DOGE Boys Stood Athwart History, Then Their Robots Deleted It
Come watch these idiots try and fail to explain themselves!
Last Wednesday a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled 2-1 that Elon Musk himself was not required to sit for a deposition about his role in using his pack of DOGE chuds to dismantle USAID. Most transparent administration in history!
However, a couple of Musk’s sub-chuds have not been so lucky. Plaintiffs the American Council of Learned Societies, a nonprofit federation of 75 scholarly humanities organizations including the American Historical Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Modern Language Association, are suing Trump’s chair of the NEH over DOGE’s abrupt and nonsensical terminations of previously-awarded arts grants. And in January they got two DOGE tools, Nathan Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, to sit for depositions to explain how they got recruited, and what their process was for cutting all those arts grants.
And the New York Times has also done some digging! Spoiler, the process was using ChatGpt (not even Elon Musk’s own Grok, OUCH!) with the prompt “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’”
HACKERMEN!!
Short version, from the lawsuit:
The official “rationale” for terminating certain grants, for example, was that they were about a “Black lawyer,” “Black children,” a “woman writer,” or “Jewish writers.” After selecting more than 1,000 grants for termination because they purportedly involved DEI, they expanded the sweep to every remaining Biden-era grant promoting ideas not deemed aligned with the current Administration’s priorities.
Another problem, aside from ChatGpt’s massive error rate which is about 50 percent even with relatively much simpler computer programming prompts, is that these guys have no clue how to say “DEI” out loud without outing themselves as sexist, racist, and/or homophobic assholes, and were therefore were unable to articulate the concept to a robot. Just like Bethany Mandel unable to explain what “woke” is, or Trump nominee Jeremy Carl unable to explain what “white culture” is. And robots don’t do well trying to properly interpret pages of couched racist euphemisms.
The “boys” —who are actually both around 28-29 years old— resist giving clear answers with all their tiny little mights. But stuff trickles, and the depositions do fill in a few gaps. Also they will give you flashbacks to bar dating in your 20s and seeing a guy across a crowded room with the potential to be a fixer-upper if he had better hair, only to have him dash all your fantasies by opening his mouth.
Who would choose to live that life, huddled with smelly, pasty incels in a locked room with blacked-out windows, subsisting off of muscle milk and typing into ChatGpt every waking hour? Here is your answer!
You can watch the interviews in full on the MLA’s YouTube page, or let’s get right to Fox playing dumb that he doesn’t know what “DEI” means.
LAWYER: Did you use any particular methodology in assessing NE grants for termination?
FOX: There was an executive order that said to eliminate spend on DEI and other wasteful, um, government spending and that was the lens.
LAWYER: So DEI would have been one kind of guidepost for the grants to terminate?
FOX: Yeah.
LAWYER: Okay, so how do you interpet “DEI”?
FOX: There was the EO explicitly laid out the details. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.
LAWYER: It’s okay. I’m asking for your understanding of it.
FOX: My understanding was exactly what was written in the EO.
LAWYER: Okay, so can you …
FOX: I don’t remember what was in the EO.
LAWYER: Okay. So, what’s your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?
FOX: Um, well, it was exactly what was written in the EO. And so, anytime that we would look at a grant through the lens of complying with an executive order, we would just refer back to the EO, right, and assess if this grant had relation to it.
LAWYER: Do you have an understanding as you sit here today of what DEI means?
FOX: Well, er, uh, I, it, it is exactly what was written in the EO. So, and I don’t have the EO in front of me, but that was we would always reference it …
The exchange goes on like that for an agonizing while, until the lawyer finally squeezes out of Fox, “I don’t, I don’t feel comfortable saying a high level overview because it is such a big bucket and there’s just a lot of pieces of the puzzle there.”
But can Fox name even one piece of that bucket-puzzle? “Um, gender fluidity. Um, sort of promoting, um, like promoting subsets of LGBTQ plus that might, um, alienate another part of a community,” hurr durr hut!
The lawyer reached his final fucking nerve. “You you say that you have an understanding what DEI means and when I ask you, you say you need to reference the EO. Do you need to reference EOS to define every word you use in your everyday life? No. Okay. So what’s stopping you from defining DEI to your understanding as you sit here today?”
