The Tesla Chainsaw Massacre: Episode One
The Weekend Gathering Of The Conservative Political Action Committee Unleashed A Fascist Freak Show of Global Proportions
As America collectively crossed the Rubicon triggered by the election and inauguration of Donald Trump over the last weeks, even the most astute political observers, if they are honest, couldn’t have seen it coming.
Of course, I’m referring to the illegal and brazen move made by Donald Trump in handing the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, the keys to the Federal government “kingdom,” and allowing an unelected overlord to decide whimsically what, and who goes, in an alleged attempt to cut government waste, fraud and abuse.
The cleverness of this ruse, another attempt by the hucksterish Trump to disguise his real intentions, is the framing: Who, after all, isn’t for ferreting out and ending the waste and abuse of the billions in tax monies provided for decades by the serfs of the American empire, who toil endlessly in a fruitless attempt to survive, while inflation eats away at every penny of salaries and hourly wages?
The skeptical, frustrated, post-political duopolists have seen it all before, but, perhaps, even they were blindsided and didn’t see this coming.
Despite abandoning all faith in the phony religion and dogma of the two entrenched political parties, knowing BOTH parties have dutifully done their part to hand over America to the corporate class, and now, in a fit of obsequious fawning, bow and scrape before the oligarchs, the post-political duopolists must still marvel at the clever, insidious nature of this latest psyop.
It seems impossible to believe that the working-class Americans who are, or will become victims, cheer on DOGE, a barely legal, unelected entity, and its modern-day Caligula, fascist prince Musk, who by his existence alone is their nemesis, and despite the reality that nothing is being wielded here but Musk’s raw megalomania.
The latest Musk dictate, which defies even good business sense, with the intent to crack a metaphorical whip, reminds me of a wizened, bitter teacher handing out an impossible-to-complete homework assignment on Friday afternoon, that they know that even the best students won’t complete. The teacher takes pleasure in anticipating failure. Specifically, Musk demanded, via a last-minute email launched on Saturday, across the entire spectrum of federal employees, that they account for, in five bullet points, what they accomplished for the week. Failure to respond would result in termination.
My first question: Who at DOGE is going to read thousands upon thousands of e-mail responses, making sure all five bullet points have been accounted for, an obviously impossible task, to evaluate the responses? Or is it a simple Yes, they responded, or No they didn’t respond? Is there an actual program that could sort the responses?
The email came from the Office of Personnel Management’s new HR email address but had no signature. The subject line reads: “What did you do last week?”
“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments,” it continues.
(Update 02/25/2025: The answer to the question is that the e-mails will be fed into an AI-based LLM (Large Language Model) system. The AI system, according to this article, will: “determine whether someone’s work is mission critical or not”. Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they had accomplished in the last week are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary, according to three sources with knowledge of the system.)
One might wonder if Musk issued this Caligula-style dictate to the Federal employees from one of the backstage green rooms at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, where the fascist energy was crackling, and Musk and his “peers” were just getting started with the freak show.
After all, who wouldn’t thrill at the thought of partaking of a dinner NAMED after former President Ronald Reagan, coffee to “fuel” the morning, lunch, dinner, booze flowing from not one, but TWO bars, and if your gut and head aren’t overwhelmed and dizzy from the free flow of booze and visions of government cut to the bone with a chainsaw, you can end the day with a slab of beef in a quiet environment.
Little did the planners know how prescient their planning would be, especially not knowing Musk would be reenacting the Tesla Chainsaw massacre.
“The annual national CPAC conference is returning to the National Harbor this year, which means all the Main Stage speeches, the action of CPAC Central, Ronald Reagan Dinner, and the Women’s Breakfast will all be taking place at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center.
The resort is a beautiful and convenient option for lodging that is just steps away from the action and all the amenities you could want!
The Gaylord National offers a variety of dining options to keep you fueled throughout the conference, including a marketplace for a morning coffee and quick lunch between Main Stage speeches, a sports bar and lobby bar for evening socializing, and a steakhouse to end the day with a quiet, sit-down dinner. The resort’s many gathering spaces also make it easy to keep the community and networking of the conference going after the close of the day’s events.
Special room rates are currently available for CPAC attendees. Book your room at the Gaylord National today before rooms fill up at CPAC.org/hotel.”
