CHAOS MONKEY ADDICTION
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Hey everybody, it's Rick and as you can see I am not in Florida today. I am out in beautiful Rancho Mirage, California at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival. It was an honor to be invited this year. Speaking on a couple of panels out here about the state of the country and the state of the nation. And obviously this is happening at a moment of great national crisis, of a real national crisis. This isn't pretend, this isn't cosplay, this isn't half-assed national crisis. We're in an actual national crisis.

And it's coming because of three reasons. I don't want to go through those today, but the biggest reason of all is the chaos monkey addiction. And that is the elephant in the room. What is a chaos monkey, you ask? Obviously, take one look at Elon Musk and his band of incels. And, you know, DOGE probably actually stands for the Department of Gooning and Edging. This is not a normal set of people. And the things they're doing are abnormal in a fundamental way.

And they're abnormal because they've taken the ambit that was given to them by Trump, and they've gone into the government with a chainsaw and kerosene and plastic explosives, and they're blowing everything up that they can. Now, look, when you are elected, you get certain powers. That is a decision that our constitutional system has made. But you still have to play inside the lines, and the chaos monkeys cannot play inside the lines.

And so you're seeing Elon and his team of incel warriors out there going from agency to agency, taking your social security data, your tax returns, your healthcare data, your privacy data, any transaction the government's ever made with you. There's a record of it. So he knows everything. And they have copied this stuff. And trust me, these guys will lie to the court. The court has ordered them out of the treasury system, for instance.

They will lie to the court. They will say, oh, we don't have any of that information. I promise you, by the time it came out onto those portable hard drives or onto whatever AWS server they set up, it was in the hands of Elon Musk and Palantir and God knows who else. They understand that data is power in this era.

And they're using it to cause the maximum chaos and disruption. This is why they're targeting individual government workers, whether they're in the FBI, the DOJ, or the various departments. This is why they're targeting the softest target first, USAID, and claiming it's a corrupt terrorist money laundering organization, which I know a lot of those, but they all include super PACs and businesses related to Donald Trump.

Um, and so this idea that we're somehow going to tolerate, uh, this for a long time depends on one big weak spot that the chaos monkeys are exploiting. And it's changing slowly. It's changing a little at a time. It's not changing as fast as you'd like it or I'd like it, but it requires fighting on three big fronts. Number one, and God save me, the Democrats have got to get their shit together. They are doing a better job this week.

They're doing it. They're doing a much more confrontational, clear and edgy approach to fighting this fight. And the reason they're doing a better job is because folks like Brian Schatz are out there. Folks like Raj Krishnamurthy are out there. They're asking hard questions in committee hearings. They're slowing things down. They're blocking appointments. They're using the power that they have in the House and the Senate to do this. That power is

like all power, does not exist unless you apply it. There's only one form of power that depends on you never using it. That's nuclear deterrence. And so far, Elon doesn't have a nuclear weapon. Let's just keep that, you know, let's not give him any bad ideas. But the fundamental framing of using the power Democrats have in the House and the Senate finally dawned on some of them this week.

And look, I think Hakeem Jeffries is doing a credible job right now. He's letting his members start to run the traps, letting his members go. They're not playing the let's wait and see what happens game. They're playing hardball, and they should be. The Senate is another matter. I'll get some shit for this, but I think Chuck Schumer is an ineffective Senate leader.

I'm just going to say it. I've said it before. I'll say it again. If Mitch McConnell was the Democratic Senate leader right now, the world would be frozen in a 50-foot block of ice. Nothing would be moving in D.C. And someone told me yesterday, oh, well, Schumer's afraid the Republicans will change the rules and get rid of the filibuster. I'm like, by the time you guys stop worrying about that bullshit, they will have completed 80 percent of the damage they're going to do to this country.

So Democrats have been standing up this week. I want a particular shout out to Brian Schatz, Martin Heinrich, both of whom in the Senate have been like swinging the axe. Go at these guys. Go at them. Don't don't let up. Don't follow the rules in the committee hearings. Let them gavel you down. Let them let them cause the spectacle. I want to go back in history for a second to tell Democrats why this is so important.

