Maybe You Should Shout Fire in a Crowded Theater (If It's On Fire): The Coup Continues
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit
05 Feb 2025 — 8 min read
Yesterday the Associated Press ran a story with this sentence in it: "Last week, regional managers for the General Services Administration, or GSA, received a message from the agency’s Washington headquarters to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, according to an email shared with The Associated Press by a GSA employee." That sentence came a little after after the opening sentence which declared that Musk and Trump were moving "to cut down on office space." So far as I can tell this means largely eliminating the federal government--for example the federal government has in my region (California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, some Pacific US territories) 170 government-owned buildings and leased space in 827 buildings. Meanwhile the difference between reducing and eliminating all the leased space seems more or less like the difference between a haircut and the guillotine. And the story, which seemed clear to me if not the AP, clarifies that Musk's apparent goal isn't to reduce the size of the federal government; it's to eliminate it. Especially if you relate it to all the other stories out there about what Musk is doing, though there's often a notion in mainstream journalism that connecting things to other things is editorializing, that the audience should be delivered facts stripped of context in the name of objectivity.
"Meanwhile the difference between reducing and eliminating all the leased space seems more or less like the difference between a haircut and the guillotine." meditations-in-an-emergency.ghost.io/maybe-you-sh...