On Fraud
At some point, we’re going to realize that movement conservatism has been the biggest and most successful scam in human history. It’s taken decades, a long game that has spanned generations, but here we are with a slight majority of the voting public believing that the best way to tackle “fraud and abuse” is to give an unelected billionaire with massive conflicts of interest an illegal line-item veto over congressional spending.
Recently, Elon Musk began to dissolve the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The brainchild of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the CFPB is an Obama-era government office tasked with protecting American consumers from ....fraud and abuse in the finance sector. The department costs about $810.6 million to run while returning $21 billion to consumers, representing the best return on investment in the federal government. Of course, Republicans have hated it but it turns out that arguing in favor of bank fraud and excessive fees is a pretty hard sell. Enter Elon and his team of Zoomer edgelords, who can shout “FRAUD” on Twitter and rip funding away from anything they want.
Going after the CFPB may just be biting off more than his reconstructed jawline can chew, given its tangible positive impact on many Americans and its bipartisan support. It would seem that Elon's newfound power as shadow president has gone to his head, as he continues to flood the zone with rant after rant about things like (checks notes) criticizing vaginal births for restricting brain size. (?!?) Despite this and many other glaring red flags, many rank-and-file conservative posters have taken to social media to celebrate their hero uncovering all of the massive fraud weighing our great country down. And so it begs the question:
Do conservatives know what fraud is?
The short answer is no. A short review of the claims made by Elon and his Doge fans will show that the vast majority of “fraud” that’s been revealed is actually just congressionally approved funding that Elon doesn’t agree with.
Professional transphobe and US Representative Nancy Mace claimed that $10 million was being spent on creating transgender mice and monkeys, and yes there was some federal funding for research to investigate interactions between hormone therapies and certain drugs, as well as determining if hormone therapy increases the risk of contracting HIV. Leaving aside substantive conversations around animal cruelty in scientific research, this research is in no way fraud and it's not wasteful by any means. Despite the bigoted opinions of people like Mace and Musk, trans people do exist and it's valuable to understand how hormone treatments can affect other medications and how they interact with other medical conditions. Even if conservatives are successful in legislating away trans people’s access to gender-affirming medicine, people still take hormone therapy for reasons that have nothing to do with transitioning. Funding this kind of research is a core function of developed nations, but since conservatives don’t care for science that doesn’t affirm their a priori beliefs, it's now considered “fraud”.
In a similar vein, any federal spending on anything having to do with diversity, equitable access, or LGBTQ visibility has been categorized as fraud and eliminated. We’ve covered the witch hunt for DEIA contracts in the federal government but Doge has highlighted USAID and State Department spending on programs benefiting trans people in countries like Serbia and Guatemala.
When the Doge brigade does offer examples of fraud under a more traditional definition of the word, it's been based on lies and mischaracterizations. According to the president “THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL” was the accusation that USAID paid $8 million to Politico in return for favorable coverage of Democrats. In reality, the entire federal government paid $8 million to Politico in subscription costs over many years, with only $44,000 coming from USAID in 2024. Say what you want about the quality of Politico’s work product, it’s just not that controversial that federal employees would need access to journalistic reporting.
USAID does actually directly fund journalism. Specifically, they spend money supporting independent investigative journalism in countries that don’t have a free press. Now before you go off and stage a protest with Chuck Schumer, it's important to note that USAID isn’t funding this journalism out of an altruistic commitment to truth. These outlets are publishing news that damages America’s geopolitical adversaries. That doesn’t mean that these stories aren’t true or that reporting on the corruption in places like Russia and Iran isn’t valuable, but we should be aware of USAIDs role on the national stage. Despite the motivations, investigative journalism is valuable and necessary. That our domestic mainstream media has devalued it in favor of elite stenography and horse race coverage is one of the prime reasons the conservative grift has been so successful.
We could go down the list and “well actually” every single item that Elon and company have described as “fraud” but it’s not even necessary because there hasn’t been so much as a hint that anyone has been or will be referred to the DOJ for an investigation. What Doge is doing is not an audit, it’s political demonization of conservative ideological enemies. It's cover for a bureaucratic coup and the usurping of political power.
It's a fraud.