Because you don't think in the long stretch of history sometimes. In the 1980s and the early 1980s, or late 80s and early 90s, the Democrats had about a 60-seat, 50-seat majority, depending on the year, in the House. It looked absolutely impenetrable. It looked like Republicans could never, ever recapture the House, okay? Well, a guy named Newt Gingrich, who you hate and who is a hateable person, had a great gift.

Newt was incredibly theatrical. Newt understood the value of political spectacle, of pulling the cameras toward the story. Newt understood how to get the narrative and the conversation off of the boring sort of national journal reporting of the committee vote was six to two. He understood you had to start injecting some heat and energy and passion and drama into the dialogue. So what did he do?

In 1992, right after Bill Clinton was elected, Newt and the Republicans decided they would amp up their messaging over and over and over again on three big fronts. There's a lot of threes in this talk today. Number one, they said the Democrats were corrupt. There was a House bank scandal and a House post office scandal where both parties were implicated, but more Democrats than Republicans. They didn't worry about that there were some Democrats on the list, too. They just said, burn it down.

So they said Democrats were corrupt over and over and over. If you go back and watch C-SPAN or go back and read the clips from that era, corruption, corruption, corruption. And that spoke to working class voters and spoke to middle class voters because they're like, well, I can't go write a check and not pay it. But the House Bank would let the Democrats and the Republicans do it. The second tier of this, this drumbeat.

And again, God forgive me for even saying his name, because if you say it three times like Candyman, he'll appear behind you in a bad wig and terrible perspectives. But Frank Luntz built a messaging structure for them called the Contract with America. And again, disagree with it all you want, but a plan beats no plan every time. A product beats no product every time. An idea beats a fantasy every time.

And so they built out this contract with America, and it was a very persistent across-the-board message where Republicans would say, we're going to clean up the House, we're going to clean up Washington, we're going to shrink the size of government, we're going to cut your taxes, we're going to do... They went through this plan, and the plan was focus group to hell and gone. It was all smoothed out, and the language was good, blah, blah, blah. ♪♪

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And the third element of this little revolution was that Gingrich maximized the use of the media of the moment. He had his people media trained. And by the way, in the mid-90s, I was doing some of that media training, so I know of this story. His people media trained. He had them ready to go out and get into confrontations with Democrats on cable news shows, mostly CNN at the time. But, you know, there was a growing sense of opportunity to use the media of the moment.

So let's look at this. Where are the Democrats right now? They're getting the fighting spirit and calling Republicans corrupt and evil. That's correct, and they should be doing that at scale. They should be keeping that drumbeat, bang, bang, bang, every day, because the harm that is being done to people is material. It's real. People are getting it. You're seeing probably on your social media now these Republicans are like, but, but, but, I voted for lower gas and egg prices. I wanted lower gas and groceries, not Gaza and Greenland.

That's what you got. The second thing they should be doing is continuing to drive wedges inside of Trump's world. You saw another story today of someone saying, Elon's too big for his britches. Oh, he's going to get. OK, Susie Wiles, we know who it was. We know it was you. Duh. So unsubtle as today. And she's much better at this normally. But.

The idea that Susie was a week ago said, oh, Elon's in a box. He doesn't have hard pass access to the White House. He's not this. He's not that. And yet Elon's like, fuck you. I'm going to do what I want. So driving that wedge and showing Trump now more and more that Elon hurts him politically because he does is a very meritorious thing the Democrats should be doing.

They were great with Kim Reynolds yesterday in the House saying things like, so would you give consultants access to your state government treasury? Do you think AID is a fraud racket? And so starting to press them in a way that divides Elon from Trump is important. Now, look, I had a pretty important Silicon Valley venture capital guy recently tell me

Elon will get bored eventually. He'll go do rockets or he'll go sleep in his factory or he'll do something. I think that is probably correct, but you can hasten that process by reminding Trump every day who the real boss is. It's Elon Musk. That Donnie Trump is Elon's little bitch. That Donnie Trump gets up in the morning and says, Elon, can I go wash your cyber truck, your douche panzer? Keeping that understanding of what Trump's psychology is and does. Trump hates everyone.

