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President Musk wants DARPA money back, and Trump, too. [1]

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Date: 2025-02-13

Donald is either staying up way too late, or never going to bed. There's no way to tell. The first post at 2:58 a.m.shows the man getting upset about Reuters getting paid for a Defense Department study.

USAspending.gov is being used by DOGE a lot these days to find items that justify withholding billions in government contracts. This is no different.

The first post was actually by Elon Musk yesterday.

Reuters was indeed paid $9.1 million for a study called Large Scale Social Deception. It was an ongoing study. The amount was paid from 2018 to 2022. Guess who was President for two of those years?

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, gave their reason for the study's commission. "The Active Social Engingeering Defense (ASED) program aims to develop the core technology to enable the capability to automatically identify, disrupt, and investigate social engineering attacks. If successful, the ASED technology will do this by actively detecting attacks, intervening in between communications of users and potential attackers, and coordinating investigations into the sources of the attacks." "Over the past 40 years, our world has become increasingly connected... with this connectivity has come the threats of cyber attacks on both military systems and critical infrastructure. While we focus the vast majority of our security efforts on protecting computers and networks, more than 80% of cyber attacks and over 70% of those from nation states are initiated by exploiting humans rather than computer or network security flaws."

It's a long explanation, but the reason for the study is obviously valid. Neither Musk or Trump bothered to ask DARPA what the study was about.

The translation is that social media is used to spread disinformation as a form of cyber attack. We know that. It was used against us in 2016 with the Russian collusion with Trump's campaign. That's what the Mueller report said. Russians and Chinese have been using this as a weapon against us ever since then. Possibly even before.

It's ironic that the worst spreader of disinformation is standing right next to Donald Trump everyday. Musk has now become a tool of Russia and China, without knowing about it.

Then Donald put in his first grievance this morning.

Elon obviously told Trump about it so he could get angry.

"Radical Left Reuters." Not hardly. Reuter is probably the most trusted independent news organization there is, with a tossup between them and the Associated Press. But, we all know how when Trump needs to attack something, it's so easy for him to deligitimize by saying "Radical Left."

Then Donald has to go overboard with, "GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!" Read the reports, you idiot. You have access to it now. Why don't you get some education before making a fool of yourself?

Trump was so successful in his first post that he had to go back and attack Politico for their subscription costs to the government.

Don't you just love the fact that Trump quotes DOGE as though they are a reliable source of information.

We already went through this a week ago. He's stuck on a Merry-Go-Round with Politico and the New York Times. People in government need reliable news sources. That's why agencies pay for subscriptions. Hard work isn't available for free, well sometimes it is. But it's always: consider the source. If you consider Elon Musk and DOGE as being a good sources, you will be continuing to make stupid mistakes.

"Buying the press???" Yes, Donald, you do have to pay for subscriptions, but implying that news organizations change their editorial position because of subscription payments is asinine.

"Failing New York Times." They've been publishing since 1851. They'll still be around long after you're dead.

Then he has to end it with a repeat all in caps.

"THEY ARE BUYING THE PRESS!" Donald, we already covered this. The only thing different this time is that you said "THEY." Is this your government? Or are you once again using that all caps "they" to blame the Democrats for subterfuge against you?

There are DOGE stories generated by Musk every day. We can look forward to more angry posts by Trump following his. We should probably just follow Musk and ignore Donald. After all, we know who the real president is.

Donald wasn't finished.

Now he thinks us creating tariffs is great. But also when other countries do it to us. Help us from this lunatic!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/13/2303423/-Trump-wants-Reuters-and-Politico-money-back?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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