Fun fact: There is a very compelling case to be made that Elon owes his status as the world's richest man to government policy and federal spending. Of course, the $18 billion in government contracts with Musk’s companies are a drop in the bucket of his well over $380 billion fortune, but much of his wealth comes from the evaluation of Tesla and Space X. Evaluations that aren’t based on profit but rather how those companies are positioned to corner their respective markets. Elon put about $200 million into Trump’s campaign and saw a huge jump in the value of his companies once Trump was elected. You can believe what you want about Elon’s motives for commandeering the federal government but investors sure seem to think he stands to benefit greatly from his attachment to the president.
It’s not just direct financial benefit that Elon stands to gain by reshaping the federal government in his own image, the gutting of federal agencies and associated firings has a direct impact on investigations into Musk and his companies. Just four days into his term, Trump fired a number of Inspectors General, government employees who actually do provide oversight for government spending and employees, citing “changing priorities”. Some of those IG’s are now suing to get their jobs back.
Transparency has been a buzzword in heavy use by Elon and others as they claim Doge is uncovering heretofore unknown wasteful and fraudulent spending. However, Trump structured the department in a specific way that seems geared toward avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Like much that Trump is doing right now, it may not be exactly legal and a separate lawsuit is challenging Doge’s ability to escape oversight.
Despite this feeble attempt, they aren’t really working that hard to disguise what is going on. When questioned about his myriad conflicts of interest, Elon claimed that Doge’s nonexistent transparency is enough to keep him honest. When asked about the fake story both he and the Trump administration spread about USAID spending $50 million on condoms for Hamas (an apparent mix-up with funding for HIV prevention in Mozambique), Elon shrugged and said “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect”. These are not serious people.
The thing is, we risk getting lost in the Elon and even the Trump of it all. If the courts and subsequent elections are able to halt and roll back this unraveling of the federal government, there will be an impulse amongst democrats and center-right types to see this period as an aberration. To position Trump and Elon as uniquely duplicitous figures who took advantage of a gullible electorate who just wanted to reduce government spending.
This is a mistake.
After Republicans acted like raising the debt ceiling under Obama and Biden was akin to personally signing over the country to Xi Jinping, their new budget plan calls for raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion in order to pass a $4.5 trillion tax cut. They can’t completely pay for these cuts but they hope to offset at least some of the costs by taking a machete to Medicare and the SNAP program. Like Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which similarly exploded the national deficit, the majority of money will go to the country's wealthiest people. Except this time, without a pandemic-fueled recession demanding spending to keep average people afloat, this billionaire payday will come at the expense of poor people's ability to eat and afford health care.
This is why conservatives are so insistent on calling all spending they don’t like “fraud”. It’s not about transgender mice or LGBTQ theater productions in Guatemala. It’s not about the government paying for news site paywalls or funding investigative journalism. It sure as shit isn’t about sending condoms to Gaza, either in Palestine or Mozambique. It’s about their ability to sell the American people on the scam.
Despite the flashy illegality of Doge and the outsized personas of the two men spearheading its federal coup, what Elon and Trump are doing is not outside the bounds of normal conservatism. It’s the entire point of conservatism. Conservatism is itself a scam. A confidence game that convinces people that their interests are best served by allowing the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country to enrich themselves at the public's expense. It's both depressingly transparent and incredibly successful, using decades of propaganda against the concept of the public good and the demonization of minority groups with no power to present its perpetrators as stalwart heroes protecting your right to be charged with fraudulent overdraft fees. But I’m sure it's just a coincidence Musk gutted the CFPB just as it was set to regulate his plan to host payments on Twitter.
As always, the Democratic party played its role as the ever-present stooge for this grift. They’ve legitimated alarmist rhetoric about the national debt, immigration, overregulation, crime, and even throwing trans people under the bus in an attempt to outflank Republicans from the right, only succeeding in helping Republicans convince people that getting robbed is actually great. Even now, people like Ro Khanna are attempting 5D chess trying to appropriate the mantle of government fraud watchdog from Elon.
Is there actually fraud in government? Absolutely. It’s impossible to appropriate and distribute as much money as the federal government does on a daily basis without someone finding a way to siphon some of it off. Just ask former Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, whose for-profit healthcare company committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history.
