Air Date 2/11/2025

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. 

The very rich, as has been noted before, are not on the side of regular people. And even if you were to think that the federal government needed a major reboot, no one but the ultra wealthy are going to be happy with what they build in the aftermath of the administrative coup currently underway.

For those looking for a quick overview, for those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes Double Down News, Democracy Now!, Velshi, Blonde Politics, Zeteo, and Takes by Jamelle Bouie.

Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there will be more in three sections: section A, Historical Context, Section B, Government Destruction, and Section C, The Bros. But first, your call to action for the week.

Activism Roundup - 2/10/25

Amanda: Hey everyone, Amanda here with your weekly roundup of activism actions. 

The national grassroots response organization, [00:01:00] Indivisible, is reminding us this week that one of the biggest tools Democrats in Congress have right now is the upcoming budget negotiations in March. Unfortunately, minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has already declined to withhold Democratic votes. While there have been protests outside government agencies, as a party, Democrats are, not surprisingly, in disarray about how to use any leverage they still have. That means our voices are critically important right now. The calls and actions last week got Senate Democrats to finally unify against Russell vote and use procedural rules to slow things down. 

So keep calling! The Five Calls app is a great tool, and keep showing up at the offices of your members of Congress. 

And it's not just Democrats who need to be pushed. If you have a complicit Republican Senator, governor or representative, it is time to shame them. Show up to their offices, hold town halls, call them out in every public way possible for for not speaking out against Trump and Musk's illegal actions and government coup. You can find call scripts and how to find or start your local Indivisible group at Indivisible.org. 

[00:02:00] And finally, President's Day is Monday, February 17th, and there are protests planned across the country. As always, prepare. Take safety precautions, and look out for each other when protesting. Counter protesters are likely. You can learn more at FiftyFifty.One, that's F I F T Y written out twice, dot O N E. 

I know it's easy to feel overwhelmed right now, but we don't get to choose the times we live in. We need everyone to act like everything is on the line, because it is.

How Oligarchs Took Over The World - Double Down News - Air Date 1-9-25

GEORGE MANBIOT - HOST, DOUBLE DOWN NEWS: There's a widespread myth which says that if only we can get rid of the Republicans, get rid of the Tories, get rid of these right wing forces, we can relax back into normality. And that normality is a democratic, progressive state. 

The democratic, progressive state is about as far from political normality as you can get. The default state of centralized societies like ours is oligarchy. An oligarch is someone who turns their inordinate [00:03:00] economic power into inordinate political power. It's very rich people becoming very politically powerful. This is why billionaires love Trump. This is why billionaires and multi-millionaires love Nigel Farage. It's why they love Marine Le Pen. It's why they love so many of the hard right and far right movements that are rising around the world, because they deliver for them. They accelerate the transformation of democracies into oligarchies. 

That is where we are heading, unless we produce massive counter movements. And we can't rely on bland, white bread, centrist politicians to prevent the rise of oligarchy. People like Keir Starmer, people like Joe Biden, they can't do it. They don't have that sort of power to mobilize people. They are trying to play both sides at the same time. They're trying to [00:04:00] appease the oligarchs to get them off their backs, and they're trying to appeal to the people at the same time. You cannot ride both horses. One of those horses is going to fall away. And what falls away is popular support. Because if your program is not meeting people's needs, people will look elsewhere. And so you find yourself riding the oligarch's horse, not the people's horse. 

And what we're seeing now is the return, big time, of oligarchic power.

And this is a phenomenon we see throughout history. And every so often, that oligarchic power is rolled back, but then it gradually begins to gather again, and starts to return, unless you are struggling sufficiently against it. 

There's a very brilliant and very depressing book called The Great Leveller by Walter Scheidel, a very impressive historian, who says that there are only four forces which have ever destroyed rampant inequality, in other words, oligarchy, [00:05:00] in human history. One of them is total war, one of them is total and violent revolution, one of them is state collapse, and one of them is massive plague. And what he's shown is that in the wake of those things, which can often destroy the power of wealthy people, you can build, much more easily, a more egalitarian and democratic society.

We can see that so much of what we have benefited from has been the result of the two world wars in the 20th century, that to a large extent they destroyed the wealth and power of the uber rich class, of the oligarchic class, partly because they needed to mobilize resources on a massive scale in order for countries to fight those wars and create a sort of warfare state which requisitioned goods from very rich people, which raised taxes massively. Taxes in the US rose to 94 [00:06:00] percent on the top rate of income tax; in the U. K., to 98%. And it stayed at that level till well after the war. In the U. K. there was a luxury goods tax as well, of 100%. And these taxes were seen as necessary to fund the war effort. 

And there were a whole load of other forces, like the physical destruction of capital, which took place on a large scale; the loss of colonies, in which a lot of capital had been invested; the rationing systems, which made it impossible for very rich people to maintain their undemocratic positions. And their power was broken. 

And following the war, amongst many of the major combatants, the warfare state became a welfare state. And the measures which were used to fund the military economy were then used to fund a civil public service economy. 

Japan was occupied by the [00:07:00] US occupation government under General Douglas MacArthur. They realized that Japan's fascist imperialism, which had led it into the Second World War and caused such horrendous atrocities in places that it had occupied, was driven by oligarchy. It was driven by a profoundly, undemocratic settlement within Japan itself. And the occupation government realized that if it was to prevent a resurgence of that fascist imperialism, it had to destroy oligarchic power. It destroyed these huge Japanese conglomerates. It distributed the land which had been captured by these big estates, and instituted the most effective land reform program in history, redistributing that land to peasants. It introduced trade unions. It insisted that trade unions must be allowed to operate and created a very powerful trade union movement which persists to [00:08:00] this day. It introduced far greater rights for workers, a minimum wage, all sorts of things that we didn't have in our own countries which were implemented by the US occupation government. And it brought about a system of democracy the like of which Japan had never seen before. 

And it was on these massive changes that a completely different society in Japan was built: a democratic, egalitarian, and highly successful society. 

It's extremely ironic that it was the US occupation government which actually did all these things. Before a few years later, it woke up and said, oh, hang on a moment, this looks a bit like socialism, and started trying to row back in it, by which time it was too late.

In the UK and in the US, the warfare state became a welfare state. And we enjoyed, as a result, the most democratic, progressive, redistributive era we have ever had. And [00:09:00] what we're seeing now is the fading of that force and the return, big time, of oligarchic power.

Is Elon Musk Staging a Coup? Unelected Billionaire Seizes Control at Treasury Dept. & Other Agencies - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-3-25

WALEED SHAHID: If this story was taking place somewhere in Central Asia or in Africa, the United States media, the United States State Department, international institutions would likely refer to this as a coup. A billionaire industrialist who donated $300 million to a campaign is installing his personal loyalists in key parts of the federal bureaucracy. This is essentially Viktor Orbán’s playbook.

And we need to know: Why does a billionaire industrialist, with millions in government contracts, military contracts for his private companies, need the Social Security numbers of every American, needs to know what every single check that the US government gives out to businesses, to charities? Why does this billionaire need to know this information?

He was not vetted or approved by the US senate. He has a history of corruption, for using public resources for private gain. He’s one of the [00:10:00] wealthiest men in the world. In any other situation, this would be called state capture, and people around the world would be condemning it. But in the United States, we are not used to this kind of level of creeping authoritarianism, of plutocracy, of oligarchy so explicit.

And we need to — as Representative Ocasio-Cortez said last night, this is a five-alarm fire. Senate Democrats need to be communicating to the American people. And last night, there was a call by Indivisible Action for people to visit their local — their senators and call for them to grind the Senate to a halt, to call for investigations and to know why does Elon Musk need to know this information. Why is he showing up on Saturday to the offices of the federal government demanding the private information of citizens all around the country?

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Well, Lindsay Owens, you say none of the reasons are good. Lay those out.

LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, absolutely. So, for most Americans, this is the first time that they’ve [00:11:00] ever heard of the Treasury payment system. So, what is the Treasury payment system? This is, effectively, the piece of the federal government that cuts the checks. And they cut a lot of checks. This is $6 trillion a year — money that goes to individuals as Social Security payments for seniors; money that goes for organizations like Meals on Wheels to deliver lunches; foreign aid; as well as the funding that the government sets aside for key programs, paying its debts, making sure that we don’t breach the debt ceiling and default on our obligations.

So, this is really unprecedented that Elon Musk has grabbed control of the keys of $6 trillion in payments infrastructure. There are a few reasons this could be happening. The first is, as your viewers know, last week, President Trump tried to end federal spending, just stop federal payments altogether. This was so outrageous and in violation of the Constitution that the courts intervened [00:12:00] and said that he couldn’t do that. What may be happening here is that Musk may be doing an end run around the courts, going straight to the source so that he can continue to stop those payments that the courts said needed to keep staying online.

The second thing that may be happening here is this could just be a good old-fashioned cyberattack. Elon Musk could be interested in the Social Security numbers, the tax ID numbers of tens of millions of Americans. We know that he has partnered with Visa and is considering spinning out a payment system of his own. What we may have here is Elon Musk’s attempt to get the private information for his own financial gain.

The other thing that is incredibly worrying here is $6 trillion in spending is not just a lot of money, it’s a macroeconomically significant amount of money. If Elon Musk starts tinkering with the code, you know, [00:13:00] the underlying technology that makes sure these payments go out seamlessly and effectively, he could inadvertently, or on purpose, bring the macroeconomy to a halt. I mean, this is an incredibly concerning seizure of government infrastructure, but it is also an economically significant moment in the country.

So, I couldn’t agree more with Waleed more. I mean, the word “coup” is the right word to be thinking about here. And Congress must intervene. I mean, if I was a senator, I think the most important thing to do is bring the secretary of the treasury to the Senate today to answer questions about what Musk has access to.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, the Treasury Department’s inspector general, who could monitor DOGE’s activities, was among the 15 watchdogs who were purged by President Trump. Who’s now in charge of or overseeing Musk’s [00:14:00] team?

LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, Musk is in charge. So, that’s exactly right. Some of the key chokeholds here to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen have been moved out of the way, studiously, exactingly moved out of the way. So, President Trump fired the inspector general of the Treasury, and the top civil servant of the Treasury Department, the man who was the acting treasury secretary between the time that Janet Yellen stepped down and Scott Bessent was confirmed by the Senate, has also been pushed aside, resigned over the fact that he didn’t want to give Musk, a private citizen, a billionaire, the keys to the Treasury payment system. So there is very little stopping Musk from taking this over. You know, Trump and Bessent have really given him a glide path.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, Waleed Shahid, where is the Democratic Party on this? Where are the Democratic senators and [00:15:00] congressmembers on this? I mean, you have Hakeem Jeffries, who holds an emergency meeting of the Democrats after a judge stops the federal payments from going out to — you know, stops the ban on federal funding.

WALEED SHAHID: So, the Democratic Party in Washington is largely asleep at the wheel. They are acting as if they’re kind of a librarian shushing noise in a crowded room. They are still believing in the normal procedures, normal decorum, normal — that everything here is the normal transition of power. And they still believe that what Elon Musk and Donald Trump are doing is just a libertarian reform of the government, not an oligarchic, plutocratic takeover of a private billionaire who is seeking to know — potentially seeking to know what his competitors might be doing with government contracts. He has private information that — Elon Musk [00:16:00] has contracts with international governments all across the world. But the Democratic Party is not able to put forward an opposition message right now, because they are — they feel like this is normal.

And that’s why it’s so important for concerned citizens all across the country to twist the arm of your Senate Democrat. Go to their office. If you go to Indivisible.org today, you can find a way to join your local chapter all around the country, whether your senators are Republican or Democrat or independent. They need to hear from concerned citizens, because the Democratic Party doesn’t move on issues of oligarchy, of plutocracy, of taking action, unless their constituents show up in person and demand that they hold hearings, take the bully pulpit in the media and also grind the Senate to a halt until we know why does Elon Musk have this information, someone who was not elected.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, the Democratic National Committee on Saturday elected the moderate political insider Ken Martin as [00:17:00] chair, despite calls from voters to urgently switch gears and respond to working people’s needs following the party’s crushing defeat, though it wasn’t a major numbers defeat, but it was a defeat in November. What do you think of Ken Martin? Where do you think it’s going?

