You know, people have been really down on Trump’s tariffs this week — now, since he’s blinked, somewhat paused — largely because people are losing lots and lots of money. (Yes, still, even with the stock market’s relieved bounce yesterday.) Promises of “short-term pain for long-term gain” are starting to fall flat, and so some MAGA loyalists have pivoted from promising economic gains to promising culture war gains.

Specifically, they are claiming that a return to factory work will bring about a return to true masculinity.

“When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this,” Jesse Watters, who previously claimed that eating soup in public and using straws makes you a woman, explained to the gang at Fox’s “The Five” this week, adding, “And if you're out working, like building robots like Harold, you are around other guys. You're not around HR ladies and lawyers that give you estrogen.”

Well, that’s just science, isn’t it?

This quote was a response to a particularly bad take from self-proclaimed “MAGA Lefty” Batya Ungar-Sargon, of Bari Weiss’s Free Press, who on Sunday told Fox News that she believes that moving manufacturing jobs overseas was one of the things that fueled the so-called current “masculinity crisis.”

“We shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living, and rely on brawn and physicality, off to other countries to build up their middle class,” Ungar-Sargon told former “Real World” star Rachel Campos-Duffy. “We imported millions and millions of illegals to work in construction, manufacturing, landscaping, janitorial services — jobs that used to give men access to the American dream.”

It seems worth noting here that both the construction and manufacturing industries are suffering from labor shortages, and have been for some time now.

It’s not that these jobs don’t exist, but that not everyone wants them. I guess the idea here would be to make them the only sort of jobs that people could have — like the Treasury secretary’s suggestion this week that all the fired government workers could get factory jobs — but that doesn’t seem very pro-freedom to me.

The sentiment has reverberated across the MAGAsphere this week, with many celebrating the idea of working in factories as being inherently more masculine and respectable than working office jobs.

Can’t they just start fight clubs?

But it’s not just about machismo. It’s also about making people less educated, more religious, and more likely to have children young. One of the things the Right has been pushing hard is that bringing back manufacturing would bring back lots of jobs for those without college degrees.

Now, on the face of it, that’s not a bad thing. Of course we want lots of good-paying jobs for people without college degrees! Personally, I think all jobs should be living wage jobs, which is just one difference between me and those people who want to bust unions at the same time they’re extolling factory work! But there’s a big difference between wanting there to be good jobs for people who don’t go to college and actively not wanting people to go to college, which is the far stronger sentiment on the Right.

Republicans don’t want people to go to college for fear they will come out of it being too smart to vote Republican. They also don’t want their kids to encounter different kinds of people and discover they’re not actually as scary as they’d been told. They don’t want people taking gender studies classes because they don’t want them to be aware of gender-based oppression, because they want them to love and embrace the patriarchy. They don’t want them taking Black studies classes because they don’t want them to be aware of racial discrimination and oppression. That’s why they make fun of these kinds of courses. They don’t want them taking college-level history courses in which they learn about the bad things the United States has done. They don’t want them taking college level biology, because they don’t want them to learn about evolution or have an understanding of sex and gender beyond what they can learn from Kindergarten Cop.

They don’t want them to have an understanding of epidemiology beyond what they can learn from “The Brady Bunch.”

This past November, the Heritage Foundation put out a “report” with the deeply creepy title “Education Policy Reforms Are Key Strategies for Increasing the Married Birth Rate.”

The gist of it was that Republicans must push for public funding of religious education and encourage young people to get knocked up young instead of going to college and waiting until they are established in their careers and financially stable enough to afford children.

No, really:

Increasing access to private and religious education for those who want it though expanded school choice, removing excess credentialing barriers in fields such as teaching and for state jobs, and reducing federal higher education subsidies and loan cancellation that place the federal thumb on the scale in favor of spending years in postsecondary work of questionable value will help young Americans to start and expand their families.

In short: “more religious education + less qualified teachers + making it harder to go to college = more babies.” This is probably true, since we can assume the children won’t learn much about condoms or birth control at those religious schools.

Not to mention more bodies to send off to foreign wars!

While no silver bullet can increase the married birth rate, developing pro-family policies is essential if Americans want to maintain their political and cultural traditions, avoid economic decline, and strengthen national defense.

Honestly you never actually expect them to say it, and then they say it.

Basically, the MAGA Right is making it clear that they want people to work in factories instead of going to college, because they believe that this will give them an edge in the culture war.

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We’ve seen this before. Under Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia (which was called “Kampuchea” from 1975-’79), the Khmer Rouge pushed the idea that more educated people in the city had been corrupted, they claimed, by Western values, and the only way for the country to return to its “golden age” was for everyone to give that up immediately in favor of becoming poor farmers. Chairman Mao, too, forced people with college degrees in bourgeois jobs to relocate to rural areas in order to work as farmers. Authoritarian regimes have a tendency to idealize the past and to demonize education, for fairly obvious reasons.

Now we have the Khmer L’Orange, with visions of Norman Rockwell paintings dancing in their heads, wanting to push Americans back into manufacturing, because they think that’s their best (and possibly only) chance to win the culture war.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Let us now check in with the latest doings of the DOGE teams, that private goon squad of the world’s richest ketamine enthusiast, which are now installed in just about any government agency you can name, chaotically and secretively destroying everything they touch like a swarm of termites.

Yesterday the Supreme Court blocked a California judge’s order to re-instate 16,000 government probationary employees that DOGE had fired, until the lawsuit plays out. The Court could have also just done nothing and not gotten involved while the lawsuit played out, but for a third time in a week they’ve intervened. Now, instead, those employees are on paid leave, getting paid to do nothing. Efficient!

It’s not a great sign for how the Supreme Court will handle any of the other more than 20 lawsuits that have been filed against DOGE, should they cross the transom. Remember when Trump thanked the justices and Chief Justice John Roberts in front of everybody? Yeah.

And now Reuters reports that DOGE is snooping on government employees and using AI to find DISLOYALS. And Wired says they’re planning to give a third-party company access to everybody’s IRS data, after firing the people who really DO look for tax fraud, all day long. Meanwhile, they answer to no one, not even the putative acting administrator Amy Gleason, who recently said in a group chat she has no involvement with what the DOGE teams are doing, and has nothing to do with the layoffs.

For a bunch of people who feel entitled to access to the tiniest government-known details about anyone, DOGE itself sure is mighty shy about who they are and what they are up to. By design! DOGE is so secretive that finding out anything is like trying to figure out what’s going on at a construction site by sorting through its garbage. And the teams are using Signal to circumvent records and transparency requirements about what they’re up to, while at the same time the government is ignoring journalists’ Freedom of Information Act requests, even after a judge ruled that DOGE is covered by FOIA.

One thing DOGE is NOT doing: saving much money. Their Twitter money-savings reports are riddled with errors, and IRS officials predict a 10 percent drop, or more than $500 billion-with-a B, in revenue, after the administration fired 10,000 IRS employees, and is moving to fire 20,000 more. And, says NPR, even if DOGE was telling the truth about the “savings” it has found, those “savings” still add up to less than half of what Musk says is his goal. And are five times less than the revenue the government is projected to lose from those IRS cuts.

And, instead of continuing a plan to modernize the IRS’s information systems, DOGE put 50 senior IT staffers on leave, including the ones who look for actual fraud. Instead, Wired reports DOGE is staging a “hackathon” this week in Washington DC to develop a “mega API” (Application Programming Interface) so a third-party vendor can access everybody’s IRS data.

Nosing through private information to figure out who might have donated to lefty causes now seems to be the only use the new government has for the IRS. Because Donald Trump thinks income taxes are a mistake, and instead he’s going to make the entire budget from tariffs, which he will put into an External Revenue Service, which does not yet exist. And then maybe he will convert it all into Bitcoin, or something. And then he’ll send everybody $5,000, ha ha ha! Just kidding, Trump floated that he’d “look into” sending everybody a “DOGE dividend,” but now Musk is hedging that such a thing would be “somewhat up to Congress.” LOL! Because NOW he and Trump need permission from Congress for something!

Oh, and another thing DOGE has done: Somehow it’s weaponized the US Marshals Service as its personal police force, busting in to agencies and changing their locks, which is WAY outside of their usual duties of transporting prisoners, protecting judges, and tracking down fugitives, Tommy Lee Jones-style. Or perhaps the squad of goons are Elon Musk’s security guards who have been deputized, and are only claiming to be US Marshals? Exactly who is sending federal law enforcement to act against other federal agencies is again not clear, and the government is ignoring questions and being sued for information.

And enemies lists! Of course they’re making enemies lists. Republicans LOVE enemies lists. And Reuters has uncovered DOGE deploying Musk’s Grok AI to sniff out DISLOYALTY to Trump or Musk in government employees’ communications. The ghost of Erich Ernst Paul Honecker is jealous!

Our Liz Dye in 2023: “imagine the chaos if Republicans were allowed to come in and fire every IRS agent, financial regulator, transportation inspector, and HUD staffer, and replace them with donors' kids?”

Well, imagine no more! Hey, whatever happened to Trump’s old loyalty-checking love tester, that handsome Johnny McEntee? Guess there’s no more need for him to sniff around for anybody with a Taylor Swift picture in their cubicle any more, or for people who wince at the Confederate flag. Nobody appreciates a good, old-fashioned, artisanal, hand-compiled enemies list any more, guess now he has been replaced by a robot.

But Grok AI is still not sophisticated enough to be able to tell you if Encanto 2 is a real movie, so probably this DOGE AI is another list of forbidden keywords, like searching everybody’s email for “ELON + SUCKS BALLS.”

We can only guess! For official word of DOGE doings, all we have is that error-ridden Xitter feed with announcements of jobs eliminated, and secondhand reports of the identities and doings of the twentysomethings/Musk employees with hair-raising conflicts of interest, and the lawsuits.

And on Monday, a federal appeals court put on hold an injunction that had blocked DOGE from accessing private data at the Treasury and Education departments and the Office of Personnel Management, and the appeals court will hear oral arguments on May 5. Though in separate cases the Social Security Administration is at least blocked from sharing SSA data, and a case against the Office of Personnel Management from disclosing data to DOGE continues. Assuming Big Balls has not already put it all on some cloud.

That’s the plan, move fast, break everything (and we do mean EVERYTHING), and dare courts to stop it. And the Roberts Court does not seem inclined to. And though Elon may be peacing out to the private sector, his little minions have no plan to go anywhere.

[Wired / SF Chronicle / FedScoop / Reuters]

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