At the end of the day, conservatism knows that its movement is just one big fraud and thus it operates as if every other political project is also a fraud. It’s projection, pure and simple. They cannot imagine a world where the government funds things just to help people because they themselves would never use state power for anything other than their own personal gain. Embracing diversity in schools must be a nefarious plan for leftist indoctrination because they want schools to be centers of conservative indoctrination. Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police was a movement meant to destroy America through rampant lawlessness because they wanted to defund the regulatory state and destroy America through rampant lawlessness.
If there is any positive to be gained from this second Trump term and the Doge Blitzkrieg through the government, it is just how mask off it all has been. Trump and Elon just aren’t as savvy as Lewis Powell and they aren’t capable of operating as anything other than naked grifters. The problem is, who exactly is going to stop them?
The courts are the only avenue for effectively pushing back, but who knows what happens if any of these lawsuits reach a Supreme Court engineered by the Federalist Society specifically for rubber-stamping the Republican agenda. Of course, things may not even get that far. Trump just may ignore court orders, while Elons funds campaigns against judges that don’t go along with the Doge program.
The Democrats, as usual, are woefully unprepared to create any sort of political consequences for this Trump fraud spree. As we mentioned, whether or not USAID is a force for good or a CIA front for empire is a complicated question. But the Democrats putting more energy into defending it than running against the harm that this haphazard austerity will do to millions of Americans is a bad political choice. The reaction to the assassination of a healthcare executive revealed just how much America is hungry for drastic changes to the healthcare system, but there was no way these Dems were ever going to capitalize on that energy.
Democrats currently do not have a functioning political party, they have no grand vision for the country, no plan to gain power nor any will to use it. The party is a make-work program for the children of wealthy liberals and not much more. It's going to be up to ordinary people to call this what it is and help and defend each other from a Trump-run government aiming to strip the country for spare parts. When it comes to primary season we need to demand a better class of Democrats, if not vote for a third party that will actually fight the grift.
It's not going to be easy. People generally resist admitting they’ve been conned. But it’s going to become really hard to ignore in the next few years. Someone’s got to be prepared to pick up the pieces.
Solidarity Forever.
'movement conservatism has been the biggest and most successful scam in human history'
Conservatism, in any of it's guises, has been what I refer to as a <sham> ideology, that is, it is a pretense of principles. It has none, because those who participate in the sham have none.
Limited government and individual liberty? Please. These are the same people who want to arrest physicians for offering abortions, even if the physician practices in a state not dominated by the GOP. They intend to send out anti-choice posses, apparently. They've made it plain they want women to have the liberty to bleed to death in parking lots or continue a pregnancy after being raped. (Not surprisingly, the GOP is a safe haven for sexual predators of all stripes.)
Fiscal responsibility? Again, please. Every GOP president since Reagan has multiplied the national debt, while funneling money to the wealthy, and cutting basic government services. By every measure, our economy does worse under the GOP than under Democratic administrations.
National security? Says the party that has sold itself entirely to Putin (long before Trump, by the way).
As I said, all a sham.
But mostly, 'conservatism' has been a sham because it has always been camouflage for its beating heart, the raison d'etre for the GOP and its voters- fascism.
Fascism, properly understood, is not a political ideology, it is a worldview- it is a way of seeing the one's self, the world and other people. It is predicated on the conviction that one belongs to a special, superior demographic, coupled with disregard for the rights and well-being of others. Violence towards the unworthy, impunity to act as one pleases with no consequence, and bigotry are all characteristic features. Also, systematically divorced from factual reality.
Now, tell me who among the GOP voters, office holders, and 'movement conservative' pseudo-intellectuals don't display this worldview...
We can agree the Democratic party doesn't have its act together, and can operate pretty aimlessly much of the time, but this much distinguishes it (the party, its officials and its voters) from the GOP- the Democrats believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and value pluralistic democracy and the rule of law. Not without flaws and failures, not without the occasionally corrupt stooge, but as fundamental premises.
Flawed, aimless... but not fascists engaged in a sham.
hard to know what to say. is there momentum toward supporting something other than dem or rep? because unfeasible as it is, i agree that if we were to get the democrats we have now back in ascendance, we'd just keep slowly sinking. this is more nightmarish than we anticipated, so it is hard to see through all the smoke they blow. or to figure out what damage is reparable and what isn't as it slides away. will you write a piece on what "the people" part of the government, the governed, can do to affect anything?