WALEED SHAHID: So, the DNC is largely, at this point, a fundraising vehicle for the presidential campaign. I hope that Ken Martin reforms the party to do things like what I’m describing. The Democratic Party should be holding daily press conferences every morning to explain to working-class and middle-class Americans why it might hurt their pocketbooks for Elon Musk to have this information from the Treasury Department and from the OPM, that Elon Musk has a history of wanting to use public resources for private gain, that Elon Musk is someone who is live-tweeting that he wants to cut the federal government’s debt every day by billions of dollars, and one of the only ways to do that would be to begin to privatize Social Security. This is what the DNC should be doing.

Now, Ken [00:18:00] Martin, we had lots of members of the “uncommitted” movement at the DNC who were being personally bullied by their DNC state parties, and Ken Martin, thankfully, did intervene to make sure that that didn’t happen. And so, that was my only personal interaction with him, and he went out of his way to make sure that our uncommitted delegation was treated with respect. Other than that, I don’t know that much about him, but I’m looking forward to — hopefully he can put together a working-class, populist agenda for the party that isn’t just a fundraising handoff.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, Lindsay Owens, DOGE is not a formal government agency, right? Which means that it doesn’t fall into any category.

LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, look, I think when President Trump announced that Elon Musk was going to be running the Department of Government Efficiency, there was a sort of tempting fantasy that maybe Musk, a tech but successful businessman, could come in and restore some efficiency in government, [00:19:00] maybe modernize some aspects of government that could use some updating. I mean, I think with this weekend’s seizure of the Treasury payment system, we can be crystal clear in putting that fantasy to bed. This is Musk determining who is going to get funding in this country, what programs are going to be funded in this country. And remember, Musk isn’t a disinterested party here. As we’ve talked about, he has many federal contracts himself, billions of dollars this year alone to his companies — SpaceX, Tesla and X, formerly known as Twitter.

But he also is interested in cutting this funding for a very personal reason, which is he is interested in paying for the tax cuts that Congress is teeing up this year. They are estimating $5 trillion in tax cuts, mostly going to the wealthy and corporations. And DOGE is the entity that is supposedly going to find the money, [00:20:00] find the savings to pay for those tax cuts. So I think we can sum it up this way: Elon Musk is going to pay for his tax cut with your Social Security. That’s really what we’re looking at here. That’s what DOGE is up to. 

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: What should people do right now?

WALEED SHAHID: People should go to Indivisible.org and visit their Senate office and demand an investigation of Elon Musk and that Senate business should come to a halt.

The Oligarchy's Power is Waking America Up - Velshi - Air Date 1-27-25

 

ROBERT REICH: Power today is not just wealth, it's information, it's data, it's knowing what it is that everybody else is doing. And certainly, if you have all of the data that government has, and you have access to it, and you can slice it and dice it any way you want, that can translate into great wealth and great power.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: So here's something interesting. Tesla dropped below 50 percent of all electric vehicle sales in the United States. That means other American companies' or other companies' cars are being sold. There are [00:21:00] zero Chinese electric vehicles in America. For better or for worse, there are zero. So these are all other competitors.

But guess what? He got an executive order this week eliminating incentives for other electric car producers. So kind of works, right? If you're Elon Musk, that, that was a pretty good investment, in Donald Trump's campaign. 

ROBERT REICH: Absolutely. In fact, look under the hood as it were, Ali, and what you always find is monopolization. In fact, every time you follow the money, and you're dealing with one of these current robber barons, you know, in the second gilded age, that's, what they are. They are the new generation of robber barons. You follow the money and you get to a monopoly, because that's where the big money is.

Combine the monopoly with data, combine power that is market power with power that is information power, and you get Elon Musk. 

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: However, on Inauguration Day, you published something which actually gave [00:22:00] me hope. I'd like to read from it. "Trump hoodwinked the average working American into believing that he's on their side, and convinced enough voters that Kamala Harris and Democrats were on the side of cultural elites. But, Trump's hoax will not work for long, given the oligarchy's conspicuous takeover of America under Trump 2. Trump's regime is already exposing a reality that has been hidden from most Americans for decades: the oligarchy's obscene wealth and its use of that wealth to gain power over America." 

This is an interesting point. And Professor Tim Snyder has mentioned the fact that people over time turn against these oligarchies. It doesn't always mean a turn back to democracy. But they, once they realize that they're being exploited, they tend to not like it so much. 

ROBERT REICH: Americans in particular, Ali, have an aversion to aristocracy. I mean, after all, we were founded in revolt against monarchy and against an aristocracy in Britain. We really don't like elites who are enormously powerful. 

The [00:23:00] thing is that the Republican Party has used cultural populism over the last 10, 20 years, to paint the elites as basically a deep state or, people who are coming into this country illegally, or people who are transgender.

I mean, there is a different elite here that is really operating and pulling the levers of power. And that elite is an economic elite. The Democrats really have not talked enough, in my humble opinion, about the economic elite that is actually, and has actually undermined American democracy over the last 30 or 40 years.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Right. A lot of people have gone after the academic elite or whatever they think the elite is, the ivory towers. But in fact, in the midst of all this, for the last 50 years, what's been happening is we've just got this class of people who are now 0.01 percent of the population controlling more wealth than the entire bottom half of the population.

ROBERT REICH: Yes, and that's exactly the point, [00:24:00] because they control the wealth. And what do they do with their wealth? They put a chunk of it into politics. There is the oligarchy. That's the oligarchy in action. That's what Elon Musk did. Putting a quarter of a billion dollars, not a quarter of a million, a quarter of a billion dollars to get Donald Trump elected is the quintessence of what we face in an oligarchy.

That's what oligarchies do. That's how they wed monopoly power and the power of just politics. that's what Elon Musk represents. That's what that picture that you showed of the three richest people in the United States in front of all the Republicans, in front of all of the people who are being nominated to high positions of power, these are the most powerful people in the world. And Musk is embracing them. 

He is not a tribune of the people. Musk is not somebody who's there for working class Americans. And it's going to be obvious.

DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America Part 1 - Blonde Politics | The Silly Serious - Air Date 11-13-24

[00:25:00] 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: The tech bros of Silicon Valley believe that the American empire is on the verge of collapse. Silicon Valley wants to speed this up, but use the coming administration to create safe landing zones for them and their cash where they can also run their own governments.

And what is so annoying about this is it makes me sound crazy. It makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. But I am talking about crazy people. I am talking about the guy who wants to colonize Mars. I am talking about the guy who said he gave up on democracy in 2009. 

These tech bros justify their point of view because they believe that that's the natural place in society. The courageous geniuses on the new frontier. I'm not speculating. These men say it. They say it on podcasts and at conferences and in interviews and in blog posts. Some are quiet. Some are very, very loud, but they all are on board. 

PETER THIEL: [00:26:00] And I think that if we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries.

MARK ANDRESSEN: If you want to replace the elite that you have today, what you need to do is you need to have a better elite. And there's a way to do this. It's been done before. 

BEN HOROWITZ: We get kind of money and property right, and that it's a strong foundation for building, you know, kind of a world that we all want to live in.

We're seeing, some, breakdown of those in the real world, in the United States lately. 

BRIAN ARMSTRONG: I'm definitely very interested in ways that you can tokenize real real estate and actual physical land to create better forms of society and governance. I do think America is in slow decline right now.

I would like us to all in crypto think about how we actually go create physical places in the world, to preserve freedom over the long term. I think that's ultimately crypto's destiny. 

ELON MUSK: The people of Mars will be more enlightened and will not fight amongst each other too much. 

MARK ANDRESSEN: It's basically tech libertarian futurism and ideology around technology, including technology enhancing human freedom.[00:27:00] 

TECH DOUCHE: I am trying to fix starvation in the U. S. The point was like, let's have a new government. 

PETER THIEL: Where do we go from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? We're far too far on the side that you can describe as collectivist, centralized, Borg-like, conformist, and also generally just simply incorrect.

DAVID SACKS: I think that what Elon's doing is showing a path to fighting back. The left wing elite's gonna be kicking and screaming the whole way. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Mark Cuban, one of the more normal billionaires, had this to say about this particular group of men that I'm talking about. 

MARK CUBAN: What's happened in Silicon Valley is insane. It's not so much a support thing. It's more like a takeover thing, trying to put themselves in a position to have as much control as possible. They want Trump to be the CEO of the United States of America, and they want to be the board of directors that makes him listen to them.

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Now, this hypothetical board includes a couple of power players that I think are worth keeping an eye on, namely Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, [00:28:00] Brian Armstrong, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and David Sachs. In this video I'm going to try and lay out what I think these people are doing behind the scenes. If you do want to dive further into this topic, I recommend looking at the work of Gildaran. I have linked his blog below. This is his beat and he's amazing at it. 

This man is named Bilaji Srinivasan. Like Beyonce, he tends to only go by his first name. Balaji is highly involved in the tech scene, and while not a billionaire himself, he is friends with a lot of them. He's a former partner of Andresen Horowitz. He is the former CTO of Brian Armstrong's Coinbase. Thiel actually recommended Balaji to be the head of the FDA during the first Trump administration. Balaji wrote a book. It's called The Network State: How to start your own country. In that book he talks about how to break nation states apart into smaller territories which can then be run like corporations.

BALAJI SRINIVASAN: What I mean by Silicon Valley's ultimate exit, it basically means build an opt-in society [00:29:00] ultimately outside the U. S. run by technology. And this is actually where the Valley is going. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: You see, like many in the industry, Balaji is a disruptor. He is interested in disrupting the current idea of nationhood through the creation of a network of sovereign, tech-run territories protected by military grade security.

Balaji wasn't the first person to come up with this idea, not even in the tech scene, but he was the first person to present it in a more palatable way. The idea actually comes from someone named Curtis Yarvin. In Patchwork, Yarvin wrote, "The basic idea of Patchwork is that as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds of thousands of sovereign and independent mini countries, each governed by its own joint stock corporation, without regard to the residents' opinions."

Patchwork is a reboot of the current system in order to install a new operating system. Yes, Yavin is a software developer [00:30:00] with a company named Urbit, invested in by Peter Thiel. He refers to these small territories as "patches," but he's flexible about how they might run, maybe like a corporate urban space or a city-state like Athens. These corporate dictatorships would use all-seeing surveillance to protect their citizens and enforce their laws. There would be biometric IDs. If you're poor, you will have to move to another patch. Or, the poor could be ground up and used as biodiesel, or locked into a virtual reality prison. Now Yavin said he was joking about the biodiesel thing. But not about the prison thing. So I'm not sure if he was joking about the biodiesel. 

Which gives us an understanding of why Balaji had to come up with [a] more appealing way to present this idea. Balaji has less about dictatorship and mass incarceration and more about freedom, and opportunity. 

A lot of people in the industry acknowledge that Balaji's ideas are a little out there. And I would dismiss them too, [00:31:00] if those same people weren't actively funding them. Millions of dollars are being funneled into these projects as we speak. This is the website for Praxis, a network state funded by Peter Thiel, Vak Andresen, Balaji and Sam Altman. Through their shared capital fund, Pronomis, which is dedicated to funding the creation of network cities. The website for Praxis says, "As local communities dissolve and nation states stumble, network states will ascend. The next global superpower will be a network state. The next America will be on chain."

The stated goal of Praxis is to build a corporate government with a global footprint. It will have territories all over the world, crypto will be its currency. The modern global system, once the greatest power in the history of man, has become a brittle, jerry-rigged contraption incapable of carrying out the most basic functions.

As these governing institutions continue to degrade, people will come to realize that no one is truly on their side. As nation states [00:32:00] falter, network states become inevitable. 

I should mention that Pronomous Capital is funding the creation of other network states, many of which are further along than Praxis. Some examples are Prospera in Honduras, Afropolitan, Itana, and small farm cities in Africa, Metropolis in Palau, and I think Yungdrung City is planned for South Asia.

On Pronomis's website they claim, "Decades of research on economic development has shown that the primary determinant of prosperity is the quality of a country's laws and the integrity of its courts, administrators, and other legal institutions. When institutions are outmoded, corrupted, or failing, the result is untold human suffering. Yet upgrading national institutions is notoriously difficult. Our solution: build the cities of tomorrow." 

Right now they are creating cloud communities, virtual nations. Once they have access to land, they will get their citizens to migrate to that city. 

Have a look at the pledge that you sign when you join Praxis, which you can join right now, by the way. 

Pronomous isn't actually Peter [00:33:00] Thiel's first flirtation with exiting democracy either. In 2009, he funded the Seasteading Institute. 

