The DOGE Counterintelligence Crack-Up Worsens

Trump 2.0’s Fyre Festival approach to the Intelligence Community is reaping a counterespionage whirlwind

“Let’s just do it and be legends, man!”

Who can ever forget the Fyre Festival? It’s the most famous music event that never actually happened. In 2017, young entrepreneur Billy McFarland – by “entrepreneur” I mean “conman” – scammed a bunch of stupid people with a wholly imaginary “luxury music festival” in the Bahamas. Who can let those high-end sandwiches slip from memory?

Undeterred by global humiliation, a prison stint, plus massive fines, McFarland is at it again, claiming that Fyre Festival 2 is in the works in Mexico. In a wholly expected development, officials on the Mexican island where McFarland asserted he’s holding a do-over this spring have stated they have no record of any such event on their schedule. Ours is an age of special idiocy.

Nevertheless, the essential ethos of the Fyre Festival – we have no idea what we’re doing, we know we’ve got no idea what we’re doing, so let’s do it anyway – hasn’t just been normalized by our culture, it’s now White House policy. How else should we characterize the vaunted Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, the world’s richest ketamine addict, which seems to be on a mission to remake the federal bureaucracy by burning down as much of it as possible, as quickly as possible?

Don’t get me wrong. Speaking from personal observation, the executive branch is loaded with fraud, waste, and abuse, and somebody should fix that. Many people have tried to fix it, it’s just difficult and slow. I lack confidence in the ability of college-age DOGEniks, who resemble McFarland in their boundless confidence in their own youthful acumen, to bring effective reform to Washington, DC.