While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:
https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless
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Journalists like *Wired*'s Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:
https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/
Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoops:
But for me, it was Tkacik - as usual - in the pages of *The American Prospect* who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook.
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While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):
https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/
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