PETER THIEL: I want to say some things on why I think seasteading is not just possible or desirable, but why it is actually necessary. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: The Seasteading Institute envisioned building these floating cities in the ocean outside of government's jurisdiction, where billionaires could live and create as they saw fit.

This idea ran out of steam because nobody wants to live at sea, especially not billionaires. Which means they need land. But how do we get from a nation state to a network state? 

BALAJI SRINIVASAN: And this is actually related to a fundamental concept in political science, the concept of voice versus exit. If a company or a country is in decline, you can try voice, or you can try exit. Voice is basically changing the system from within, whereas exit is leaving to create a new system, a new startup, or to join a competitor sometimes. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: There's another way that Balaji also talks about how this could possibly happen. He calls it tech [00:34:00] Zionism. 

BALAJI SRINIVASAN: You know, what I'm really calling for is something like tech Zionism: a movement supported by a global network to take back territory in the city, floor by floor, street by street, block by block, policeman by policeman. You have a foothold of private property, and you have a group membership of grey tribe membership and private property. You also issue t shirts. 

The tribal lens is like a virtual reality filter. Every single thing can be tagged as grey or blue in the city. I mean like literally. So grey is the future, red is the past, blue is the present. So blue stands against both the past and the future. They're against both the self driving cars and they don't want to go back to the 50s. They prefer OnlyFans, MeToo, BLM, Ukraine.

The hard part is to take control of the streets. How can you fence off a street, and make clear that it's under gray control? Take total control of your neighborhood, push out all blues, tell them they're as unwelcome as just as [00:35:00] blues ethnically cleanse me out of San Francisco, push out all blues who has lost some territory in the cloud.

They still control the land. Once gray starts taking back control of the land that they're really going to howl. As they start losing, they're going to whistle for backup. From California and eventually DC. Okay. They're going to try to get executive orders or things like that, which means you're going to need to have sympathizers at the level of California and DC, who will side with you enough to block those actions, number one. And, or number two, You, actually get to the level of a sanctuary city and you say, I dare you. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Keep in mind, actions like this are already being attempted in places like Solano County where they're trying to build California Forever. Or the actions that Gary Tan is taking in San Francisco. But the people in these areas are putting up a fight and it's costly and it's slowing everything down.

Why the Tech Bros Allied with Trump - Zeteo - Air Date 2-2-25

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, MEHDI UNFILTERED: You mentioned Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world, owner of the most influential messaging platform on the planet, and is now an official American government advisor. [00:36:00] Is there a precedent, Heather, for someone like Elon Musk in American history? The Rockefellers, Henry Ford, none of them come close, do they? Is there anyone like Musk that we've seen before in American history? 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: We can point to people for sure. You think about the elite southern slavers, they had their advisers, people like William McKinley and before him, Benjamin Harrison had Andrew Carnegie. I mean, you certainly had these people, but there's a really big difference between them and somebody like the tech bros that we're talking about, like Elon Musk, who, first of all, has at his disposal, apparently now the most powerful government in the world.

When we talk about Andrew Carnegie, for example, the US government is important in America, it's not terribly important in the rest of the world at that point. We don't yet have a big global footprint and we won't until really after World War II. 

So there's that problem, there is also the problem that even though Carnegie did write for the papers or some of the later people in the 1920s had some media [00:37:00] reach, we have the problem of the fact that these tech bros have control over very large digital platforms that determine many of the ways in which we live. They also determine our public speech, and that is truly frightening. 

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, MEHDI UNFILTERED: It is truly frightening, and this is the era we're entering now, and in many ways, it is sui generis. As you point out, America wasn't like America before. There were figures like Musk, but not quite like Musk, and Trump is Trump, and that's where you and I agree a lot. 

During the first Trump presidency, a lot of people looked to historians, scholars of fascism for context, for history, and this is not a country, let's be honest Heather, and I say this as an American citizen who's an immigrant from abroad, this is not a country that really studies history very closely or has a long memory. There's a real goldfish tendency to a lot of Americans. 

So people like yourself and Kevin Cruz and others, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a good friend of mine, became very prominent during the Trump era for giving historical context from both [00:38:00] other countries and the US, got big followings. And then you got critics as well, as is the nature of things. They call you Twitterstorians, dismissively, or resistance historians. And the argument against people like yourself, and I wanted to get your response, is that you give Democrats a pass and suggest Donald Trump is an aberration in US history, when in actual fact, he's a product of bipartisan US institutions and of American capitalism. What is your response to people who say that? 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Well, first of all, I would not say that he is completely divorced from American history at all. I have argued just the opposite, that he is a continuation of the Republican rhetoric since the 1980s. But I think you're asking a larger question and that is... There are two larger questions there.

The touchstone for me is not partisanship, it's not Democrats or Republicans, it is who is currently a threat to American democracy. And that right now is the MAGA party, which I've said repeatedly is not the same thing [00:39:00] as traditional Republicans. I can't speak for other historians, but that to me is what's really at stake here. Not Republicans or Democrats or Independents or any political party.

MEHDI HASAN - HOST, MEHDI UNFILTERED: Democracy itself you're focused on. 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Yes, and the principles of our foundational documents. But I think there's a larger question there for the profession, and that is, there's two ways to look at what we do as scholars, not as teachers, which I think is a third question. And that is, do you support a political party, which is something that someone like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. insisted was the case. That, in fact, historians should throw their weight, in his case, with the Democratic Party because that was the wave of the future. Or should you do what somebody like John Hope Franklin argued very well, I think, in The Historian, should you try to identify what historians actually do, which is the patterns of American, in this case, history, to illuminate the present without taking a side, necessarily. 

And people disagree about that. And people who, I respect a lot [00:40:00] disagree about that, but I'm with John Hope Franklin on that, that what we do as historians is we say, here's some patterns and here are the patterns that may or may not have resonance today, and that doesn't suggest that any historian has a monopoly on those. 

So we have different ways. We look at the world. And I would suggest that. The more voices we get not only from history, but also from literature and from art and from music from American culture in ways that has tended to be neglected over the last several decades is really valuable, because people might listen to me and think, "Oh, man, she's nailed that pattern, it's really great. This is the way I should think about the world," and somebody else is going to say "she is completely out to lunch. She has completely missed this issue that is much more important." And neither one of those are necessarily wrong. They need to be in dialogue with each other. 

And I love that we are now listening to voices again that for so long just simply, we're getting no traction at all in popular America. I laugh a little bit at the idea [00:41:00] we got huge followings because we still are historians. It is really shocking to me. The degree to which so many people who simply paid no attention to history at all before this moment, literally paid no attention to history at all before this moment are waking up and saying, maybe William McKinley matters. Why does he matter? And that I think is very healthy because until the 1960s people did read history, they did care about his they learned quite a bit about it, and I think it really matters.

President Trump and the Power of the Purse - Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie - Air Date 2-5-25

JAMELLE BOUIE - HOST, TAKES™ BY JAMELLE BOUIE: However all of this ends, it should be emphasized that the president has no authority to do any of this. And he has sent us headlong into a genuine constitutional crisis. To specify, the president has no legal authority to freeze, suspend, or what's called impound congressional. appropriations. It is true that there is a 1974 law, the Impoundment Control Act, which sets up a set of procedures by which the president can request to Congress rescission of [00:42:00] funds, meaning just withdrawing funds or reallocation of funds, but it's a very specific process. It's usually based on a rationale like "Oh, I found a more efficient way to do something for you." And in fact, when supporters of the idea of an impoundment power say that, Oh, it's happened before what they're specifically referring to is a circumstance in the 1800s when Thomas Jefferson as president spent less than what was appropriated because he found a cheaper way to do it.

But even in whatever circumstances are outlined by the law, the president still has to contact Congress, explain to Congress what the president is doing, and give a timeline for when the funds are going to be used. Any attempt to impound funds outside of the parameters set by this law is on its face constitutional for the very, very simple reason that the Constitution gives Congress the full and unambiguous power of the purse. It is, in fact, the very first power enumerated under Article 1, Section 8, "the Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, in post and excises to [00:43:00] pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."

The issue of an impoundment has come up before it came up during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Nixon, certainly a great American hero, wanted to stop spending congressionally authorized funds, and various legal authorities popped up to say, no, you can't really do that. And in 1988, the Justice Department's office of legal counsel even put out a memo kind of reflecting. past empowerment controversies and stating outright that this power simply doesn't exist for the simple reason that it would contradict and undermine the constitutional structure itself.

It would be anomalous, said the Justice Department, for the president to both take care to execute the laws as per the Take Care Clause of the constitution, but also declined to execute the laws as Congress set forth. You can't really do both. You have to choose one or the other, and the constitution clearly lays out that the president's job is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, which is generally understood to mean the [00:44:00] president has to execute the laws as Congress writes them, unless Congress provides the executive with discretion as to how the laws are going to be executed. 

Now there's the plain text and logic of the constitution that makes clear that impoundment is not a thing a president can do, but you can also look at the history of the constitution to make clear that impoundment is not a thing the president can do. During the fight for ratification, when supporters and opponents of the constitution battled it out in ratification conventions across the 13 states, supporters of the constitution had an answer for those who worried that the constitution gave entirely too much power to the president. "The purse is in the hands of the representatives of the people," said James Madison at the Virginia ratifying convention, responding to Patrick Henry's fears of military despotism. "They have all the appropriation of all monies." Of all money, this is a funny way to say that, yeah. 

Alexander Hamilton made a similar point when speaking at the New York Ratification Convention. "We have heard a great deal of the sword and the purse. Let us [00:45:00] see what is the true meaning of this maxim, which has been so much used and so little understood. It is that you shall not place those powers, either in the legislative or executive singly. Neither one nor the other shall have both, because this would destroy that division of powers in which political liberty is founded. It would furnish one body with all the means of tyranny. But where the purse is lodged in one branch and the sword in another, there can be no danger."

The principal aim of the 1787 constitution was to secure the future of Republican government in the United States. It's lowercase R republican, not the political party, but the notion of self government. Of self government bounded by rules and institutions. Of self government defined by scheme of representation. Of self government that rests on the virtue of the people. Of self government that is defined by separation of powers, and institutions that are meant to make sure that no one particular force can irrigate all the power to itself.

And this is not just me [00:46:00] speaking here, Republican political theory at the time insisted on "the separate and distinct exercise of the different power of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty," that's James Madison, again. 

The president may have wide authority to act across a number of areas, but the one thing the president cannot do is unilaterally decide what to spend and how much to spend. President cannot spend any more or less than what Congress mandates without the explicit approval of Congress. 

I'm going to quote Madison again, this time from Federalist number 58 written to the New York ratification convention to persuade them of supporting the "this power over the purse," wrote Madison, "may in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people for obtaining a redress of every grievance and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure." 

To upset this balance of power, to, in effect, give the president the power of the purse, [00:47:00] is to fundamentally unsettle and unravel the constitutional system of the United States. The system as it exists is built on the idea that these things are separate, that they have to be separate in order to preserve liberty and freedom.

A Congress that cannot force an executive to abide by its spending decisions is a Congress whose power of the purse is a nullity. It doesn't matter. It effectively doesn't exist. It's not there. So if you read the memo announcing the freeze or the pause or whatever, it stated this was necessary so that officials could align their objectives with those of the President's will. And you see this type of phrasing all over the Trump government, that the president's will must be obeyed, that we must follow the president's will. But wait a sec. Let's hold up. Let's, let's stop. 

In the American system of government, the president's will doesn't direct the government. The people who serve the government don't pledge an oath to the President, they pledge an oath to the Constitution and to the [00:48:00] American people. Everyone who serves in the government, career and political appointees alike, have a duty to obey the law and to follow the constitution. There is no mechanism in our system by which the mystical authority of the people flows into the President and gives the president sovereign authority over everyone. It doesn't happen, that's not the United States system of government. 

President is a servant of the constitution, bound by its demands. Most Presidents in our history have understood this, even when they pushed for more and greater authority. But not Trump. He sees no distinction between himself and the office, and he sees the office as a grant of unlimited power. Or, as he once said, 

DONALD TRUMP: an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as President, but I don't even talk about that. 

It's a thing called Article 2. Nobody ever mentions Article 2. 

More importantly, Article 2 allows me to do whatever I want. 

