This Is Not a Drill

The Incel Coup

Close your eyes and think of a coup, any coup. What comes to mind?

Perhaps you are old enough to recall September 11 1973, when the Chilean army and air force attacked the Moneda palace in Santiago and killed the elected president Salvador Allende. Or the tanks and truckloads of soldiers that moved smoothly and reassuringly into position in Buenos Aires on March 24 1976, bringing to an end the chaotic and bloody reign of Perón’s widow. There was no fighting then; many Argentinians welcomed the military as a stabilising force, not knowing that the armed forces had already laid the groundwork for a secret campaign of torture and extermination that would plunge Argentina into the darkest chapter in its history.

Or maybe you’ve seen the Brazilian Oscar nominee, I’m Still Here, which depicts the military coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart. All these coups were supported and to some extent facilitated by the American government - continuing a tradition that the US began with the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.

Whatever happens afterwards, the initial phase of a coup usually contains the same elements: a military presence on the streets; roadblocks and ID checks; the seizure of tv and radio stations; the immediate suppression of democratic political institutions; emergency legislation to justify mass arrests and other exceptional measures. Some coups might have ‘spontaneous’ mobs or crowds to give them the appearance of popular legitimacy. Others, like the Franco-led putsch in 1936, require a civil war in order to prevail.

What is now unfolding in the United States is something entirely different. There are no soldiers, police, and paramilitaries. No mass arrests or concentration camps. No displays of force to cow the opposition.

On the surface, a normal, democratic transfer of power has taken place, regardless of the fact that the principal beneficiary of this transition is a convicted felon, who once attempted to overthrow the elected government that defeated him.

And yet, as a result of this process, some of the lamest, stupidest, cruellest, greediest, most fanatical, most rotten, contemptible and downright evil people in America have done to the American government what no American political party has ever attempted to do, and what few people would once have even imagined that anyone would dare to do. For the last month, the richest man in the world - in fact the richest man the world has ever seen - has embarked on the most destructive assault on the federal government in American history, using a team of software engineers, some of whom are not even out of their teens.

Ensconced on sofa beds in government buildings, Musk’s little men have gained unprecedented access to the Treasury’s expansive payment system, which is responsible for an annual budget of trillions of dollars. They have gathered data on millions of government employees, and have begun writing code on government computer programs. So far DOGE has dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) - an achievement that Musk celebrated with all the savage sociopathic cynicism that we have come to expect from this obscene travesty of a human being:

Yes, he should have gone to the parties and entertained them with his dazzling wit. Instead, he preferred to take money from some of the poorest people on earth and then brag about it to his Nazi followers.

Musk’s dweeb hit squad has also imposed mass layoffs at the Education Department, the Small Business Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the US Forest Service and the National Park Service.

Amid this mayhem, there is a kind of sense. In shuttering the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Musk - a man with multiple conflicts of interest - has sought to eliminate the federal department which regulates banking, lending, and credit practices, and which also poses a potential obstacle to his own business interests, and to those of the tech bro mafia who stood gurning beside him at Trump’s inauguration.

DOGE has also gained access to the Federal Aviation Administration’s ‘rapid safety upgrades’ technologies, which aim to improve safety in the aviation sector - a sector in which Musk has a direct interest through his SpaceX company. The Muscovites are currently gathering personnel information at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at Medicare and Medicaid, at the Department of Energy, at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Veterans Affairs (VA).

Last week, the DOGE inbetweeners sacked between 300-400 nuclear weapons specialists at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), without realising what this department actually does. Musk’s vandals have since been trying to give them their jobs back, except that they don’t know how to locate many of them.

Put that in your pitch for a Netflix series and you’d probably get rejected on the grounds that you’d been hitting the ketamine too hard, which according to rumour, is exactly what the world’s richest man has been doing.

For a country to place its collective fate in the hands of men like this, is the most extraordinary, jaw-dropping, barely credible folly imaginable. Yet not a single soldier or tank has been necessary to achieve this wild outcome.

