The Reasons that I Write These Blogs
On vacation in the Ozark Mountains during the summer of 2024, I visited a Native American museum. During this visit, I saw an Iroguois painting with these words on it:
In every deliberation and decision, we must consider the impact on the next seven generations that follow us.
I believe that! I really do! That is why I write these blogs. I want my children, grandchildren, my grandchildren’s children, and the next seven generations to know about these topics. These are the most important topics of the present and future.
Who is Elon Musk?
Musk was born in 1971 to an affluent family in Pretoria, South Africa. He grew up in South Africa. Then he immigrated to Canada and acquired Canadian citizenship via his mother. He moved to the USA in 1995 to go to school at Stanford University with his brother Kimbal. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002.
He is private citizen and the wealthiest person in the word with a net worth of at least $397 billion. He is not an elected official and was not on the ballot.
In 2020, Musk first posted on twitter that he was a 3,000-year-old vampire. In November 2024, he revisited that claim saying on X that his profile had been verified since 3,000 BC. He said then, that, “Even though I’m 5,000 years old, I think I look much younger.”
He also said that being a time-traveling, vampire alien “would explain a lot of things” about him. Hopefully, Musk has a sense of humor and is just kidding.
It would explain a lot of things but not his penchant for lying.
Musk has made many unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 mis/disinformation, affirming antisemitic and transphobic comments, promoting conspiracy theories, and saying that funding to certain agencies and certain causes was restarted.
For example, in the President’s cabinet meeting this week, he joked about restarting Ebola prevention. Ha! Ha! What he said was a lie. He said, the Trump adiministration “restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.” But his statement was not true, according to two former U.S.A.I.D. officials with knowledge of the situation in Uganda and based on the comments of Craig Spencer, M.D., MPH who contracted Ebola while serving patients who had it. To this day, funding for Ebola has not been restarted. The U.S.A.I.D. officials asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.
On February 27, 2025, Dr. Spencer wrote on social media: “The day after Elon Musk assured us there was “no interruption” in Ebola prevention the Trump administration cancelled almost all Ebola-related contracts along with HIV medications for kids and polio vaccines and malaria programs stopped. We will regret this.” I agree.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) was also controversial due to a subsequent increase in hate speech and the spread of misinformation on the social media service.
Musk has engaged in political activities in several countries, including ours. He is a very wealthy and vocal, financial supporter of U.S. president Donald Trump since 2024. Musk supports far-right activists, causes, and political parties.
The Devil in in Details
My former boss, Archie Bedell, MD, PhD, always said that “the devil is in the details.” So let me provide with some details of Musk’s activities to gain access to the President and to our federal government.
The New York Times interviewed more than 60 people familiar with Mr. Musk’s efforts to take control. They did this to piece together new details about the operation, which Mr. Musk and his advisers mapped out early in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla. Below is what the New York Times reported (February 28, 2025):
It all started as musings by Mr. Musk at a fundraising dinner party in September of 2023 for Vivek Ramaswamy at the Silicon Valley home of technogy invester, Chamath Palihapitya. There Musk said that he he would like to gut the federal government. By the way, the dinner cost $50,000 a head to attend. Above my pay grade!
As the night wore on, Musk talked about a variety of topics on the patio, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation. He talked about his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border; the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. With the passwords, he said jocularly, he would make the government “fit and trim.” He told the party of around 20 people that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Musk realized the advantage of an inside strategy. He and his allies did not want to create a commission. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. His team seized on a little-known unit with reach across the government, the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014. The Musk team realized it could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.
On July 13, 2004, Musk swiftly endorsed Mr. Trump. On August 2, 2024, on a podcast, Musk first made public mention of his interest in what would become DOGE. He said, “I have discussed with Donald Trump the idea of a government efficiency commission and I would be willing to be part of that commission.”
About a month later, on Aug. 19, 2024, a Twitter user, proposed the organization be named the Department of Government Efficiency. Its acronym, DOGE, refers to Dogecoin, a meme cryptocurrency that the billionaire had joked about for years. “That is the perfect name,” Musk replied on X.
