Democrats' Toxic Anti-Masculinity Problem

New podcast dropped!

May 29, 2025

Mark Halperin and Aishah Hasnie joined me for the latest podcast, which focuses among other things on the challenges for Democrats with male voters. Listen and subscribe here:

Elon Walks Away From DOGE

Gabe Kaminsky in The Free Press:

Elon Musk was back at SpaceX this week, planning to update the world about the company’s plans “to make life multiplanetary” right after launching the latest test flight of its Starship rocket. The update was canceled after the rocket spun out of control, but at least it didn’t explode after liftoff like SpaceX’s last two flights. Notwithstanding the two failed launches, Musk is back to doing what he does best.
But now that the world’s richest man has returned to a mission he had long before Donald Trump tapped him to lead DOGE, what will become of the bureaucracy-hunting, cost-cutting attack dog that Musk unleashed on the federal government?
Musk, who said this week he is back to “spending 24/7 at work” for X, xAI, Tesla, and SpaceX and “sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” might find more success in his quest to reach Mars than he did as the leader of DOGE. His exit followed a chaotic five months that spurred a conveyor belt of legal challenges and resistance from top Trump officials, as well as pushback from Republicans to what looked like DOGE’s inflated estimates of how much in federal spending it helped cut. DOGE’s website puts the total at $175 billion, but outside budget experts and some conservative critics have said the actual savings are much smaller due to DOGE overcounting grants and contracts awarded by the government.
“Musk made himself a total pariah,” Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist in Trump’s first White House, told The Free Press. “He had access, admiration, unlimited resources—and by his own actions toward people, blew it all.”
On Wednesday night, Musk thanked the president in a post on X and wrote that DOGE’s mission “will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”
While Musk is gone, he is leaving behind dozens of DOGE staffers that he helped install at federal agencies across the bureaucracy to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse that Musk said was rampant. They have backgrounds in software engineering, human resources, law, finance, and real estate. Many are young and had no prior government experience.
Most importantly, many of these staffers have begun to accumulate power and influence that they believe will help them keep the mission of DOGE alive. “DOGE as a construct has now gone from this specialized task force that shocked the system into something else, with most of the key policy people embedded at the agencies,” a senior DOGE official said.
While early on DOGE was mostly working across agencies as “landing teams,” it soon became clear that some of the people on Musk’s team should convert to political appointees to have broader authority, the DOGE official added. For example, lawyer Jeremy Lewin, who reported to Musk and was assigned to various agencies, now reports to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Lewin, 28, also is acting director of the agency’s Office of Foreign Assistance and is helping dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development as its acting deputy administrator for policy and programs.
Other DOGE staffers joined Musk’s team as unpaid volunteers. And some paid DOGE employees who reported to Musk are now embedded at agencies such as the General Services Administration, which oversees federal contracts; the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources agency; and the U.S. Digital Service, temporarily renamed by Trump as the U.S. DOGE Service, to work on software and IT modernization.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told The Free Press that DOGE’s mission to cut waste, fraud, and abuse “will surely continue” and that employees from DOGE “who onboarded at their respective agencies will continue to work with President Trump’s cabinet to make our government more efficient.”
But perhaps the biggest challenge that DOGE faces is overcoming the chaos caused by its unconventional tactics that had strained its relationships with Trump administration officials. A painful “inflection point,” described one senior DOGE official, was when the directors of some federal agencies told their employees to ignore Musk’s directive in February to email what they did the last week at work—partly out of concerns that the emails could result in the accidental sharing of classified materials.

Trump’s Harvard Funding Threat

David Harsanyi in the Washington Examiner:

Do taxpayers have a constitutional duty to bankroll Harvard University?
On MSNBC, David French argued that the Trump administration’s defunding of Harvard is little more than “political retaliation.” In the United States, we don’t sentence people before hearing the verdict, the New York Times columnist said. Ignoring due process is “directly contrary to our constitutional principles.”
David might not be aware that in addition to the joint-government task force’s claim that Harvard leadership failed to meaningfully confront pervasive insults, physical assault, and intimidation of Jewish students, there’s also a blistering internal university taskforce report that maintains that Harvard allowed antisemitism to permeate “coursework, social life, the hiring of some faculty members and the worldview of certain academic programs.” Harvard concedes, “members of the Jewish and Israeli communities at Harvard reported treatment that was vicious and reprehensible.”
The verdict is in.
But, I suppose, I’d pose the situation in another way: If a government investigation and internal review both found that white supremacists on Harvard campus were terrorizing black students and engaging in racist marchers and that their violent beliefs had found favor in the school’s curriculums and in social life, would anyone on MSNBC argue that the government had an obligation to keep funding this school until a civil lawsuit worked its way through the courts? One suspects not.

Jake Tapper’s Hilarious Biden Book

Matt Taibbi in Racket:

I wasn’t going to do it, really. After stepping to the edge of nervous collapse of late, I promised, no more Conventional Wisdom Bestsellers. I saw Abundance in an airport and turned away before registering cover art. I had the same plan for Original Sin, the “controversial” book in which CNN’s Jake Tapper teams with Alex Thompson of Axios to get real about the media and Joe Biden’s health. One moment of late-night weakness later, I was reading from Chapter One, “He Totally Fucked Us”:
No one thought that the Harris campaign had been without error. But for the most knowledgeable Democratic officials and donors, and for top members of the Harris campaign, there was no question about the father of this election calamity: It was Joe Biden. Harris, loyal to Biden to a fault, might never say such a thing. But plenty of people around her would… “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us.. Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed 107-day race was “a fucking nightmare.”
“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. Referring to Biden’s decision to run for reelection, then wait more than three weeks to bow out, Plouffe added: “He totally fucked us.”
Holy catfish! I thought from online buzz that Original Sin was a mea culpa. It would own press failures to cover Joe Biden’s infirmity in a super-belated version of Canadian comic Bruce McCullough’s “I’m sorry I caused all that cancer” routine. But Original Sin isn’t that. It’s much crazier! Instead of a dreary and predictable book-length excuse for thousands of media professionals simultaneously whiffing on the most obvious story in history, it’s an ambitious book-length effort to absolve all concerned, pin an industry’s coverage mistake on its President Droolcup subject (a gambit many times ballsier than blaming one reporter, à la Judith Miller), all while additionally swirling a new storm system of bullshit storylines to delay more serious questions about things like who was just president for four years.
It’s the opposite of a mea culpa and the literary degree of difficulty is awesome, equivalent to a blind unicyclist trying to juggle six chainsaws. Do Jake and Alex pull it off? They don’t! But they sure leave a hell of a lot of blood on stage.

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Manhattan Institute: Homicide Spike and Recovery in Big Cities, 2018–23

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