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Last Weekend's Best Coup Reporting By Independent Media

We are in our second Trump term because mainstream media normalized the most unfit person to ever be POTUS. As they now normalize what experts are calling a coup, independent media rises.

On Saturday I saw Marisa Kabas’ great piece entitled “Did you hear about the Friday coup?” The piece included alarming details such as one federal source claiming Musk’s action were “like a bank heist.”

As we started to learn more about Elon Musk gaining access to the Treasury department’s $6 trillion payment system, mainstream media largely failed to sound the alarm. Instead, corporate newsrooms framed the events as Musk being Musk—taking on the bloat within our government with the same aggressive approach he used at Twitter (never mind that he turned it into a cesspool of disinformation and hate). DOGE was never meant to illegally “delete” departments of government, those decisions are the purview of Congress, but that didn’t seem to bother the leaders of our commercialized newsrooms.

A Monday press conference by Democratic lawmakers outside of the USAID building was deemed not worth covering by 24/7 cable news channels MSNBC and CNN, who one would presume are desperate for the type of midday breaking news alerts that drive viewership like, say, an un-elected Nazi ordering law enforcement to bar entry by members of Congress into federal buildings.

So to independent journalism I turned for the type of context the moment desperately needed. Accounts I follow on Bluesky were sounding the alarm and firing off newsletters about what was at stake just as responsible, pro-democracy independent newsrooms were stepping up to the plate. The country is in desperate need of context and these people, unlike mainstream media, are willing to provide it.

Garrett Graff penned a piece pretending to look at the unfolding events through the lens of a foreign correspondent—journalists who are often afforded the ability to write with “more incisive authority” because, well, there aren’t news consumers who might be turned off by prejudices towards homegrown authoritarians.

In his piece, “Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government,” Graff started off breathlessly:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.

Graff took some poetic license here and there, but honestly not much. The result is a chilling portrayal of what is really going on. We are being soft-couped while everyone is too busy reporting on tariffs. Indeed, as of today, we still have no idea what Musk is up to with our nation’s money or what he is doing with the private information of millions of Americans.

Waleed Shahid wrote “Elon Musk is staging a coup” for his Substack. He was sure to call out the failures of mainstream media to sound the alarm.

If this were Pakistan, Chad, or Venezuela, the headlines wouldn’t hedge: A billionaire oligarch seizes control, dismantling democracy in real time. Musk’s loyalists, armed with executive orders instead of rifles, are gutting the civil service, locking officials out of government systems, and dictating policy from a boardroom-turned-war room. Trump, a fading strongman, is the figurehead; Musk, the junta’s real leader. Treasury, national security, federal agencies—one by one, falling under private rule. In any other country, experts would call it state capture, a textbook coup. Here, the press still asks if democracy is in danger, as if waiting for the moment history makes it undeniable.

David Dayen, executive editor of American Prospect, conducted a “Q&A with Nathan Tankus on what it means for Elon Musk’s forces to have commandeered some level of control of the U.S. payment system.” Tankus is an expert in the technical aspects of US monetary policy. It was a very illuminating piece that you should definitely read if you want to be a little smarter about what’s going on. That interview can be found here.

Tankus published his own piece yesterday, “Elon Musk Wants to Get Operational Control of the Treasury’s Payment System. This Could Not Possibly Be More Dangerous, which is more technical than the Prospect interview, but absolutely worth a read.

Wired has been doing great work researching the team of unvetted 19-24 year old computer engineer lackeys that Musk is plugging into our government systems. Read their piece, “The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover.”

And Talking Points Memo has also been reporting on these young men. Read, “Musk’s Little Green Men.

We knew 2025 would be a difficult year for journalism as the new POTUS has made reporters his sworn enemy and has begun weaponizing the FCC against newsrooms. Even though corporate media had already shown their willingness to “bend the knee” in the face of Trump’s attacks (as in when ABC/Disney settled a frivolous Trump lawsuit every expert said they’d win), we didn’t know just how badly major newsrooms would fail in the inevitable crises moments that lie ahead. This was an uninspiring start.


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