On Sept. 5, 2024, Trump called for the creation of an efficiency commission led by Mr. Musk during a speech at the Economic Club of New York.
Two months later on Nov. 12, 2024, a week after Election Day, Trump officially announced the creation of DOGE, to be led by Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy. He said that, “The Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of Government.” It was obvious that Musk was not a government employee nor was he voted on.
On Inauguration Day, the White House said Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, was leaving the project and was running for governor of Ohio. That’s another story.
Musk pushed for radical changes, the kind he put in place at Twitter. He expressed impatience with warnings that the team would need a phalanx of lawyers to help with executive orders and regulations. He urged advisers to consider ways to cull the federal work force.
It is important to note that Musk and his team laid the groundwork well before Inauguration Day. The team began its move on the digital service office earlier than previously reported, while President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still in office, giving it the ability to operate on Mr. Trump’s first day.
Around the time that Mr. Musk identified the digital unit as a key part of his strategy late last year, the Trump transition gained a key ally on the inside: Amy Gleason. A veteran of the digital service, Ms. Gleason rejoined its staff as a senior adviser at the end of the Biden administration.
Ms. Gleason, who would later be named DOGE’s acting administrator, recommended that the unit bring aboard several young engineers who would later become part of Mr. Musk’s team. Allies of Mr. Musk, meanwhile, fanned out across the government as part of the transition, extracting intelligence about computer systems, contracts and personnel, including your personal information.
Details of Musk Paying to Gain Access to the Federal Government
The bulk of Musk’s spending was through his own America Poltical Action Committee (PAC), to which he contributed $239 million.
However, filings also showed that Musk put $20.5 million into a PAC that used the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s initials “RBG PAC.” Musk’s $20.5 million is the only contribution it received. This benefitted Musk and Trump because they were able to buy advertisements with misleading claims said that Ginsburg held views on abortion that were similar to Trump’s.
Ginsburg’s granddaughter, Clara Spera, told The New York Times in October that the PAC was an “affront to her grandmother’s legacy,” and it was “nothing short of appalling” that Ginsburg’s name was being used to support Trump’s reelection campaign.
Musk also donated $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which supports Republican Senate candidates, and $3 million to the Make American Healthhy Again PAC, a group affiliated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Let’s Talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
What did Kennedy give Trump to gain a cabinet post in Trump’s administration. Easy! Winning the backing of Mr. Kennedy — an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and a person of Democratic royalty — supplied Mr. Trump with votes, or so he thought. Trump is not a good deal maker like his book touts. Trump overpaid for the deal.
Pre-election polling and post election analysis has been inconclusive about whether Mr. Kennedy’s exit from the presidential race and giving his support to Trump gave Trump more of a significant advantage or gave the advantage to Kamala Harris.
Mr. Kennedy has said that “there is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” a view at odds with most scientists, all of public health, and most of the country regarding childhood vaccinations. He’s wrong! However, he had made millions from his false claims.
Documents obtained by the Daily Beast show that Kennedy—after being nominated by Trump for his Cabinet—amended his disclosure forms and reported that he actually earned a total of $1.2 million from his anti-vaccine nonprofit. RFK Jr. has described his anti-vax drive as a “labor of love that cost him friends—and money.” Uh, huh. Lots of money.
By the way, as of today, February 28, 2025, one hundred forty-six measles cases have been reported in the outbreak in West Texas, the Texas Department of Health Services said in an update. This is 22 more confirmed cases since an update earlier this week when 124 cases were reported. Twenty patients have been hospitalized, and most cases are in children aged 5 to 17 years old. Around 10% of cases have been in infants, who can have serious outcomes from measles.
This week, Trump’s choice of Health and Human Services Secretary. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. answered questions during the first cabinet meeting of the new Trump administration.
He incorrectly described the number of people who died in the West Texas measles outbreak and the reason people were hospitalized. He also said that measles outbreak are “not ununusual.” The truth is that a measles outbreak is very unusual.
Kennedy Jr. does not what he is talking about.
