If there’s one idea that the rise of social media has proven it’s that a large proportion of the population are extraordinarily susceptible to propaganda. This widespread intellectual naïveté transcends political allegiance because both the left and the right of the political spectrum are equally vulnerable to disingenuous narratives. We are, though, to be clear, still living in the twilight of a left-liberal intellectual hegemony and consequently, the dominant propaganda of the current age is a multifaceted kaleidoscope of left-wing philosophy, which means that the agitprop of the contemporary zeitgeist, cultural socialism, is today the most successful and widely accepted propaganda.

Nowhere is this situation better exemplified than in the extraordinary lightning-fast redefinition of Elon Musk, in a matter of months, from a successful entrepreneur and inventor to the spawn of Beelzebub. Articles, memes, cartoons, news stories, etc. have been utilised to change the public’s perception of a man who has, like most people who provide goods and services, been a largely benign and positive presence in the world.

The reason that the cultural establishment, which, to be precise, is a set of ideas as well as a fulcrum of political power, has attempted to destroy Elon Musk, is because he is the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Trump administration. What the experts of DOGE have discovered is not only gargantuan levels of government waste throughout the American political system, but what is essentially a shadow government funding a suite of progressive ideologies, many of which the majority of people, judging by the results of opinion polls and elections, viscerally oppose. It is this shadow government that is doing everything in its power to bring down Musk, because, if its ability to influence American and international politics is curtailed and the faucet of publicly funded money is turned off, the institutional capture, in other words, cultural power, it’s maintained for decades is comprehensively diminished.

It’s not only, though, the corruption of government institutions like the FBI – which have behaved disgracefully towards Trump and the Republican Party – but the publicly funded government organisations, like USAID, which are hiding in plain sight and whose raison d’être is automatically assumed to be benign. Let’s be clear, the people working for these organisations are well-intentioned, and they are often correct in their understanding of contemporary politics and international affairs. But democracy is an ever-changing dynamic process governed by the will of the people, and it is the antithesis of liberal democracy to have a permanent caste of ideologues determining policy even if they are sometimes correct in their analysis.

This is where the power of propaganda works its magic. If you were to ask the average person whether cutting government waste is a good idea – making sure, in other words, that when the government puts its hand in your pocket it’s not being flaithiúlach with your hard-earned cash – or whether limiting the power of unelected bureaucrats is a positive initiative, the overwhelming majority of people would instantly reply in the affirmative. But after an insidious campaign of misinformation that characterised DOGE and Musk as attempting to undermine democracy and slash social welfare programs – both of these claims are untrue – people have posted the most risible nonsense on social media. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the textbook of propaganda – allow people to believe they are the creators of their own philosophy.

America’s current debt is $36.56 trillion. This is not simply an economic catastrophe; it is also a foreign policy crisis. And it is an impending disaster facing the entire liberal democratic world. Moreover, it’s a catastrophe of the West’s own making. Liberal democracies have prioritised international human rights legislation over national sovereignty. DOGE is trying to fix at least some of America’s financial woes and prepare America and the world for the coming challenge from anti-democratic states. It’s also trying to de-fang an ideology that believes everyone, across borders, should have the same economic and political rights, irrespective of fiscal considerations, genealogy, culture, sex, criminality, history, ideology or citizenship. The bureaucrats pushing this ideology, which is underpinned by an unrealistic belief in theoretical equality, or equity, and which is devoid of human relationships, were funded by the taxpayer and have acted like a state within a state for decades. Moreover, liberal democratic nations cannot afford to pay for the myriad demands of its citizens (and asylum seekers, genuine or otherwise) without major reforms. Another focus of DOGE is to make government more efficient by updating its computer systems, thus saving multiple hours of needless work. Cuts, however, to government waste will prima facie be a net positive because the savings will be redirected towards more worthy causes, Musk, for example, says that people relying on social security will be paid more in benefits after DOGE’s work is completed, which is projected to end in June 2025.

Is DOGE perfect? Definitely not. Musk, in reply to his critics, has said that the results of his team’s investigations are publicly available on DOGE’s website. Some of the criticisms levelled at DOGE, though, have been justified, but many of them have focused on single trees and ignore the forest. While mistakes have been made – what enterprise of this scope could not make mistakes? – in general, DOGE has done what its representatives claimed it would do, which is remove government waste – in other words, save money. According to DOGE, they’ve eliminated approximately four billion dollars a day since the department began operating. We’ll see at the end of its remit, when the media does a detailed evaluation of its claims, whether DOGE was a success, a failure or something in between. All we can definitively claim is that saving any taxpayer money is a good thing. And also, you would have to be a crank or have a vested or ideological interest, to criticise, without nuance, DOGE’s attempt to clean up government waste.

To be clear, criticisms of Musk and DOGE are premised on an intellectual fallacy which fails to recognise that everything in life is a trade-off and that costs and benefits don’t disappear simply by wishful thinking. We can only hope that DOGE accomplishes some of its aims and that people become less susceptible to the sorcery of propaganda. Hope, as Alexander Pope said, springs eternal.