A Bodyguard of Misdirections - Part 2
Misdirection #2 - Two Party Politics
There hasn't been even a semblance of democracy in the US since Bill Clinton showed up to hijack the Democratic party. He replaced class conscious, pro-worker policies with identity politics. After thirty years of "triangulation", the Dems platform is suicidal. It valorizes toxic policies like unsafe, ineffective vaccines, illegal immigration, the promotion of the transsexual agenda, pornography in schools, and the same support for the MIC and for the genocidal Zionists as the Republicans.
When it comes to Zionism, there isn't even misdirection. It is in your face. AIPAC owns both political parties, and they actually brag about it. Trump is a Zionist. Biden is a Zionist. Of course, there is the Trump/Bibi tag team show to keep the populace distracted. But nobody believes that the US will stop supporting and defending Israel.
Its like a three act play. First the Dems ignore their base constituency's economic issues. Then they adopt social policies guaranteed to outrage the working class. And finally, they back Zionist aggression and genocide, Ukrainian fascism, and every South American reactionary they can push into office. There is no opposition in America. It is all theater.
The Trump/Musk Tag Team
Given that democracy is nothing more than theater, the tempestuous bromance of Trump and Musk is just another misdirection. Trump's government by provocation style - ignoring laws, judges, and Congress - and Musk's Libertarian antics may look like their goal is to destroy the government. The reality is that Trump is a front for the Project 2025 crowd and Musk is a front for Peter Thiel and the whole Dark Enlightenment (see below) crowd. Both of those real agendas are so toxic that they need the cover of the Trump/Musk two stooges act.
We now have after-the-fact evidence that DOGE wildly overstated its benefits, but certainly destroyed large parts of the government that the oligarchs want destroyed - social security, medicare, the VA - parts that actually help the public. The misdirection is that DOGE draws the public's attention while Peter Thiel builds out Palantir's spying capability.
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One of Palantir’s core products, an all-in-one data-processing platform called Foundry, is reportedly in use at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, while the IRS and Social Security Administration are “speaking” with the company. The open menace of these initiatives was a little much for even a few MAGA diehards, who, after years of complaining about government persecution, sense a bit of danger in the establishment of an even more severe surveillance regime by a 78-year-old man who — even if they trust him — will be in charge of it only for a few years.
...the story is fairly understood in outline: The government would officially like to obliterate the already inadequate rules for compiling and sharing data about citizens and noncitizens and is seeking the help of a politically loyal firm to carry out its plans.
It’s fair to point out that this impulse has existed within the government for decades
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In further misdirection, Trump puts the kitchen sink of obnoxious changes into the BBB; but what's really important is the ten year moratorium on regulating AI. AI will be used to replace your government with Silicon Valley control.
This is exactly the kind of hijacking that has been explained by Quinn Slobodian.
...opposition to democracy, however, doesn’t imply an opposition to government...market radicals are enthusiastic about state power and resources—as long as that power prioritizes their ability to do business. “Their goal,” Slobodian writes, is “not to take a wrecking ball to the state but to hijack, disassemble, and rebuild it under their own private ownership.” Crack-Up Capitalism argues that market radicals aspire, above all, to use the authority of government to serve their interests: to eliminate taxes, unions, workers’ and citizens’ rights, political uncertainty, and barriers to capital flows, and to put the resources of the state—whether labor, land, or the legal system—at their disposal. They believe that this approach will, in turn, result in a more prosperous society with benefits eventually accruing to all.
- Adam Lowenstein, The Billionaires who Are Threatening Democracy (The Atlantic)
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Misdirection #3 - Ignore the Dark Enlightenment and Peter Thiel's ties to it.
The only real politics in America today is the war between Silicon Valley ideologues and the legacy conservative/reactionary GOP. The corporate media refuses to even mention the subject.
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Sure, Republicans are going to gut government spending to pay for tax cuts for the billionaires who own them. And they definitely want big Wall Street banks to run SocialSecurity just like George W. Bush handed more than half of Medicare (so far) over to giant for-profit insurance companies. After all, both industries represent such big campaign donors.
But this goes way beyond merely making billionaires richer or giving corporations more power over our lives. The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on—which Trump probably doesn’t even understand—involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.