In 2000, the measels was eradicated in the U.S. That means for one entire year, there were no cases. In 2020, twenty years later that were 13 cases. In 2021, there were 49 cases. In 2023, only 59 cases.
Because of the anti-vax message, vaccine reluctance, and distrust of medicine and science, in 2024, there were 254 cases. How many cases will there be in 2025?
CNN News reports: “Classifying it as ‘not unusual’ would be inaccurate,” said Dr. Christina Johns, a pediatric emergency physician at PM Pediatrics in Annapolis, Maryland. “Usually [an outbreak] is in the order of a handful, not over 100 people that that we have seen recently with this latest outbreak in West Texas.”
“This is not usual,” said Dr. Philip Huang, director of the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department. “Fortunately, it’s not usual, and it’s been because of the effectiveness of the vaccine.”
“The United States had really gotten to a point where we just didn’t see these kinds of outbreaks happening,” Dr. Lara Johnson, the chief medical officer of Covenant Health Lubbock Service Area, said at a news conference after the first death in the West Texas outbreak, the first measles death in the US in a decade. “Obviously, that has changed over the last 20 something years, and so we do see outbreaks more frequently, but that that is related to how much we’re vaccinating our population.”
It is important that you also understand that the financial burden of measles outbreaks multiplies as the disease spreads. Curbing a 2018 outbreak in Washington state with 72 cases cost about $2.3 million, in addition to $76,000 in medical costs, and an estimated $1 million in economic losses due to illness, quarantines, and caregiving. That is in 2018 dollars. That was seven years ago. What will the 2025 outbreak cost?
Public health researchers today expect such outbreaks to become larger and more common because of a variety of laws in the U.S. — pending and recently passed — that ultimately lower vaccination rates by allowing parents to exempt their children from vaccine requirements at public schools and some private schools.
Conflict of Interests Galore
Whenever I write a grant or submit an article for publication, I must sign a “Conflict of Interest Form.” This form states any conflict of interests, and where I may have received other funding or support. This is the way that I maintain my validity and reliability.
Not so of Elon Musk. Conflicts of interest surround him.
Two of Musk’s companies alone (Tesla and SpaceX) account for at least $15.4 billion in government contracts over the past decade. That is a major conflict of interest!
Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, effectively dictates NASA’s rocket launch schedule. The Defense Department relies on him to get most of its satellites to orbit.
His companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies. That is a major conflict of interest!
His conflict with federal regulators are also numerous and adversarial. His companies have been targeted in at least 20 recent investigations or reviews, including over the safety of his Tesla cars and the environmental damage caused by his rockets.
I am guessing that those federal regulators will now be fired. If these people are fired, that is a major conflict of interest!
The Fox is Guarding The Hen House
My late grandmother Rodman used to day, “That is like the fox guarding the hen house.” Yup! Good analogy. My grandmother always saw a conflict of interest.
For the first time in our history, we have a private citizen, who paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars to gain access to our President and our federal government and is eliminating whole federal departments and thousands of workers.
Plummeting Popularity with Americans
An Economist/YouGov poll of nearly 1,600 U.S. adult citizens found the majority of respondents had positive views of the following: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, USAID, and free online tax filing. All of these areas have recently been in the sights of DOGE, the Department that Trump has given to Musk and his chainsaw.
Meanwhile, DOGE itself had just 42% of respondents seeing it favorably.
A separate question about Elon Musk showed that 52% had an unfavorable opinion of him. Musk claims that if he were not doing something right that people would not be protesting. Another lie.
All across the nation, people are protesting at Tesla dealerships. Yesterday, Tesla shareholders were furious with Musk because the Tesla stock dipped for the sixth consecutive trading session.
Trump is not much better. Trump’s approval ratings this week in polls — including the Post-Ipsos poll and others from Reuters, Quinnipiac University, CNN and Gallup — have ranged from 44% to 47%. In all of these polls, more disapprove than approve of him. That’s a reversal from the vast majority of previous polls, which showed Trump in net-positive territory.
