Elon Musk is telling federal employees that they need to detail five things they did last week to justify why they should keep their jobs.
I don’t know who died and made him king, and as far as I can tell, Elon isn’t my boss, but whatever, I don’t want the bosses here at AFP to get any ideas.
So, here goes: my five things (last week).
1. Argued with some rando who kept emailing me about not being fair: This kind of thing goes on all the time.
“Your reputation is now garbage. For us intelligent folks we can spot a sellout fake journalist hit piece a mile way.”
This rando says his name is “Jason.”
He was writing to complain about an article on RFK Jr.
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“When you write an unbiased article you need to show both sides of the argument. Then folks may actually trust your article and may trust your publication.”
I replied to “Jason,” who claims to be a political independent, to ask him to forward me his latest email to a publication to complain about an article painting a liberal politician unfairly.
Seemed a fair question to me.
He wrote back several times saying he had, expressing upset over me not believing him, and that he had “nothing to prove” to me.
Which, no, he doesn’t.
I don’t care that a MAGA gets butthurt over an article is lying through his tooth about being an independent whose big issue is showing “both sides of the argument.”
My advice to people like “Jason”: if you don’t like what we write, find another website.
There are literally billions of them out there.
2. Helped get a couple hundred people out to Ben Cline’s mobile office hours in Waynesboro: Usually, mobile office hours events get a handful of people to meet with a low-level staffer from a congressional office about issues with Social Security or Medicare, nothing big.
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I noticed the one on the schedule for Cline’s staff last week in Waynesboro, and thought it looked like a good opportunity to let people know that, since Cline doesn’t do town halls, maybe a visit to the library to give the poor staff person hell could take the message back to DC.
Cline, predictably, used the occasion to write, from the safety of DC, of course, about radical activists hijacking his office hours, stopping just short of saying that the constituents on hand for the event were “paid operatives,” which is how the President and House Speaker have taken to referring to angry taxpayers.
3. Two other things with Bennie: Cline wrote a letter that he of course made sure was released publicly calling for an ethics investigation into a Black state senator that he claimed had pressured the VMI Board of Visitors to extend the contract of the school’s Black superintendent because he’s Black.
Somebody had to call BS on that, so, I did it.
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- Ben Cline is playing DEI politics over the future of VMI’s Black superintendent
- Youngkin nominates Ben Cline staffer to spot on VMI Board of Visitors
- VMI Board votes against extending contract of school’s first Black superintendent
Then we presaged the move led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin to engineer the ouster of the superintendent by writing about his emergency appointments of two MAGA stooges to the VMI Board, one of whom is a Cline paid staffer.
The resulting BOV vote on Friday wouldn’t have come as a surprise if you were reading along, though that wasn’t the goal.
(The goal: sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant.)
4. Youngkin and the White cop: We got a press release late Sunday night from the office of the governor about how Youngkin had commuted the sentence of a White cop in Fairfax County who had shot and killed an unarmed Black shoplifting suspect, and gotten a five-year prison sentence just handed down on Friday.
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The reason you send a press release out late on a Sunday night about something like that is, you hope nobody is paying attention, and the story goes away on Monday because other stuff is there to write about.
The advantage to working from home is, you’re always at work, so, we were able to get the word out in real time.
The disadvantage to working from home, of course, is, yep, you’re always at work.
5. The ‘anti-Catholic case’ sentencing: We’re on the Department of Justice press list, and routinely get updates on arrests, upcoming trials and sentencing decisions on cases involving Virginia.
One last week from the DOJ, about a guy from Henrico convicted of possession of eight Molotov cocktails, was presented rather low-key by the PR team.
Turns out, after Googling the guy’s name, it was the guy whose case triggered the fake outrage of the right over the infamous FBI “anti-Catholic memo.”
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The fake outrage made it seem like the FBI was somehow targeting people for going to church.
It didn’t take much digging to see that the guy from Henrico is a White supremacist who was trying to recruit people to join him in starting a race war.
Geez, I wonder why this DOJ would low-key that in a press release bragging about the guy getting a prison sentence.
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Chris Graham
