Barbarians and mandarins
"As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes."
After six weeks, is Trump 47 going well? It is and it isn’t. Frankly, I give it a C-. While still far below its potential, it at least has not failed. Which is frankly amazing.
What is frustrating about this administration is that it has the opportunity to win and the strength to win, but neither (it seems) the will or the understanding to win. So, it’s going to lose. But it is not yet fated to lose.
Here are some things the new Trump administration doesn’t seem to understand, some things it does seem to understand, and some more things it doesn’t. After the paywall, I’ll give a policy example of what could be done in a world with more clue.
What everyone understands
Here are the great philosophical truths that everyone in this regime seems to realize:
First, the government needs to be run top-down from the Oval Office. This is why we call it the “executive” branch. “Executive” is a literal synonym of “monarchical”—from “mono,” meaning “one,” and “archy,” meaning “regime.” “Autocratic” is fine too. The “executive branch” is the “autocratic branch,” or should be if English is English. Libs: if these words don’t mean what they mean, what do they mean?
The apex of the orgchart pyramid does not literally have to be one person. It can be a pair of cofounders, as in a YC startup, or the Manhattan Project. It can even be some kind of funky triumvirate. It just has to never, ever fight with itself—it needs to be one organizational node. And while it can extract advice from the rest of the pyramid, this top node is always, always in charge.
Second, existing infrastructure cannot be relied upon to work or even be controlled. Generally the right first assumption is that it needs to be hacked—made to operate in an unusual way that its designers, its previous operators, or both, did not expect. (The metamorphosis of USDS into DOGE will be the gold standard here for many years.)
Defenders of the Deep State should note that, when the legislative branch (democratic in theory but not in practice) uses microbudgeting to micromanage the executive branch (democratic in theory and in practice)—this too is a hack. Everything is a hack. I read that in Carl Schmitt. Have a nice ride in the van.
Third, power creates power. Power is habitual obedience. The more power you use, the more power you have. Not only can you just do stuff—you also have to. You have to keep using power—otherwise, you lose it. In fact, if you don’t grow it, you lose it.
Unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power—which is too high to sustain, but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes.
Unfortunately, it is not quite clear that everyone in the administration gets this last fact about power. Is just the first of many strategic shortages of graduate-level clue. The undergraduate material, I have to say, is down pretty solid. But…
The world-historic crisis of global retardation
Alas, beyond these essential elements, there is what a well-informed friend calls a “world-historic crisis of global retardation.” It’s curable. I think. It needs to be cured.
The crisis cannot be understood without understanding the cultural personnel base of Trump 47. There are two broad groups of high-level staffers in this weird larva of a new regime. I call them the Barbarians and the Mandarins. No, this is not “tech” versus “MAGA.” Either may be culturally blue or red. (DOD has many red Mandarins.)
What differs is the resume. Barbarians have always worked in the private sector. Mandarins have always been on the government track. Unfortunately, there are very few hybrids—individuals who have succeeded separately on both sides of the line.
Each of these groups, without clues the other has, is globally retarded. There are some clues that neither group has. It is unclear that anything can be done about this—perhaps it’s even it’s clear that nothing can be done. In case I’m wrong, however, here are some ideas.
The fundamental problem of Trump 47 is that Barbarians (a) do not know how to rule, (b) do not want to rule, and (c) only want to repair the system. Mandarins (a) want to rule, and (b) know how to rule, but (c) do not even really want to repair the system. Mandarins and Barbarians are both too close to the metal to see that it is irreparable.
Only Barbarians are ready to destroy subsystems, and only when the whole subsystem is flagrantly flagitious. No one is ready to replace anything or create anything new. No one is interested in taking power, regime change, or any such nonsense. Sorry guys.
When the Barbarians enter the cathedral, they wander around the nave, break bits of gold and jewels off the crosses, dress up in the sacred robes and barbecue a goat on the high altar. When the Mandarins enter the cathedral, they all become cardinals, then focus on reforming the Mass and getting their nephews altarboy internships.
It’s true—Catholicism isn’t what it used to be. Is that really our biggest problem? One says of most things the Mandarins tackle: is that really our biggest problem? Maybe the wisest of them know: it is the biggest problem they can tackle right now. Perhaps the Barbarians are right and Trump should just turn the church into a barbecue joint.
