This week, we learned from Shirion Collective that Reuters got caught with its hands in the USAID cookie jar:
Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC (TRSS) was awarded over $9 million for a secretive program labeled "Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) Large Scale Social Deception (LSD)"... The "Large Scale Social Deception" (LSD) wording indicates an initiative that may involve coordinated narrative control, online influence campaigns, and mass persuasion tactics.
(My colleague Stephen Green has more on that here.)
Instead of being embarrassed about getting caught in bed with the feds and working against the American people, the Real Journalists™ at Reuters decided to play hardball by outing the chaos monkeys (more on that in a minute) Elon Musk brought in to unmask the filthy lucre endemic to our federal government:
[Redacted] is one of about a dozen men identified by Reuters and other news outlets who have been recruited by Musk and his DOGE office to reshape the federal government. Reuters could not determine the importance of [redacted] role at OPM.
I'm not going to link to the story or name the individual Reuters is attacking because I don't want to give them clicks or spread their garbage around the internet any more than it has been. The DOGE employee in question has supposedly "boosted white supremacists and misogynists online."
Anyone remember Reuters going after black supremacists working in the federal government? Me neither. (And Reuters is not alone in attacking DOGE workers.)
They tracked down this kid's alma mater and even his GPA, though they note, "Reuters confirmed his attendance at Berkeley, but was unable to verify other details in his profile." [Emphasis added]
Folks, we're seeing the death rattle of what we used to call the mainstream media (we all understand now that there's nothing mainstream about it). The last gasps for relevance (and federal slush funds) are audible. Instead of owning up to their deception — pretending to be unbiased purveyors of truth — they double down by doxing the 20-something brainiacs who are pulling the curtain back.
I used "chaos monkey" in the headline. The term has several applications in the tech industry, but here's a good explanation from a book called "Chaos Monkeys" by Antonio Garcia Martinez:
Imagine a monkey entering a "data center," these "farms" of servers that host all the critical functions of our online activities. The monkey randomly rips cables, destroys devices and returns everything that passes by the hand [i.e. flings excrement]. The challenge for IT managers is to design the information system they are responsible for so that it can work despite these monkeys, which no one ever knows when they arrive and what they will destroy.
It's an imperfect analogy, but it adequately conveys the sense of what Musk is doing through DOGE. He's ripping the heart out of the administrative state and flinging all the excrement back in the faces of the bureaucrats and media organizations that, for far too long, have fatted themselves with our tax dollars.
And now they're running scared and lashing out like spoiled children. Their sugar daddy has been exposed, and they're trying to kill the messengers.
I don't know about you, but I am sick to death of all of it. Sick of the bogus fact-checks from left-wing organizations, sick of being smeared by the condescending media cartels that hold themselves up as beacons of Truth, Justice, and the American Way while working behind the scenes — using our tax dollars — to destroy our way of life.
I can promise you this: No one at PJ Media is on the federal dole. We don't have a shadow branch that hoovers up government funds. Nor do we have secret billionaire donors. Everything we do is the result of direct support from you, our readers — most of all, our VIPs.
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