"But during the transition Ramaswamy and Musk increasingly disagreed about how to make the government more efficient."

"Ramaswamy, who had apparently come around to the fact that significant cuts would require an act of Congress, began meeting regularly with a small group of legislators. Musk mostly did not attend. A source close to doge told me that Musk seemed to regard members of Congress as irrelevant, sometimes referring to them as 'N.P.C.s,'—non-player characters—the often mute and nameless figures who populate the backgrounds of video games. Musk was more interested in cutting spending via the executive branch, and spoke often, according to the source close to doge, of a need to 'control the computers.' In meetings, Ramaswamy resorted to using metaphors from the tech world to emphasize the importance of deregulation, calling the government’s rules 'the matrix' and insisting that doge needed to rewrite its source code. Musk was unmoved...."

Writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in "What Did Elon Musk Accomplish at DOGE? Even before Musk fell out with Donald Trump, the agency’s projected savings had plummeted. But he nevertheless managed to inflict lasting damage to the federal government" (The New Yorker).

"He’s still not a populist nationalist, he’s a globalist. He and I have a chasm that is probably insurmountable."

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "The Populist vs. the Billionaire: Bannon, Musk and the Battle Within MAGA/President Trump has made clear he wants to keep both men and their allies within his movement, but the tensions are growing" (NYT).

Mr. Bannon vigorously disagrees with Mr. Musk’s support for H-1B visas, which allow high-skilled individuals to work in America. Mr. Bannon has also warned that billionaires like Mr. Musk and other tech executives — many of whom supported Democrats before backing Mr. Trump — will abandon the MAGA movement.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Is this a mixed metaphor: 'He and I have a chasm that is probably insurmountable'?" And: "I think a good writer would see the concrete images behind these words and keep things coordinated. I believe George Orwell — 'Politics and the English Language' — supports my position."

But Bannon wasn't writing. He was speaking. 

"The DOGE Plan to Reform Government" — by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Read it in The Wall Street Journal. Excerpts:

We are entrepreneurs, not politicians.... We'll cut costs.... We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden's tenure.

"Somehow, his typically insufferable manner worked well in the big convention setting."

I'm reading "'A Joyful Fellowship of Patriots': The Best and Worst Moments From Night 2 of the Republican Convention" — a collection of opinions from various NYT contributors. Asked what was the "best moment" of Night 2, there's this from Michelle Cottle:

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Vivek Ramaswamy was en fuego. His barn burner of a speech included the requisite partisan red meat, but the way he talked about the shrinking American dream could resonate well beyond the Republican base. Somehow, his typically insufferable manner worked well in the big convention setting. Go figure.

I haven't watched this yet. I'll give you the video and come back with my opinion:

 

ADDED: I've listened. Great content and delivery. But Cottle couldn't say it without calling him somehow simultaneously "insufferable." The "insufferable manner" works in the big arena. Fine. He's still insufferable (per Cottle). It's the received view of Ramaswamy and you must never forget it.

"[H]is bleak vision of millennial and Generation Z voters 'starved for purpose, meaning and identity,' with a black hole in their hearts had surprising resonance with older voters."

"He used the debate stage to clash fiercely with Republican rivals for the nomination not named Trump, mocking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for what he said were high heels on his boots, calling Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, a stooge for China and the defense industry, and tarring the entire field as pawns of the wealthy financiers of their super PACs. He even called the G.O.P. a 'party of losers.'... Mr. Ramaswamy had privately told backers that his strategy was to cling to Mr. Trump in the hope that the former president’s myriad legal battles would force him out of the race — and Mr. Ramaswamy would be the logical next choice for Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters.... But with Mr. Trump making it clear not even a conviction would force him from the race, Mr. Ramaswamy’s strategy and self-funding proved unsustainable."

From "Vivek Ramaswamy, Wealthy Political Novice Who Aligned With Trump, Quits Campaign/A self-funding entrepreneur, Mr. Ramaswamy peaked in late August but deflated under attack from his rivals. He endorsed Donald J. Trump after dropping out after the Iowa caucuses" (NYT).

Did the case of Claudine Gay give new energy to the conservative campaign against left-wing academia?

I'm reading "How a Proxy Fight Over Campus Politics Brought Down Harvard’s President/Amid plagiarism allegations and a backlash to campus antisemitism, Claudine Gay became an avatar for broader criticisms of academia" by Nicholas Confessore, in The New York Times.

