Arrest Elon Musk. Shut down DOGE.

Of the coalition of enemies of democracy now tearing away at government by the people, Elon Musk represents the greatest threat. The religious right is too mired in medieval beliefs to do more than drone on about putting women in their place and publicly hating gays, while pimping for Judgment Day. The merely greedy oligarchs are fixated on their money game. They are just useful idiots for the tech billionaires bent on running the world according to their own fantasies, in which We the People are just wasting oxygen.

The Republicans are operating on the belief that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." It's never true. You might forge an alliance, as the Allied forces did with the Soviet Union in World War II, but remember that Communist Russia was seen as a threat prior to World War II, and was treated as one again immediately after it. The Republicans have handed all power to the tech crowd, content to let them demolish the support for citizen government. The tech crew, for their part, are eager to weed out the undesirables in society.

I have no doubt that many families would welcome the legalization and promotion of euthanasia for elderly or disabled family members who are costing them thousands of dollars to support right now. First they'll come for the easily discarded. It will even seem like a relief.

All Democrats should be talking about right now is arresting Elon Musk and unplugging DOGE immediately. That will still leave plenty of destructive plans in motion, but unless someone asserts the Constitutional power of elected government right now the next step will be bloody, with an uncertain outcome. It will definitely involve drones and armed robot dogs.

Because none of this will happen tomorrow, or next week, or even by summer, lots of MAGA cultists will be happy at the prospect of DOGE's destructiveness. Undecided voters will waver. Vocal opponents will appear hysterical. I'd love to be overreacting. I'd love to look hysterical in retrospect, from a place of renewed hope and progress, because the opposition to this coup was successful in some unspectacular but conclusive way. That just doesn't seem likely right now.