On the same weekend Americas working class, the 99 percent, and some of retirement age, priced out of being able to afford a roof over their heads, trying, with dignity and quiet desperation to eke out a strategy for survival living in their cars, CPAC offered their well-heeled attendees luxury options for fine dining to “keep them fueled through the conference.”
Perhaps as a warm-up to Musk’s mad emperor act, Trump associate Steve Bannon, feeling unloved and outclassed by the “main stage speeches” threw in a rabidly enthusiastic tribute to Trump, reviving the bizarre “Fight, Fight, Fight!” mantra made infamous by Trump as he rose like defiant Lazarus from an assassination attempt.
Bannon, obviously excited by dreams of Trump 2028 and beyond, inexplicably threw in an Elon Musk “wave,” which, uncannily, looked exactly like Musk’s Nazi salute from the Republican National Convention. You might recall Musk becoming indignant at the suggestion, clarifying that it was a misunderstood gesture of love to the crowd, and Bannon also followed up similarly, claiming his gesture was a stiff-armed wave to the crowd, despite the logical presumption they were fully aware of his presence, so why the need to wave at all?
But I digress.
Here is the actual footage:
Ironically, one person who definitively wasn’t convinced by Bannon’s explanation was CPAC scheduled speaker, Jordan Bardella, leader of the right-wing French nationalist National Rally party, who withdrew his participation, claiming Bannon was, indeed, “making a gesture referring to Nazi ideology.”
As some opined on X and social media, (paraphrasing) when even a Nazi sympathizer is offended by a Nazi, you are in unknown territory entirely.
Bannon’s antics even overshadowed Trump’s string of non-sequiturs, otherwise known as a “full speech.” Nothing new here, Trump has never been known for being a serious politician, intellect, or orator, and he doesn’t disappoint, resorting to childish taunts, bragging about his “accomplishments,” gloating that he has triumphed over his enemies, and taking the opportunity to feed his endless ego.
One of the “victims” was, of course, his alleged nemesis Biden, now relegated to scraping by in relative obscurity contracted with “powerhouse talent agency CAA, joining its star-studded ranks of Hollywood actors and sports legends as he explores what comes after the White House.”
IMHO nothing illustrates the corruption of the politicians in both political parties and their nefarious alliance with corporations, oligarchs, media, and Hollywood than the hyperbolic promotion of a warmongering ex-president who needed cue cards to find his way around the White House, whose chief memorable legacy is aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes, and whose mental decline was covered up entirely by a combative legacy media.
“President Biden is one of America's most respected and influential voices in national and global affairs," said Richard Lovett, co-chairman of CAA, praising the former leader's "commitment to public service."
Yes, he was so influential and well-respected that his party threw him under the bus, and denied him a second term. Cynicism aside, perhaps there is an audience who will buy a book, largely ghostwritten, stringing what’s left of Biden’s coherent thoughts together into a puffed-up legacy denying reality and exaggerating his importance.
Good luck selling that in these times.
Even to those pining for the good ole days pre-DOGE.
It really can’t be overstated how dangerous an unfettered Elon Musk emperorship, unregulated by law or any opposition as the American empire falls into the chasms of forgotten history is to average folks.
If you were hoping for a strong, principled opposition to the assault on the American government, you CERTAINLY won’t find it in the corrupt remains of the feckless Democratic party.
The same politicians who rightly pointed out Trump’s fascist tendencies were then, as they are now, only incrementally to the left of the oligarchs.
They hypocritically embrace the “good billionaires” over the working class, and despite the latest round of performative political theater by the Democrat’s most faithful cuck, Senator Bernie Sanders, there is no serious opposition to Trump, Musk and DOGE.
Sanders in 2016, 2020, and 2024 thrice betrayed working-class voters and those who advocated for peace and stability by folding to DNC leadership and the donor class by supporting Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and another addition to the CAA’s “talent” roster Kamala Harris.
People truly aligned with the left, not the liberal corporate class who paint themselves blue, know that Sander’s latest schtick is also a ruse, as it was the liberal billionaire class affiliated with big tech, Hollywood, and banking that gave us the vacuous campaign of candidate Harris.
Sanders hypocritically talks about “fighting back,” (a phrase worn out by Democrats with no real solutions or fresh ideas) while it is Sanders and his party that are also sellouts.
