Insanely Generative
Paul Henry Smith
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The Great MAGA Purge. What will you do?
Today’s Guests * George Orwell – Writer, professional prophet of authoritarian disaster, and weary commentator on mankind’s inability to read his books correctly. * Steve – A MAGA government efficiency officer who considers firing bureaucrats his patriotic duty, much like Paul Revere, if Paul Revere had been galloping around reporting suspicious diversity seminars. * Ms. Chao – A former Treasury Department policy analyst who, until recently, naively believed that data analysis was too boring to be politically dangerous. * Mr. Bao – Former head of the Red Guard in China, a man who knows a thing or two about ideological purges and is here to show the bumbling amateurs how real totalitarianism is done. Introduction: “And So It Begins” ALEX: Ladies, gentlemen, and those of you awaiting your turn before the ideological firing squad, welcome back to Insanely Generative, the only show where history is not merely discussed but actively repeated before your very eyes. I’m your host, Alex, and today, we’re looking at America’s newest grand experiment: The Great DEI Purge. For those of you just tuning in from under your rocks or perhaps a soon-to-be-cancelled government position, the Trump administration has decided that America has had enough of diversity bureaucrats, equity consultants, and other such nefarious agents of inclusion. The government, we are told, will now be a meritocracy—which is Washington-speak for “we’re deciding who deserves to have a job based on our ideological preferences instead of yours.” We’ve gathered quite the panel to dissect the implications of all this. First, Mr. George Orwell, who has the unenviable task of watching yet another government use his books as blueprints rather than warnings. George, glad to have you. ORWELL: It’s a pleasure, though I must say, the human race is rather determined to keep proving my books relevant, much to my dismay. ALEX: Next, we have Steve, a self-described government efficiency warrior who has been instrumental in rooting out bureaucrats who—God forbid—may have once attended a diversity seminar. Steve, welcome. STEVE: Thanks, Alex. Listen, what we’re doing here is common sense. The American people are sick of their government being turned into a left-wing indoctrination factory. It’s our job to clean house. ALEX: Speaking of houses being cleaned, Ms. Chao is with us—formerly of the Treasury Department’s Equity Hub, until it was unceremoniously tossed onto the scrap heap of history. Ms. Chao, what’s it like to be persona non grata? MS. CHAO: Honestly? I’m still trying to figure out how researching barriers to economic access became the same as leading a socialist revolution. But here we are. ALEX: And finally, Mr. Bao—a man with real experience in mass ideological purges. Former leader of the Red Guard, an architect of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Bao, welcome. MR. BAO: Thank you, Alex. I look forward to helping your guests understand what a true purge looks like. So far, they seem to be amateurs. Part 1: The DEI Purge—Steve Explains How It’s Done ALEX: Steve, let’s start with you. Walk us through this purge—how did it start, where is it going, and, most importantly, when do we get the book burnings? STEVE: Well, first off, there’s no book burning—this isn’t some authoritarian crackdown. We’re simply restoring government to what it was meant to be: a machine that rewards hard work and merit, not identity politics. ALEX: Ah yes, “merit.” The magical word that justifies every ideological purge in history. Please, continue. STEVE: First, we identified the worst offenders—DEI officers, equity consultants, basically anyone whose job description included words like “inclusion” or “systemic.” Those people? Gone. Then we dug deeper. A lot of these people weren’t just in DEI offices. They were hiding in HR, in policy research, in legal departments. So we asked agencies to comb through their ranks. Who attended diversity trainings? Who organized equity initiatives? Who, God help them, once wrote a memo using the word “privilege”? Those people? Also gone. And the best part? We don’t even have to find them ourselves. We set up a tip line. Bureaucrats are turning in their own colleagues. If you knew how many government employees were secret leftists, you’d be disgusted. ALEX: Delightful. Nothing quite like turning your workforce into a snitching competition. Very healthy for national morale. Orwell, you’ve written about this sort of thing before. Any thoughts? ORWELL: Yes. It’s called a two-minute hate, except instead of shouting at a screen of Emmanuel Goldstein, they’re screaming at their HR department. But let me tell you exactly how this plays out. First, it starts with the bureaucrats—the “useless” paper-pushers who, supposedly, are not doing “real work.” But here’s the trick: Governments are made