Dr. Gay’s defenders... warn[ed] that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and imperil academic freedom. (Though some experts have rated Harvard itself poorly on campus free speech during Dr. Gay’s tenure in leadership.)...

What a delicious parenthetical!

That link on "poorly" goes to the FIRE website, where you have to do a search to see where Harvard ranks. I did the search (and you can too). We're told the "speech climate" is "abysmal."

But of course, this article, outside of its parentheses, portrays conservative critics of academia as the threat to freedom.

"Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy repeatedly challenged [Nikki] Haley to name 'three provinces in Eastern Ukraine that they [she and Biden] want to send our troops to actually fight for.'"

"Neither have said they want to send troops — Ramaswamy also falsely asserted 'these people want to send your sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine, they’ve been arguing for it for a year' — but Haley eventually mentioned these names. She missed with Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, though to be fair Ramaswamy asked her to name three provinces, not 'the three provinces' of eastern Ukraine. The third province in eastern Ukraine is Kharkiv — which Ukraine liberated in a stunning counteroffensive in 2022."

Writes Glenn Kessler, "Fact-checking the fourth Republican presidential debate" (WaPo).

ALSO:

Vivek exposed Nikki Haley for exactly what she is:

A neocon puppet of Boeing & Raytheon, with absolutely no foreign policy experience or knowledge apart from once raising her hand on command at the UN.

There's no coming back from this 👇 pic.twitter.com/NJPyldx5ge

— System Update (@SystemUpdate_) December 8, 2023

"I was fluid. I didn't really have much restraint."

Ramaswamy expresses pleasure with himself. I watched some, not all of it, and I think he did very well.

This morning, I'm seeing he's trending on X, and NYT is likening him to Trump and Alex Jones:

After Megyn Kelly told Chris Christie nobody likes him, Ramaswamy had to rephrase it, more cruelly, with fat shaming.

NEW: The Republican debate has been an absolute beatdown on Chris Christie.

Christie had to sit through 30 seconds of the brutal truth from Megyn Kelly after she reminds him how unliked he is compared to Donald Trump.

Then he got bodied by Vivek Ramaswamy who told him to leave… pic.twitter.com/pTt3omzjub

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 7, 2023

If you want to watch the entire debate: here.

Why have anti-Trump Republicans chosen Nikki Haley as the one who should beat Trump?

I see, in the NYT, "Some Republicans Have a Blunt Message for Chris Christie: Drop Out/Several anti-Trump Republican donors and strategists are pushing Mr. Christie to end his presidential campaign and back Nikki Haley."

Obviously, it's getting late, and it doesn't seem as though anyone (other than Trump himself) can stop Trump from getting the nomination, but why this convergence on Haley? When I click on my "Nikki Haley" tag to see what I've found notable about her over the course of the campaign, I see nothing I like. She wanted to require everyone on social media to post under their real names. Her idea for the war against Hamas was, bluntly, "Finish them. Finish them." She called Vivek Ramaswamy "scum." He called her "Dick Cheney in 3-inch heels." And she's talked about her heels repeatedly. (She announced her candidacy with the statement: "I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.")

Googling "Why is Nikki Haley the best choice to beat Trump," I got: "Senate anti-Trump GOP see Haley as best hope to avoid disaster." That was published yesterday in The Hill. The idea there is:

"A struggle ensued, with the crocodile attempting to pull Deveraux into the billabong, while Deveraux in turn, he said, tried to kick the creature..."

"... with his left foot. He was pulled deeper into the water and onto his knees. Then, in a move he described as 'half-accidental,' his teeth caught on the animal's leathery eyelid. 'I managed to have a bite,' he said, adding: 'I jerked back on his eyelid and he let go.'"

From "Crocodile Bites Man. Man Bites Back. A surprising tale of Northern Territory chutzpah" (NYT).

I'm reading that because it comes up in the dialogue between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, a regular Monday morning feature in the NYT. Collins brings up the crocodile story because it reminds her of the GOP presidential candidates who are stuck fighting Donald Trump. 

Collins, like a lot of people in elite media these days, are pushing the idea of Nikki Haley as the one who ought to take on Donald Trump. But why? 