That campaign was roundly (and IMHO, rightfully) rejected by voters, Palestinian Americans, anti-war advocates, and average folk who didn’t get the feeling that an edited 60 Minutes word salad represented credible policy. Perhaps like, myself, they were full of angst at the prospect of a Trump power-grab, but couldn’t tolerate the fact that Harris could not be her own candidate and meaningfully separate herself from the unpopular policies of Biden.
So now that angst is apparently fueling anti-Trump sentiment, but ironically, also dissatisfaction with the feckless Democratic response.
As Sanders revives his populist, socialist evangelical act, “fighting the oligarchs,” mixed messages stream forth from Democrat leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, tweeting by the hour how hard they are fighting against DOGE and Musk and Trump’s mad power grab, but in reality, offering tepid, weak, non-action.
What can we do? says Jeffries shrugging his metaphorical shoulders:
“Like his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer, Jeffries seems entirely unequal to this moment. He has also started a — wait for it — “task force” on Trump and Musk’s destructive and illegal assaults on the federal government and its employees. In defense of this project, it does involve Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, one of the few House Democrats who does seem to be fighting tirelessly to expose and prevent the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destruction. But the term “task force” almost seems deliberately chosen to sound pathetic and useless.
Earlier this month, Jeffries whined, “What leverage do we have?” Even respectable voices in the mainstream media are losing patience with him: a Bloomberg opinion headline Friday read, “Hakeem Jeffries needs to get it together.”
For the final act of the show, one that I call “The Tesla Chainsaw Massacre (All credit to Keaton Weiss of Due Dissidence podcast for that phrase,) we bring out right-wing President Javier Milei, who currently presides over a poverty rate in his country of 52 percent, and an even higher rate of destitution, and predictably, was lauded by his fellow grifter Donald Trump, who proclaimed Milei to be a “MAGA guy.” Is Trump saying that what’s good for Argentina is also good for America?
“Between the first quarters of this year and last, 3,410,300 people have swollen the sector of the population lacking the necessary money to eat every day, taking the total already up to 6,012,772 individuals.
If this state of affairs is consolidated, it is far more probable that a new floor of structural poverty will be formed.
“Structural poverty is people living in conditions where economic fluctuations do not affect them because an improvement in their incomes will not take them out of where they are,” concluded the UBA body.
The prestigious Observatorio de la Deuda Social (ODSA) of the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) defines people in structural poverty as those “presenting a high-intensity level of deprivation of social rights and who are also poor in income terms.”
Milei, whose least concerns were about structural poverty in his country, was thrilled to simply bask in the aura of money and power at CPAC and had the privilege to roam around in the audience and backstage “gifting” Musk with a decorated glittering chainsaw.
The idea, I suppose is that Milei uses a metaphorical chainsaw to cut away the waste and fraud in the Argentinian government’s equivalent of DOGE.
Musk, fired up by the attention and the obsequious fawning intro by “host,” Fox News Jesse Waters, was sent into an over-the-top frenzy as he gleefully accepted Milei’s gift, and used it as a prop, stalking the stage maniacally while eliciting an effeminate high-pitched scream.
“How You Guys Doing?” Waters asked the moderately enthusiastic crowd, and then made a hand gesture indicating there needed to be more applause and enthusiasm as if he were an announcer at a Rock concert.“Nice vibe we have this year” Waters intoned with a smile. Yes, if you consider worshiping at the feet of Moloch, throwing out a few Nazi salutes, and kneeling before the altar of concentrated wealth for the few, and poverty for the majority a “nice vibe”.
Musk comes across here as a childish, egotistical narcissist with fantasies of being a world-famous hip-hop artist, and the ludicrous laughable graphics and images with Musk’s name and face blown up on the giant LED screens just add to the Felliniesque empire circus.
“President Milei has a gift for me, Musk intones, while a synthesized backing track with a hip-hop beat drones in the background a special “surprise” for the audience. “We love you! screams the audience. They are “shredding the swamp”.
Ah, but words truly don’t do justice to this freakish spectacle, here is the entire presentation.
True megalomaniacs are now holding sway over our lives.
When the bread and circuses fade, and Trump’s shit show is truly exposed for being what it is, not the effective cutting of waste but the ruination of the lives of Americans, revolution might be too little too late.