Elon Musk cyberbullies a federal worker while showcasing his own ignorance
Elon Musk has it out for federal employees.
He’s promised to fire them en masse in a bid to cut down government spending by trillions of dollars, and he plans to do this through DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, a commission that will be formed as part of president-elect Donald Trump’s administration.
That much is old news. But as The Wall Street Journal now reports, Musk has taken his animus to another level by cruelly singling out an individual federal employee named Ashley Thomas, who works a relatively obscure job at the US International Development Finance Corporation, to be harassed online.
“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the WSJ. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.”
Things kicked off when a popular right wing account ridiculed Thomas in a tweet, writing, “I don’t think the US Taxpayer should pay for the employment of a ‘Director of Climate Diversification (she/her).'”
Musk quoted the post with a dunk of his own, effectively inviting his hundreds of millions of followers to join in on harassing this random government worker.
“So many fake jobs,” Musk wrote in the tweet, which now has over 200,000 likes.
Seemingly, the billionaire culture warrior saw the word “diversification” and thought “diversity,” “DEI,” or some other form of “wokeness” — his favorite punching bags — as did his many followers.
“You aren’t getting rid of all the good jobs are you?” replied one of his courtiers. “I just applied for Chief Climate Gender Diversification Administrator.”
Aside from the harassment and the abhorrent massacring of comedy on display here, this is a truly bizarre job to single out.
The work of climate diversification, a subset of economic diversification, does not involve sitting around at the office and inventing pronouns or whatever Musk is imagining, but to develop strategies to reduce the impact of climate change on various sectors of the economy, especially agriculture. If certain food crops end up failing, for example, diversifying what we grow ensures that we don’t all literally starve. But Musk and his cronies clearly heard the job and thought it sounded like out-of-control wokeness.
Additionally, it’s pretty ironic that Musk is picking a bone with the International Development Finance Corporation, because it was his buddy-slash-father-figure Donald Trump that created it. [Continue reading…]