Elon Musk is, among many other things, now the co-chair of the currently non-existent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory group. Now, before he even gets rolling, he has begun singling out individual government employees who he says are emblematic of government inflation and posting about them to his hundreds of millions of followers on X.
Earlier this week, as the first reported by The Wall Street JournalX user “datahazard” shared a screenshot on for the employment” of that role. Musk I posted it againadding the comment “so many fake jobs” in a post with more than 33 million views.
like him WSJ As he points out, Musk’s followers have responded exactly the way you’d expect: with an avalanche of memes and harassment directed at Thomas, whose LinkedIn and Facebook pages are now private. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the WSJ that the publications “are intended to sow terror and fear among federal employees.”
Flooding targets with harassment is a tactic Musk has used in the past, including calling spelunker Vernon Unsworth a “pedopathic,” criticizing a former Twitter executive following his bid to buy the company, and suggesting that the head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, was understanding. to pedophilia. All, of course, under the pretext of “freedom of expression.”
The resulting harassment, of course, is precisely the point: Musk has systematically turned X into a megaphone for his views and has used that megaphone for any purpose he finds funny or useful. Musk and DOGE co-head Vivek Ramaswamy have also promised to do much of their work in public (and sometimes via survey X), meaning this kind of targeted attention will likely be directed at many other public officials in the future. nearby.