Musk's DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS(washingtonpost.com) |
Musk's DOGE seeks access to personal taxpayer data, raising alarm at IRS(washingtonpost.com) |
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/former-i...
Some are more equal than others.
Henchmen violating privacy laws is just as illegal as of they were murdering people in the street. There's no "because your boss is a clown" exception.
Imagine the outcry if the Biden White House had tried to do this, especially because Trump has never (to this day!) posted his tax returns..
Musk could use this to get Trump's tax returns. That could be blackmail material on Trump. (And the Supreme Court, in the same way.) He could leverage that into getting an even freer hand to do whatever he wants.
Now who's ruling the country? People talked about "President Musk", but that was just sarcasm (we think). But he could use this to really be "the power behind the throne", with money, media clout, and blackmail material on all the office holders.
Is that just tinfoil-hat level paranoia? Or is it what's really going on? (Or, between the two, is it not necessarily what's going on, but still a real concern?)
The inner dynamics must be fascinating, even without one of Musk's broodlings telling Trump to shush his mouth on TV.
Not saying your tinfoil hat is any less likely, but Trump has a pattern too, and he's the only one SCOTUS has declared off limits.
Musk... Has probably cooked his brain on a combination of stimulants and ketamine and Neo-Nazi Twitter. He's living on entirely frictionless life because of his money and thinks his scions will be the princes of Mars.
My bet is that these people think they can feed all this data to a magic AI and presto, out comes a list of “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Otherwise you’d need trained auditors, which the IRS already has. What a shit show.
What goes around comes around, wake me up when something unexpected happens
The federal government is nearing a state of abeyance. It's run by a mafia. Why wouldn't they come for judges next?
This is a false equivalency I've been seeing for a very long time: Someone on the right claims that the left is just as extreme as the right (usually they're claiming the left is more extreme), when the people they are referring to on the left are nobodies with little to no political influence or power, whereas on the right the extremists run the entire party and currently control the entire government. It isn't a valid comparison.
There will always be nuts in any large enough group, the difference is that the left doesn't give them outsized power, whereas the right elects them as congresspeople and president.
If it was wrong for "leftists" to do something, that makes it morally correct for right wingers to do it? Do no t right wingers have moral agency of their own?
Beyond all that, these "leftists" weren't the US government, they did not have historical employment and income and related data, and they didn't have the capability of organizing some kind of large scale smear campaign with other arms of the government.
That's more "performative bloviation" than anything of substance.
I don't think this is the case anymore, I hope I'm wrong.