JAMELLE BOUIE - HOST, TAKES™ BY JAMELLE BOUIE: The freeze, the Elon Musk shenanigans, all of this is an [00:49:00] attempt to make this a reality. He wants to take the power of the purse for himself. He wants to make the Constitution a grant of absolute authority. For lack of a better term, he wants to be a king. And the big question facing this country is if we're gonna let him make himself a king, or if we're gonna try to do something about it.

Note from the Editor on the dream of the accelerationists

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Double Down News laying out the need for mass movements to unseat oligarchy. Democracy Now! explained the state capture coup currently being undertaken. Velshi spoke with Robert Reich about understanding the nature and sources of power today. Blonde Politics laid out the tech bro's plan for the collapse of society. Zeteo stressed the importance of having an historical understanding of the influence of the super wealthy. And Takes by Jamelle Bouie explained the constitutionally prescribed roles of Congress and the presidency that Trump is attempting to steamroll.

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section. 

But first, [00:50:00] a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get access to bonus episodes and enjoy all of our shows without ads. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support (there's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. And as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

And we're trying something new, offering you the opportunity to submit your comments or questions on upcoming topics, so you can join the conversation as it happens. Next up, we'll be taking a broader look at Trump's efforts to simply break the government in as many ways as he can, followed by the dystopian plans for Trump's deportation regime. So get your comments and questions in for those topics now. You can leave us a voicemail or send us a text at [00:51:00] 202-999-3991. We're also now findable on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01. There's a link in the show notes for that. Or you can simply email me to [email protected]. 

Now as for today's topic, I feel like the search for hope for a continuing semi-functioning democracy is coming from darker and darker places these days. For years, since the Bernie or Bust movement of 2016, I have been arguing against the philosophy of accelerationism, though I didn't always know it by that term.

In essence, there are those generally on the left who don't personally believe in the philosophy of burning the government to the ground, who nonetheless believe in accelerating its demise, mostly through the election of far-right candidates, in order to 1) have the opportunity to rebuild something better from the ashes of the destructive right wing policies; and [00:52:00] 2) demonstrate for the masses the horror of electing the far right in a sort of slingshot maneuver that will swing the pendulum all the way back to the far left, so that socialism can finally be ushered in.

Like I said, I've been arguing against this idea for nearly a decade, because I find it morally unjustifiable when you consider the near certainty of the predicted destruction and suffering that ushering in right wing policies will bring, and the extremely uncertain hope that it will lead to a sufficient backlash that will bring the left back into power to rebuild from those very predictable ashes. 

That said, It's no longer a philosophical hypothetical. Accelerationism and the destruction of the fundamental rule of law, along with various pillars of government structure, are being dismantled as we speak. And so, now we get to see what happens.

At the very least, It is everyone's duty to highlight the [00:53:00] destruction in personally resonant ways to your friends and neighbors so that people understand the damage being done on a personal and visceral level. Those are the building blocks for the backlash that we desperately need to materialize. Not just protests and demands of elected Democrats to do what they can to minimize the damage, but the long term movement building that will fundamentally change electoral politics going forward.

People need to become and stay outraged at the destruction of the rule of law and our government systems, but that will only happen if they understand the connections to their own lives and the lives of people they know personally. Sad but true. 

The upside is that we are finally living in the accelerationist playbook, and the far right is doing exactly what they want with very little restriction on their power. Therefore, the damage will be as obvious and as clear as any accelerationist could have ever hoped in order to demonstrate to low information [00:54:00] voters the cost of electing Republicans and making as clear of a case as possible for a change in direction to allow the left to be the ones rebuilding from the ashes. 

And that is what qualifies for hope these days.

SECTION A: HISTORICAL CONTEXT

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics. Next up, Section A: Historical Context, followed by Section B: Government Destruction, and Section C: The Bros.

What Aristotle Knew About Oligarchy That We Forgot - Legendary Lore - Air Date 9-11-24

HOST, LEGENDARY LORE: In an oligarchy, focus shifts from the welfare of the community to the interests of the rulers themselves. It's no longer about who is most capable or most dedicated to the common good, but about who has the most money or property.

In aristocracy, leaders are chosen based on their ability to govern well and their commitment to the public interest. In oligarchy, the path to power is paved with gold, and the purpose of rule becomes the preservation and expansion of the ruler's wealth and influence. This transformation doesn't happen overnight.

It's a gradual process from usually [00:55:00] polity, democracy, or aristocracy, and often subtle at first. Perhaps wealth starts as just one factor among many in selecting leaders, but over time, it becomes the dominant or even sole criterion. Or maybe virtuous leaders slowly begin to prioritize their own interests over those of the community.

Aristotle noted that oligarchies, like tyrannies, are forms of government where power is used to benefit those in control, rather than the broader community. So both systems are self serving, but while tyranny is ruled by one person and his close circle, an oligarchy is ruled by a few more individuals.

But more importantly, tyrants often rely on military force, whereas oligarchs first and foremost gain and maintain their power through their wealth. This is sometimes written into the law, but often it's just based on informal influence, which leads to laws and policies that favour the wealthy. The main point is that power is kept within the wealthy few, either through high property [00:56:00] qualifications for holding office, or by making the process of running for office too expensive for most people.

This financial control allows them to operate within existing legal and political systems, manipulating these systems to suit their needs. This gives oligarchies an appearance of legitimacy, making them seem more stable than tyrannies, but Aristotle still considered them unstable at their core.

Oligarchs are skilled at using their political power to protect and grow their wealth. They might pass laws that give them lucrative government contracts, protect business monopolies, or create regulations that limit competition. These tactics can sometimes lead to supreme oligarchy, where the wealthy have unchecked power and ignore any appearance of cultural or constitutional limits.

In these cases, decisions are made solely for the benefit of the ruling elite, rather than for the good of society. This disregard for the common good is another trait that oligarchies share with tyrannies, making them similarly dangerous to a state's stability. Also like [00:57:00] tyrants, oligarchs tend to distrust the general population.

They might disarm the common people and hire foreign mercenaries to guard against potential uprisings. This reflects their very real fear of losing control, leading them to keep the poor at bay, sometimes even pushing them out of cities by making urban living too expensive or taking more direct measures to maintain their grip on power.

Aristotle pointed out that oligarchy isn't a single uniform system, but rather a spectrum with different types. On one end, there are extreme forms where only the very richest have power. In other forms, a small, powerful minority controls the government, and while it might seem open to those with modest wealth, it remains firmly in the hands of a gate keeping in a circle.

So how do these oligarchies come to power? Aristotle explained that it often starts with a gradual shift. A small group of people begin to accumulate more wealth, which in turn allows them to gain more political influence. As their power grows, they shape policies and [00:58:00] institutions in ways that further increase their wealth, creating a cycle where wealth leads to power and power leads to more wealth.

A system that seems democratic or aristocratic can start to slide into oligarchy without most people noticing. Over time, certain signs become clearer. The wealthiest begin to control all key government roles and institutions. Merit and ability become less important than wealth for gaining leadership positions.

And the idea that economic inequality also justifies political inequality becomes more accepted. Once an oligarchy is established, the people in power use several tactics to keep their hold on power. First, they use state power to keep class distinctions in place, reinforcing social barriers that prevent people from moving up.

This might involve controlling the education system to ensure that only their children can afford the opportunities for leadership roles or enacting laws that make it harder for those born into lower classes to build wealth or social status. [00:59:00] Gradually, oligarchies take control over the legal system and law making process.

They shape laws to serve their interests, often claiming they are just protecting property rights or maintaining economic stability. This can mean taxes that benefit the wealthy, or regulations that protect their businesses from competition. Eventually, the wealthy begin to exert influence over all crucial aspects of society, perhaps the primary industries, major trade routes, or the means of cultural production.

Furthermore, oligarchies rely on strong alliances among elites. These aren't just political alliances, but also social and economic connections, like intermarriage between powerful families, shared business interests, and exclusive clubs. These connections create a tightly knit ruling class that works together to maintain its control.

Over time, this concentration of power and wealth often leads to a decline in public virtue, where personal gain takes priority over the common good among all members of [01:00:00] society. At this point, you might be wondering how these ancient insights apply to the world around us. While Aristotle was examining the city states of ancient Greece, his observations on oligarchy were remarkably astute, and perhaps relevant to a few other societies throughout history.

Welcome to the new American oligarchy: Trump’s rise was decades in the making - Velshi - Air Date 1-26-25

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Perhaps no image so powerfully encapsulates the nation's 47th presidency of the United States. Rows of seated billionaires, the wealthiest incoming cabinet in U. S. history. Formally ushered into power, the combined personal worth, not the market value of the stock of the companies they lead. I'm talking about the actual personal net worth of the billionaires seen in this image is estimated to be nearly 1 trillion.

According to Forbes, the message seems to be welcome to the new American oligarchy. This billionaire flex is a stark and damning illustration of the role that extreme wealth plays in Donald Trump's orbit. But understanding how we got here and how to rise from it requires us to zoom out from this image [01:01:00] and this moment.

President Trump is the inevitable outcome of forces that were set in motion some 50 years ago, maybe even longer. His ascendancy marks the apex of laissez faire economics. A philosophy that argues for minimal government intervention in the economy, what we think of as the free and largely unregulated market system.

That, combined with pivotal Supreme Court rulings that lifted sensible restraints on corporate political spending. Together, these forces set America on a path toward oligarchy. Trump recognized the brokenness of our system, and then moved in to capitalize on it. Investopedia defines an oligarch as a person or of a quote, ruling class of individuals who amassed great wealth or status and who exert power over the highest government circles.

Starting in 1976, the Supreme Court's landmark decision in the campaign finance case Buckley v. Vallejo unleashed a torrent of political spending by wealthy individuals. [01:02:00] In that case, the high court determined that limits on election spending were unconstitutional. Opening the door for the ultra rich to spend as much as they want on their own campaigns.

34 years later, the Supreme Court would go one step further in Citizens United, granting corporations First Amendment rights. Meaning that their political spending was protected as a form of free speech. Essentially opening the door to unlimited election spending. With a single ruling, the Supreme Court dismantled over a century of federal restrictions designed to shield our political systems from the corrupting influence of extreme wealth.

The damage to our democratic institutions cannot be overstated. Dark money flooded our politics. Politicians became more beholden than they had been to moneyed interests. rather than to their voters. A handful of unelected judges essentially gutted the fundamental principle of one person, one vote, forcing your individual vote to compete against billions of dollars from industries whose interests [01:03:00] often conflict with those of the working and middle class.

Meanwhile, a new economic philosophy emerged in the 1980s, one that prioritized free and unregulated markets, a seismic shift that would usher in historic levels of inequality. Deregulation across multiple administrations brought prosperity to the wealthiest, while the rest of America experienced stagnant or even declining incomes when you account for inflation.

And that brings us to today. Today, just a tiny sliver of the country controls the overwhelming majority of wealth in this nation. According to a Congressional Budget Office report from October, the country's top 10 percent maintains a majority of the wealth in the United States. The top 1% Controls nearly a third of it.

What effect does control of the money class over politics have on us? Well, today the word care in American healthcare has been stripped of all compassion with insurance companies routinely putting profits over [01:04:00] people. According to an FTC report from last week, some of the nation's largest health insurance companies profited from prescription price hikes of 1, 000 percent or more.

Today, health insurers interrupt doctors in the middle of surgery to question their patients coverage, as a Texas physician detailed in an Instagram video earlier this month. Today, so called food barons dominate our food industry, where just a handful of megacorporations control every link. of the food supply chain as an investigation by the Guardian and Food and Water Watch revealed in 2021.

Today, a monopoly of home builders is worsening the housing shortage in the United States, pushing home ownership further out of reach for the average American. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, tackling America's housing crisis will require taking on these monopolies. Decades of laissez faire policies have completely shattered the American dream for the nations working in middle class.

Oxfam America puts it [01:05:00] bluntly. Today, the top 0. 01 percent of giant corporations have rigged the rules so drastically that some billionaires end up paying 0 percent in taxes. Nothing. Instead, working families are bearing more than their fair share of the tax burden. As a result of all of this, 46 percent of America's middle class say they have no choice but to scale back or suspend their retirement plans, according to a Primerica report, and now need to rely on staying healthy enough to work more years than they had initially planned.

Those economic forces, combined with key Supreme Court rulings, have collectively laid the groundwork for the seismic shift in power that we are witnessing today. Notably, today's equivalent of the robber barons not only control vast streams of wealth and production. but also the flow of information, possibly making them an even greater threat to our democratic institutions and public welfare.

The tech industrial complex, as Biden called it, now seems to function as an [01:06:00] unofficial propaganda arm of the Trump administration, cloaking its actions in the language of economic populism and even democratic rights as the oligarchy prepares to strip America for its parts. Zuckerberg, for instance, frames crucial and much needed regulation of the tech industry as an infringement of the constitutional right to free speech.

As our nation enters this new chapter, we at Velshi remain committed to providing you with clarity amid the smoke screens of deception and holding to account the tech industrial complex that now occupies the halls of American power. We will closely track these threats to our democratic institutions and to America's working and middle class, these threats to you and your livelihood and your prosperity.

And we will hold those who are using their economic power to undermine yours. to account. Everybody uses the word oligarchy now, but what we are seeing is its manifestation. We are seeing the ways in which the powerful make decisions without [01:07:00] shame that influence policies that affect the prosperity of the average American.

THOM HARTMANN: Absolutely. The book was published four years ago, by the way, and and not much has changed. It's gotten worse. Um, what's interesting, Allie, is that starting in 71 with the Paul memo, which really kicked this off. And then, of course, the Reagan revolution. But, you know, as you mentioned, the Supreme Court in 86 ruling that money isn't actually money.

It's actually speech, and therefore it's protected by the First Amendment when it's given to politicians. And then Lewis Powell himself, two years later, in 78 authoring the Pilate decision. That was an entirely Republican appointee decision, as was Citizens United. I think it's important to note. That these are entirely Republican efforts that that the consequence of all this has been that the Democratic Party has been focusing on elections.

They've been focusing on Congress and the White House, and the Republican Party has been [01:08:00] focusing on the courts and on the media, buying up media, like, there's no tomorrow and and packing the courts, realizing that if you, if you control the courts in the media, you can control the elections. And then thus the elected bodies, and that's pretty much where we are right now.

This is the 2nd time we've seen this in America. The 1st time was in the period from the 1830s to the 1860s in the old South, where a group of plantation owners as a result of a technological innovation. You know, the kind of the tech bros of their time, um, started using this device called called a cotton gin.

Eli Whitney had invented in 17 89 and it could do the work of 50 people. And so a small number of very large plantations were able to just wipe out all of their competitors over this 20 30 year period and ended up ruling the south with an absolute iron fist, ending democracy, controlling the courts and controlling all the newspaper.

Any, any [01:09:00] newspaper publisher who took them on could find himself hanged. And, uh, you know, we ended up fighting a civil war over that little brush with oligarchy. 

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: You know, we've gotten to an interesting place. The, the, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist and billionaire, Nick Hanauer, who's a, a sort of an activist, has recently explained how the wealthy deploy propaganda to justify this consolidation of power.

And he, he talks about a specific refrain that we've, uh, Often heard from the corporate sector, he says. The one thing I've come up against so many times in my career working on economic policy is it's a job killer. How many times have you heard that? If you raise taxes on the rich, it'll kill jobs. If you regulate big corporations, it'll kill jobs.

If you raise wages for working people, it'll kill jobs. We live in a world that has turned so upside down by this market fundamentalist framework that anything you propose that will improve the lives of middle class or working people has to affirmatively prove that it will do no harm. But anything good that happens to the truly rich is an unalloyed good.

So infinite bonuses on Wall Street are a sign of economic growth [01:10:00] and success, but a tiny increase in the minimum wage is a very dangerous job killer. I mean, that's become the reality of the discourse these days, Tom. 

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, and Nick is a good guy, uh, you know, in his participation with patriotic millionaires and, um, but it's absolutely the case.

And which another book I wrote, The Hidden History of American Monopoly, um, what we've seen since Reagan in 1983 essentially directed the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice to dial back on their enforcement of the antitrust laws. Um, you know, we had kind of, uh, during the Industrial Revolution, the 18, yeah, the 1870s, 80s, 90s.

Um, Senator Sherman of Ohio introduced the Sherman Antitrust Act, and, and that was passed in 1881, as I recall, but it really didn't get enforced until Teddy Roosevelt became president in 1901. And, and, uh, you know, the, the, the consequence of Reagan and, and, and for all [01:11:00] that time from then until the Reagan revolution, we were actually enforcing the antitrust laws.

There were two other ones, the Clayton Antitrust Act in 27 and 1 56, and the reso, and in fact the Supreme Court in 1965. ruled that it was illegal for Buster Brown and Kenny Shoes to join because the resulting company would control 5 percent of the shoe market. 5%? Today just Nike controls 19%. Yeah. I mean it's, so what we're seeing is just this absolute seizure of American business by these giant monopolies.

It's massive.

America Fought a Revolution to Stop Kings! Trump Just Gave Oligarchs Their Throne Back - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 2-4-25

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: The author of the Declaration of Independence, you know, that guy, uh, went to great lengths on numerous occasions, I wrote a book about this, to point out that when he and his colleagues started the United States of America, they were explicitly rejecting in favor of an early form of democracy.

The men, and they were all men back then. Who drove the three historic tyrannies kings, theocrats and oligarchs, autocrats Popes, and the [01:12:00] morbidly rich. Basically, for 2000 years before Jefferson and Washington and Hamilton, and Payne, and Adams and Revere and their colleagues created a checks and balances system of Republican democracy.

Every country in the world was ruled by one of those three by a king, a pope, or an oli, or a theocrat, or the rich. And today, of the 167 countries on Earth, only 74 are democracies and only 24 are full democracies. And now, because of the Republican Party, America stands on the verge of losing that status.

Theocrats have seized control of our Supreme Court, gutting the rights of women and religious, racial, and gender minorities. Members of the House and Senate are so terrified of the oligarchs funding primary challenges against them, that it's been over 40 years since any major legislation has passed fulfilling the wishes of the majority of Americans.

And on top of that, now we have, now we're hearing reports that many Republicans are [01:13:00] explicitly telling reporters on the, on the, on the QT. You know, don't quote me, but telling reporters that they are worried about physical violence against themselves and their families from the people that Trump let out of prison if they vote against Trump.

I mean, that's wild. That's wild. And our White House today, you know, that's, that's your king, right? And, and those are your oligarchs. And our White House today is occupied by a billionaire who believes himself to be a king or appears to, you know, Trump's attack on our democracy is an old story. It's played out repeatedly in various countries by every generation in the past two centuries.

And it follows an absolute playbook. There are four aspects for, uh, what would you call them? Department systems. Um, of governance, at least in our form of Republican democracy. And that's small, our Republican, a [01:14:00] democracy within a Republic as conservatives love to cite. And those four things are the legislative article, one of the constitution, the executive, the president article two of the constitution, the judiciary article three of the constitution and the press, the first amendment to the constitution, four branches essentially.

While Democrats have been, over the last 50 years, have been focusing their efforts on, you know, electoral politics, on seizing control of the judici of the, excuse me, of the legislative and the executive branches, the right wing billionaires who wanted to take over America, and now appear to have succeeded, or are very close to having succeeded, they focused their efforts where they didn't have to win elections, uh, other than occasionally, where really they could just do it with money.

And that is corrupting the judiciary and seizing [01:15:00] control of the press. Building their own press systems. 1, 500 right wing radio stations, 3 right wing television stations, Fox so called news, uh, Twitter and Facebook, you know, tilting hard to the right. And that, by the way, is a pattern. In other words, first take down the press and seize the judiciary.

Then you can attack the, you know, the elected branches. All you want, I mean, all you need to do is get elected to the executive branch and then you can just basically neuter, castrate the, the, the, uh, the legislative branch. This is exactly what Viktor Orban did in Hungary. This is exactly what, uh, Vladimir Putin did in Russia.

It is, it is what, uh, Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela. It's what Alexander Vucic did in Serbia. It's what Robert Vico did in Serbia, in Slovakia, excuse me. You know, his, [01:16:00] you had Mitch McConnell steal two Supreme Court seats and give them to Donald Trump. And so we've, you know, and, and you've got this huge, you know, billion dollar funded massive machine to, to indoctrinate and, and move, you know, right wingers, fans of oligarchy into our court system.

And you have this huge right wing media machine. They've launched now, and now Trump is trying to, you know, really nail this stuff down. He is launching lawsuits against, uh, uh, C-B-S-A-B-C-N-B-C, uh, Robert Carr, his, or, uh, Brendan Carr, I believe his name is. The, uh, the, the head of the Federal Communications Commission has announced that he's going to launch an, that he is launching an investigation into NPR and Public Broadcasting, uh, PBS into them for breaking the law by accepting, uh, commercials.[01:17:00] 

I mean, this, if they can take down NPR and, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, if they can take them down or just intimidate them, you've already got, you know, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post on your side. You've got the Wall Street Journal, the, the New York Post, the Fox News, all, all the, you know, the right wing media that I just described, you've got all that on your side.

And they can cause all of the major national media, you know, the, the three big television networks and, and CNN and MSNBC and everybody else to basically. freak out and shut up under threat of lawsuit, then they can continue. Now, the good news here is that there are two countries that have seen their democracies under attack by oligarchs and wannabe kings,

who have reclaimed their democracy. The first was Poland. And the reason why is because 70 percent of the independent media in Poland [01:18:00] stayed independent, even after Duda took over and, uh, you know, president Duda and, and, and, uh, started attacking the media and because they had an independent media and the elections in 2023, they went back to democracy.

Poland did the other country is South Korea. And again, president Yoon did not. had not succeeded in nailing down the media first. And that's why he's sitting in a jail cell right now, rather than being the dictator of South Korea, which was his goal. So here we are. Jefferson was right. Without a free press, you can't have a functioning democracy.

And, uh, Republicans, and Trump in particular, are doing everything they can to intimidate our press, to seize our press, to bring our independent press under control. And I'm telling you, you know, this is the independent press right here.

Trump’s Administrative Coup w/ David Cobb & Kali Akuno - Jacobin Radio - Air Date 2-4-25

MELEIZA FIGUEROA - HOST, JACOBIN RADIO: We've had several, uh, shows on this program talking about traditional ecological knowledge, [01:19:00] talking about Indigenous relationship with the world and to, you know, just for our listeners to, to understand too, because there's a whole like story in society that, you know, life before industrial capitalism was just nasty, brutish and short, you know, you have a lot of folks talking about, oh, there's just going to be wars over resources and just repeating the prejudice that we've been taught that pre colonial societies were So You know, stone age prehistoric and that to adopt any part of that, going back to some kind of imagined caveman existence or something like that.

I mean, there's that bias and, you know, one of the things I have learned over my many years of working with indigenous communities is that these lands were lands of abundance before industrial capitalism devastated lands around the world. And so, um, it is possible. To live in abundance, it is possible that we don't need capitalism, or actually we, we should actually [01:20:00] just overcome it, right, um, in order to bring it into balance, but this thing that you're both highlighting about techno feudalism is Incredibly salient in this moment where Elon Musk is literally taking the reins of the government's fiscal system.

Like literally the, the government agency that writes the checks is being taken over by, by Musk lackeys. And then we also have this, uh, this battle now, this global battle over AI. And which, you know, the, the release of deep seek, the, the sort of on the cheap 50 times better AI model that China put out, which of course is not ecologically viable either.

But what it revealed, I think was just the dependence of the US economy on technological primacy and what, what they were hoping to do in the AI field. And Trump even signed an executive order protecting the US' [01:21:00] primacy. Um, in this field. Kali, I know you've, you've referenced many times a really deep cut Dune reference, which as a sci fi fan, I really appreciate.

And that's Butlerian Jihad, which for the record has nothing to do with either Islam or Judith Butler. But if you want to talk about that, talk about, we're going to pivot right now to like, kind of what, what you all are doing, what needs to be done, how we extricate ourselves from this. 21st century Gordian knot.

So let's go from there and then go into the grassroots infrastructure that you all are building and hope to build and are starting to build at scale. 

KALI AKUNO: Let me start with the Butlerian Jihad piece. I would encourage everyone to do a deeper dive in the work of Frank Herbert and Dune. The Butlerian Jihad is a term that comes out of his work, a concept that comes out of his work, wherein he envisioned a world where in, uh, what we would [01:22:00] call AI, what he called thinking computers, uh, had taken over the kind of vast expanse of humanity in his, his, uh, books.

By that time, humanity expanded to large sections of our galaxy. And these computers took over and for a period of time, uh, they got to a period where they were basically running all of society and dictating to humanity what humanity would do and started enslaving, uh, large sections of humanity. And, uh, there was a revolution to move them, to displace them from controlling Butlerian Jihad.

And that ushered in this, uh, Kind of a new era where humans had to kind of perfect their own skills and talents, uh, in order to do the things that they were dependent upon machines doing. So intense calculations, for instance, for space travel and managing society, et cetera. But I want you to read it, not just because of that.

That's a particular novelty, but I think You know, why I've been getting into it so much the past couple years. I read it as a kid and [01:23:00] it interests me, uh, always was dear to my heart, but I think he was on to something deeper about how the present era, and he was writing this primarily in the 60s, 60s and 70s, how we look when we look at it.

You know, a Donald Trump or we look at, uh, Erdogan or a Modi or I can go on a site, many, but we look at how this fascist order is being kind of organized. And you got folks, intellectual folks who are now even openly arguing, getting printed in the New York times and the New York and mainstream press.

Arguing that we need to return to monarchy and just call it a questionable and it's becoming mainstream currency We're moving back towards this feudal era That I think Giannis Varoufakis who kind of coined the term techno feudalism kind of harking to And I think this book The book series and the work that he was underscoring leads us in this direction to provide us an analysis of what we need to do and to come back to this reference upon [01:24:00] how do we perfect our skills as human beings and make deeper connections within that.

Uh, to liberate ourselves. Now, there's some aspects about, you know, the breeding program and stuff of like the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. I'm not an advocate of that, but I do think it's some of the work that we've been trying to do in PNLL. We're trying to harken back towards what can our communities do with the resources and skills and talents that we have that don't necessarily require.

Huge amounts of capital infusion and definitely don't require the permission of those who would be our overlords to kind of execute to build a transformative program in our local communities based upon local connections. Uh, local care work and has productivity in local scales and in deep democracy in local skills.

Uh, this is what, you know, with cooperation Jackson, we called it a build and fight program of adoption extension of that within a PNLL. Uh, and it fundamentally entails, you know, starting [01:25:00] with mutual aid, uh, social reproduction and care work as a base level of, of connection that we want to make to re instill, uh, the Solidarity within our communities connections within our communities and meeting each other's fundamental needs, but also, you know, coming up with a clear determination of what each other needs.

So we can try to produce for that leads to the 2nd point, which is dependent upon a program around land decommodification, if not decolonialization as a further step, ultimate step. For us, it's a way to get to building a program of food sovereignty, right? Starting with producing enough of food security in our communities, but getting to a level where we are producing the essential food stuffs and required pieces that we need to ensure the stability of our communities and make sure that everybody has enough food.

And we are, we can do that within the abundance that you spoken to, uh, mail around really learning our bio regions and what they can do and sustain [01:26:00] in order to, to build a program of regeneration, regenerating our soils, replanting, you know, kind of a native flora and fauna to do the, the deep healing that we need, uh, and put ourselves in right perspective as a, as a second piece of that.

Uh, and then the other core components are doing the work or self organization on a mass scale. If that's, you know, building trade unions to be, to have more aggregate power to ultimately kind of, uh, take over various corporate entities or build new cooperatives, uh, so that we collectively manage work together and build it out.

These are core components. And then the critical piece that we were adding, uh, is this critical piece around digital fabrication, right? Community production is, is what it is. And that is taking some of the more advanced technology that has kind of emerged the last 40, 50 years. Putting it to communal use, subjecting it to communal kind of control and dictates in doing it.

Utilizing what we call appropriate technology to produce [01:27:00] for communal needs. Use value exchange ultimately is what we're looking at to eliminate all of the excessive waste that comes with the mass Fortis based production that capitalism has kind of been centered around for the last century. But it all ultimately has to come together with broad democratic practices.

So planning councils and people's assemblies, this is what we're trying to build out And all the different nodes of the people's network for land and liberation. And I just tried to give it to you in short, a succinct order, but we definitely encourage folks to take this up and we know that there are elements of this that are being practiced everywhere, particularly since the pandemic as folks are trying to meet their needs.

1 of the critical pieces we want to do is promote this demonstrated in practice and have folks ally with us and federate with us. To build on the ground by our regional alternatives that can link up and create a new society. That's what we're aiming to, to kind of meet this moment, [01:28:00] meet this threat head on, uh, in a meanness, in a way that's going to meet our actual material and social needs.

The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, Thom Hartmann - The Mark Thompson Show - Air Date 1-16-25

THOM HARTMANN: This is not new.

This is something that we saw in ancient Rome. Um, the, uh, the richest guy in Rome, his name was Marcus Licinus Crassus. Uh, basically was offended by the free bread for all welfare state of, uh, democratic Rome. Rome was democratic for about 500 years. And, uh, he funded, uh, you know, just political gridlock, the, the, the Roman equivalent of Newt Gingrich, um, to, to create basically warfare within the Roman Senate.

And this led to popular discontent. It led to the rise of populism. And ultimately it led to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon river and seizing Rome. And, uh, you know, Uh, just a few years later when, uh, Octavia, um, Augustus Caesar, uh, took over, that was just the end of 500 years, a half, a [01:29:00] half a millennia of Roman democracy, and I think that we are damn close to a very similar point right now.

MARK THOMPSON - HOST, THE MARK THOMPSON SHOW: What, what, what does that look like in the modern age then? 

THOM HARTMANN: Well, it, it looks like oligarchy typically and classically does, which is basically ruled by the rich for the rich.

It's, it's when the resources and assets of the nation, um, including its labor force and its taxpayers are, are redirected towards serving a small group of, uh, of oligarchs, essentially the problem with oligarchy. And I get into that in some detail in the book, the big problem with oligarchy, and we've flirted with it in this country three times now, by the way, um, one led to the civil war.

One led to the, to the kind of eruption in the 1890s with the Sherman Antitrust Act and whatnot that carried on through the Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft administrations. And then the third one was, you know, at the end of the, well, at the beginning, I guess the, the Republican Great Depression with the rise of FDR, um, you know, ending.

The [01:30:00] oligarchs and putting them back in their place. And now we're in this fourth kind of tranche of it. But the big problem with oligarchy is that it's a transitional form of government. Oligarchy is not stable. It rarely lasts more than a generation. And the reason why is because people get pissed off.

You know, hey, the rich guys are getting everything and I'm getting screwed. I mean, that, that, that just becomes the consensus opinion. And so they start demanding change. And typically oligarchies flip in one of two directions, either like America has three times. Now they flip back to democracy or like Hungary has done and India is doing and the Philippines did.

And I mean, you know, we could, I could give you a dozen examples, uh, Egypt, uh, you know, et cetera. Um, they flip into tyranny and we're at that. You know, we're on that knife's edge right now. 

MARK THOMPSON - HOST, THE MARK THOMPSON SHOW: It's interesting because the door to the tyranny we've seen kicked open by the MAGA faithful and by Trump as their leader.

And the oligarchs have sort of drafted [01:31:00] on that. They've, they've found their way through Trump. And so these two things coexist, but as you describe it, uh, they, they merge. And so the authoritarian tendencies of Trump and the like, uh, Uh, they may be well served in a sense by the oligarchical takeover by, uh, of our government.

THOM HARTMANN: Well, we now have a Caesarist movement within the, uh, w within the GOP. Um, you know, it was really started, I I think you could argue, by Curtis Yarvin, you know, 15 years ago or so. The the philosopher king who, uh, J. D. Vance is a big follower of. 

MARK THOMPSON - HOST, THE MARK THOMPSON SHOW: Right.

THOM HARTMANN: Um, you know, who actually openly called for it. Although he, you know, his his original Uh, take was that FDR and Lincoln and Washington were kind of Caesarists, you know, strong men who got things done.

And that's what we need. Um, and, uh, and now, you know, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation is another one of these big Caesarists. I mean, these guys are calling basically for strong man rule. They think that that's the only thing. I [01:32:00] mean, we've had what, 25, 30 years now of gridlock and political warfare funded by you.

Right wing billionaires and acted out by the G. O. P. You know, initially Newt Gingrich may, you know, the destruction of norms of, you know, you know, reasonable behavior among politicians and things like that and and the concentration of both wealth and power and increasingly small number of hands. So, uh, we're there.

We're there. 

MARK THOMPSON - HOST, THE MARK THOMPSON SHOW: You know, you saw Newt Gingrich sort of become patient zero in, uh, creating the contagion that was the hyper partisan Washington, D. C. And the virtue in that, uh, but this rise of the oligarchy seems super charged by social media and the new media environment. And, and obviously there's one of those oligarchs who has been, you know, uh, who took over X certainly got his money's worth and now may be granted Tik Tok.

I mean, I don't know to what extent. He'll have buy in on that. But the notion of [01:33:00] sort of a monopolization of these social media platforms, it's gone away. I mean, Zuckerberg as well with the, with his control of Facebook and Instagram. I mean, these are massive platforms with tremendous influence. 

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah. And, and if you post right wing memes on those platforms, they get radically and quickly amplified.

And if you post left wing or even just pro democracy means they get suppressed. Um, I've been arguing for some time as does. Ironically, Josh Hawley, uh, he wrote a book about this, as did I. Mine was the Hidden History of Big Brother. Um, that, uh, those algorithms should be public. You know, they should be required to publish them.

If they're going to manipulate the data that we're seeing, we should at least know the dimensions of them, uh, and, and, and parameters of the manipulation. Um, and that's not even, I mean, that's a modest ask. I mean, I, frankly, I, I agree with Josh Hawley that we should just do away with Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act that granted these guys, you know, an end to liability.

If right now, if you were to publish in the New York [01:34:00] Times or the Washington Post or on CNN or MSNBC or ABC or, you know, any bill, any other main media outlet, or even on my newsletter, some of the things that show up on Twitter or Facebook or, uh, uh, Um, you'd be in a whole world of trouble. You know, you could, you could be sued and these guys are immune from lawsuits because of this one little provision in law in 1996 that, that everybody from Bill Clinton and Al Gore on the one hand to, to, you know, the Bill Gates and the emerging kind of, you know, tech bros, uh, believed and, and Republicans for that matter, um, believed would kick off the Internet and launch a golden age of everybody having information and everybody having access to the world's knowledge. And it was a great idea, but, uh, You know, it's time has come and gone. I mean, it's time for section two 30 to go away. 

MARK THOMPSON - HOST, THE MARK THOMPSON SHOW: And I'll give them credit for that goal. Uh, you know, meaning I'll give them credit for a sincerity in that goal.

I think now all this stuff is wrapped in some [01:35:00] BS goal. And, uh, yet the, the steam, just the steam engine just keeps picking up more and more steam. And, and I just. Also think, Tom, they've successfully, uh, and through the weaponization of some of these things and platforms that you've talked about, uh, created, um, well, a demonization of immigrants and they've created the otherness that has, in a way, thrown so many Americans off the scent of what you're talking about, off the scent of the complete takeover of government.

THOM HARTMANN: Yeah, it's, uh, again, these are the classic weapons of Caesarists or, you know, strongman, uh, type, uh, you know, people who aspire to strongman kind of authoritarian power, is, uh, first you've got to have an enemy. I mean, one of the things, I, I, I was surprised when I learned this, I, I was in my twenties and I wanted to write novels, and, um, and I've written like seven or eight of them, they're just terrible.

Um, two, two made their way into print. But don't bother reading them. But I took a class, [01:36:00] uh, Louise and I took a remarkable class on novel writing back at the, at the Maui Writers Conference. And the guy said, your hero is not the most important character in your book. Everybody thinks he is, or she is, but that's absolutely not the case.

The villain is the most important character. Superman would just be a boring guy who stopped people from sticking up 7 Elevens if it wasn't for Lex Luthor, right? Batman would just be some rich guy who drives around in a fancy car in a funny outfit if it wasn't for the Joker. You've got to have a supervillain in order to have a superhero.

So every Throughout history, I mean, again, going back to Julius Caesar, throughout history, every wannabe dictator, every wannabe authoritarian always starts out by creating an other that they can point to and saying, that's the supervillain. And, you know, we've, we've got several candidates right now that the Republican Party has offered us, um, immigrants, uh, [01:37:00] trans people, uh, the, the queer community in general, black people, uh, you know, there's, there's, there's a few, uh, Muslims.

There's a few, but, uh, typically they settle on one, one big one. And, uh, Trump has been riding the immigrant one for some time. We'll, we'll see how this shakes out over the course of the next two years. 

SECTION B: GOVERNMENT DESTRUCTION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Government Destruction.

Democracy doesn’t exist in the United States: Chris Hedges - UpFront - Air Date 1-31-25

MARC LAMONT HILL - HOST, UPFRONT: One of the things you just talked about was an out of touch elite, uh, we're certainly seeing a growing concentration of wealth and political power, uh, among a very small group of people.

Uh, I think most notably of the fact that Trump has assembled the richest set of advisors and cabinet members in American history. They're worth a collective 450 billion. And of course there's increased corporate influence, uh, and billionaire influence. The Democrats, the Republicans, over the whole political scene, uh, how much of that context, uh, is important for understanding the future of American democracy?

Is American [01:38:00] democracy, uh, under threat because of this? 

CHRIS HEDGES: Under threat? Does it exist, Mark? I don't think it exists. It's a veneer. It's the end of the Roman Empire. You have the symbols, the iconography, and the language of a democracy, but internally, corporations and oligarchs have seized all the levers of power.

I looked at this election as a battle between corporatists and oligarchs. Corporatists, the Democrats, the Republicans. They want something very different from oligarchs. Corporatists want stability, they want decorum, the kind of decorum that Obama had or Bush had, or, Bush was an idiot, but at least he had some, you know, they could clean him up a little bit.

Uh, and Biden, you know, whatever his cognitive failings were, Uh, they, they, because they want stability, especially in terms of trade agreements, because they make investments overseas, takes a while for a return on a profit. Corporatists want something different from oligarchs. Oligarchs are about chaos.

They're about, as Steve Bannon [01:39:00] said, deconstructing the administrative state. Why? Because it is a pure form of rentier capitalism. And by that, I mean that they make their money by setting up tollbooths. Amazon. You know, all of these digital media platforms. It's it's not about producing goods. And the more that the state is deconstructed, that's why they want to abolish the Department of Education.

Everything that we need as a civil society becomes privatized. And you see it in, uh, I wrote a book called America. The Farewell Tour begins in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where everything, the sewer systems privatized, the parking authority is privatized, the electricity is privatized. And of course, they've jacked up the rates.

Uh, and the services are not very good, and they want to privatize the post office so we can have a dysfunctional post office like the UK, which is privatized. And so that's what oligarchs want. And the oligarchs They won and, uh, but that's what this battle was about in terms of if we, if we strip away, [01:40:00] it's, uh, you know, the, the kind of trivia or the, uh, cultural differences between the two parties that at its core was what it's about.

And so we have, as you point out, I mean, we have now an oligarchic system, but as Aristotle wrote, Once you create an oligarchic system with those kinds of inequities, then your only two choices are tyranny or revolution. 

MARC LAMONT HILL - HOST, UPFRONT: You talk about people choosing fascism. Uh, people or the conditions being set for people to almost have no alternative choice.

And you've written about this, this idea. You wrote an article, in fact, that I thought was super interesting. Uh, how fascism came. Uh, now that term itself, uh, has its roots in Mussolini's authoritarian rule in, during World War I. Uh, I think of brutal oppression. I think of, uh, the crushing of dissent. Uh. Is it not hyperbolic at this moment in history to say that that's [01:41:00] what we're facing here?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, every fascist system has its own peculiar characteristics. So you mentioned Mussolini, that was rooted in ancient Rome and the glory of Augustus and all this. Whereas German fascism was rooted in tectonic myths and Spanish fascism under Franco was something different. Robert Paxton, when he writes his book, The Anatomy of Fascism, he calls the Klan the most authentic fascist movement in American history.

Okay. And, and again, uh, Paxton in the book says that it won't come with swastika, it will become with the Christian cross and mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. And I certainly came away after spending two years with the Christian right with a belief that these people, that they had politicized and used, uh, Christianity to build a native fascistic movement, uh, of course, grounded in white supremacy, um, and, uh, and, and you've seen Um, Uh, Trump has no ideology.

He's just a [01:42:00] grifter. But he has filled that ideological void with these figures like Mike Huckabee, uh, you know, who, who calls the West Bank Judean Samaria or, uh, the his U. N. Ambassador who said, you know, suddenly U. S. Foreign policy is rooted in biblical myth, but that's where we're headed. Um, and so, yes, I see it as especially as the system disintegrates.

And in terms of voting for, well, I mean, any totalitarian movement is grounded in magical thinking. And, and when the real world becomes so onerous, so oppressive, so exploitive, uh, and you engender that kind of despair and all the writers of totalitarianism ground the rise of totalitarian movements, Hannah Arendt, Fritzter, all of them in despair, which is what's happened, To significant part of the country, then you reach out for magical thinking.

That's what Trump offers. He he, you know, none of it is coherent, but fascism is not really a coherent ideology. [01:43:00] That's the way it in his book. Male fantasy talks about how it's really at its core about hyper masculinity. If you look at Trump as a coal figure in Margaret Singer's book, Colts and our Miss, Uh, it's about endowing your cultish leader with omnipotent power to do anything.

MARC LAMONT HILL - HOST, UPFRONT: Let me push back a little bit, because I hear this a lot, and I don't disagree that there's a cultish, uh, tenor to much of what we see in the Trump rhetoric and the rhetoric of his followers, but sometimes I worry that Using the language of cult makes it seem as if his followers are misled, that they have the world wrong, uh, and that they're always operating against their interests.

What do you say to the person who says, well, look, yeah, that might be true in part, but Trump is also advancing policy initiatives that actually, are in line with their ideology, whether it's the anti LGBTQ stuff, whether it's the anti DEI stuff. Uh, there are people who fundamentally believe [01:44:00] in what Trump is selling, and they're notthey're not being, they're not being, uh, misled.

They simply believe things that are in line with his movement. 

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, those are the cultural, uh, kind of targets that Uh, have been picked out to, uh, I think, mendaciously explain the despair and the economic immiseration that these people live in. The problem is Walmart. Uh, the problem is Goldman Sachs. The problem is Citibank.

The problem is, but those people are not mentioned. You're mentioning undocumented workers. You're mentioning GBTLQ, you know, people. But let's be clear. Let's go back to the Democratic Party, that they abandoned the working class, and they spoke in this kind of, you know, scolding, you know, Uh, you know, virtue, uh, signaling wokeness, uh, rather than being rooted in, uh, the class war that has now largely been finished, but the class war against the working poor and the working class, which they were part of.

So you have a reaction to, [01:45:00] uh, this, uh, you know, political correctness because it was used to demonize a working class that was You know, being pounded to death. And so, yes, there's a, there's a reaction, but none of it's dealing with the actual structures of power. None of it's dealing with the reality of why they are where they are.

So, yeah, they all hate immigrants the way in Nazi Germany they hated Jews or the way in Germany. When I was in Bosnia, the Serbs hated the Muslims and the Croats hated everybody. And so, uh, yeah, but that's, that is about transference. It's about the demonization of the other. Um, so in that sense, Trump is a complete grifter, um, like all demagogues.

Elon Musk DOGE COUP at USAID - Chris Norlund - Air Date 2-2-25

CHRIS NORLUND - HOST, CHRIS NORLUND: So Elon Musk and his doge lackey agents are currently staging a coup. Of the United States government. We have to talk about this. It's a serious story Uh read the headlines here senior us aid security officials put on leave After refusing musk [01:46:00] doze access to agency systems Um musk actually tweeted out just two hours ago From his point of view.

He's claiming that the u. s. Aid is a criminal organization time for it to die We're also talking about physical harassment altercation. Um, this is from an account that he interacts with. It says breaking us aid, senior officials put on leave, uh, after trying, uh, physically trying to stop doge from accessing agency systems.

Um, I want to go through a description of this thing and I'll give you a basic gist of it. Musk is showing up with his, uh, agents, Packer type people. Uh, they're age 19 to 24. They show up in these black SUVs. Musk got his kid there as a human shield. And they're, they're trying to get access to government buildings, uh, on a Saturday night.

That's what's going on. This is a coup. Um, you can read the description here. It says, uh, the two top, uh, security officials at us agency for international development were put on administrative leave Saturday [01:47:00] night, right? So it's all happening really fast again. It's on a weekend and at night. Um, after refusing to allow officials from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to access systems at the agency.

So, Musk just shows up and is like demanding access and they're like, no. Um, even after Doge personnel threatened to call law enforcement. So, so the DOJ personnel is like, well, if you don't, you know, don't let us get us in, let us in, we're going to, you know, call someone to come arrest you kind of stuff, right?

We're going to call law enforcement. Um, it says here, according to sources, personnel from the MUST created office, physically tried to access the USAID headquarters in Washington, D. C. and were stopped, right? So not everyone is going along with this. They're just, who are you? What gives you the right to access our, our system?

That kind of stuff, which is a natural reaction from any one of these agencies where you would oppose Musk. It just shows up. And wants access to all your, you know, computer systems. Um, the DOJ personnel demanded to be let in, right? So [01:48:00] Muskins, we were like, you have to listen, demanding to be let in and threatened to call the U S marshals to be allowed access.

Um, and then you would put the U S marshals in an awkward situation. I'm like, okay, who has power here? Um, I live in Korea and we just had the situation where President Yoon tried to stage a military coup. The Congress and the people actually fought back and ultimately arrested President Yoon and now he's being indicted for insurrection.

So he's in, he's detained right now. It's a very different situation in Korea because we have a different history than what's happening in USA. I have not seen something like this in the USA. Ever in my lifetime, nor did I think I'd ever see anything like this, uh, in the USA. Um, it, and this is just, this is, uh, I think the third agency now, cause he was over at the, um, it's the, uh, OPM was like the office of personal management.

Then you have the general service administration. This is now the U. S. Aid Agency. There [01:49:00] could be other situations where Musk is trying to access computer files. Um, basically what, what, from what I gather, uh, they're trying to get personnel files, uh, they're trying to figure out payment stuff, so the idea is that, um, if there's any programs or anything that Congress has approved that Musk, uh, doesn't like, he'll, he'll just try to cut the funding to it, like the actual funding, the, the payment systems.

Um, I mean this is all, in my opinion, all illegal. Uh, and unconstitutional. This is just an overreach of, of, uh, powers here. And I don't even know what power Doge has, as this is a new organization, or whatever you want to call this thing, that's just put into action by an executive order. Um, I've already seen that the Fox News people are like, Oh, look how awesome Trump is.

Look at all these executive orders. He's, he's doing a lot of great things quickly and more than any other president in history. But it's like, I don't know. You're doing things unilaterally, right? This is not how democracy functions. Um, this is more a description of the situation, but I hope you guys understand the seriousness of this.

Remember, [01:50:00] Musk shows up in his black SUV cars on a Saturday night in front of the, this, you know, government offices and demanding to be let in and demanding to be accessed to the computer systems. Just understand the significance of that. Picture that in your mind. Um, the Doge personnel wanted, uh, wanted to gain access to U.

S. Uh, aid security systems and personnel files. Uh, two of those sources also said the DOJ personnel wanted to access, uh, to classified information. Wow. Uh, which only those with security clearances and specific need, uh, need to know are able to access. So, so not only is this wanting the. Uh, personnel files, security systems.

So it says gain access to security systems and personnel files. And some of the stuff is classified. Um, if you don't know, uh, the USAID organization, I'll just read a brief description of it says the United States agency for international development is the primary us agency that provides foreign aid and development assistance to developing countries.

USAID's work [01:51:00] includes helping countries recover from disasters, escape poverty, and engage in democratic reform. So that's the description of it. Um, the reason why I'm reading the description from it, and this is actually from Google, is because, uh, they've actually taken down the website of the USAID website.

The website's not functioning. Um, I want to put this in context as well, because you have to understand, like, like, this is a much bigger story than just this incident, which, this incident is not good. Again, Musk shows up on a Saturday night, Demanding access to, you know, as described, classified material.

Um, January 17, 2025, this was the headline here. Chinese hackers access Yellen's computer in the U. S. Treasury breach, right? Uh, that was from Bloomberg, another one. Chinese hackers access Yellen's computer in U. S. Treasury breach. Um, this is something that, that I, I pointed out before when it was going on, uh, live.

That Musk was kind of making joke about this, right? He actually, this is most tweeting out on January 17th, same day. Uh, he tweeted out, 12 year old [01:52:00] script kitty could hack into Yellen's computer. I doubt she knows how to reboot her wifi router. Do you guys understand, like, how ridiculous this is? So, the story comes out that Chinese hackers are effectively attacking our, you know, computer system.

