Panic at the disco. Three weeks into Trump the Sequel’s executive order blitz, with technology industry legends standing at the president’s side, and figures throughout the government and media likening the newly-minted Department of Government Efficiency’s staff and budget cuts to the rise of fascism, there are two things everyone finally seems to agree on: the Deep State really does exist, and it really does run our country. Now we’re mostly just divided over the question of whether that’s a good thing, and a little shocked by what these people actually look like (yes, I’m about to be petty).

As it turns out, there is no mysterious cabal of chain-smoking men in the shadows, quietly pulling the strings of our country. Much as we saw in tech throughout its era of shameful censorship, the Deep State — our actual government — consists of a decentralized network of value-aligned (center left) normie career bureaucrats numbering in the tens of thousands, with a good sprinkling of sexless, joyless, untethered they/them radicals (extremely, psychotically far left) who have taken root in their ranks like parasites feeding off the carcass of FDR’s legacy (don’t get me started). They have no leader. They absorb their marching orders from the culture, which has until now protected them. While they’re of considerably lower skill than most of what we saw from the radicals in tech, they’re more difficult to dislodge, and far more empowered. They were also largely invisible until they were threatened. But now, with his new general Elon Musk, Trump is over the target, and our nation has entered a power struggle unlike anything most of us have ever seen.

In just the last week: One of the highest-ranking members of the Treasury Department resigned rather than comply with Trump’s directive to grant the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to the government’s payment system, which it requested for audit; USAID officials, with a budget of over $40 billion a year, were put on leave after attempting to thwart an audit; the General Services Admission (GSA), a kind of bureaucratic layer managing property and procurement among many other agencies, was seized and exposed for a variety of racist and sexist hiring practices, directives euphemistically described as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and what appears to be an explicit strategy of bloating the government with like-minded radical gender goblins dedicated to the Trump Resistance (it seems they’ve mostly all been fired); thousands of government sites and site pages were deleted, including pretty much everything related to DEI; over two million federal employees were offered a buyout, much as Twitter employees were offered a buyout before the company’s mass firings; government unions, which for some reason continue to 1) exist, and 2) bargain with each other on behalf of the US taxpayer (the US taxpayer always loses) urged employees not to accept the buyout; and the FBI vowed… I mean it sounds like they are urging agents to fight against the president?