CPAC 2025: Elon Musk Wields Chainsaw For Bureaucracy

"WATCH: Elon Musk wields 'chainsaw for bureaucracy' on stage before speaking at CPAC" 

Source:PBS NewsHour showing Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt "interview" of DOGE CEO/Co-President of the United States, Elon Musk. "Unelected President of the United States Elon Musk", is probably more accurate.

From the PBS NewsHour

From The Hill: 

"Tech billionaire Elon Musk joined the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) stage Thursday wielding a chainsaw, underscoring his efforts to slash the federal budget and workforce through President Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency panel.

Dressed in a black “Make America Great Again” hat and sunglasses and chain, Musk walked on stage and was joined shortly after by Argentine President Javier Milei, who gave him a black chainsaw that the DOGE leader held up as the crowd cheered.

When Musk held the chainsaw up, he screamed, “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy.” 

Milei, who rose to prominence in Argentina with a vow to shake up the country’s government and economy, often wields a chainsaw at political events, emblematic of his mission to cut large swaths of his country’s federal government.

Milei has reportedly been an inspiration behind DOGE, which has set up shop in various federal agencies in what the Trump administration frames as efforts to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in the government.

Musk is facing mounting criticism for DOGE’s efforts, especially those that have led to mass layoffs of federal workers, closures of entire independent agencies and access to sensitive information. Several lawsuits have been filed contesting the layoffs and the access to federal government databases... 

From The Hill

Former U.S. Representative Charlie Dent (Republican, Pennsylvania) talking to Brianna Keilar and John Berman on CNN: 

"CPAC has always been an odd gathering. But now it's been taken over by radicals, anti-vaxers. It's a land of misfits, toys, it's a political freaks show. It's the Star Wars bar, it's bizarre... Serious people are not showing up to this thing. They had their stupid straw poll, its rank choice now. They're not serious and one doesn't know if they should laugh or they should cry about what they're watching and witnessing at these CPAC gatherings." 

For anyone who really wants to know what I really think about CPAC... from what I wrote about it a year ago: 

"CPAC today is really just: Crazy People At a Convention. And I mean that in a political sense. Before these escaped political mental patients accuse me of slander or defamation. As Charlie Dent said, this is not a serious group. Or as I would like to put it, they're the American political version of a Star Trek Convention, except that these folks aren't loyal to Star Trek. They're loyal to Donald J. Trump." 

From The New Democrat

"Imagine if there were let's say 100, maybe a 1,000 people, whoever showed up at CPAC last weekend, who not just got our prison, perhaps a mental hospital, but just got out of solitary confinement either in prison, or at a secure forensic hospital, (which is a prison for mentally ill criminals) and they've been institutionalized for a very longtime and perhaps were just released because of prison overcrowding.

So now these folks our out of the institution, they've been out of society for a very longtime, the world even in real life, doesn't look the way it did lets's say 20-30 years ago, before they were institutionalized.

So now you have all these career criminals and career mental patients, who decide to invade Washington, for let's say their annual get together. That's what CPAC looks like, at least in a political sense. You have a lot of people there who look and act like they're from not even the 1950s, but perhaps even in the 1920s, and still think that's what America is culturally, ethnically, racially, religiously. And they just get out of the institution and see this new country that's also called America and feel the need to fight back and "take back America" and return America to the "real Americans" as they see themselves. 

MAGA doesn't live in the same country as everyone else. This is not the Conservative Political Action Conference. This is as one of the CPAC speakers said Jack Posobiec, this is a movement that wants to not end American democracy, but American liberal democracy and replace it with some type of Christian Nationalist government, where life for Americans who aren't Northern European, who aren't Protestant, who aren't male, would very different from the way it is today. 

To the outside world, MAGA looks like a bunch of escaped mental patients. The problem is, they're big enough, they're crazy enough, they're violent enough, to take down the American form of government and all our individual rights, if the real American patriots don't stand up, fight back, and prevent these folks from ever getting any real power in this country." 

From The New Democrat

Another way to describe CPAC (Crazy People At a Convention) would be to use a pro wrestling analogy. And the 10 pro wrestling fans who see this post, will understand what I'm talking about. Unless they're MAGAheads and they didn't take their medication today. 

So in the late 1990s, I'm in my early 20s (I'm 1 of the last of Gen-Xers) and my favorite show on TV at that point, was WCW Nitro, which was on TNT every Monday night. So the main WCW (which stands for World Championship Wrestling) storyline was that you had this renegade group of journeymen pro wrestlers, who put their own wrestling crew or organization together, to take over pro wrestling, or at least WCW and replace the leadership with their own people. Now put that in political terms: does this sound familiar? 

Hulk Hogan was like the president of this group called NWO (or New World Order) Eric Bischoff was like his executive vice president, who ran the day-to-day operations of WCW and NWO, who reported directly to Hulk Hogan. Kevin Nash and Scott Hall (also known as The Outsiders) were like the chief enforcers of this group.

So you look at the beginning of this video about CPAC, (Crazy People At A Convention) you have Elon Musk, who is sort of like Eric Bischoff character in the NWO and you have Argentine President Javier Milei (of all people. I guess they couldn't find an American President to do this for them) coming out on stage with a chainsaw, sort of pretending to be Donald J. Trump, pretending to take a chainsaw to American democracy. I mean bureaucracy?

At an event that's advertised to be a political convention, where "Conservatives" come together to talk about the future of America and the "conservative movement", this sort of looks like an MTV (when MTV was Music Television) awards show, or some Saturday Night Live skit.

If you are still wondering why I struggle (actually, I don't bother to even try to take CPAC seriously) to take CPAC seriously, I think I just gave you several reasons. At least with pro wrestling, it's admittedly fake where the matches are fixed and lot of the punishment that's dished out between the wrestlers is not real. But CPAC actually expects Americans to take them seriously. And not just the escaped mental patients that show up to their events every year, but the media and people who aren't MAGA fanatics. But this is how they present themselves instead. 

Apparently Elon Musk making a couple attempts of humor at this event when they were talking about the Russian war in Ukraine: "Donald Trump has a lot of eympathy. He's a good man." 

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