Nazis and Racists and “Big Balls,” Oh My!
Elon Musk’s DOGE-boys are hacking our government. The misogynist bros of the 2014 Gamergate travesty have won. For now.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk walks on stage to speak during the inaugural parade inside Capitol One Arena, in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025.
(Angela Weiss / AFP)
I feel like I’m trapped in a streaming science fiction series that I would never watch, but now I’m being forced to. It feels familiar too: A bunch of post-puberty boys, ages 19 to 25, some of them wealthy, some of them striving, are claiming control over the rest of us. Only one of the five unvetted and unqualified Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees is a teenager: Edward Coristine, 19, who calls himself “Big Balls” and was fired from a previous cybersecurity job for leaking proprietary information. In addition to his DOGE role, Coristine is listed as a senior adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, The Washington Post reported Monday afternoon—a hub for sensitive and routine data, officials said. He also has a State Department e-mail address. Arguably, Trump is only president because Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had some e-mail issues, but the media cares much less about the DOGE boys than Clinton’s e-mail non-scandal.
The rest of Musk’s crew are 25 or under. The 25-year-old, Marko Elez, resigned after The Wall Street Journal revealed his racist, eugenicist, and super-stupid social media posts. The guy who called for eliminating the Civil Rights Act held administrator access to the Department of Treasury’s tax payment system. He boasted on X last year: “I was racist before it was cool.”
Musk has promised to rehire Elez; I’ve seen no confirmation of that.
Gavin Kliger, 24, who seemed to be in charge of furloughing US Agency for International Development staffers, according to an e-mail he sent last week, has been a big social media promoter of Nazi-friendly Nick Fuentes and self-proclaimed misogynist (and accused rapist) Andrew Tate. (His LinkedIn page says he’s a “senior advisor” at the Office of Personnel Management.) Harvard undergrad Ethan Shaotran, 22, was a runner-up in Musk’s xAI “hackathon” competition last year.
The outsize power of Musk’s young male minions has reminded me of #GamerGate, the 2014 conflict in which mostly young, male video gamers viciously attacked female gamers, female game developers, and gaming journalists. Death threats, rape threats, and doxxing of these women was routine; they derided these gamers for critiquing the male-centric world of video games, the lure of guns, butts, and boobs, and for suggesting more realistic and diverse characters, scenarios, and creators. Gamergate’s misogyny was packaged in the ludicrous guise of “ethics in gaming journalism,” because it started with one man’s vicious attack on his game-developer ex-girlfriend, who he falsely accused of trading sex for positive coverage. Some of Gamergate’s loudest voices—Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos—became alt-right heroes and Trump acolytes.
Presciently, The Guardian’s Matt Lees noticed the echoes of Gamergate in the online Trump movement–back in 2016. “The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right,’ are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence,” he wrote. Lees noted Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon’s role in fomenting Gamergate outrage while leading Breitbart News, and connected the angry sense of grievance over losing control of a white male–dominated space—gaming—with the rise of nasty male Trump supporters determined to diminish the role of women and people of color in public life. “Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now,” Lees concluded.
And infinitely more dangerous 11 years later, with the rise of Gamer Elon and his DOGE boys.
Of course there are forces even more disturbing than unelected teens and twentysomething hackers taking over government payment systems and delving into State Department secrets. The Nerd Reich’s Gil Duran, who wrote a series of stories outlining Silicon Valley dreams of a “network state” for The New Republic last year, has continued to hammer away at how the so-called “broligarchy,” a term that diminishes their actual menace, is reshaping government under Trump. Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, David Sacks, and others have openly yearned to impose a technocracy, a blueprint borrowed from Curtis Yarvin’s RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). “It’s about gutting democratic institutions from the inside out and turning them into something else,” Duran writes.
Another influential thinker is tech baron Balaji Srinivasan, author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country, a guide for tech plutocrats wanting to flee democracy and form new sovereign territories. His crackpot notion—a world of “blues” [us] vs. “grays” [them]—in which grays wear gray clothing and have gray parties and festivals, and stigmatize and isolate “blues,” is seemingly oblivious to the segregationists of yore under the Confederacy.
Steve Bannon is a Srinivasan fan, as is Andreessen, whose firm, by the way, just hired Daniel Penny, the man who choked a mentally ill Black man to death in New York last year.
Another animating force is Musk’s greed. Musk, who previously called for ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, before actually moving to eliminate it, plans to make X a dominant financial platform. His plan is advancing wildly, with the announcement of a partnership with Visa to allow X premium users to make direct payments—a system that would have been overseen by CFPB. And with the DOGE boys gaining access to Treasury and CFPB financial systems, they now have information about digital payment systems those consumers use. “Musk now has tremendous access to confidential information about his competitors,” a CFPB official warned Musk Watch.
What unites the broligarchy with the DOGE boys with Gamergaters is, of course, that they’re (almost) all boys, and most have a keen sense of grievance that the world is worse off when women and people of color have a say in it. It feels like no accident that Musk, Thiel, and Sacks—all opponents of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives—all hail from apartheid South Africa. (DOGE has been particularly aggressive in weeding out agencies and even individual federal employees with DEI responsibilities.) Thiel, who essentially created Vice President JD Vance, perhaps with AI, has lamented women’s suffrage, and more recently said he doesn’t think “democracy” is compatible with “freedom.” And he chooses “freedom.”
These are the men and boys in charge of Trumpworld, while the president himself renames the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, announces he’s phasing out pennies, and swans around at the Super Bowl. Theirs is a world of techno-authoritarianism, where they believe they were born to rule and anyone who seeks to question that notion deserves to be attacked. This vision is in no way compatible with democracy. Gamergate, a misogynist preview of Trumpworld, marshaled none of the real-world power Musk and the DOGE boys have grabbed. They are much more dangerous.
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