The Barbarians do not even understand themselves as seeking power. They see their goal as reducing, opposing, or improving power. The goal of Musk’s army is literally to save taxpayer money—as if Alaric came to Rome for the shopping, museums and food. They seem to be able to destroy anything they set their eyes on—yet their appetite for destruction is oddly limited. They have no appetite for capture, some for repair, and none for construction. Ultimately, their vision remains deeply rooted in entertainment.
While it is fine and normal for a great Chinese dynasty to arise as some bandit gang, the Mandate of Heaven is not a gameshow and receives only those who truly ascend. The true emperor has deep contempt for his absolute power. He sees it only as a duty. The Barbarians have yet to utterly and fully purge the grifter legacy from their hearts.
The Mandarins love power, understand it, and are completely endemic to it. But all they know is how to inhabit power as it is—or at the very most, renovate it to be what what it used to be. It is much easier to restore the Mass than to make the Catholic schools and universities Catholic again. It is possible. The other thing is not. So?
Their idea of how to use Washington is: do the right thing, not the wrong thing. As long as they are working effectively to make things better, they are doing the right thing. This sounds right, but it amounts to the equation of strategy with tactics. In fact they have no strategy: no plan and no endgame. Since action without strategy is ineffective and ineffective action is a grift, the Mandarins are the most convincing grifters of all. (Also, no one seems to care about their policy papers. What did they think a unitary executive meant? “Vibes, papers, essays?” But it is dysfunctional.)
No one has an appetite for destroying and/or replacing the old administrative state. Everyone wants to make it efficient and effective. Particularly enlightened actors, Barbarian or Mandarin (more the latter, of course) also want to reward their friends and even their supporters—where permitted, of course, by law. This is wise. The end. There is no Trump revolution. Nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. Sorry guys.
The likely result of this confused attack is that the system sustains minor damage till it learns to resist the new insult. This was the result of McCarthyism, for instance. The effect is like giving an inadequate dose of an antibiotic or chemotherapy. By insulting the organism, we are only strengthening its will to resist—and destroying the window for this treatment, which will never again work—not even a little bit.
McCarthy killed anticommunism. He did not kill communism—he only finished off centralized Old Left communism. But he killed McCarthyism. Which is why America is a communist country (decentralized New Left) to this day. (What did you think “progressive” meant? Look at the history of this word across the 20th century. As Earl Browder said: “communism is as American as apple pie.”) Trump is on the way to killing Trumpism, in the same way.
As we saw in the case of USAID, the alliance of Barbarians and Mandarins is strong enough to literally destroy entire agencies, signage and all. But in order to retain this strength, it will have to keep acting this strongly and more. Power at this level has to go forward or it goes back. It certainly cannot do its enemies any favors, and win.
Where do we go next? Where do we end up? When you are acting without any clear answer to these questions, you might want to put more energy into strategic analysis. Strategy can affect your tactics more than you think.
Let’s look at these two groups and the clues I think they are missing.
The Barbarian worldview
The Barbarian worldview is that a new CEO, perhaps in some kind of private-equity deal, is taking over an old, inefficient company—not unlike the takeover of Twitter.
Let’s go with this metaphor. Here is how the Barbarians are just plain wrong. Yes, it is like a turnaround deal. But it is not like, it’s 2022 and you just took over Twitter.
No, it’s like: it’s 1992 and you just bought a Romanian tractor factory in Transylvania. You think. I mean, you think you bought it. There’s some very large guys who seem to think different. There’s a lot of land, most of it covered with broken tractors. There’s also a factory. With machines. It makes tractors. You think. They are copies of an Austrian tractor from 1931, but they are tractors. There are also some people who come to work, and some people who are paid. Sometimes they’re the same people… For 1.3 million lei—that’s $1152.78 on your MasterCard—can you really go wrong?
Twitter was still a functioning company. Yes, it didn’t need 80% of its staff. But it is solving the same problem it was solving before—making money for its shareholders, by hosting a global microblog site.
You don’t even know what problem your Romanian tractor factory is solving. Maybe it should be making tractors. Maybe the tractors should be sold off for scrap and the land should be turned into an ecotourist resort. Maybe none of this matters and some Romanian kangaroo court is going to tell you that you don’t own it at all. You have to think from first principles.
The problem with the Barbarians is that they are not actually thinking from first principles. They are not actually thinking at all. No one can think without a theory. Having rejected the existing theory on which the system operates—something about the glorious collective achievements of Romanian Socialism—our new barbarians have no other theory to go on.
