Abominations, Pettiness, and Your Daily Dose of Dystopia
Musk, Milk, and MAGA's Brave New World
Posted from the sky; aboard Southwest Flight from DC home to Milwaukee. So pardon the turbulence.
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It was inevitable. And it was foretold.
But the era that will be best remembered for the Booger-in-the-Oval1; the ketamine besotted chainsaw wielding; and the bromance between the world’s richest man and its most powerful is sadly, but definitively over, demised, cancelled, and deleted.
And we are reminded once again how badly this tweet aged:
Happy Wednesday.
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To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication. There are no investors. No sugar daddies. We’re not affiliated with any PACS. Or parties. Just me. And the dogs.
“Disgusting Abomination”
It’s a classic story: Rich boy on the spectrum, trailing a cloud of sperm donations, fueled by the wonders of the pharmaceutical industry and the heady narcissism of power and celebrity, flies too close to the sun — only to fall to earth.
Except that we lived through the whole sordid thing and know how truly f’d up it was; how clownish, destructive, and ultimately farcical. And now Elon is out; apparently trying to salvage a bit of his reputation and stock valuation by throwing down with the man he had been tongue-bathing only five minutes ago.
This has been coming for a while now, and Musk has expressed his “concerns” about the BBB before, but the language of Tuesday’s denunciation was unambiguously a declaration of… well… something. Ever the self-dramatist, Musk cast it as a cri de coeur of his tortured fiscal conscience.
Explained Musk: “It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”
And he continued Xeeting through the night: ““Mammoth spending bills are bankrupting America!” he wrote, sharing a graphic depicting rising national debt over the past three decades. “ENOUGH,” he added.”
As Politico notes, the timing of Musk’s jeremiad is interesting:
Crucially, Musk chose to deliver his critique at the very moment Trump is trying to turn the screws on GOP holdouts. Suddenly, the same Hill Republicans Trump is trying to pressure and isolate have found an ally in the world’s richest man — and the very guy Trump brought in to cut government spending.
Musk is not wrong about the deficit, of course. And his intervention will boost critics. But Musk may be surprised to discover just how little his MAGA celebrity counts when he challenges the Orange God King Himself.
Because it was never really about cutting the debt or the deficit, was it?
Slava Ukraini II
Ukraine continues to play the cards that Trump told them they didn’t have. Fresh off the mass drone attack that took out a chunk of Vlad’s bomber force, Ukrainian forces blew up a key Russian-built bridge in Crimea.
“Today, at 4:44 a.m., without any civilian casualties, the first explosive device was detonated,” the agency said in a statement. “The underwater support pillars were severely damaged at the seabed level — aided by the equivalent of 1,100 kg of TNT.”
Surveillance footage released by the agency and verified by The New York Times shows an explosion under the Kerch Strait Bridge, which connects Russia’s mainland and the Crimean peninsula. The attack appeared to target support features of the bridge.
All of this was massively impressive, but Viktor Kravchuk points out another crucial detail:
We launched one of the biggest operations deep into Russia. Dozens of successful strikes. Some targets were 4,000 kilometers away.
But tell me, did you see a single image of a bombed apartment?
A Russian mother screaming in the dust?
A Russian child buried in bricks?
No. Because we don’t hit civilians.
We fight to live, not to destroy.
The Pettiness is the Point
“Hegseth orders Navy to rename ship honoring gay rights activist Harvey Milk.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to strike the name of pioneering gay rights activist Harvey Milk from one of its ships, orchestrating the change as Pride month celebrations take place, according to sources.
A defense official said the timing of the decision was intentional.
More pettiness may be on the way:
"The reported decision by the Trump administration to change the names of the USNS Harvey Milk and other ships in the John Lewis-class is a shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American dream," former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a Tuesday statement.
Other ships in the John Lewis class include the Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sojourner Truth, John Lewis and Thurgood Marshall, among others.
Two Dystopian Stories
Just what you needed, right?
First, make sure you read: Dean Blundell’s “The Digital Coup: How Trump and Peter Thiel Are Building the Biggest Surveillance State in U.S. History.”
I believe the technical term is “scary as fuq.”
As of June 2025, Donald Trump and Silicon Valley overlord Peter Thiel have joined forces to do something that should terrify every American: centralize the private data of 350 million citizens into a single, all-seeing database—run by Thiel’s tech war machine, Palantir Technologies.
This isn’t speculative. It’s already happening….
On Trump’s orders, every federal agency—from the IRS to the Social Security Administration—is now legally obligated to hand over its data troves to Palantir. Bank accounts, health records, immigration files, employment history, disability status, social media activity—it’s all being vacuumed into one of the most powerful surveillance platforms on earth, owned by a man who once wrote, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
Let that sink in.
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Second: This one is more dumb than scary. But sheeeesh.
Via the NYT: Jeff Bezos' apparently plans to robotize the Wapo’s opinions
The Post aims to strike some of the initial partnership deals this summer, two of the people said, and the company recently hired an editor to oversee writing for Ripple. A final phase, allowing nonprofessionals to submit columns with help from an A.I. writing coach called Ember, could begin testing this fall. Human editors would review submissions before publication.
It’s not your imagination…
We have been living through a firehose of bullshit, invective, and crazy. Via the Wapo: “Tallying Trump’s online posting frenzy: 2,262 ‘truths’ in 132 days”
As of Sunday, Trump had posted 2,262 times to his company’s social network Truth Social in the 132 days since his inauguration, a Washington Post analysis has found — more than three times the number of tweets he sent during the same period of his first presidency, according to data from the Trump Twitter Archive.
Thursday dog
This was probably inevitable, too. There was thunder at home yesterday, and Eli sought shelter in… the fireplace. Fortunately, all the ashes had been cleaned out. But still.
Lest we forget this iconic moment:
Tell me if you've seen this before:
Two people hook up. They slobber all over each other in public, making sure that everyone sees them doing it. They want the whole world to know that they've found each other. For a brief period they are inseparable, have each other's backs to a fault, and lose almost all sense of rationality as they rush to attend to each other's wants and needs. Then reality sets in as they begin to bicker, see differences between themselves, and start to realize that they aren't a perfect match. Then the fights grow deeper, spill out into the open, tempers flare, and they break up in a wild stream of justifying themselves, insulting the other, and airing their grievances to the same world of people who were supposed to share in, and approve of, their earlier love for each other. It turns out that at least one of them has been on drugs the whole time. The other is demonstrably borderline psycho. And we all are worse off for having had to put up with their fast fling of romance and togetherness and inevitable disengagement.
I was thinking of a high school romance as I typed that. If you were thinking of the Trump-Musk affair, I cannot fault you. It is far too similar to the high school experience, in both look and feel. How unsettling is it that our nation is being run by folks more in tune with what teenagers do, and how they do it, than serious people who understand and appreciate the gravity of their adult responsibilities and how they stand to impact the world order as we know it?
As to Pete Hegseth … he spends more time on hair & makeup than Harvey Milk ever did.