There has been a lot happening in the United States since Donald Trump’s inauguration particularly surrounding the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which is headed by Elon Musk. Unlike mass media, I don’t have a short memory and so remember the negative post I wrote about him on the last day of 2024 less than two months ago. Though what is happening is very interesting and sounds very hopeful, I am not writing to enthuse about this new department while pretending I never said anything negative about the man heading it. I still don’t trust him and I haven’t changed my mind. The most recent news I’ve seen of him is that he’s impregnated an astroturfed “conservative” “influencer” [separated inverted commas necessary] that made one sensible observation I remember almost six years ago.
I am writing because of some of the implications that have come out from this department so far. This is all while acknowledging that I don’t know exactly what is happening behind the scenes or how much of this is theatre. All I know is that even if this is all pure theatre, it is still showing the US taxpayer (and by extension most of the Western world), just how corrupt and irresponsible the US government is with tax revenue. Specifically with how this has been used to fund a variety of media organisations both legacy and modern.
Just how much effect media has on us has been studied and discussed extensively. I don’t have anything new to offer here but it what is clear from all that is coming out so far is that the powers that be (whoever they are), clearly consider it very important for shaping public perception and exercising control. Plenty of people see through it of course but they often don’t see through it all and so fall for something else. I am guilty as charged here and have had to admit quite a number of positions I held were previously wrong.
I had little knowledge though that some of the things I had seen through and spoken out against were being defended by people who were far better funded and resourced than I was. Even people that presented themselves as just normal people online in many cases were actually funded through organisations like USAID. Of course this is being rejected by the opposite side claiming that this is only a fraction of the US budget which is still 40 billion dollars and that most of this is helping developing nations or some such nonsense. I naturally don’t believe this and I don’t believe this is even scratches the surface of how misused and mismanaged tax revenue is in the United States.
Even if as mentioned, it turns out that much of this is just political theatre, the public has still been given a very important window into how manufactured so much of the media is and how much effort is put into shaping public perception. Or as the anons have it, everything is “fake and gay”. So much so that the more that comes out the more literal the latter becomes.
I until recently could have summarised even #GamerGate as an online turf war between disgruntled gamers and a bunch of trust-funded freaks in gaming media. It seems even that had the government involved and naturally on the side of the freaks.