Musk's superteam of former iPad babies

Coup D’Twitter

On Friday morning, we received a tip from an employee working for an agency funded by federal grants working in HIV care that word had come down from their manager to archive anything they might need from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website in case it went down in its “entirety”.

After speaking to government employees and contractors throughout the day, we learned that federal websites were given a deadline of 5 PM Friday to remove "all references to gender ideology" or face a complete removal from the web. One government contractor told us much of this was being coordinated “verbally," with staffers being told not to write anything down. But a spokesperson for the CDC confirmed to Garbage Day this morning that “all changes to the HHS website and HHS division websites are in accordance with President Trump’s January 20 Executive Orders, ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’ and ‘Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing’.” Luckily, the entire pre-purge CDC site was successfully archived.

Many other government websites faced outages throughout the weekend as they scrambled to figure out exactly how to comply with the instructions being sent out by the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM). And it has been equally confusing for average Americans — and the media — to understand exactly how the federal government is being dismantled amid the Trump administration’s first few weeks. As Onion CEO (and former NBC News reporter) Ben Collins noted, “There appear to be at least three separately operating heel factions breaking things within the government in wholly different ways right now.”

These factions certainly have overlapping interests — and members — but they do differ in important ways. And understanding those differences is key to making sense of what both the Trump administration and Elon Musk are trying to achieve. The first and most official-ish of these factions is a group led by White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, focused on immigration. We’re going to leave this one out for now because his planned “overhaul” is still taking shape. But it apparently involves turning Guantánamo Bay into a concentration camp.

The second faction is led by Russell Vought, who is not a character from The Boys. The National Women’s Law Center called Vought a key architect of Project 2025 and he was nominated by President Donald Trump to head up the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He previously worked for the lobbying arm of The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that published Project 2025. The reason Trump wants to install Vought at the top of OMB is because one of Project 2025’s main goals is to use the OMB to take control of the federal budget, which, as with everything Project 2025 wants, is written out pretty clearly in the public document they’ve been passing around for months. Other Project 2025 authors that have made their way into Trump’s administration also include the aforementioned Miller, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, “Border Czar” Tom Homan, and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Brendan Carr, who is currently harassing NPR and PBS.

The third, and buzziest faction is Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a “temporary organization” working within the United States Digital Service, that Trump is using as a wrecking ball against the country’s vast network of personnel and payment services. According to The Wall Street Journal, Vought and Musk have been scheming together since November and Miller’s wife Katie is on the team. As are a whole bunch of broccoli-haired zoomers, which WIRED named in a recent investigation. Musk is currently legally threatening anyone who names them, but I don’t rely on X for traffic and, also, it’s not illegal to name government employees, even if they’re 19. So their names are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran.

Coristine (aka “BigBalls”) is a 19-year-old former camp counselor and bike mechanic who interned briefly at Neuralink and is currently working in some capacity at both the OPM and the General Services Administration (GSA). Farritor is a Thiel Fellow and former SpaceX intern, Shaotran and Killian both worked at AI startups, Bobba interned at Meta and Palantir, and Kliger rolls the sickest blunts and knows all the liquor stores near the White House that don’t card — jk lol, he was a software engineer at pre-Musk Twitter. He also has a Substack, obviously. And shares Nick Fuentes posts on X. Leading OPM is Amanda Scales, who came from Musk’s xAI. And working as the general counsel for OPM is Andrew Kloster, who spent years blogging about how consent is bad is and slavery is good.

This team of former iPad babies and incels have not only compromised the OPM and the GSA, reportedly hooking up an illegal server to access federal employment databases. They’re currently trying to block staffer access to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). And over the weekend they successfully infiltrated the US Treasury’s payments system. Helping them is the Treasury Department’s newly-appointed and very pro-cryptocurrency secretary, Scott Bessent. Thanks to him, DOGE now has access to every American’s Social Security number, Medicare benefits, and the system that pays government contractors. Also, a Garbage Day reader noticed that among the Musk cronies present during the Treasury Department invasion this weekend was Baris Akis, the Turkish co-founder of a venture capital firm called Human Capital, who, as CNN reported, appears to have no actual position in the administration or any kind of security clearance. Scales used to work at Human Capital, as well.

These are the demagogues, oligarchs, and literal teenage boys tearing apart our government right now. They are fueled by Silicon Valley’s dream of a monarchist network state and blood and soil white nationalism and they want to replace our money with the speculative cryptocurrencies they’re already holding, replace the country’s digital infrastructure with X, an online platform they invested in, and route all federal power to Trump, a president they’re actively bribing. They did not plan any of this in secret. They know this their moment and the coup is underway. They are serious. And every day they’re in power means more years, if not decades, of our lives that we will have to dedicate to trying to piece the country back together when they’re gone.