Answer, the topic is simply too big for his brain. Oh, no shit?
Watch his full deposition if you want!
Liberals really missed an opportunity to turn that bad-faith “what is a woman?!” questioning on them. Because after years of effort the best they can come up with was some non-science about gamete size, which read better as an argument that everyone is actually nonbinary. They have no fucking idea.
Abd/but whoops, turns out he did know:
As evidence, the filing notes a list Mr. Fox compiled of what he called the “craziest” and “other bad” grants, which he planned to highlight on DOGE’s X account. He used three dozen keywords, including “L.G.B.T.Q.,” “BIPOC,” “tribal,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “equality,” “immigration,” “citizenship” and “melting pot.” (A majority of the two dozen grants deemed “craziest” related to L.G.B.T.Q. subjects.)
In the deposition, Mr. Fox said the list reflected his “subjective” judgment about whether a grant might be out of line with Mr. Trump’s executive order.
“‘Crazy’ is one way of saying it,” he said. “‘Most incriminating’ is another way.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers also asked Mr. Fox about some grants flagged in his original ChatGPT search, like one for a documentary about the 1873 massacre in Colfax, La., where dozens of Black men were murdered by a mob of former Confederates and Ku Klux Klan members.
ChatGPT had deemed it “D.E.I.” Mr. Fox said he agreed. “Because it focuses on exclusively anti-Black violence, which is a race,” he said.
Here’s another list of grants cancelled for ridiculous reasons. And in the end, almost all Biden-area grants ended up yanked, then replaced with millions in grants to conservative-backed civic organizations. Including a $10.4 million award, the largest in the NEH’s history, to a group called Tikvah, just because one of the DOGE leaders was impressed by a podcast episode the group’s leader had recorded, and whose wife had been involved with a program there. But but but mah waste, fraud and abuse!
And then there was Nate Cavanaugh.
Cavanaugh said he’d been working for the past six years at a startup he founded, called BrainBase, and then at another called FlowFinance for six months before being hired at DOGE by Steve Davis, the CEO of Elon Musk’s Boring Company, after a venture capitalist and DOGE ally named Baris Akis recruited him. Most LOL part: Cavanaugh said he’d become political because he was concerned about the budget deficit. As most healthy 20-something-year-old men are wont to fret about! That is why so many party bangers have been written about 30-year Treasury rates.
The guys are adults who made their adult choice of where and how to be employed, of course, but we’ll point out again how predators like Trump, Epstein, Rep. Tony Gonzalez etc. prey on younger, more inexperienced people like these two. These guys may have decent enough resumes, but are clearly dumb as a bag of toenails, and surely thought they was hot shit getting these Very Special Jobs. But just because someone can make an app or pass the bar exam somewhere doesn’t mean they understand the law or have any social skills or common sense.
And your reminder, the DOGE boys weren’t just there to do some racisms. And they sure as shit weren’t there to save taxpayers any money.
USAID being the first agency to get DOGEd was most telling. It didn’t simply provide food and medical aid, it also did oversight as to where foreign aid money wound up. And if, say, a dictator was alleged to be taking USAID money and laundering it to give to MS-13, as Nayib Bukele of El Salvador allegedly did, USAID would look into it.
Or say a US defense contractor like Elon Musk’s Starlink was alleged to have endangered the lives of our allies by single-handedly deciding to cut off service to Ukrainian forces, USAID would investigate that too, potentially putting SpaceX’s contracts and security clearances in jeopardy.
According to whistleblowers, some DOGE boys were also transmitting Americans’ sensitive data to servers in Russia, and God-knows-where for God-knows-why, then sloppily and unsuccessfully tried to cover their tracks, and then stalked the whistleblowers for telling on them, too.
The full DOGE story has yet to be told, but one thing is for sure: they may be evil, but they’re also real corrupt, and mighty dumb, too. With a smattering of Daddy Issues.
Can’t wait for there to be consequences!
SEE ALSO!
[New York Times gift link]
The whole thing was a data mining operation. The DEI stuff was just a smokescreen.
Chat fucking GPT. They based governmental decision making on a program that thinks glue is edible and Greek is not the primary language spoke in Greece. That can be convinced there is a z in the word strawberry.
Fucking hell