No one elected Musk. Neither he nor his hirelings are subject to congressional accountability, and a Republican-dominated congress has no interest in seeking it. Latin American golpistas have generally relied on state forces to achieve their objectives. But this is a coup being carried out against the state - authorized by a flurry of executive orders from the criminal-rapist, crooked real estate magnate and reality tv star, who is now telling the dazed electorate that voted for him: ‘ He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.’

Someone should tell the crazed mandarin satan that this is not how democracy works, but don’t hold your breath.

According to WIRED, Musk’s team was recruited on online chatrooms last year. At least three DOGE staffers were recruited by Peter Thiel’s company Palantir, in the following manner:

In online chat groups linked to Palantir alumni and SpaceX interns, Musk’s space company, as well as in a Discord server associated with a military artificial intelligence program, the engineers said they were looking for people willing to spend six months in Washington, DC, cutting federal spending—which accounts for around a quarter of the US gross domestic product—by a third.

One of these recruits is a 19-year-old with the nickname Big Balls, who now occupies the position of senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology. Another of Musk’s bright sparks is a 25-year-old staffer, who resigned after tweets were discovered in which he bragged that ‘I was racist before it was cool’ and called for the tech sector to ‘Normalize Indian hate.’

That squeaky little eugencist has since been reinstated by Musk, who called for the journalist who revealed these tweets to be fired.

This is the mighty ‘crew of teenage mutant incels’, as Stephen Colbert calls them, who are defanging the FBI, trying to close down the CIA, and cutting millions from the education budget. All this in the country that raised the ‘national security state’ to a quasi-religious status during the Cold War, and introduced the US PATRIOT Act in order to deter the threat from foreign terrorism.

It’s less than a decade since Trump called Edward Snowden a ‘total traitor’ and a ‘disgrace’ for revealing the US government’s covert surveillance programs. Yet now, Trump and his minions smirk happily while a billionaire with political ties to America’s enemies decimates key government institutions and his pipsqueak army gathers data that neither he nor they are qualified to handle.

Snowden justified his whistleblowing on ethical grounds. The Trump/Musk gang has no such arguments. They are dismantling their own government in broad daylight, in order to create a libertarian environment favourable to Musk and his fellow-predators, while pursuing a vindictive culture war which is removing words like ‘women’, gender’, ‘lesbian’, ‘Black History’, ‘National American Indian Heritage’ and other manifestations of wokery from government websites.

No wonder America’s enemies are laughing. And as for al-Qaeda and the Great Satan, well there’s no need to cut off the head of the snake when the snake is swallowing its own tail. Russia, the country which did so much to inject the culture war toxins into America’s mouldering body politic, also has particular reason to celebrate this outcome.

Last year, Russian media commentators were mocking the stupidity of Trump voters. This year, Russian state television is praising Trump for ‘cutting apart the Western world’ because of his ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine. This ‘plan’ looks set to give Putin everything he had asked for, while bypassing Ukraine - the victim of Russian aggression.

Last week, European leaders listened with stupefaction to an atrocious MAGA speech from the Hillbilly Faust J.D. Vance, who claimed that Europe was more of a threat to freedom and free speech than Russia. Vance coolly expounded Alexander Dugin talking points, collapsed the US-European alliance and abandoned Ukraine to its fate, with the arrogant insouciance of a man who knows he can say whatever the hell he likes without any consequences.

The problem - and it is a huge problem - is that he can, because too many Americans have been too frightened, complicit or lily-livered to call out this barking madness. Too many politicians and commentators have behaved like the punters at Westworld, who thought they were just fighting play-robots and re-enacting the same old fantasy scenarios, until the robots opened fire and started killing them.

European politicians are not entirely dissimilar. To his credit, the German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius excoriated Vance's lazy and dishonest arguments, and even John Major - Mr Gray Man himself - has raised his voice to condemn the good ‘ol boy with a hole in his soul.

But too many politicians continue to treat Trump and Trumpism as if they still lived in a world where the old rules apply. Too few seem unable or unwilling to recognise that the reason why Trump and his MAGA cult are aligning themselves with the Kremlin’s gangster-authoritarianism, is because they are gangster-authoritarians themselves, who share the same reactionary cultural/nationalist vision espoused by Kremlin ideologues like Dugin. This affinity explains the once-unlikely alliances that are now emerging, as a result of Trump’s sordid démarche to Putin. And it also explains how the Musk coup has been allowed to happen.

