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Elon Musk [who promised to fire government employees en masse through DOGE, the new Department of Government Efficiency to be created by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump] 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.

[…]

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.

[…]

At any rate, Musk clearly knows what he’s doing here by making that tweet. And if he doesn’t, he’s an idiot.

In the past, Musk disparaged Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth by more or less implying that he was pedophile, which his followers capitalized on by sending him death threats. So intense was the onslaught of hate that followed that Yoel felt forced to flee his home.

That, and this latest episode, are a testament to the power of even just one tossed-off post by Musk — who now tweets as if it’s his job.

43 points

Perfect that the thing they are attacking her for is not even what she does. Just proves complying in advance is worthless, as Musk and his lackeys will attack for what they perceive to be true regardless of reality.

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25 points

Yeah, that’s what they said before the election. For example, leaked videos of two speeches Russell Vought delivered during events of a pro-Trump think tank led by Vought showed what they intend to do:

“Put Them in Trauma”: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda – (archived)

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so."

“We want to put them in trauma.”

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8 points

This is why the Democrats lost, among other things.Always on the defensive, never on the offensive.

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2 points

If they push back too much, their donors wouldn’t be happy.

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33 points

Absolutely sickening. Words can not express how much I loathe this prick

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25 points

What a sad little man.

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20 points

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.

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16 points

Its actually insane that the guy who owns the most valuable electric car company in the world would have a problem with climate diversification

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