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I myself was purged from my government job by this revived "gay mafia" conspiracy theory. 18F was dissolved because a right-wing influencer thought that we seemed queer. Musk saw this and fired us all. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-mass-f...

In one particularly nasty post, Rosiak wrote “More of 18F's totally merit-based and nonpartisan employees” over a screenshot of nonwhite and non-gender conforming staff photos—implying they were unqualified “DEI” hires for being nonwhite and using pronouns.

Shortly after, Musk responded to the thread by saying “That group has been deleted.” That was not true at the time, but now it’s clear it presaged what was to come.

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A similar panic about gay people in Hollywood and other parts of the media took hold during McCarthyism. Once established, this rumor of control by a "Gay Mafia" hung around for the remainder of the 20th Century. glreview.org/article/the-...

In the mid-90’s the fact that media moguls David Geffen, Barry Diller, and Sandy Gallin, designer Calvin Klein, painter Ross Bleckner, and writer Fran Lebowitz were all close friends gave rise to rumors of a “Gay Mafia” (or “Velvet Mafia”) in charge of Hollywood. Once such clusters were identified as working in each other’s interests, it was a short step to the inference that they were working in the interests of gayness as a whole and excluding heterosexuals. The presence of more than one gay person evokes the possibility of a perverse cultural coup. I’m reminded of how President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and his supporters keep calling the cabinet of British Prime Minister Tony Blair a “gay mafia” merely because it used to include two gay ministers.

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Two of these conspiracy-addled minds were Trump's mentor Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy. In the 1940s-50s Lavender Scare they tried to purge all gay people from the US government. Their argument was that gay people were secretive and therefore untrustworthy. (Can you guess why they were secretive?)

Opening of Wikipedia article on the Lavender Scare

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 21/02/2026

Let's talk about the history of "the gay mafia" 🧵

A screenshot of a story by Wired, "Inside the Gay Tech Mafia" featuring a bizarre image of a handshake with the hands emerging from within two mens' pans

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Wow, raised Christian and I'd never heard of this wacky list before. I can see why people don't talk much about it!

Exodus 34
You shall worship no other god
You shall not make cast idols
You shall keep the festival of unleavened bread
All that first opens the womb is mine
On the seventh day you shall rest
You shall observe the festival of weeks
You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven
The sacrifice of the festival of the passover shall not be left until the morning
The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring to the house of the Lord your God
You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 18/02/2026

We're all used to the absurdity by now, but it's wild how many headlines every day are just like: "New study finds US taxpayers are the ones who pay US taxes. Trump administration threatens retributive violence."

Top Trump official attacks New York Fed over tariff study
The study found that US consumers and businesses are bearing the bulk of higher costs from Trump's tariffs.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 17/02/2026

Media has reported that DOGE is over but that simply isn't true. When elections come around we are going to find out.

The potential for this sort of misuse is not far-fetched. In early January, the DOJ admitted that a DOGE employee at the Social Security Administration “signed a ‘Voter Data Agreement,’ in his capacity as an SSA employee” with an advocacy group whose “stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.” The willingness of the administration to share sensitive information with outside actors intent on overturning election results makes the memorandum of understanding even more troubling.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 15/02/2026

My English-Scots-Irish ancestors didn't die for multiculturalism; they killed for it. Killed Confederates who said shit exactly like this.

A racist tweet by Elon Musk:
For a country to survive, there has to be a common culture. Nobody dies to defend a "multicultural economic zone!" American culture, with its English-Scootts-Irish origin, is great and worth fighting for. Some may not realize it, but that's why people come here.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 03/02/2026

They started building this immigrant-hunting nightmare system without a contract directly at Palantir headquarters. If you don't know much about government contracting you might not know why that is bad. But if you do, it is breathtaking.

While the Treasury Department has denied the existence of a contract for this work, IRS engineers were invited to another three-day “training and building session” on the project located at Palantir’s Georgetown offices in Washington, DC, this week, according to a document viewed by WIRED.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 02/02/2026

When he *doesn't* go to parties he kills people

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper

Could have gone to some great parties.

Did that instead

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 31/01/2026

The app features gamified neighborhood maps, like Pokémon Go for hunting immigrants. Palantir warns the software is "not for mass prioritization of locations where lots of people it [ICE] might detain could be based." But this is what actually happens when you give ICE a map and a quota:

In testimony 404 Media obtained from a case in Oregon, an ICE official said ELITE is what ICE sometimes uses to track the apparent density of people at a particular location to target. “You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than [...] like, if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent [...] you’re not going to go there,” the official said. “It’s basically a map of the United States. It’s kind of like Google Maps.” That case related to a woman, who has the initials MJMA in the court records, who was detained with more than 30 other people in what her lawyers described as a dragnet.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 26/01/2026

We even discovered his article from 1992 had been cited by someone else, in 2001. The man's first citation in his life. He didn't know about it until yesterday. It felt so good to be surrounded by people who care about knowledge

The Wikipedia 25th birthday gathering at the SF public library. Me and a an older man have our heads together over a laptop. Lots of other Wikipedians in the room.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 14/01/2026

He would be right to fear his "encyclopedic knowledge" could be weaponized

Mr. Thompson’s departure is a major blow to the effort. A self-described workaholic, he has encyclopedic knowledge of dozens of investigations involving a complex web of defendants and transactions.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 07/01/2026

Here's my most recent Google search. Looking up a time zone in Europe, Google AI guesses I instead want the time zone in middle of the Atlantic Ocean. How can it be this bad??