Instead all that is in their heads is memes. Whatever evolves, is good. Vox populi, vox dei—whatever climbs out of the meme soup, and isn’t Romanian Socialism, must be right. Seat-of-the-pants common-sense thinking supercharged with 160 IQs, America First, tax cuts, get the government out of our business, drain the swamp, etc, etc. Wacky medical memes, some of them no doubt true, flourish like mind-mildew.
The Barbarians feel no connection to the art of statesmanship as once practiced, not only in Romania but all over the world, before the noble and glorious Romanian Revolution. They also feel no connection to the art of statesmanship as redefined by Romanian Socialism. But they did grow up in it, so it is hard for them to really unlearn. Those of us with a taste for the past find this ruefully ironic.
The general ideology of the Barbarians is the liberal libertarianism of Bill Clinton—the early post-Marxist uniparty consensus of James Q. Wilson and his ilk. The USSR had just fallen. There was hardly an inch of daylight between Clinton and Bush—and everyone but the real crazies were in this mainstream. The Ron Paul Revolution had not even happened. The money bomb had not gone off!
This was the world of the early 1990s, in which both me and Elon Musk graduated from college. As libertarians, the Muskites are not even Rothbardians—like Milei in Argentina, with his cloned dogs and his chainsaw bikini girls. The difference between Austrian and Chicago Schools is too abstract, anyway. The real future is late Heinlein—we will all be liberal libertine libertarians. The end. (PS: I am a Rothbardian.)
What I would say to the Barbarians is: forget about “efficiency.” There is no way to make US foreign policy efficient. We cannot even interpret the question literally. It is like saying: how can we make a kilometer heavier?
Actually, we know the official answer: the purpose of US foreign policy is our national security. This is why US foreign policy is run by the National Security Council. If you are capable of finding 20th-century history funny, which certainly takes a special kind of wit, one of the funniest things is the post-9/11 invention of that strangely Teutonic term, “homeland security.” One might have said “national security,” but that was taken.
All we know about what “national security” means is what it doesn’t mean: “homeland security.” Can I explain what it does mean? Yes, I think so. I have entire walls of books about the 20th century—gone, but not forgotten. I have theories about the matter. But can any Barbarian explain what “national security” means? Lol I’ll wait. No AI pls.
Well, whatever it is, we can make it more efficient by—spending less money. For the same amount of “national security.” Or maybe less? Or even more? We could know—if we knew what “national security” is. Not only can Elon not manage an operation on this basis—God himself could not manage it. It’s one thing when you have a KPI, like aesthetic quality, which you can’t measure. It’s quite another when you can’t define it.
Who cares about money anyway? Imagine Tesla. Now imagine Tesla paid all its bills in—$TSLA. In Tesla stock. All its suppliers, employees, are paid in $TSLA. If Tesla loses 3 trillion dollars a year—it’s just increasing its market cap by 3 trillion dollars a year. It’s called “growth,” dude. What’s the catch? There is no catch! In today’s economics, this is called “modern monetary theory.”
This is exactly the relationship between the USG and its “Federal Reserve Notes.” Of course, there is a catch. (It’s called “dilution” or even “inflation.”) This is a relatively subtle catch, though, compared to not being able to make payroll. In general, an enterprise going through bankruptcy will expand both its debt and its equity.
Because, if DOGE is truly a restructuring, we should expect it to cost money. When we restructure a corporation, we are trying to get it into profitable operating condition. We are restructuring because mere budget cutting is not sufficient to accomplish this. We generally expect to borrow more money to cover our one-time restructuring costs. So the balance sheet will expand. This is not my brilliant idea. This is basic MBA stuff.
Moreover, cost reduction is not the proper metric for the performance of DOGE. The inefficiency of the executive branch is a symptom. The disease causing this symptom is: the libs. The big guys who think they still own the tractor factory. Their power is a sort of dark equity, which must be discharged before the factory can flourish.
Libs are fine, actually, unless they have power. Then they become a problem. The real KPI of DOGE is its ability to take power from the libs, then keep it. If, by spending a bit more money, we destroy more liberal power and generate more post-liberal power, why not? Power is our equity; Federal Reserve Notes are our equity; just do the math.
Why do you want to shut down the Department of Education? Don’t you want to be the one writing the “Dear Colleague” letters? Doesn’t education in the US need to be completely rebooted—from kindergarten to university? How else are you going to do that, except with all the dotted lines that come out of the Department of Education? Do you really think that if you cut those lines, it’s just going to reboot itself, to some kind of Norman Rockwell little red schoolhouse system, magically, like, on its own? It’s going to teach itself Greek and Latin, maybe?
Nothing about the Romanian tractor factory will reboot itself. Everything about this so-called business, from the lowest tactical to the highest strategic detail, demands to be completely rethought. Also, if it didn’t have to be rethought for productive reasons, it would have to be rethought for political reasons—even if an agency were operating perfectly, reorganizing it as deeply as possible is the best way to take control of it.
The Mandarin worldview
I don’t of course mean the old lifers and true believers of the permanent civil service. I mean the new mandarins—the young, talented, educated people parachuting into all the agencies all across DC. The veterans of Project 2025 and American Moment and sometimes even Trump 45. This is American conservatism now.
There is not one Mandarin worldview. There is one for every agency and department. But broadly speaking: they have a plan and know how to execute on it. They are going to make America great again, inasmuch as they can, using the government they have, with the executive power that Trump 47 has decided, Théoden-like, to finally wield.
This has no chance of working. As I foresaw, it is completely impossible to drain the swamp by merely occupying it. I am sorry to be the bearer of this bad news. While I originally did not know how this outcome would come about, I now feel I do.
I got one thing wrong: I thought that if a Republican administration decided to try to actually run the government, it would back down in the face of the civil service, the press and/or the courts. So far this has not happened. Props. But it’s still early.
The problem with this worldview is simply that “inasmuch as they can, using the government they have” just isn’t very much. It’s actually a lot. It’s a huge amount—by Washington standards. But by objective historical standards, it isn’t very much. When you are winning by the standards of your enemy, that doesn’t mean you’re winning.
A huge amount of work on immigration is being done, by Washington standards. But it will still leave us with a country whose government has no reliable list of its own citizens, and does not know to within 10 or 20 million people who are in the country. This is just one example. And whatever this administration does, it will still leave us as one country with 50 DMVs—which makes about as much sense. (There is certainly no “Indiana way of driving” for these “laboratories of democracy” to be field-testing.)
The first problem with the Mandarin worldview is that you could multiply the power of Trump 45 by 100, and the libs would still cry out in terror (as they did for Trump 45), and the cons would think “trust the plan, patriots in control” (as they did for Trump 45), and still, nothing significant would be happening. By historical standards.
DC does not need better policies. It needs a complete reboot—as complete as the denazification of Germany in 1945, though without the same vengeance. The USG, or at least its executive branch, needs to be rebuilt from scratch on a totally new design. The Barbarians are not nearly barbarous enough on this point.
What would a truly new government even do? Whatever the project of any such new executive branch, it will certainly overlap in some ways with the old regime. This gives us three spaces of action: (A) any necessary function that is already performed by the old regime; (B) any unnecessary function that is still performed by the old regime; and (C) any necessary function that is not already performed by the old regime.
The project of identifying (C) functions and building new organizations to implement them is completely foreign to both the Mandarin and Barbarian ways of thought. Sad. The project of identifying (B) functions is near to the Barbarian heart, and even to the Mandarin heart when it’s someone else’s department.
However, most things fall under (A). Here is the problem with (A): there are two kinds of (A) functions, (A1) and (A2).
Under (A1), the most effective way to perform the function, for the given amount of money, is to reform the existing organization. Under (A2), it is to dissolve the existing organization and create a new organization.
Any fool who looks at Washington today with a clear and distanced eye will observe that for everything that might be in A1, there are 10 things obviously in A2. The Mandarin, who knows Washington better, has never considered the possibility of A2.
Apart from the mere inefficiency of existing structures, structures dictate policy. One well-known law of Silicon Valley is Conway’s Law: the structure of a software system tends to reflect the structure of the organization that creates it. Of course, the same is true of public policy.
Big-brained people think that “personnel is policy,” but I and other galaxy-brains know it’s much worse than that. Structure is policy. You cannot fix the wrong structure by putting the right people in charge of it. The structure of the US foreign policy apparatus inevitably dictates US foreign policy. 1945, that magic year, will never die. Put the right people into the wrong structure, and they will develop wrong opinions.
The US cannot not have a foreign policy. But the assumptions of this foreign policy must not be inherited from the age of “national security”—which means that the organizations that execute this foreign policy should probably also not be inherited from the 20th century. Why would they be?
This is the fundamental structural problem with the Mandarin situation. However based their policy preferences, once they are parachuted into DC, they instantly take their positions as defenders of their own agencies. How else will they work there?
Ultimately, the perspective of even the most well-intentioned Mandarin is deeply bounded by his career track. The purpose of his career is to accumulate clout. As he rises, he participates in a clout exchange with his mentees and proteges, who are also trying to accumulate clout. The interface with the Barbarians is always tricky—do the Barbarians respect clout? Do they even understand clout?
When every Mandarin looks at a function of government, he immediately classes it in A1. Whatever he thinks about the reality he lives in, it has to at least conclude that his own agency is A1. Obviously, it is socially easiest to assume that everything is all A1. Everything is fine. DC is fine. We’re in power. We’re going to make America great again. Trump is dancing, dancing. Some say he will always dance.
Everything in the Mandarin’s professional situation asks him to turn into yet another DC clout whore. The kind of gigantic achievements promised in Trumpian rhetoric—in reality unbelievably modest expectations for anything like a national revolution—are far out of reach. Lucrative employment, contracting and networking opportunities are not. There will never be as many right-wing gigs in DC as left-wing gigs, but the “Thank You For Smoking” profession will always exist. Sigh.
The fact is: the Mandarins (our Mandarins, not the immense faceless mass of faithful system slaves) are the best people in DC. And will probably always be. They are also not good enough—not, at least, by themselves. But this is not their fault, not really.
Science: a case study in global retardation
Here is a case study in global retardation. (In this case, we are looking at a Barbarian retardation. If there is interest, a future essay may cover Mandarin retardations. These are generally more subtle, but often even more destructive.) Here’s what happened.
Someone in DOGE hacked the law (hacking is good, taking dramatic actions is good) by realizing that a certain class of administrative employees in NSF and NIH, so-called “probationary” employees, could be legally shot without a trial. A review of unused drainage ditches in Bethesda showed adequate excess capacity. DOGE acted. The customer-service records show few or no complaints about seepage, odors, etc…
Comrades! I understand the energy here, comrades. But is it really serving the cause? For me, the best defense against ugly actions is that they really don’t work well at all. Generally, everything ugly is stupid. Or in other words, retarded. Don’t be retarded. There is no ethical system in which it is okay to be retarded. Not even Nietzsche—evil German philosopher guy with mustache—not even Nietzsche will let you be retarded.
Because—here is what it feels like to be on the other side of this savage, random razzia:
But what’s happened in the last few days has been notable for the widespread firing of people who were in the “probationary” period of employment. This needs some detail, because in most places that means new hires. That’s true for the government, too, but it also means people who have recently been promoted or who have moved to another part of the organization.
Why fire them? Because they can be fired much more easily; they are relatively unprotected compared to people who have been in their same position past that probationary period. It’s certainly true that I don't think that anyone has ever come into this situation thinking “Hey great, a whole bunch of people I can just toss onto the street without all that paperwork,” but that's obviously what we’re seeing here.
Actually, I think they were thinking: “fuck yeah! That’s going to leave a mark!”
Comrades: this kind of thinking is understandable. Entirely understandable. To be exact, here is why it is understandable—from the same writer (Derek Lowe, a genius old-school med-chem blogger I’ve been reading for 25 years):
It’s about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible.
Just who knew about these faked-up results over the years is a topic we may never really get to the bottom of: some co-authors have died over the years, and others appear to be running for cover.
The NIH has stated that Masliah is no longer heading the Neuroscience division, but they haven’t stated much else, honestly. How many people do we need to check? How many figures do we have to scrutinize? What a mess.
And lest we be tempted to canonize Lowe himself:
At this point, I am going to work on the basis that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. It would take extraordinary and dramatic evidence to convince me otherwise, and I doubt that anything like that is coming.
What a mess! Mandarins are like: let’s design new market-based processes that can hold bad scientists accountable. Or something. Just spouting libertarian LLM here. And Barbarians are like: fuck yeah! That’s going to leave a mark. Also, ivermectin. Meanwhile, mainstream scientists are like: let’s invent a virus that kills 20 million people! Let’s do fraud that leads Alzheimer’s research down a blind alley for 20 years! What a mess.
The Mandarins and Barbarians are agreed, however, in eliminating the 60% overhead payments on science grants that are generally sent to top academic institutions, such has Harvard. The theory is that Trump was elected to end waste, fraud and abuse, and all the money sent to Harvard is abusively, fraudulently wasted… Comrades! I get it. I don’t want to send money to Harvard. I want to turn Harvard into dust. Into quarks. But this can only be done in the right way—and not at all in the wrong way.
So, you’ve saved a bunch of money (since, again, money is USG shares, while it is good for USG to save money, it doesn’t quite mean what you think it means) and thrown a big wrench at a broken system. Grepping grants for the word “diversity” and killing studies of “microbial diversity” doesn’t exactly feel like a real king, either.
What would a real king do for his science policy? Hello, king.
First, he’d see that the primary goal of science policy today is to take and keep power. Generating good science for a good price is only a secondary goal. Once political stability is achieved, it can become the primary goal. This is a long time from now. Most areas of public policy share this strategic calculus. However, in most cases, the path to power is smoothest if both goals, power and good governance, stay aligned. But you should still think about first things first.
There are three forces of government: the authority of the monarch, the solidarity of the best, and the solidarity of the many. An effective monarch owns all these forces, which all support him. Any rift between the king and either the nobles or the masses is a serious problem. Democracy isn’t real—nobles always punch above their weight. And this is especially true where the masses are domesticated and no longer mob up.
Unless the monarch is ready to actually genocide the nobility or the masses, he has to capture their loyalty—or, in liberal parlance, obtain their consent. That’s just how it works. You’re not going to foam these people, like turkeys with bird flu. Right? That means your only option is to convince them to love you. Sorry. The job is just hard.
Humans being humans, it is easier than they want you to think. Just (a) be stronger than any other power, and (b) love them back. It works on both peasants and nobles. Naturally it is harder to convince the nobles, but it matters more.
Since this weird “meritocracy” of institutional credentials is our oligarchy, nobility and aristocracy, scientists hold the highest rank in our system. At the level of power, public policy in science is the battle for the minds of scientists. Winning this battle is taking a substantial fortress in the war to capture the nobility as a whole.
In any society, nobility is defined by prestige: fashion and status. The hardest task of any 21st-century oligarchy is to capture the nobility. Yes, you can shoot or otherwise persecute them—there are plenty of 20th-century examples. It turns out that without getting to early Soviet levels, you can’t really use force to seriously impact fashion. These levels of gnarly just don’t exist in 21st-century politics, so it doesn’t matter.
Prestige in an oligarchy is never completely amorphous. It always has structures. These structures and institutions have names, buildings, staff, bank accounts, etc. When you are trying to transfer power from an oligarchy, these structures need to either be filtered or replaced—generally the latter.
Saving money in this battle is a counterproductive goal. Actually, money should be poured into it—the professional job market in science is absolutely terrible. The loyalty of these people is cheap compared to their connectivity on the social graph. Dissidents in science, like Sakharov, played a huge part in bringing down the USSR. Borrow the money now, and pay it back when America, Inc. turns a profit.
When we realize that it’s just as okay for us to buy power with taxpayer dollars as it is for them—far more so, because we will put the power to good use—we realize that the goal of saving money for the government, as a whole, is generally counterproductive.
DC is a vast check farm. More checks go out than come in. If it is the job of DOGE to figure out who should and should not be getting these shambolic, random rents—who does not and does deserve state payment—it can invest an infinite amount of effort. The answer is: some of the money is wasted. Some is not. And some is sort of wasted. And everyone who is getting it feels like they deserve it.
All this effort is invested in making influential people decide that you have taken away something they felt they deserved, causing them to hate you for life. Yes. These people are, generally, libs. They were already your enemies. Do you want to hurt them, or do you want to convert them? A child would want to hurt them; a king, to convert them.
Scientists don’t like the ideology. No one likes the ideology. Everyone likes power. Instead of injuring them, stretch out your protective arm and own them. Show them that your power loves, protects and nurtures them, whereas the power of the libs frustrates, annoys and represses them. And their ideology will change. Think about it: if libs were not prehensile, how could they possibly believe what they say they do?
The way to think about a lib is: the lib is a zombie with a chip in the back of his head. The chip responds to prestige signals from a variety of public and private antennas. All these antennas need to be attritted. The protocol needs to be reverse-engineered. New antennas, all responsible to the new regime, need to be configured and powered. Generally, the new signal should be stronger than the old one. Then, you own the libs.
What actually needs to be destroyed and replaced is the science governance industry. The whole funding process is not providing effective accountability or direction to scientists—and not only does it cost a lot, it takes immense amount of scientists’ time. This is an enemy power network which needs to be scattered to the winds.
There needs to be some system that governs science—which decides what science is good and needs to be funded, and which science is bad and needs to be defunded. At present, like many other systems, this system is broken. It needs to be replaced. It is in class (A2)—there is no reason to reuse existing structures in building the replacement.
Positive ideas below the paywall: