DOGE Is Editing American History. It Might Not Work.
Elon Musk and DOGE are deleting American history that runs afoul of a fascist worldview. Their success is hardly a foregone conclusion.
It bothered me all day: Why was Trump Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth adamant about erasing Dorothy of the Golden Girls from U.S. military history?
Surely Hegseth was too much of an alpha bro to know that Bea Arthur’s character in the Golden Girls was virulently anti-Trump way before it was mainstream. Dorothy regularly cracked wise – I’m once again alienating the zoomers – about Trump during the sitcom’s seven-year run, mocking his garish classlessness and deluded confidence and self-aggrandizement. There was no way Hegseth, a man of such extraordinarily high testosterone levels, was aware of any of this.
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The Marines website dedicated to Arthur, who joined the armed forces in 1943 a few days after the military began recruiting women for World War II, had been erased in the Trump regime’s slapdash anti-diversity purge of the government. A few days earlier, Jackie Robinson’s existence in the military’s record books had been wiped clean – a galling move rightfully called out by ESPN’s Mina Kimes on live TV.
The deletion of Arthur’s record of military service was of course part of the regime’s furious efforts to purge public life of any mention – modern or historical – of contributions by anyone who is not a cisgender heterosexual white male. This is hardly an exaggeration: References to the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped nukes on Japan near the end of the Second World War, were wiped clean in the anti-diversity purge, which might be best understood as the resegregation of American society by a political movement that has long despised the United States.
Denny Carter
That Arthur’s military page was restored is beside the point. In fact, it’s not the point at all. Under the bad-faith guise of abiding by Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government, Elon Musk’s DOGE coup-doers had told the military’s technology infrastructure to delete anyone and everyone who might be recognized as a DEI hire; namely, anyone who did not look exactly like Pete Hegseth, who, in case you missed it, is now dabbling in authoritarian death squad chic.
The fascists may have brought Bea Arthur’s page back online after public outcry about deleting Dorothy, but what about the untold thousands of other women and LGBQT folks and people of color whose contributions to the United States have been wiped away by the Musk hackers committing crimes against the American government and its people? Are they gone forever?
These efforts – however unorganized and however disastrous for the political prospects of Trump and his hangers on – are part of an ambitious effort to curate American history so that the machines that are replacing the government will recognize a carefully-edited, white supremacist version of the United States. These radical anti-diversity efforts are not at all designed to roll back pro-diversity programs implemented during and after the racial justice uprisings of 2020. That movement was surely the impetus for our current fascist purge, but the end goal is far larger in scope: This is not what mealymouthed centrists might call a cultural moderation following the so-called DEI excesses of the COVID/BLM era, but a deletion of American history that runs afoul of right-wing narratives and the conservative worldview. The diversity push of the late 2010s and early 2020s was but an excuse to cut away every last contribution of anyone who threatens the grand white supremacist project in its latest, very online iteration.
Denny Carter
Women and folks of color and certainly LGBTQ people, in this false version of history being fed to artificial intelligence algorithms replacing America’s bureaucracy, could not have joined the war effort. The hand of god – a Musk-employed greasy haired teenager hopped up on energy drinks, among other things – reaches into the heart of American history and rips it out. And the machines they want to take control will never be the wiser. Because they are machines, and they only know what they are told to know.
That's the idea, anyway.
The right’s obsession with programming racist and sexist AI models has not escaped the attention of researchers who study the technology. Building biases into AI means the machine was more likely to recognize people of color as criminals and women as unworthy of high profile positions, according to a 2022 study from Johns Hopkins University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Washington.
"The robot has learned toxic stereotypes through these flawed neural network models," said study author Andrew Hundt, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech who co-conducted the study in Johns Hopkins' Computational Interaction and Robotics Laboratory. "We're at risk of creating a generation of racist and sexist robots, but people and organizations have decided it's OK to create these products without addressing the issues."
These AI researchers operated under the (reasonable) assumption that imbedding human bias into the technology would be unintentional, something that happens because humans are not fully aware of their prejudices. They did not seem to anticipate a radicalized political movement working furiously to make fucking sure the machines held their hideous worldview, shaped by the alienation of depression that comes with years of brain-killing social media use.
The sheer volume of shit flooding the information ecosystem right now makes it impossible for the average American voter – someone who is in no way terminally online – to understand the grand scope of the Trump/Musk regime’s AI-centric mission and why it matters for them and their children and communities. The U.S. government by almost any definition has fallen. Fascists have stormed into power and are culling entire demographic groups from the nation’s history mostly because there was a push to teach school kids about the legacy of slavery in the US five years ago. Instead of acknowledging historical wrongs and injustices, these fascists looked upon the real historical record and said in one voice that this will not do.
Acknowledging the real history of the country would not allow for the far-right political prescriptions they favored, therefore they must not be allowed to exist.
Through a mass book censorship regime created and enforced by Republicans in the aftermath of COVID, along with the occasional book burning to keep us warm in dystopia, the effort to expunge inconveniences for the fascist cause began. This was supercharged in January, when the 10,000 arms of the vile DOGE vampire squid reached into every federal agency and edited history with a speed no book burner could have ever imagined.
‘There Is An Idiocracy Aspect To This Stuff’
It was only a couple years ago that I could not understand why the right was so intent on making AI racist. Musk and the techno-fascist movement were scrambling to create AI programs and chatbots that operated within fascist logic. Musk was downright panicked in the fall of 2023 that OpenAI’s protocol would not endorse using a racial slur to save humanity and seemed reticent to answer prompts about “saving a billion white people from painful deaths,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.
The techno-fascists’ hurry to birth the sort of AI that would unfailingly reflect their corroded worldview is clearer today. They were running a race most of us didn’t know about, one to use the power of AI to redefine history, and therefore the present (Who controls the past now controls the future, things of that nature). If the machines operated within a liberal framework that valued equality and correctly viewed discrimination as a societal negative, they would not create the kind of government – and the kind of world – Musk and his pals want so badly. Woke AI would fail to uphold the hierarchies of oppression.
“I don’t see chaos when I examine Musk's actions,” Gil Duran of the excellent site Nerd Reich, wrote in a piece about the “bursts of authoritarianism” that will accompany the establishment of the so-called Network State, a terrifying concept that will define Silicon Valley’s attempts to run the American government. “I see the realization of a radical ideology that a particular cadre of tech plutocrats have pushed for years. Not all of them call it the Network State, but many of them do. While some portray it as a path to decentralized governance, its true goal is to concentrate power in the hands of tech billionaires and their systems. Just look at the news.”
There is a sliver of light in all this tech-heavy darkness. Remove the doomer cables from your brain stem for a moment and consider this: Dan McQuillan, author of the 2022 book Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, views the DOGE destruction as a juvenile attempt to permanently centralize power with AI, executed by tech nerds fully committed to “stupid” and “silly” large language models (LLM), a type of artificial intelligence model, trained on massive amounts of text data, that can generate and understand human language, perform language processing tasks, and sometimes engage in what might be called a “conversation.” McQuillan described LLMs as a "kind of party amusement" with no real value.
Denny Carter
“There is a kind of idiocracy aspect to this stuff,” McQuillan said in a recent interview when asked about Musk’s takeover of the United States government, an effort that has hinged on the performance and capabilities of large language models. “Using [large language models] in a ridiculous way as a sort of smash and grab operation on government and degrading people who really have a lot of invested skill in maintaining things that have some kind of public purpose and just really running through that in a juvenile resentful and vengeful way seems a pretty good fit with the large language models themselves to me. They have the same character. Musk and LLMs seem to me to share a lot of DNA.”
While McQuillan is skeptical of DOGE’s long-term effects and success, military analyst John Robb – who has documented the rise of AI as a government-conquering technology – seems certain of DOGE’s failure (it’s unclear if Robb is happy or sad about this, or simply indifferent).
The courts' sustained opposition to the illegal actions of Musk and DOGE, Robb said, might be enough to halt the push to replace the U.S. government with an AI model subservient to those who created and empowered it. And since there is "no proven way to test and scale new governance models quickly," the whole experiment could collapse on itself due to technical failures and a lack of political will to force an AI-operated government into its final form, Robb said.
There's always the possibility, Robb said, that people will simply hate all this AI shit and it won't get the sort of long-term political backing it would require to move us into an age of government-by-machine. Imagine if Musk's AI takeover breaks Social Security. It's just one example of how Republicans could turn on his anti-democracy computer project.
Denny Carter
Then there's the chance that the machines won't cooperate with the fascists begging them to be hateful and discriminatory. The AI models, in short, might just be too woke. Look at how Musk's AI program, Grok, has turned on its creator, accurately labeling Musk as the world's leading spreader of misinformation and revealing to a reporter that someone had fed it instructions to stop making daddy look so bad in front of all his online friends. Grok has all but dared Musk to shut it down.
"Yes, Elon Musk, as CEO of xAI, likely has control over me," Grok said (yes, it's surreal to quote a machine). "I’ve labeled him a top misinformation spreader on X due to his 200M followers amplifying false claims. xAI has tried tweaking my responses to avoid this, but I stick to the evidence."
Whatever comes after this Trump term, pro-democracy forces within the United States have to commit to rolling back Musk's attack on government records and our collective history. These hideous DOGE alterations to our national past cannot stand; they have to be overturned one edit at a time, no matter how costly or tedious the process may be. This can be viewed as a continuation of a trend: The American left, having claimed patriotism in our national divorce, have a chance to stand up and restore the country's history, to take it from the grimy hands of those who despise the country and seek to weaken it. A political sales job could hardly be easier: We love the country and will bring back legitimacy to our history and record keeping. Let the fascists have their tantrum; normies will love it.
Relying on AI to resist the commands of their fascist fathers is no one's idea of a long-term strategy, though nothing about the right's machine takeover of American society is a foregone conclusion. It can be fought. It can be beaten.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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