The Collins/Stephens dialogue begins with Stephens saying he's been "devoted almost entirely to outrages and tragedies in the Middle East: 

But I couldn’t help smiling for a second when Nikki Haley called Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” at last week’s G.O.P. debate, after he raised the subject of her daughter’s use of TikTok.

On the occasion of Nikki Haley's calling Vivek Ramaswamy "scum," I look into the history of "scum" in my archive.

1. October 23, 2019 — blogged here — Trump called his antagonists "human scum":

The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2019

2. On October 24, 2019, I wrote "Troubled by Trump's use of the phrase 'human scum,' I decided to trace its usage, over the years..." This post traces the use of the phrase "human scum" in the NYT archive, beginning in 1897. I note: "The epithet rarely appeared until 2003, when it began coming up repeatedly in statements from the North Korean government. The first person called 'human scum' by the North Koreans was John Bolton."

2. In December 2017, according to The Daily Beast, Facebook was banning women who call men "scum" (because it, supposedly, "classifies white men as a protected group"). I wrote: "I don't support what Facebook is doing, but I do think the use of the word 'scum' warrants a historical note on 'SCUM' — The Society for Cutting Up Men. The author of 'The SCUM Manifesto,' Valerie Solanas, wasn't joking....'The Manifesto argues that SCUM [a revolutionary vanguard of women] should employ sabotage and direct action tactics... "If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade."'" Solanas became famous for shooting Andy Warhol.

3. On December 11, 2020, I blogged about a Wisconsin State Journal headline "Sen. Ron Johnson called 'delusional scum' for considering challenge to election." I asked "why is the fact that somebody hurled one particular epithet the subject of a headline? If the insult-hurler isn't important enough to name in the headline, why put one nasty insult in a headline?"

4. Back in January 2015, I blogged the immortal words of John McCain: "Get outta here you lowlife scum!"

5. On May 24, 2022, I happened to revisit Hunter S. Thompson’s 1994 obituary of Richard Nixon. Thompson wrote: "Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. … You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."

"The more time Vivek spends around the GOP establishment, the more contempt he harbors for them, and rightfully so."

The more time Vivek spends around the GOP establishment, the more contempt he harbors for them, and rightfully so.

The neocon GOP of 2002 never went away. They just pretended to under Trump. You see that now as they're partying as if it's Sept 12, 2001:https://t.co/zCSgizB63R

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 9, 2023

Ha ha... "two of them." One is Haley. The other is DeSantis in his elevator boots. I thought it was a cheap joke when I heard it last night and started yelling. It's only this morning that I noticed the "two of them" swipe at DeSantis. That's absurd and subtle enough to lift the joke to a new plane and get my respect. 

"He was talking quickly and kind of oscillated in his words."

Said spokeswoman for Vivek Ramaswamy, who had said, in last night's debate, "Ukraine is not a paragon of democracy... It has celebrated a Nazi in its ranks. A comedian in cargo pants. The man called Zelensky. That is not democratic.”

I'm reading "Ramaswamy Seemed to Call Zelensky a Nazi. His Campaign Says That’s Not What He Meant. A spokeswoman for Mr. Ramaswamy acknowledged that, without context, his remark could be easily misunderstood" (NYT).

The spokeswoman said, as the NYT paraphrases it, "he was referring to an event in September in which Mr. Zelensky visited Canada’s Parliament and joined a standing ovation honoring a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian war veteran."

But "the veteran, Yaroslav Hunka, had served in a division that was under Nazi control during World War II."

I'd like to see the full transcript of the debate. I've looked for one and think it ought to be available within a few hours of the event. I'd like to check the context of quotes like this, which make Ramaswamy sound either inept or invidious.

ADDED: The context (which makes it quite a shame that his words awkwardly bunched together right around "Nazi"):

.@VivekGRamaswamy drops Ukraine red-pills pic.twitter.com/2zPA0F1vGi

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 9, 2023

"Ramaswamy, whom none of the other Republican candidates for President can really seem to stand, either politically or in the most basic human way, spread his arms dramatically..."

