As Elon Musk hurls digital debris (X-crement) at federal employees from his X-Twitter-platform treehouse, we might ask the same question Joseph Welch famously posed to Senator McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency?” Though perhaps with less formality, given the rhetorical present situation.
Recently appointed as redundant co-lead of the Department of Government (DOG) redundancy advisory group, Musk has begun singling out individual federal employees for public criticism before his audience of hundreds of millions of followers on X Twitter.
The aspiration, let alone parallels, to McCarthy’s tactics are striking.
The redundant DOG redundancy co-lead’s behavior bears an unsettling resemblance to a primate displaying dominance through chaos, flinging accusations at federal workers from the tall tower of his social media perch while his followers scramble to join the mayhem. Yet unlike actual primates, who typically display such behavior as fear-driven survival mechanism, Musk’s digital tantrums only serve abuse, intimidation and entertainment purposes for his audience.
Consider the recent case of Ashley Thomas, Director of Climate Diversification at the US International Development Finance Corporation. After another user questioned her role, Musk amplified the criticism to his massive following, dismissing it as a “fake job.” It’s not like she’s a redundant co-lead of the DOG redundancy, but Musk thinks he’s untouchable so…
The result? A deluge of targeted mob harassment that forced Thomas to privatize her public presence. This mirrors McCarthy’s practice of publicly naming government employees and subjecting them to widespread scrutiny and harassment.
The irony here is thick enough to cut with a knife. While Musk critiques supposedly wasteful government roles, he co-leads the DOG, a currently nonexistent advisory group that itself represents a new unnecessary layer of bureaucracy without any clear mandate or any demonstrated benefit. It’s the definition of governmental bloat masquerading as the opposite, making his attacks on career civil servants especially hypocritical.
The key similarities to McCarthyism are of course troubling to those familiar with basic history:
1. Both men wielded institutional power while simultaneously acting as public influencers
2. Both falsely claimed to be fighting government inefficiency and waste
3. Both rushed to target individual civil servants who had limited means to defend themselves
4. Both used public exposure and humiliation as tools of intimidation
5. Both falsely claimed to be acting in service of American taxpayers
As Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, noted, these posts “are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees.” This statement could have been lifted directly from the McCarthy era, when government workers lived in fear of being named and targeted.
There’s also a serious legal question at play. Deliberately inciting a mob to harass individuals potentially violates several federal laws, including those protecting federal employees from intimidation and harassment. After flagrantly violating public safety laws and labor laws for decades, you have to wonder if American justice willfully ignores Musk. While Musk always argues he’s merely expressing extremist ideas, the predictable and seemingly intended consequence of his actions — unleashing millions of followers on specific individuals — surely puts him across legal lines again, particularly by ruthlessly targeting government employees in their official capacity.
The key difference from McCarthy’s era? While McCarthy had to pull in and rely on newspaper coverage and radio broadcasts, Musk used Russian investors to buy direct access to hundreds of millions of followers through social media, making the potential for harassment even more immediate, intense and… Russian. The velocity and volume of modern social media harassment can destroy careers and lives in hours, not days or weeks.
What’s particularly concerning is that this is happening before the redundant co-lead of the DOG redundancy has even begun any official work (as if it will have any to do). If this is the preview of the poo fling, what might the full feature sewage system look like? Will we see systematic targeting of civil servants who work in programs or departments that don’t align with particular political viewpoints?
Rhetorical, I know.
The lessons of the McCarthy era taught us that public harassment of government employees doesn’t lead to greater efficiency. It leads to fear, dysfunction, and the destruction of institutional knowledge as talented people flee public service. That’s probably Musk’s biggest hope, to remove all function of government.
McCarthy’s downfall began when he went too far in attacking experts in geopolitical risk, leading to the famous hearings where his tactics were finally exposed for what they were: gross fraud by a substance abusing attention addict.
Today’s moment calls for the same courage that Joseph Welch showed in 1954. Someone needs to stand up and ask: In using your massive attention-seeking platform to direct harassment toward individual civil servants, while failing substance abuse tests, have you no sense of decency? Have we learned nothing from our own history?
The answer to inefficiency, if it exists in anything, lies in systematic review, careful analysis, and thoughtful reform, not clueless revolution. Publicly targeting individual civil servants for harassment and humiliation by knowingly inciting a huge mob seems like the sort of thing judges used to frown upon. We’ve seen this show before. We know how it ends. The question is: how much damage will be done before we remember the lessons we learned seven decades ago? And how long before someone in authority questions the legitimacy of redundancy in the DOG redundancy itself, an ironic embodiment of the very bureaucratic waste it claims to aggressively oppose?