If you know more about this or have a general tip, you can reach us on Signal at ryanbroderick.69420, happy to keep things anonymous or off the record.

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A Beautiful Onion

The US Vs. China Vs. Everyone Else

A lot going on right now, so, in case you missed it, we entered into a sorta-kinda trade war with Mexico and Canada over the weekend. It’s gotten bad enough that fans at a Toronto Raptors game booed the US national anthem.

The Trump administration instituted a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico, which briefly crashed the Dow and the S&P 500 this morning. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo negotiated a pause on the tariff, after agreeing to send 10,000 Mexican troops to the border. It’s unclear how Canada will bend the knee to earn their own pause. It’s worth pointing out that Trump supporters will not see this as a failure. Based on my experience talking to them, this is proof to them that Trump is a master statesman. If you’d like to read a good Canadian take on the end of North America as a concept, here’s a good one.

All of this saber-rattling seems explicitly tied to American anxieties about Chinese influence, which is ironic, because if Mexico hadn’t caved, they absolutely would have become more deeply aligned with China. In fact, Panama just agreed to exit China’s Belt And Road initiative if Trump stops threatening to take over the Panama Canal.

And this all extends to artificial intelligence, which is slowly worming its way into global statecraft. OpenAI just penned a deal to monitor our nuclear security program. Uh oh! And a reportedly US-led DDOS attack on Chinese AI DeepSeek pointed the total traffic of Europe at its systems for over three days.

Did You Know Fortnite Has A Creator Program

During a panel the other day, I was asked by a social media manager in the audience where they should be making accounts. Essentially, what is the next big platform to focus on. I didn’t want to be a doomer, but I had to admit that I think the era of The Next Big Platform is over. I don’t think Bluesky will ever be as big as Twitter was. And I definitely don’t think Threads will be either lol. Just like I don’t think there will be a video platform that’s bigger than YouTube, etc.

But I also don’t think the entire internet is just done. I am not that kind of millennial newsletter writer lol. There’s always going to be some new thing right around the corner, but I think Web 2.0 is largely over. So what do I think is next?

Well, Fortnite’s creator program is actually a really good glimpse of what’s coming I think. According to Epic Games’ “Year In Review” for 2024, 37 Fortnite creators made over a $1 million last year. If you didn’t know that Fortnite had a creator program, don’t feel bad, I didn’t either lol. It’s called the Island Creator program and it’s similar to what Roblox offers, where creators and developers can make content that other players can use. Do I think developing mini-games for sandbox games will replace influencers? No, but I do think we will see more gaming platforms start to act like — and eventually replace — social platforms.

Unfortunately…

Gamers Are Bad

A mod for Fallout: New Vegas called Fallout: Nuevo Mexico was canceled last week after gamers got upset that a Hispanic modder was making it. The developer behind the fan project, Zapshock, said they were inundated with racist abuse and had to shut down the whole thing.

Even more troubling, a campaign of racist gamers are claiming they reported Zapshock to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a way to get the game canceled.

Just to make this totally clear. This was a fan game. It was totally free. And it was being made by volunteers.

What Is A Benson Boone?

There were lots of big moments at the Grammys last night — Kanye West and a naked Bianca Censori getting removed from the red carpet, Kendrick Lamar accepting an award for “Not Like Us” wearing a Canadian tuxedo, Chappell Roan demanding record labels give musicians health insurance. But the most important, I think, was the appearance of someone called Benson Boone, who no one seemed to know anything about. As one X user wrote, “Riverdale name. AI-generated song. Netflix original face.”

Boone makes what I like to call “Los Angeles music,” which is typically performed by very talented people (living in LA) but usually sounds like it would play behind a commercial for erectile dysfunction medication. And the fact he had a massive hit on short-form video platforms last year which failed to convert into any real name recognition feels like a good snapshot of the kind of influence those platforms are generating. Which is to say, less and less.

A Very Cursed Pokémon Tier List

You can click through and look at the whole thing. If you dare. I agree with Gengar being up at the top though. Very dark sexual energy surrounding that guy.

Some Stray Links

• “‘The Rizzler’ and the Creeping Childishness of Pop Culture”

• “I Have Strong Feelings About The Use Of Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)” In The Opening Credits To This Netflix Video Game Anime”

• “The power of independent journalism: From her Brooklyn apartment, she ‘scooped’ the nation’s media”

P.S. here’s Plimbo.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***