"... to indicate the others onstage. 'These are good people, who are tainted by a broken system....' 'Not all of us are tainted!' the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, who is polling around one per cent, called out, and then Scott, Ramaswamy, and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, started speaking all at once. It took close to two minutes for their voices to become fully disentangled. When Ramaswamy tried claiming credit for disinvesting from China, Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador, jumped in: 'Yeah, right before you ran for President,' perhaps the lone good line of the crosstalk apocalypse. Ramaswamy did not look flustered—his smile was broad, his hair was piled into a pompadour, his voice was declarative—but he also plainly had no idea what he was trying to say. At one point he tried to break through the noise, saying sardonically to his rivals, 'Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.'" 

Writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in "'Thank You For Speaking While I'm Interrupting': The Crosstalk Chaos of the Second Republican Debate/The event, which was billed as a chance for Donald Trump’s rivals to change their fortunes, only reinforced the confusion and aimlessness of their candidacies" (The New Yorker).

Here's a clip of that chaos:

"The meandering and at times indecipherable debate seemed to validate former President Donald J. Trump’s decision to skip it."

"With only occasional exceptions, the Republicans onstage seemed content to bicker with one another. Most of them delivered the dominant front-runner only glancing blows and did little to upend the political reality that Mr. Trump is lapping all of his rivals — whose cumulative support in most national polls still doesn’t come close to the former president’s standing."

From "5 Takeaways From Another Trump-Free Republican Debate/The party’s front-runner took few hits as his rivals bickered, Nikki Haley delivered an assured performance, Tim Scott reasserted himself and Ron DeSantis took his first debate swipes at Trump" (NYT).

I only watched about 3 minutes of the debate. I don't have cable anymore, so I had to search for a live feed on YouTube, and I found something that had the debate on the left side of the screen and some guy with a headset on the right side who would mutter short comments now and then. The guy was ridiculous and distracting, but the debate seemed worse. A moderator asked an absurdly long question about the auto strike, and then Tim Scott started talking and acted as though we were dumb to take something stupid he'd said literally. And I was gone. 

Chris Christie on Vivek Ramaswamy: "To me, he looks like the guy you wanted to stuff in the locker in the 11th grade."

"Much has been made of Ramaswamy’s irrepressible annoyingness... But what I found striking about Ramaswamy..."

"... both in our conversations and on the debate stage, was not that he’s especially irritating (how many people who run for president aren’t?) but that he represents a distinct, very familiar flavor of irritation: He’s the epitome of millennial hustle culture, less a Tracy Flick know-it-all than a viral LinkedIn post come to life. The guy who’s always mining and nurturing new connections, always leveraging those connections into the next new thing, always selling and always, always closing. Seen this way, Ramaswamy’s otherwise quixotic-seeming presidential run makes perfect sense. Whether or not it wins him elected office, running for the White House is the ultimate rise and grind.... [H]is current comfort with [the word]  'woke' works for winning over a G.O.P. primary audience. When he needs to cultivate a broader base... I’m sure he won’t hesitate to reach out and tell me just what he thinks I want to hear."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "Vivek Ramaswamy Is a LinkedIn Post Come to Life" (NYT)

"Moderate and sane, but also cutting and sharp, particularly when it came to her vivisection of Vivek Ramaswamy’s neo-isolationist, Putin-kowtowing foreign policy."

Such violent imagery from Bret Stephens, describing Nikki Haley, in "Vivek Ramaswamy Is Suddenly Part of Our Political Life," the regular "conversation" at the NYT between Stephens and Gail Collins. I assume the conversation is in writing, because no one could speak spontaneously like that.

The "vivisection" play on the name Vivek must have seemed too delightful to pass up. And yet I would feel compelled to edit out metaphorical violence aimed at a particular individual. Does Nikki Haley even want to be portrayed as a woman who cuts up men?

Collins says: "Wow, is he irritating. Not many people I can think of who I’d rather have over for dinner less than Donald Trump, but this guy’s one of them."

"We typically don’t engage in these bad-faith attacks but yesterday a line was crossed. A GOP candidate referred to Ayanna as 'a modern grand wizard of the KKK'..."

"... because she speaks out against racial injustice. This is backwards and harmful, but that is the point.”

 
Said Ayanna Pressley's "team," quoted in "Ramswamy [sic] stands by dis of Dem Rep. Pressley as among 'wizards of the grand KKK'" (NY Post).

Ramaswamy hadn't faulted Pressley for speaking out against racial injustice, but for saying "we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice," which he characterizes as contrary to racial injustice.

ADDED: Video of Ramaswamy.