...some of these guys believe that most of the decision-makers and agencies of the federal government can simply be replaced by banks of computers, deciding who gets what, when, and why. All it’ll take is a monarchical leader…
Trump could be that leader—or at least the useful-idiot-frontman for the technocrats likeVance and Musk who are really running things—and the gutting of federal agencies opens up a space to replace them (and their workers) with AGI-based computer systems.
The Dark Enlightenment
Petet Thiel is the dark heart, the driving force behind what Slobodian calls the market radicals. He has funded Curtis Yavin - an author of the Dark Enlightenment (DE) - who has been called "Silicon Valley's resident neo-monarchist".
Here is a very good summary of the DE, worth reading before proceeding:
Hase Fiero, The Dark Enlightenment: The Rise, Ideas, and Influence of a Controversial Movement
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Thom Hartmann has listed some of the DE political activities:
these people intend to replace the 240+ year “AmericanExperiment” with a brand new governance “experiment” of their own. One that was largely developed in computer rooms around San Francisco...
This hot new experimental ideology, enthusiastically embraced by Silicon Valley billionaires and their “tech bros” dismantling our government, is called the Dark Enlightenment or the neo-reactionary movement (NRx)....
The Dark Enlightenment has little use for democracy; openly disdains notions of equality as proposed in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution (viewing them as unnatural and counterproductive); and rejects what they call “Whig historiography,” which assumes history inevitably progresses toward greater liberty and enlightenment.
Instead, like Julius Evola, Thomas Carlyle, and Oswald Spengler, they argue that “classical”societal structures that ruled the world for millennia (like feudalism, monarchy, or cameralism) are superior to democracy and, completely ignoring the history of the development of modern democracy, should—with a high-tech AGI twist—replace today’s democratic “experiment.”
Some high-profile observers of American politics are alert to this takeover-in-progress that most of our media has completely missed. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for example, recently wrote for his Substack newsletter:
In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure.
Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
He notes that these tech-bro “oligarchs of the techno-state” want to replace “inefficient”democracy with “an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.”...
- Thom Hartmann, The Dark Enlightenment: The Tech Oligarch IdeologyDriving DOGE’s Destruction
Hartmann points to Rana Foorahar of The Financial Times:
The philosophy argues that democracy inherently leads to social decline, because of the development of deep state bureaucracies that are unable to control oligarchic forces, and that societies should be run like corporations, with a kind of CEO Monarch in charge.
As Yarvin has said, “If Americans want to change their government, they need to get rid of dictator phobia… One way of dealing with that is… hire two executives and make sure they work together and there is really no other solution…”
And they’re much further along in the process of both gutting government and seizing total control of our political system to implement this experiment than most Americans realize.
A new site that lays out exactly how they’re progressing toward their goal of kneecapping the federal bureaucracy is project2025.observer; according to the site, they’re about 40% of the way there, although the courts may set them back temporarily.
And the project for billionaires to take complete control of our elected officials (and thus our government, at all levels) is also nearly complete: Fully 18% of all spending on the 2024 elections was done by just 150 billionaires.
The Dark Enlightenment and racism
there’s an overlap between the Dark Enlightenment and the white supremacist, anti-immigration groups, like the VDARE Foundation. According to her article, the Southern Poverty Law Center describes the VDARE site as “a place where relatively intellectually inclined leaders of the anti-immigrant movement share their opinions.” One of its biggest contributors is Peter Brimelow.
...medievalist fantasies of honour and nobility (are) a way of bypassing Enlightenment ideals of reason and Republicanism...a way of hiding pseudo-scientific race theories under the disguise of ostensible historical legitimacy...a seemingly benign mode of nostalgia...They don’t reject other races, they say, they celebrate their own heritage. In this climate, the Middle Ages have become particularly fertile ground for the kinds of pseudo-scientific race theories espoused by white supremacist blogs and far-right nationalist groups.
The Three “Hards”
Quinn Slobodian has identified racism as one of the "three hards" of neoliberalism.
the new fusionists landed on what Slobodian calls the three “hards”: hard money (gold), “hardwired human difference” (a racist and eugenicist understanding of IQ), and hard borders. Each of these was simultaneously an argument and a goal. Only a nation that recognized these “hard” natural truths could succeed.
The “three hards” schema is illuminating. When the paleoconservatives of the 1990s — figures like Pat Buchanan and Murray Rothbard — asked themselves what a nation was, they turned to scientific racism. Language, culture, or politics were too soft. Likewise, macroeconomics offered too many answers they might disagree with on money and budgets. Gold did for money what IQ did for race and racial hierarchy: it naturalized existing inequality. Slobodian writes that “IQ-centrism offers a simple and powerful story about the world that naturalizes and hardens existing hierarchies, reinforces folk understandings of difference, and disempowers efforts of collective reform.” This is also, he argues, what goldbug political economy and hard-borders xenophobia do. Each of the “hards” represents an insecure retreat into supposed immutability, an attempt to win at politics by escaping it.
Of course, the hardness of gold, borders, and human difference was a fantasy. Supposedly “hardwired” human difference is anything but. The IQ tests so beloved of the Right are not an objective metric of human capacity that sits outside of time: they are a specific instrument used by particular institutions for specific reasons.
Virtually every feature of new fusionism Slobodian describes can be found in nineteenth-century antecedents to neoliberalism, above all the work of Herbert Spencer. Evolutionary arguments that blur (and gravely misunderstand) both biology and culture? Ostensibly liberal arguments for free markets alongside brutally repressive arguments for hard borders and antidemocratic states? Toggling between dispassionate global-scale arguments about sociology and fire breathing political interventions against reasonable regulations? Spencer’s got it all. “Survival of the fittest” itself came from Spencer, not Charles Darwin.
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Misdirection #4 - Ignore the massive funding of Dark Enlightenment, Effective Altruism, etc
EA and DE are totally alien ideologies to America - worse than Communism - yet no one is speaking out against this fundamentally seditious movement or its funders.
Remember that fey crook Sam Bankman-Fried? He was another believer in Effective Altruism. He altruistically comingled funds, and lied to his customers. That's what will be the norm if this crowd gains total power. And they are pushing this ideology hard - probably over a billion dollars of spending so far.
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EA has a great deal of corporate money supporting it. Nearly all of that money is coming from the tech industry in the form of donations to the various EA charities. The single largest donor to Effective Ventures - the umbrella nonprofit...for EA organizations - is Open Philanthropy. Open Philanthropy is mostly funded through the fortune of Dustin Moskovirtz, one of the cofounders of Facebook...As of August 2024, Open Philanthropy has donated over $200 million to Effective Ventures.
Other nonprofits in the wider EA ecosystem have received even more lavish tech funding...The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit with ties to the EA community...FLI also has strong ties to the tech industry. It was cofounded by...an Estonian tech billionaire who helped develop Skype and Kazaa. Elon Musk has also donated $14 million to the nonprofit. But the overwhelming majority of FLI's money comes from a single source: Vaitalik Buterin, the cocerator of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, donated over $650 million (in the form of a different cryptocurrency called Shiba Inu) to FLI in 2021 - instantly putting it on a similar financial footing to more wore well-known and influential think tanks like the Brookings Institute
- Adam Becker, More Everything Forever
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There might be something we can do
In contrast to my usual "there is nothing we can do" ending, I do believe there is something that can be tried. We need to shine the spotlight on the monarchical pretensions of these ideologues and their tech bro funders. I think the average American would be repulsed if they actually heard what these people are saying. If they aren't, then America is already beyond hope.
Michael Williams, a professor of politics at the University of London has labeled them "decadent conservatives". I think that is a good label to try to pin on these dangerous people.
It is to ask, what kind of conservatism are we seeing today? Dismissing these people as “not really conservative” clearly doesn’t work — they support conservative objectives and play important roles in conservative politics. Yet their tastes and lifestyles hardly seem to fit traditional conservative standards. They look suspiciously, for lack of a better word, decadent.
Decadence, after all, has been the target of conservatives for centuries, and accusations of it remain one of the Right’s most reliable ways of condemning liberalism as a culture of relativism and nihilism. And yet the suspicion that we are witnessing a new Decadence — this time emanating from parts of the Right — is not mistaken. The resemblance to earlier cultural episodes — whether F. Scott Fitzgerald’s roaring twenties or the fin de siècle Decadents of Britain — is deeper than it appears and is worth tracing further.