Unless he can, unless they're going to pay him or he's going to, or they're going to let him fuck him. Elon is now costing Trump and Trump is in a real, really, really tough bind. If he fucks Elon over and fires him, he is going to get Elon going on Twitter and saying, I tried hard, but Trump's really a fraud. The deep States captured him. And he's got a bigger audience than Trump online. And he could tank Trump's meme coin in a hot minute. All these things.

put Trump in a bad spot. So Democrats, you need to keep emphasizing, and we're doing that at Lincoln, you need to keep emphasizing that there is an inherent conflict between who is the president. President Musk is going to drive down President Trump's approval numbers. Elon Musk is right now about as popular as RFK's brain worm. His numbers are crashing. Tesla is crashing. The stock is in the...

With the growing understanding that it's always been a carbon capture voucher scheme, not a car company, and the fact that the audience for Tesla are the kind of people that are not big fans of what Elon Musk is doing to America right now. And the third and final thing that Democrats need to be doing, and I'm looking at groups like Future Forward who have probably still about, I don't know, 80 million bucks in the bank after the election.

flood the zone with lawsuits, not just lawsuits, seek emergency orders, seek injunctions. The more static and friction and pain you can shove into the machine every single day makes the chaos monkeys at least have to start responding because although they will eventually ignore many of these court orders, some of them are going to grind their way into a position where they're black and white

They're black letter law issues that are not going to get elevated to the red court. They're going to get handled in the DC circuit or they're going to handle somewhere else in the States. And so pushing that over and over and over again on the legal front is vital. There is still a vestigial mechanical process that will slow these guys down. If we, if we can get these groups and some of them are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, some of them are doing it because they, they, they've got a, you know, an individual patron doing it.

find lawsuits that can push and push and push, seek emergency injunctions over and over and over and over again. They have a lot of bandwidth, but they don't have infinite bandwidth. And there's nothing Elon and these jerk-offs can do when they finally start getting, and here's the secret weapon, folks. The biggest thing against the chaos monkeys right now, state attorney generals, the people in these individual states,

And I looked at red state attorney generals will do nothing, of course, because they don't give a fuck about their people, but the rights, the civil right and civil rights and privacy rights of Americans are being violated every minute that these weirdos are in there hacking government computers. It's,

unquestioned now by their own admission. They have accessed the treasury payment system. They have made backups of government databases across the board. They are going through this thing like shit through an owl. That state power

is still quite enormous, still quite significant. I want every one of those little motherfuckers subpoenaed in these states. There are privacy laws in these states. There are state versions of HIPAA. There are all kinds of causes of action for state attorney generals to bring cases. And don't just bring one massive case, folks.

individual states bring do do one consolidated fine but individual states also need to be bringing these you need to up the pressure the tension the legal friction the money the costs onto these people and you need to drag Elon and all these fuckers that work for him out of their offices in DC and

out of their cozy little nest they have in the OMB building, you need to drag them to your states. You need to get them in front. You need to subpoena them. And when they defy the subpoenas, you need to follow the legal procedures that allow you to go and serve them. Go get them. Make their lives more difficult. Make their shit hurt. They want to hurt you. They want to scare you. They want to say they've got this infinite amount of government power that they're going to exercise every single minute of the day.

While you still have it, state democratic attorneys general, use it.

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Now, for regular folks out there, you are starting to see what's coming together. Okay? Don't try to push it all into one single demo. If somebody the other day was like, oh, you guys are keyboard warriors. You're not at demonstrations. I would rather you as individuals walk in to your local congressman's local office, your U.S. senator's local office, in person, politely,

steadily, calmly, no threats, walk in there and say, I do not want my congressman, and mine is Neil Dunn. I'm going to go to Neil Dunn's office when I get back to Tallahassee, and I'm going to tell him, don't do this shit anymore. Don't back this play. Now, he's going to say, fuck you at first, but it's not just one of you or two of you. When it's 150 of you in the course of a week, when the office can't

Answer the phones because you're calling him every day. Has he changed his position on this? Has he changed his vote on this? Why is he doing this? Can you give me an answer about my data? You need to be requesting from your member of Congress

that they get from the administration every piece of your data that was compromised. You need to know what they know. You need to ask those questions. You have a right as an American citizen to address and seek redress for the grievances and the harms that your government is doing to you right now. Elon Musk is the face of that. Project 22 is the roadmap of that. Donald Trump is the chief chaos monkey of all that. But guys, it's hunting season.

