Job #1 Is Stopping Musk's Historic And Dangerous Crime Spree

I start today inspired by the grit, love of country and commitment of the Hopium community - thank you all

Morning all. I try very hard to push through all the shit each day to focus on the do part. What can we do? And every day together we put our heads down and go to work. You contact your reps. Write your postcards. Make donations. Do some info warring through your networks. I write Hopium and work my networks. For Hopium paid subscribers we then hit the chat, self-report our progress, share articles or videos we’ve found to be helpful and learn from one another.

I just want to begin the day by saying thank you. The passion, love of country, grit and fight you all are exhibiting right now in the face of extraordinary ugliness is keeping me going. It lifts me off the mat (along with a little coffee) and gets me ready to dive back in every morning. I sit here with Tug, my ancient English Bulldog, and we make Hopium together. Here is my snoring buddy as I write right now:

I’ve struggled to write today. I feel a bit overwhelmed by it all this morning. As I wrote to our paid subscribers last night the vaporizing of USAID has gotten to me. That the world’s richest man has chosen to end a government agency - with no warning, no consultation, no planning - that serves the world’s poorest is a historic, world-altering wrong. Millions may die, soon, in the next few weeks. Hundreds of millions of lives are being disrupted. Countries destabilized. Life-saving food and medicine rotting on container ships and in warehouses. Thousands of American citizens are being repatriated without jobs or homes for their families or schools for their kids. Our nation’s reputation may never recover for allowing one man to decide that millions should die. Trump and Musk and Rubio are turning America into a global pariah, and what haunts me today, is that my three Gen Z kids are going to spend their lives in a world where America is far more likely to be reviled than admired.

It feels like one easy decision by the U.S. president is quietly killing so many lives,” said Saw Nah Pha, a tuberculosis patient who said he was told to leave a U.S.-funded hospital in the Mae La refugee camp, the largest refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border.

And I am fucking angry. Really really angry this morning.

A new story from the Washington Post attempts to catalogue Musk’s historic crime spree across our nation’s capital. What’s happening here to the government of the most powerful nation in the world is beyond belief:

The chaotic blitz by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has triggered legal objections across Washington, with officials in at least a half-dozen federal agencies and departments raising alarms about whether the billionaire’s assault on government is breaking the law.

Over the past two weeks, Musk’s team has moved to dismantle some U.S. agencies, push out hundreds of thousands of civil servants and gain access to some of the federal government’s most sensitive payment systems. Musk has said these changes are necessary to overhaul what he’s characterized as a sclerotic federal bureaucracy and to stop payments that he says are bankrupting the country and driving inflation.

But many of these moves appear to violate federal law, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, one audio recording, and several internal messages obtained by The Washington Post. Internal legal objections have been raised at the Treasury Department, the Education Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the White House budget office, among others.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,” said David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School.

So what to do we do? I think we have one job now as a community - Musk must be stopped at all costs. Hundreds of lawsuits. Criminal referrals. State indictments. Protests. Contacting the families of the kids working with him. Whatever it takes. Issue formal governmental condemnations. Bring up contempt of Congress charges. Contact/call your reps today at all levels of government and demand they do everything within their power to stop Musk. Musk is on a lawless world-altering rampage to destroy the US government and what I call the America of the Four Freedoms. He is a serial criminal and a traitor. He is not the President, but a private citizen. We have to do everything within our power to stop him. We are not powerless. We are Americans, and Democrats. We fought and beat fascists once before and are being called on it to do so again. We have to fight, our leaders need to lead and we have to win.

Representative Maxwell Frost released this video from outside of Treasury yesterday. More of this. Much, much more of this:

Here’s a new NBC News article this morning, USAID upheaval is paralyzing global food and medicine delivery. Look at what is being done in our name - historic madness, malevolence, and murder:

Shipping containers packed with lifesaving antibiotics and antimalarial drugs are being held at the Port of Sudan, where they sit in limbo. Essential medicines are expiring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after a cash-strapped government contractor was forced to shut off the air conditioning. Millions of pounds of American-grown soybeans that were bound for refugee camps overseas are being diverted to warehouses instead.

President Donald Trump’s mission to upend the U.S. Agency for International Development, a government organization tasked with alleviating global poverty and providing humanitarian relief, has paralyzed efforts to distribute essential food, medicine and other lifesaving supplies around the world, according to nonprofit organizations, farm industry groups and federal lawmakers.