The numbers foreshadow a hurdle ahead for the Trump’s administration’s efforts to dismantle much of the apparatus of federal government. James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist said that the Trump administration will “collapse” within 30 days. “It’s collapsing right now. We’re in the midst of a collapse,” Carville told Mediaite founder Dan Abrams on his podcast, The Dan Abrams Show, last Friday.
One thing is for sure . . . the Trump administration is facing dozens of lawsuits nationwide challenging his executive orders and moves to shrink the federal government.
While many Americans say they support cutting waste and saving tax dollars in theory, their feelings are much different when specific programs that they benefit from are ready to be chopped or when they try to call an agency and have to wait all day for an anwer.
In a past blog post entitled “The Future of Public Health,” I described the findings of studies that show that most Americans (79%) are opposed to reducing the size of Social Security benefits and 67% are against raising monthly premiums for Medicare. Instead, 58% support the idea of increasing taxes on households making over $400,000 yearly to pay for Medicare. The same is true of Medicaid.
If Trump, Musk, and the Republicans move forward with their House-passed budget proposal, they will kill their party, I predict. As Aaron Blake of the Washinton Post reports on February 26, 2025, that while the bill does not explicitly call for Medicaid cuts. However, it clearly lays the groundwork for that.
While Republicans have tried to massage that fact and say that this is merely the first step in a long process, targeting the entitlement program that provides health insurance to tens of millions of low-income Americans would seem unavoidable. Plenty of history shows how politically dicey that could be, especially for a party that does not have a mandate from the American people to do what they are doing.
Those That Voted for Trump and Support the Republicans
My theory is that it is financial. Those that support Musk, Trump, and the Republicans are members of the “have nots.” They have stayed the same or lost ground financially while the “haves” have gained more of societal wealth. Have you heard of the “shrinking middle class?”
The 1% like Musk get richer and richer while the “have nots” lose societal wealth. Let me ask you, could you afford to pay $50,000 to attend that fund raising dinner that I previously described. I could not. Read – “The Growing Divide.” https://1795group.com/the-growing-divide/
Being led to believe by their political leaders that the “system is broken” are prevalent feelings across the world right now. Global citizens want a strong leader to “take their country back” from the rich and powerful. Only the political leader can fix things. Sound familiar?
The defining characteristic of a populist party like Trump’s is the claim that they represent an “organic” people or nation (e.g., true patriots), rather than specific interests or groups It is groups like Native Americans, Hispanics, Black Americans, the poor, the mentally ill, the aged, and children are who we should help!
Those who disagree with populist view of “the people” or “the true patriots” are obviously not the “real” nation. The opposition is considered treasonous and treacherous. Populist parties cannot deal with dissent or disagreement. Thus, those who oppose are fired, lose their job, are jailed, or worse. Sound familiar?
According to Stanford University (2025), among the most dangerous consequences of populism is the erosion of formal democratic rules and institutions. The destructive effects of populist rule include the takeover and taming of judges, courts, and oversight institutions, and new laws that limit the freedom of the media and civil society. These maneuvers erode public trust, transparency, and accountability. Sound familiar?
Just as importantly, however, populist governments also make a point of undermining informal democratic norms, such as conflict of interest laws, financial transparency, or respect for opposition. Such norms and informal rules are the product of decades of interactions and are very difficult to replace. Once such trust and consensus disappears, it is not easy to bring them back. We are seeing this now in the U.S.
The 1795 Group Can Help
The 1795 Group believes in leaving this little blue planet a better place for all who live on it. We have a moral obligation to those that follow in our footsteps to inform them, warn them, and to educate them. That’s why I write and share this blog.
The 1795 Group believes in being part of solutions. Let’s work together at the grass roots level to help solve this problem!
Perhaps you would like a guest speaker or a presentation on this topic. Perhaps you would like to have your students, learners, or employees enjoy an in-person or virtual professional development workshop in this topical area. Perhaps you need a course to be written for your learners. Whatever your need, the 1795 Group can help. Call us and let’s brainstorm ways to work together.
Contact Me Today:
Phone: (440) 296-9709 (text first)
Email: tjordan@1795group.com
Website: www.1795group.com
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