of bureaucrats. They handle the dull, necessary things that keep a country running. Tax policy, infrastructure planning, public health coordination—boring, mundane tasks that only become noticeable once they stop happening properly. When you purge based on ideology rather than competence, you don’t actually remove inefficiency. You remove stability. And what fills the vacuum? Not meritocracy. No, what fills it is a new ideology—one that is just as corrupt, just as self-serving, but wearing different colors. First, you fire the DEI people. Then you fire the people who worked with the DEI people. Then you fire the people who didn’t report the DEI people. Before long, the question isn’t “Are you competent?” but “Are you loyal?” And once that’s the standard, it doesn’t stop. STEVE: Oh, come on. That’s ridiculous. We’re just removing bad actors, not setting up some kind of ideological purity test. MR. BAO: Ha! Foolishness. You think you can purge the enemy without building an army of your own? No, no, no. Listen carefully, because I have done this before. Part 2. Mr. Bao’s Masterclass in Totalitarianism MR. BAO: Your mistake is in hesitating. You are cutting heads, yes, but you are leaving too many necks intact. Let me tell you how we did it in China. We did not merely remove bureaucrats. We deputized the children. Middle schoolers! We gave them armbands and wooden guns and the moral clarity of youth. We made them enforcers, and suddenly, the whole country was policing itself. You must do the same. Find the young and hungry. Tell them their government has been infested with traitors. Give them authority. Let them march through the halls, calling out names. They will do the work for you. ALEX: Ah, yes. Nothing quite as effective as a government-sponsored child militia. Gets the job done every time. Part 3: The Inevitable Collapse—Orwell’s Tour of History’s Ash Heap ALEX: Alright, Steve, Mr. Bao, Ms. Chao—strap in, because Mr. Orwell here is about to do what he does best: explain, in exquisite and excruciating detail, why this little bureaucratic witch hunt of yours is following a script older than dirt, and why—historically speaking—it always ends the same way. George, walk us through it. ORWELL: Certainly, Alex. Since Steve here is convinced that ideological purges are simply a matter of “efficiency,” let’s take a brief historical survey of other “efficiency movements” that began exactly this way. Consider the Soviet Union in the 1930s—Stalin’s Great Purge. At first, it was framed as a necessary crackdown on inefficiency and counter-revolutionary elements within the Party. Just like Steve’s little housecleaning effort, it started with obvious targets—old Tsarist bureaucrats, Trotskyists, people who had already been branded ideological enemies. But once the purging machinery was in place, something very predictable happened: * First, Stalin ran out of actual enemies, so he started purging former allies. * Then, people in his own administration began denouncing each other preemptively, just in case the axe was coming for them next. * By the end of it, Soviet governance had devolved into a game of bureaucratic Russian roulette—nobody dared to do anything because taking action meant exposure, exposure meant scrutiny, and scrutiny meant a bullet to the back of the head. And let’s not forget China’s Anti-Rightist Campaign under Mao in the 1950s—same pattern. It started with intellectuals, teachers, and government workers who were deemed not sufficiently enthusiastic about the revolution. The government encouraged people to report “rightist tendencies” in their coworkers and neighbors. The result? A self-perpetuating paranoia spiral. If you didn’t accuse someone, you might be accused next. Fast forward to America today, and Steve, I must congratulate you. You have, whether by accident or sheer historical illiteracy, stumbled upon the exact same methodology. The only thing missing is the gulags—though I suspect you might have a few empty FEMA camps in mind. STEVE: Oh, come on, that’s ridiculous. We’re just cutting government fat. ORWELL: Ah, yes, the “fat.” And tell me, Steve, how do you determine what is fat and what is muscle? Because in every ideological purge, the initial justification is always “efficiency.” The Soviets purged “saboteurs” and “wreckers.” The Chinese purged “bourgeois sympathizers.” And now America is purging “woke bureaucrats.” But the problem with ideological purges is that the standards are always subjective. At first, yo u’re eliminating DEI officers. Then it’s anyone who attended a DEI training. Then it’s anyone who didn’t report someone attending a DEI training. And soon, the only metric that matters is whether or not someone is sufficiently loyal to the new order. ALEX: And here’s the fun part, Steve—you think you’re on the winning team, but let me tell you something history guarantees: The purgers always get purged in the end.
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