I'm not excusing elected officials. I would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE. I'm just pointing out that the Trump admin deliberately lied about its connection to Project 2025, which made DOGE's connection unclear to people who consume Fox News etc.

People are downing my comment for suggesting that many people who don't take the internet straight into their veins every day might have had a hard time connecting the dots between DOGE and Project 2025.

All they had to do was skim any decent daily, weekly, or monthly newspaper or news magazine in 2024. Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid. The reason they don’t know WTF is going on may be due to their news sources, but they chose those. That’s a really stupid thing to do.

I think at some point people need to take some accountability for their own information ecosystem.

It really is a Catch-22 though, since the imperative and ability to do that is itself derivative of the information ecosystem.

Which is why I blame, more than anyone else, the actual smart people (largely cynical, craven, and greedy) who didn’t through their weight against this stuff when it could’ve mattered.