiːn/ GEEN; August 27, 1906[1] – July 26, 1984), also known as "the Butcher of Plainfield" or "the Plainfield Ghoul", was an American murderer, suspected serial killer and body snatcher. Gein's crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety in 1957 after authorities discovered that he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned keepsakes from their bones and skin. He also confessed to killing two women: tavern owner Mary Hogan in 1954, and hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957.

Gein was initially found unfit to stand trial and confined to a mental health facility. By 1968 he was judged competent to stand trial; he was found guilty of the murder of Worden,[2] but was found legally insane and thus was remanded to a psychiatric institution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein