Weekly Private Reality Check #2

Each week, you’ll get this special 20 min deep dig audio analysis that explains the mechanisms at play. It’s your Reality Check. Everybody is reporting "What" is happening. It's the "Why" that gives us the keys to the car of survival navigation. When you know the plot of the play, you can predict the methods to get there and hopefully avoid the worst of it. I hope you will join others and consider becoming a paid member. I thank you!

Authoritarian Future in Teal and Orange

Welcome back, you poor, beautiful data packets—tethered to Earth, tracked like tagged caribou in some divine bureaucratic preserve. Today’s sermon from the mountaintop of madness comes courtesy of the Department of Government Efficiency—yes, that’s DOGE, no relation to the grinning Shiba Inu meme, though both share a flair for the absurd.

DOGE, you see, has taken it upon itself to consolidate every digital breadcrumb you’ve ever left behind—tax returns, DMV records, library late fees, Spotify playlists, Tinder swipes—into one glistening government database. A Tower of Babel made entirely of surveillance metadata. Something about “eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse,” they say. The kind of slogan you'd normally find on a gulag poster or stitched into a TSA agent’s neck pillow.

And just who’s behind this divine datamining crusade?

Well, although the White House assures us he isn’t “officially” in charge, all fingers point to Emperor Elon the First – or as he renamed himself Lord Kikius Maximus - Yes, that Elon. Rocket baron, Martian landlord-in-waiting, self-declared technoking with all the restraint of a raccoon in a moonshine factory. Apparently, Mr. Kikius Maximus ’s definition of “government efficiency” is stripping data protections faster than he stripped away Twitter’s moral dignity.

Now DOGE operatives—who may or may not have actual security clearances, but definitely have startup hoodies and venture capital in their bloodstreams— Now DOGE operatives are elbow-deep in a project to stitch together a master file on you. Yes, on you! Never mind the 1974 Privacy Act.

That relic of democratic idealism is being treated the way most billionaires treat pre-nups: as a polite suggestion.

There are lawsuits, sure. Eleven of them, last I checked. But what’s a lawsuit when you're racing to build a digital panopticon before happy hour? If George Orwell had lived to see this, he'd have drowned himself in a puddle of vodka and binomial code.

Naturally, White House officials say there’s nothing to worry about. They’ve assured us DOGE’s systems are protected by “some of the brightest cybersecurity minds in the nation.”

Which is sort of like saying your parachute was sewn by the finest philosophy majors—it sounds impressive right up until impact.