Trump’s voters may believe that the criminal-rapist is putting ‘America first’, but outside the cult, it looks a lot more like the collapse of an empire.

Some may argue that it serves America right. After all, how many countries have been invaded or attacked by America? Or had their political systems subverted or corrupted, and their governments overthrown by American-led covert ops? Now America itself is sinking into a vortex of political chaos, stupidity and delusion, and the incel coup is both a cause of that implosion and a consequence of the terrible judgement that made it possible.

Too bad, you might say. And good riddance. But the collapse of an empire is not the same as the collapse of a country - and a society. American neo-imperial decline is a welcome process, because the world doesn’t need empires, whether formal or informal. Nor is clear that this decline is taking place. The nineteenth century Manifest Destiny language that Trump and his mob are moronically and brutishly using regarding Canada, Mexico, Greenland - and Ukraine - suggests that reports of the empire’s death may be premature.

And the priorities that Vance presented to Europe’s stunned leaders last week is just the leading edge of an authoritarian-nationalist wave that threatens democracies across the world, and which is unrolling at precisely the time when the world needs collective solutions to collective problems.

The incel coup is already hurting and killing people, and it will hurt many more. The cancellation of US Aid has destroyed anti-trafficking efforts in the DRC; it has closed hospitals in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, and HIV clinics in Uganda. People are dying, and more will die, thanks to DOGE and Trump, and that is not a mistake - it is the result of a deliberate choice, which makes it evil.

Some Americans may not be bothered by this - for now. But they will also feel the consequences, as they lose firefighters, Medicare and Medicaid and social security, staff in their national parks, government regulators, aviation safety programs, schools, and cancer research programs.

This is class war acting under the guise of culture war, intended to strip American society to the bone. And this is what nationalism does - it rips the heart out of your country, transfers vast wealth to those who are already obscenely rich, and leaves you waving your flag and bleating about sovereignty or transwomen in the bathroom, while telling yourself how great you are and how you owned the libs.

Where this ends, we can’t yet say. The courts may yet force a constitutional crisis, in which the president has to choose between the law and constitution on the one hand, and his malignant agenda on the other. At that point, there will be a political crisis, in which Trump’s movement will implement the next phase of their ‘bloodless’ revolution, as the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts called the Project 25 ‘road map’ that Trump is essentially following.

Perhaps a movement will develop that will bring about the collapse of this deranged government. Or perhaps Trump will bring out police and soldiers. And then there will be dictatorship, civil war, or some kind of Orban-like repressive pseudo- democracy.

At this point, all possibilities are open, and yet too many politicians refuse to recognize it. Here in the UK, our timid and increasingly directionless government continues to imagine that the ‘special relationship’ is still special, and dreams of acting as a ‘bridge’ between America and Europe.

But this is not the bridge, this is the fateful crossroads and the fork in the road. This is the movement that must be opposed, resisted and quarantined within immovable red lines. Because make no mistake about it, these monstrous politics are coming here. And if Reform make any progress, then they will have their own dweebs and incels waiting to reduce Whitehall ‘waste’ in the way that Dominic Cumings has only dreamed of.

To prevent this, we need the broadest possible alliances. We need politicians with principles and integrity who know what they believe in and will stand up for what they believe in. We need journalists who will call a coup a coup, and lay off the sanewashing and the normalising and the ‘let’s just listen to both sides’ kumbaya trilling.

We need people who are prepared to resist, oppose, and condemn this cruelty, inhumanity, corruption and gross deceit before we are all dragged into the MAGA gutter. Such resistance needs to be individual and collective, legal, cultural, intellectual, political and moral.

We need to support Americans who are already doing this, and play our part in building these movements wherever and whoever we are. Otherwise, we might find the incels camping out in Whitehall, and the tech bros in Downing Street, advising Rupert Lowe or Nigel Farage, as they tear society to pieces in front of our startled eyes, while we stand waving flags and telling ourselves we got our country back.