Elon's Bad Faith

'We'll Never Be The Same': The Victims Of Elon Musk's Unreality

'A clownish South African reaper figuratively chainsaws me, a human being, to cheers from a rapturous crowd.'

“I’m a somewhat stoic person,” the federal worker told me not long after I had posted about my family member losing their stable, good-paying government job in Elon Musk’s coup.

The federal employee, one of several to message me after my Bluesky post, wanted people on the outside to know how devastating and disorienting Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government has been for those being purged by his DOGE boys, turning off life-saving funding streams with every click and sending hardworking Americans into the unemployment line for no particular reason beyond inflicting pain.

I got his message just after checking Facebook and seeing a longtime friend asking for folks to bring canned goods to USAID workers who had lost their jobs in Musk’s totalitarian takeover (if you think this is hyperbolic, consider some smart, sober political analysts are using this language on live TV). I haven't been that angry for a long time.

Things are dark, the federal worker told me. He hears longtime colleagues panicked and holding back tears as best they can as they plead for clarity from management. Management doesn’t know shit though; no one does. Musk’s indiscriminate rampaging through the civil service is causing real pain for real people – something that Musk, in all his blackpilling and astounding ignorance, either does not understand or does not care about.

He wanted me to know he’s not an emotional man, hardly prone to public displays of emotion. The mass layoffs and attacks on civil servants – a sport of sorts for Musk and his buddies on the fascist-making factory known as X – had finally gotten to him though.

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He may be stoic, he said, but he’s not “the new-age male self-help stoicism defiling the philosophy section at the bookstore or contaminating your YouTube algorithm. I try not to get too high or too low.”

“But I’ve cried at work more than once this past month,” this federal employee continued. “Some of those tears, at first, were due in part to the impending doom hanging over me as a clownish South African reaper figuratively chainsaws me, a human being, to cheers from a rapturous crowd. After all, I’m going to lose my job for no good reason. And that job pays for my home and my food, two things every person should have without worry.”

That cheering – the brain-poisoned people urging Musk to go further with his assault on the American government, to turn the Pain Dial to 11 – has to be agonizing if you are in the crosshairs of Musk’s DOGE hackers. I sometimes try to imagine it and I instantly become so furious and I can hardly think. Knowing there are thousands (millions?) of broken people on the social media site from hell taking great pleasure in your joblessness, in your anxiety, in your needless professional demise, is something new to the American experience. It is an outgrowth of the internet's inhumanity.

I think of Musk’s fanbase as the demons from the Hellraiser movies whose pleasure depends entirely on the suffering of a human being. Some poor woman’s flesh is torn and the demons are in ecstasy; some unfortunate man cries out as he’s choked by magic chains and the demons are practically gleeful. I don’t mean to make light of this worker’s situation by comparing him to the victim of a slasher movie monster who says things like, “Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell.” I don’t know how else to describe the mindset of a person who sees a powerful (unelected) official immiserating hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans and cries out for more. Their pleasure can almost be described as sexual in nature.

It's a reminder to decent people to reach out to friends and family finding themselves in the path of Musk's scythe. Fascist online hoards cheering the misery of these government workers can't be the only voices they hear. No one deserves that.

"So much of social media has become an echo chamber for hatred and disdain for us," a recently fired federal worker posted online this week. "It warms my spirit to know there are people who still care. Probably the only way I am hanging on to any shred of mental health these days."

Muskian Unreality vs. The World

I’ve used the term “unreality” to describe how political and cultural circumstances are invented out of nothing to create a new reality in which certain (right-wing) solutions can be applied. This is how intolerable politics becomes tolerable, palatable, even preferred (think of the invented migrant crisis in the US). The reason you are unable to grasp the fascistic jubilance of Musk supporters as he runs roughshod through the government is because you don’t reside in the unreality they have generated for themselves, one in which federal bureaucrats – that dirty word – are intentionally ruining the country from the inside with their woke bullshit about climate and gender and race, addressing hierarchies of oppression that have almost religious significance to the American right.

These federal employees, in this Muskian unreality, are bad guys doing bad deeds on purpose. That’s how one arrives at the belief that DOGE is a cleanser for an inescapably filthy entity. It’s how Musk is held up as a savior of the republic, not its executor.

It’s this inability to understand the unreality of federal government workers that has made it impossible for those affected by the Musk purges to make sense of their persecution.

“I’ve cried for them as they try to apply facts and logic to the situation, pleas for answers from flatfooted management somehow caught unaware that they are dealing with a legion of bad faith warriors unleashed upon their departments and agencies,” the federal employee told me.

Most of the other times I’ve cried at work, which has become less frequent as the situation has crystallized into an infuriatingly absurd stupid manifestation of Catch-22 (if you do send us five bullets listing what you accomplished last week, you don’t have to list five bullets listing what you accomplished last week. But if you don’t send us five bullets listing what you accomplished last week, you do have to send us five bullets listing what you accomplished last week. Or some shit like that) is on account of my colleagues. They’re good people, insofar as it matters or I can tell. They’re parents, spouses, young folks, old folks, some are the types of people you’re not supposed to be (according to the people who think such things) and well, it doesn’t matter what they are. They’re people. And they’re distraught and engaged in a single-sided psychological war of maniacal disproportion. I’ve heard them on all-hands calls, posing questions to management on the verge of tears. Most of them are really reasonable things to ask, how do I know where I’ll be working? Will I have a desk? Can you inform us of the plan so I can figure out how I will make sure I can plan to take care of my children?

Empathy for suffering colleagues seems to be a through-line among those who have taken to various internet forums, including Reddit, to anonymously share the harm Musk and his hacker army have done to everyday working folks just trying to get along, earn a decent paycheck, and live their lives.

"Emotionally, I'm dying inside for the people around me," one Reddit user said this week. "Particularly for the woman I've mentored for like two years, who finally got hired two months ago and may get shit canned for no reason. A single mother of two, one special needs. An amazing performer who doesn't deserve this shit. I'd quit if she could stay."

Though online message boards are filled with support and words of encouragement for Musk's many victims, the federal worker who reached out to me said "many of us are suffering through this alone, watching a society too inured, uneducated, helpless or otherwise mean-spirited to care. We’ll never be the same."

Anonymous federal government workers have shared their stories of urgent doctor office visits following chest pains brought on by the acute stress of Musk's destruction; of the constant irritability that comes with job insecurity; of the post-traumatic stress they're experiences as DOGE shitheads goose-step into their place of work; of struggling to find the right anxiety and depression medications to help cope with the inhumane DOGE cuts; of trying for years to land a coveted federal job only to lose it to the whims of the DOGE boy known as Big Balls; of feeling defeated after putting a dozen years into a job designed to improve the lives of people in the poorest regions of the US.

One poster talked in detail about her boss "enthusiastically" supporting the Biden administration's many diversity efforts, only to turn against those efforts 24 hours after Trump's inauguration. Spooked by Musk's attacks on the U.S. government, this superior had instantly committed to DOGE's re-segregation measures and "hung us out to dry." This reflexive move to save one's own ass, I suspect, is common in federal government circles today. These are hardly the first people to fold in the face of authoritarian terror made possible with the widespread embrace of Musk's carefully-curated unreality.

A Reddit poster known as Type 1 said they had gone to their doctor last week amid the Musk-driven turmoil. The doctor was well aware of what this federal worker did for a living, and at the end of the appointment turned to his patient and said, “Thank you for your service. None of you deserves what’s happening right now.”

"I burst into tears," Type 1 said. "Ugly sobs. The weeks of uncertainty, fear, anger came rushing out. All because of this simple act of kindness. I thanked him and composed myself before leaving the room."

The doctor's words seemed to serve as a needed pat on the back and an acknowledgement that the federal worker existed in a reality where the vast majority of people are on their side. Muskian unreality and all its overwhelming nihilism did not exist in that doctor's office.

"I left his office feeling better and lighter," they said. "People see what's happening. They support us."

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.