Tuesday’s whistleblower revelations are stunning concerning the raid by Elon Musk’s DOGE phalanx into sensitive files of the National Labor Relations Board, the evidence of a massive theft of data and the acknowledged attempt from a Russian IP address to extract it at the same time.

Two Virginia lawmakers, U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Fairfax County and U.S. Senator Mark Warner, are in the forefront of efforts to address the issue. Connolly, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, has formally called for an investigation, asserting that DOGE “may be engaged in technological malfeasance and illegal activity,” as reported by National Public Radio.

“Individuals associated with DOGE have attempted to exfiltrate and alter data while also  using high-level systems access to remove sensitive information,” Connolly wrote in a letter to NLRB officials. The whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, an information technology staffer at the NLRB, filed a complaint with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chair and ranking Democrat Sen. Warner.

Berulis appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show Tuesday night to talk about his findings, including the reference to the identified effort by someone in Russia to hack into the data breach just as it was happening. No doubt, congressional investigations are coming. 

But this is not all this week. This incredible story was compounded further by yesterday’s exclusive Washington Post report from Spencer S. Hsu and Aaron Schaffer that Ed Martin, Trump’s pick to be the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, appeared on Russian state TV no less than 150 times (or more) since 2016, and that Martin covered up all this in his application for the post.

The Post report documents an incredible and unmistakable pattern of pro-Moscow apologetics by Martin on the Russian RT and Sputnik networks, taking the Moscow propaganda side against the U.S. on matters from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the murderous pro-Russian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria to its interference in U.S. elections.

According to the Post account, Martin’s comments on Russian TV “appear to agree with Moscow’s geopolitical views and foreign policy aims, while embracing a worldview distrustful of U.S. institutions and experts, similar to disinformation pushed by the Kremlin.”

It cites former U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s statement that  RT and Sputnik’s parent company “are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus.”

At the same time as all the above, of course, Trump is continuing to wreak havoc with the U.S. economy, with his tariff wobbling severely undermining confidence in ways that will savage the U.S. bond market as the value of the dollar plummets and the stock market’s volatility index is at its highest level since the days of the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008. It was the severe wobble effect in the markets that preceded that crisis, and the U.S. is far less capable of either staving off or recovering from another situation like that one.

But Trump, Musk and the Trumpists that they, either through appointments and threats, are having installed in all levels of the government, are nowhere near relenting. Meanwhile, their assaults are deepening against the media and educational institutions such as Harvard.

These are all hallmarks of a classic cult. But this time, the effort to restrict access to information is extending not only to cult members, but to the American public as a whole. At all levels, as in the cases of the cults that so widely proliferated in the 1970s, authoritarian pronouncements substitute for any contrary knowledge or information.

Comparisons with Trump are now being made to the Jonestown cult that suffered over 900 suicides and murders on one unholy night in November 1978. It is widely held that Jonestown was a KGB operation.

The language and practices of cults are remarkably uniform. They are extensions of the kind of bullying skills that some children develop on playgrounds and that gang and organized crime figures hone to terrorize their victims.

Now, the victims are all of us. The only remedy is to conquer fear with rightly-justified resolve and strong, effective action.