Notes for the Kakistocracy, 2025-02-10: Elon as Dwight K. Schrute, a Canadian call to action, Ezra Klein’s “Don’t Believe Him”, 3-ring government

Big “Assistant to the Regional Manager” energy

I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s noticed the similarities between The Office’s Dwight K. Schrute and the United States’ very own Assistant to the Regional Manager…

Call to action for creative Canadians

Here’s a LinkedIn post from Kevin Newman, Canadian and former anchor/journalist for ABC, CBC, CTV and Global National. He’s putting a call out to social media-savvy Canadians to build a rapid-response anti-mis/disinformation team. Interested? Read on for more.

Does this describe you?

• A proud Canadian.
• Friend of America.
• Someone who has worked in or is retired from television journalism.
• Someone with proven creative juice and a laptop loaded with GFX/edit tools.
• Ready to act, but not sure how?
• Do you believe the best defence is a moral offense?
• Do you have half a day here and there to volunteer for the next 6 months?

If we still have your attention, here’s what we’re thinking.

As we’re seeing around the world, the most potent non-combat weapon is increasingly InfoWar.

Our adversaries are using it to soften resistance and make people question truth and facts. We are seeing they can win, even in the United States, yet no one seems to have come up with a defence plan.

Our leaders are not protecting the hearts and minds of Canadians, and winning over more Americans. We are becoming a bigger target for misinformation campaigns against our sovereignty.

So we’d like to propose kickstarting a defence.

We are looking for motivated creative Canadians capable of building rapid-response fact-checking on all the bogus information out there. A social-media-only campaign built for the platforms where misinformation thrives. This is not a partisan endeavor — we only seek to promote truth and verified facts.

So if you’re looking to engage, here is the first step.

Send an email here: 2025iamcanadian@gmail.com

Former journalist and historian Jonathan Jackson will be managing our interest and building a database of volunteers. He will need your contacts, any specific skills and areas of interest you can research and write about, your resume and a sense of your time availability.

We need:

• Reporters
• Graphic artists
• Fact-checkers
• Video editors

We will not share this information with any outside entity. We aim to eventually pay for the skills you bring. We are already hunting for donors across Canada. If you think you can be a partner in this effort, please DM Kevin directly on LinkedIn.

Thank you for considering this appeal. We hope you feel as we do that its time to fight for Canada in the creative/information space and will share this online to friends in our industry. We’ll keep you updated on our progress here.

— Wilf Dinnick and Kevin Newman

The Ezra Klein Show: Don’t Believe Him

To me, Ezra Klein’s pieces are hit and miss, but I think he hit it with this recent podcast piece about The Manchurian Cantaloupe, Don’t Believe Him.

Some key bits:

Why he’s pushing laws through executive orders instead of through Congress

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress.

 

A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way.

 

Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government.

 

You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

Why such a breakneck pace?

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them.

 

The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already.

 

We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post.

 

For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

Be thankful for the speed

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive.

 

I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly.  If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

 

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

Three-Ring Government

If you’re too young to have watched Schoolhouse Rock during Saturday morning cartoons, or didn’t live within the broadcast radius of ABC during the 1970s and 1980s, you’ve probably never seen Three-Ring Government, a cartoon musical short explaining the three branches of the U.S. Government.

It seems that JD Vance hasn’t watched it, based on recent statements…