The administration’s 90-day freeze on foreign aid, a stop-work order to review agency operations and the abrupt closure of USAID’s headquarters have stalled the aid distribution system, despite the administration’s claim that “life-saving humanitarian assistance” would be allowed to continue.

The agency announced on its website late Tuesday that almost all direct hires around the world will be placed on administrative leave later this week.

The agency’s future is now deeply uncertain; Trump has seized on it as part of his mission to radically reshape the federal government, saying it was “run by a bunch of radical lunatics,” and the agency’s spending and staff must be scrutinized. The State Department took control of USAID this week.

There are layers of problems. The process to apply for a humanitarian waiver is new and mired in confusion and delays. According to nonprofit groups, it’s not clear how the administration is defining “lifesaving” aid that can continue despite the freeze, or whether the holdups in releasing funds are intentional.

“For more than a week now, essential lifesaving programs and commodities like food and medicine have been stopped,” said Tom Hart, president and CEO of InterAction, an alliance of U.S.-based nongovernmental organizations, many of which rely on federal aid to fund their work. “That’s a massive waste of taxpayer money and goodwill, as well as devastating humanitarian impacts on people in need.”

Some shipping containers full of aid materials already en route to their destinations are being diverted to warehouses and held at ports in the U.S. and overseas, caught up in the confusion, according to farm industry groups.

That includes about 33,000 metric tons of soybeans and soy products used to treat severe malnutrition in East Africa and other regions, according to Gena Perry, who leads a human health program for the American Soybean Association, an industry trade group.

“There’s a carveout for emergency feeding, so that’s supposed to be flowing through, yeah?” said Joe Cramer, director of the Michigan Bean Commission, which represents domestic bean growers. But he said that hasn’t been happening. “There’s a freeze on shipping anything,” he said.

The confusion around delivering essential food and medicine has drawn rare criticism from Republican lawmakers, as well as Democrats.

“I urge @SecRubio to distribute the $340 million in American-grown food currently stalled in U.S. ports to reach those in need,” Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., wrote on X. “Time is running out before this life-saving aid perishes.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., urged the Trump administration to resume the distribution of HIV drugs under a decades old initiative to fight HIV/AIDS.

“It is a Republican initiative, it is pro-life, pro-America and the most popular U.S. program in Africa,” Cassidy wrote on X. “There’s even a waiver acknowledging this, yet I’m told that drugs are still being held at clinics in Africa. This must be reversed immediately!!”

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for Moran and Cassidy said there were no updates.

The breakneck effort to stymie USAID has prompted many humanitarian groups to suspend their work entirely. Others have scaled back services while struggling to stay financially solvent as USAID has stopped payments — including those for services already rendered.

A senior leader of one humanitarian organization said their group was owed nearly $50 million from USAID for work completed in December and January.

“We have essential medicines rotting in warehouses in the DRC because we can’t operate the air conditioning,” said the staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity over fears of retribution. “We can’t continue to front money.”

The group also said it had $500,000 worth of antibiotics, antimalarial drugs and other essential medicines currently stuck at the Port of Sudan because of the Trump administration’s stop-work order.

Hart, the CEO of InterAction, corroborated the group’s account.

Kaleb Brownlow, a former senior USAID adviser, said there could be serious health implications from suddenly stopping medication like HIV antiretrovirals, including higher viral loads and the development of drug resistance.

“There’s more viral particles circulating your body, which causes an impact to your own self, but also means that you can spread the disease and increase the likelihood of transmission,” said Brownlow, who was among the hundreds of USAID workers who were laid off last week.

Brownlow described his final days of work as a “complete scramble” as colleagues tried to redirect HIV, malaria and tuberculosis medication to warehouses around the globe.

“There was no attempt to actually phase this out — this was just a complete abandonment,” said Brownlow.

Of course TeamPutin is cheering this on for they are watching Musk light America’s reputation on fire throughout the world:

Musk is turning the developing world against us while President Trump focuses on turning other parts of the world - Mexico, Canada, China, the Middle East and soon Europe - against us too.

Time is of the essence. We have to keep helping our leaders understand what their jobs are now, and we have to stop Musk.

From the FDR Memorial....

Good luck today everyone. Let’s do some good, together. Tug and I are sending our love to all of you today, and I look forward to seeing some of you tonight at our paid subscribers get together - Simon