It’s a Republic of Shitposters, If We Can Keep It

Lost in the general turmoil of the moment is news that, over the weekend, the President of the United States posted a Spongebob Squarepants meme. CNN reported it as part of its coverage of the email Elon Musk had sent out to all federal employees demanding to know what they were up to.

We live in a very stupid time and are governed by meme-fried brains. Resistance is taking many forms and some are meeting shitpost with shitpost.

In a comic mirror of the way Musk ran Twitter, the richest man in the world demanded that all employees of the federal government provide a list of five things they accomplished the previous week. This email went out on a Saturday and followed a post from Musk warning about the email on X, the website he owns.

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Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.

Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2025

“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk said.

A lot of bosses told their employees not to respond. The email went out to everyone even tangentially related to the federal government. FBI Director Kash Patel told agents to “please pause any response.” The State Department told its employees that no one was actually obligated to respond. Tulsi Gabbard told DNI the same thing. So did the Pentagon.

But a lot of people did respond, and not all of them federal employees. The email wasn’t popular among already stressed out feds and the address it came from leaked online quickly from multiple sources. It was an Office of Personnel Management address related to the Human Resources department. Anyone, it seemed, could send along a little message about what they’d done that week.

You really can just email Elon Musk at [email protected] pic.twitter.com/67ynbglkZX

— ☀️ Jon Schwarz ☀️ (@schwarz) February 23, 2025

I just sent this email to Musk “HR” team why the fuck did they accept email from non government sources lmao fucking idiots, send them an email yourself : [email protected] pic.twitter.com/nMVhgrBGuY

— NAFOrious B.I.G. (CIA)