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 30/12/2025

The article compares memory safety to seat belt safety, which was coordinated via government action. The author says "we do not need to wait for regulation to catch up" which is a sad statement: memory safety regulation was catching up until Musk destroyed it.

The state of possibility with memory safety today is similar to the state of automobile safety just prior to the widespread adoption of mandatory seat-belt laws. As car manufacturers began to integrate seat belts as a standard feature across their model lines and states began to require that drivers wear seat belts while driving, the rate of traffic fatalities and severity of traffic-related injuries dropped drastically. Seat belts did not solve automobile safety, but they credibly improved it, and at remarkably low cost.

The same can be done with memory safety. There is an opportunity to make substantial inroads at addressing a serious class of vulnerabilities while also, long-term, saving money on the development and operation of software systems. Memory safety is not a silver bullet, but it is a credible and cost-effective assurance technique that we as an industry should pursue aggressively. We do not need to wait for regulation to catch up; it is in our best interests to act today.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 23/12/2025

Here's a good book on the skills I think will be useful to journalists and citizen-researchers of the future, written by my colleague @micahflee.com

Cover of the book Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 17/12/2025

RIP "American wars are not about oil" 1990-2025

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 17/12/2025

If you join "Making Government Cool Again" be aware that Wired will publish this illustration of you

An illustration from the Wired article "Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’" of March 13, 2025

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 10/12/2025

Then let me be specific: by "feeding USAID into the wood chipper" Musk has killed approximately the same number of people as Belzec extermination camp

A tweet from Elon Musk: "falsely labeling non-violent prior as "fascist" or "Nazi" should be treated as incitement to murder

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 09/12/2025

In tonight's episode, Magnum is clearing the name of a dead court-martialed sailor. For which he has to track down the man's old lover, a now-elderly Japanese woman. He understands the racism that kept her from testifying, and knows without being asked to take off his shoes upon entering her home.

Magnum PI taking off his shoes, Season 3 Episode 11

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 03/12/2025

A well-functioning democracy would prevent extraction by hype. So, the hype men take the logical approach:

How hype becomes a tool of authoritarian governance

In 2012, Peter Thiel stated that “when technology's unregulated you can change the world without getting approval from other people. At its best, it's not subject to democratic control, and not subject to the majority, which I think is often hostile to change."

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 01/12/2025

This kind of spying is already against the law, namely the Privacy Act of 1974. The original intent of that law (epic.org/the-privacy-...) was clearly to prohibit the kind of thing CBP, ICE, and DOGE are doing now:

There must be no personal data record-keeping system whose very existence is secret.
There must be a way for an individual to find out what information about him is in a record and how it is used.
There must be a way for an individual to prevent information about him that was obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without his consent.

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 01/12/2025

The story here is not just about the hidden cameras, like this one. This is also about data consolidation. It rhymes with what DOGE is doing at the federal level.

A camera hidden within a roadside traffic barrel

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Everything that DOGE touched, they added visible evidence of their assumption that there is a real live DEI conspiracy which can be fought with lawyers and funding cuts Here it is at the top of the DOJ Civil Rights Division website

Do you believe you have been discriminated against because of diversity, equity and inclusion? Get help NOW!

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I've taken a deep dive into the DOGE bro's open source software code commits to verify they never wrote (or even oversaw) any code beyond culture war messaging. It's all trivial stuff like this: taking out the "nonbiary" option on some form.

A screenshot in which DOGE X account claims to have "fixed" the FAFSA form because Libs of TikTok complained it had a "nonbinary" gender option

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I think the right-wing conspiracy active here is quite old and mundane: the belief that government is full of freeloaders, or full of leftists which are the same thing As you can see, we all had "lower productivity jobs in the public sector" and a presumed lazy desire for extended vacation

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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 25/11/2025

They thought we, being radical leftists apparently, would put a "DOGE sucks" type of message onto government websites or into government communication systems My evidence for that: the right did exactly this to government websites. So they were projecting what they planned to do onto us.

A banneer on the hud.gov website:

The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands. The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people.

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By "decentralized" they just mean: DOGE is everywhere now

In early June, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, told lawmakers that the vision for DOGE was for it to become more "institutionalized" within agencies as “in-house consultants,” and that the leadership of DOGE was “decentralized” and with agency heads.

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This isn't the first time DOGE has claimed to not exist. They've been been saying "we're not here" for almost a full year.

The General Services Administration’s acting leader told employees in a recent all-staff meeting there’s no one from the Department of Government Efficiency at the agency.

“There’s nobody working for DOGE here,” acting GSA Administrator Stephen Ehikian said at a March 20 town hall.

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I'll admit I enjoyed the textbook irony of DOGE people being interrogated and fired in exactly the same way they interrogated and fired me and my colleagues

As the White House became aware of Davis’ attempts to continue wielding power, the Presidential Personnel Office set to work rooting out Davis’ influence throughout the government. Trump’s appointees, under the direction of then-personnel chief Sergio Gor, quietly contacted DOGE staffers, sometimes through the White House liaisons in the agencies, with instructions to cease all communication with Davis. (Gor didn’t respond to a request for comment on his role.) Personnel office staffers also began to conduct 15-minute interviews with DOGE staffers to determine what exactly each did. At least one Cabinet member was informed that he was free to fire any name he found from lists of DOGE employees.

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A constant churn of purging and back-stabbing within the ranks of the fascists is to be expected. Even violence. Hell, until I read that Politico article I almost forgot that Musk had a literal black eye on the day he was forced out.

Elon Musk receiving some sort of golden key trinket from Donald Trump. Musk has a visible black eye.

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