Richard Feidler

He didn't quite know how to wield his incompetence.

against this incredible, actually... And there are obviously problems with government bureaucracy anywhere, and perhaps in the United States in particular, but still, when you're close to government, you realize there's an extraordinary amount of just accumulated competence, which is something that I think he viscerally hates.

And so during his second administration, he came in with the guy with the chainsaw,

And only now, about a year and a half, a year and two months after Doge went to war against the federal government, are we finding out really specific details, mostly thanks to lawsuits, about how that chainsaw was wielded.

And it was wielded exactly in sort of the militantly incompetent way.

Like, for example, we now know that the National Endowment for the Humanities was gutted with the use of ChadGBT.

They fed all these 20- or 25-year-old Doge employees who had no background in anything relevant to the job that they were supposed to be doing.

They fed NIH grants into ChadGBT with the prompt, is this DEI?

And if Chad GPT said, yes, this is DEI, oh, respond in 120 words or less.

Because apparently they were pressed for time.

And so Chad GPT would say, yes, this is DEI, or no, this is not DEI.

And most of what it found was DEI in Chad GPT's estimation.

And so those grants were canceled.

I think that's part of what's going on.

And I think there's another similarity, which is that...

Everything is so hollow.

The loyalty that people had who were appointed in these communist countries, there was the personal loyalty, which usually got them the job.

And then there was the loyalty oaths and the joining the Communist Party when it was required.

The saying all the right words, the citing all the right sources if they were supposedly academics or other kinds of writers.

All of this sort of hollow performativity is actually very similar.