Put another way, he has an astonishing model of sentiment, purchase habits, relationships, etc.—all the classical big data stuff—that can now be merged with the entire economic, military and potentially intelligence data of the US government. Data that, the moment anyone connects a bank account

So this data assemblage worried me but it wasn't especially clear to me what it was all for. And still isn't. But an insight struck me when Swisher confirmed that fear for me. Elon also already has eighteen years of twitter data. And he's trying to create a payment system that uses twitter.

because, after the bumbling mess that was the first Trump administration, the one thing that Project 2025 and the widespread testing of radical policy at the state and municipal level has demonstrated has been a radical and coherent tactical rally. They learn from their mistakes. They plan.

There had to be something this was all in service of. And from the requests from the FBI's case assignments to the treasury records, pentagon records, and now, potentially, IRS records, the one thing that consistently *has already succeeded* was the accumulation of data. I feared this

Because the scatter-shot EO strategy is chaos cover for something, and whatever that something is surely must be critical to a broader plan, and it would be the thing that has to succeed. While much of what's happening might meet judicial or theoretically even congressional opposition

Kara Swisher, a few days ago on Anderson Cooper, said out loud something I'd been nervously considering for a few weeks now. Which is that Musk's real goal at DOGE is getting data. From the outset of this "flood the zone" administration I've asked myself the question: but what's the real aim?

yeah but when the trump stazi start taking down media enterprises time will be laughing all the way to the state propaganda bank