Go get them. You have power individually. Call that U.S. Senator. Call that member of Congress. Go to that district office. Send that letter. Don't just send an email. Send a physical letter because they freak the fuck out when they get physical letters. I swear to God, it's weird, but it's true. The pressure campaign has to come from all different angles. It is starting to work, guys. It is starting to crack them. It is starting to really mess with them. One of the ways you know that it's messing with them

is Donald Trump has declared this week, as you all know, that the United States is going to occupy Gaza. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it. That we're going to take over Gaza. That we're going to clean it out. Clean out a certain ethnicity. Is that what they call ethnic... What's the word? Cleansing? And look...

It is not a pro-Hamas position to say that if America goes and parks troops to level and then rebuild Gaza while relocating over a million people to other countries forcibly, if you thought Al-Qaeda was bad, if you thought ISIS was bad, as Mark Polyphemus says, you're going to get a generational jihad question at that point. You will have proven to every single Islamic radical that their bullshit was always true.

You're going to have proven that. And Trump showed us very clearly the other day that he's disconnected already. He's not running the game like he used to run the game. That statement caught the White House by surprise. Look at that picture of Susie Wiles, folks. She looks like somebody killed her dog. It caught the Pentagon by surprise. It caught the State Department by surprise. Oh, and by the way, the State Department will slow roll this. Pete Hexeth may start putting a package together to go to Gaza.

It's going to be exciting to see in the next few days. But Trump's failures in the last 10 days are mounting. So the pressure campaign meets with those failures. You want to have that. You want to meet, you want to hit your pressure and their failure modes. You want to hit your pressure points and the places where they're screwing up. Donald Trump is screwing his own base. He's letting Elon fuck his own people over. He's letting Elon go out there and,

arbitrarily and illegally and unconstitutionally, blah, blah, blah, make these cuts and freezes that are harming the red states the most. You see in this online, like we talked about earlier, Trump, people go, I can't believe I didn't vote for that. I wanted lower egg prices and I just didn't want communism. Well, now what you've got is chaos. Now what you've got is Donald Trump promising to send American forces, not just to the Middle East, just, you know, we've all learned by now it's kind of problematic,

but to the white hot radioactive center of the one place in the Middle East that is absolutely where you never, ever, ever want to put American troops on the ground. So the chaos monkeys have had a loud and busy week. There are fractures forming. The Democrats have started to wake up. Individual Democrats, I want to say this, follow your gut. Go out there and swing the ax. Do not wait for a plan from consultants.

The consultants, I know this for a fact, have already been saying, the American people want us to all work together, and they want us to do things. You are not dealing with rational counterparts on the other side of the equation. You are dealing with chaos monkeys, and the chaos monkeys need to be eliminated.

put under the maximum amount of pressure. We need to purge them out of our system. We need to get them out of our government, out of control of your benefits, your data, your government, as soon as we can. And that's the elephant in the room, folks. Hey, do me a favor. If you have a moment, like and subscribe because the algorithm needs its feeding every day to the elephant in the room and the Lincoln Project YouTube feed. You can also check out my podcast at The Enemy's List.

And you can also check out my sub stack at the Rick Wilson dot sub stack dot com. And if you're so inclined, do us a favor. Go on Lincoln Project dot US slash help LP. And you can fund our continuing work producing the ads that we're hitting senators in D.C. with. And we're hitting the White House with now to start to drive Trump crazy again, because the more we can drive him crazy, the sooner we can break his heart with Elon and and sooner we can keep this going.

administration off balance. So that's LincolnProject.us slash HelpLP. Thanks, folks.