This is the treasury. And then Must makes jokes about that. He never says anything bad about the, uh, Chinese government, right? Doesn't tweet bad things about Russia, but yet he attacks American institutions and literally showing up on a Saturday night demanding access. And this is, um, just, you know, a couple of weeks after Chinese hackers are trying to break into our systems.

I hope you guys understand the significance of how terrible this stuff is. I can't even make jokes about it. Um, it's, it's just frankly not funny.

(UNLOCKED) Trump 2.0: Oligarchy Unleashed - Revolutionary Left Radio - Air Date 2-2-25

BREHT O'SHEA - HOST, REV LEFT RADIO: So America is once again, Uh, in, in the Gilded Age, Trump is now, the first go round he was talking about himself in terms of Andrew Jackson, this term he's talking about himself as William McKinley, the president, um, who oversaw, you know, the early 1900s presidency, um, William Jennings [01:53:00] Bryan, I actually graduated from a school named after him here in the Omaha metro area.

Um, but he was a prairie populist, right? The boy orator of the plat came out of Omaha and Lincoln, um, and ran as a, under the populist and the democratic campaign. He ran as a dual, um, sort of candidate for both the, the progressive populist party that emanated out of the great plains, you know, farmers and workers, uh, and economic left wing sentiment.

Um, that was challenging the two corporate parties and because he had so much popular support and because he gave his cross of gold speech at the, um, Democratic convention, he ran, he was embraced by the Democratic Party as well. So he ran as a populist progressive under their party and as a Democrat to try to win the election, um, against the Republican McKinley and ended up losing.

And obviously what he had in mind, William Jennings Bryan, is economic populism. Real left wing economic populism. They were talking about an eight [01:54:00] hour workday. They were talking about labor protections. They were talking about nationalizing key industries like the railroads. Um, just a slate of economic reforms that, uh, Anybody on our side today would be like, hey, that's a, that's wonderful.

That's a great start. Let's move in that direction, right? Um, he wasn't necessarily a socialist. I think he would be more of like a robust social democrat But at that time in the late 1800s early 1900s I mean that was pretty new And what it did is it set the stage for the progressive era writ large and then for eventually that led into the new deal era Um, with the rise of FDR and the, uh, social programs that proliferated in the wake of that and the New Deal era stretched from post war FDR, you know, post Great Depression, World War II, all the way up until, you know, Jimmy Carter, but specifically with Reagan, um, that that New Deal era was dismantled in favor of the era we're living in now, neoliberalism.

Now, is Trump a representative of the end of neoliberalism? [01:55:00] I think there is an element of, of an anti globalization trend happening where there's a, an inflection point in nationalism, broadly conceived, especially across the West. And with that comes these ideas of sovereignty, border control, reshoring of industries.

And so aspects of the neoliberal globalization trend that we've lived through since, you know, the 1980s, um, and really the late seventies, but specifically, it really started taking off in the, in the late seventies. And in the eighties with the rise of Reagan and then consolidated as the bipartisan consensus with Clinton in the nineties, there's elements of that changing specifically internationally and globally.

Um, and certainly the American empire with the rise of multipolarity. It's in a weak position the unipolar moment of complete hegemonic domination by the united states is for sure over Um, and there's ways to manage that end of the empire There's there's responsible mature egalitarian [01:56:00] ways to manage the decline of that empire and there are accelerationist Um nihilistic accelerate, you know brutalist Um forms of of doing that.

I think trump obviously represents the latter the democrats having You Prevented the rise of a Bernie Sanders style answer to neoliberalism, handed the entire thing over to Trump, but domestically and, and, and, and from a zoomed out overall perspective, I do not feel at all that Trump is representing the end of neoliberalism.

In fact, what his economic policies seem to be is the logical conclusion of neoliberalism, a crescendo. Of neoliberalism the gutting of the administrative state, not that everything about the administrative state is great. You know, not, not that everything about the U. S. government is great, but there's looking to dismantle that.

Um, get rid of huge swaths of the civil bureaucracy. Again, there's pros and cons to that in a vacuum. Um, this, this freezing of federal [01:57:00] grants and, and federal funds and loans. This is horrific. Um, what it is is it's a, it's. It's, it's preventing, you know, money from, already relegated money, this money was already designated to go to these places, stuff like disaster relief, stuff like Medicaid, stuff like Head Start education, um, for, for, um, you know, working class and poor people.

Um, and you know, working class parents in those first few years, you either have to pay exorbitant costs for daycare or stay home and, and, and decrease your income in order to take care of kids. I have a three year old. I know exactly how this goes. And headstart is a way to get them into the school system quicker, get their education jumpstarted and also provide an ability for the parent to be able to go back to work or to not have to pay daycare, right?

Public education. So I think our, our older son was enrolled in headstart and we're going to try to get. Our younger son when he's ready enrolled as well. But these are the things that are freezing food programs go down the list. Um, there's, there's plenty of, of good things that help [01:58:00] people that is being frozen.

And then you have this, you know, Elon Musk led doge thing, which is all about dismantling, um, the S the social safety net is they talk about spending in government. Do you think the single biggest contractor of the Pentagon, i. e. Elon Musk. Do you think Doge is gonna go start sniffing around and dismantling the Pentagon budget?

Absolutely not. He's coming from Medicaid, Head Start program, food for fucking kids. That's what they're doing. Um, they, they are, are attacking the social safety net, dismantling it under the guise of fiscal conservatism and responsibility. Now, the pentagon can't pass an audit for many many years. The pentagon gets almost a trillion dollars of taxpayer money every year.

Every single year as its budget, the pentagon and the military industrial complex is full of corruption and bloat and bureaucracy. Um, you know, this, these, these exorbitant prices that private contractors will charge the U. S. government, the [01:59:00] military industrial complex in so many ways is a money laundering scheme by which these private entities, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, go down the list.

These private entities shift. Public funds, i. e. taxpayer money. They funnel public taxpayer dollars into their private for profit companies. Right? They use that enormous amount of wealth to then buy off politicians in both parties to continue that flow of money. There's overcharging. There's a use it or lose it idea within budgeting in the Pentagon.

So there's an incentive to use money that you don't even fucking need just so you can get as much or more in the next, um, you know, the next budget cycle. And it's fundamentally about shifting public money into private profits. That money goes to ultimately, uh, Um, to the pockets of the top brass of, of these private for profit companies, right?

And the, and the, and the private shareholders, um, the shareholders of those, of those [02:00:00] companies. Um, and so what does that necessitate? Well, one of the things that it necessitates is constant war. You know, if you're a, a military contractor that produces weapons and bombs and fighter jets, et cetera, well, it really helps if there's Always an enemy if there's always a threat that needs to be neutralized if there's always a proxy war somewhere where you can funnel your Your um your business into or just straight up wars that you're engaged in and so that's why that's a huge reason why Our entire lives the u.

s Has consistently been at war in one way or another big obvious wars like the invasion of iraq and afghanistan or vietnam or korea and also a million little proxy wars and we can see the You War in palestine and the war, um, uh, between russia and ukraine As fitting completely within this realm of proxy of proxy wars And then you have to think about the black budgets.

You got to think about the cia. You got to think about Aspects of the [02:01:00] military apparatus in the united states that are not transparent, right? They can't pass an audit so trillions of dollars just go somewhere and the pentagon doesn't Can't figure out where it all went. No politician seems to really give that much of a fuck.

Nobody's held accountable. We're constantly at war. People are constantly being murdered around the world. Um, and this, not only does it help the military industrial complex and the private contractors in particular, but it helps monopoly capital more broadly, right? Opening up new markets, toppling regimes that are hostile to Western infiltration.

Um, Of their economy, et cetera. And Elon Musk, the leader of Doge, just a billionaire who spent $270 million to weasel his way, totally unelected into the dem, into the government in a, an important position at that, deciding what gets funding and what doesn't. Who is this fucking asshole? Right? He is the single biggest benefactor of American tax dollars.

Um, as his, you know, his businesses are contractors for the Pentagon and the government. He's the [02:02:00] single biggest benefactor of American tax dollars in human history, in American history. And this motherfucker's telling us that we gotta cut stuff like Medicaid. Um, we gotta cut disaster relief, Head Start education, food programs for the poor and the needy.

Doesn't even mention the Pentagon. Doesn't even mention the bloated military budget. In fact, the military is now being used to go down to the border to violently enforce that border. Um, so what we're seeing now is the era of Trump is the era of the oligarchy unleashed. It's already been unleashed.

Neoliberalism is, it's, it's unleashing. We're dismantling the New Deal. We're dismantling unions. We're dismantling worker protections. We're deregulating massive corporations. We're deregulating the banks. We're cutting taxes for the ultra rich and corporations. And we're letting this bitch rip. That's neoliberalism in a nutshell

Guests: Heather Digby Parton of Salon, 'Driftglass' of 'Pro Left Podcast' on the disastrous, illegal, authoritarian Trump/Musk World and rising opposition - The Bradcast - Air Date 2-5-25

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: Heather, I think that, uh, frankly, I may have. Underestimated Elon Musk and the, uh, the so [02:03:00] called, uh, Doge project here before Trump took office. Mostly because, you know, I thought that, well, this is ridiculous. That it's this department of government efficiency.

It's not an actual government agency. They have no actual governing. authority to do anything. They can talk about what they want to do. They can make recommendations, but they can't actually, you know, cut budgets or departments, et cetera, without approval by Congress. But as, um, one of the former Noah staffers, the national oceanic and atmospheric administration staffer said today about what musk to be preparing For NOAA and for the National Weather Service quote, there is no transparency.

They just show up wherever they want, do whatever they want. They're following through on major budget cuts and major and major staffing cuts. Adding, I think the strategy here is, well, we're just going to do it and dare someone to stop us. And by the time [02:04:00] they stop us. We'll have destroyed it. So, uh, Heather, a, does that seem to be the strategy B will at work?

And, uh, if it does work, how would it be stopped and by whom? Because they seem to be doing this across the whole of government right now, as insane as it is. And unauthorized as it is. 

HEATHER "DIGBY" PARTON: Well, I just saw on X that Elon Musk retweeted a headline that said that they're into the Medicare system now. And that he says that this is where the big fraud is and they're going after it.

So just, you know, that's another one here. All the seniors go get your, go get your meds and get your checkups. Cause that's about to be, uh, you know, At least, uh, so he's compromised. So he, 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: he shut down the entire, uh, USAID, uh, billions of dollars sent everyone home from the Washington headquarters is now recalling every employee from around the, around the world, because [02:05:00] that wasn't just a bad apple with a worm in it.

That was an entire ball of worms and yet Medicare. You're saying he is saying is now where all of the real fraud is at? 

HEATHER "DIGBY" PARTON: That's where the real fraud is. That's what he says. And, you know, there is such a thing as Medicare fraud. In fact, one of the big Republican senators, Rick Scott, is probably the greatest Medicare fraudster in history.

But, you know, whatever. Yeah, to answer your question, look, I don't know how much damage he can do. None of us do because there's zero transparency in what he's doing. And he's got a bunch of kids apparently, you know, age 19 to 23 or something who some of them still in college. Uh, that are going in and messing around in the computer systems to try and determine what the fraud and abuse is, and they're going to take care of it.

They're going to be making decisions about who gets paid and who doesn't. And yes, they're planning on getting rid of, I think USAID is gone, [02:06:00] to tell you the truth. I, I see no way to claw that back. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: Oh, USAID, yeah.

HEATHER "DIGBY" PARTON: Yeah, USAID. I think, I think it's gone. They, this is, you know, they're recalling everybody.

They're shutting it down. They told the General Services Administration to, um, you know, end the leases on 50 percent of the federal government's office buildings around the country. So this is wild and it has to do, I mean, this is his philosophy, which is you go in and you shut Everything down and then you go and, you know, rebuild it and put things back.

Well, you know, you can do that with Twitter because who gives a damn, right? If, if one of the, the, um, you know, the functions of it doesn't work for a day and you come back, okay, well, maybe we really need to put that back in. People need to get their DMS after all, or whatever. That's Twitter. And maybe even with Tesla or, or with SpaceX or whatever, that's, that's This is the federal government you shut down medicare for a few days or you shut down and they already have done this in the you know, The office of management and [02:07:00] budget put out that that order to freeze everything and then the courts put a restraining order on it But apparently a lot of the agencies didn't get the word because a bunch of stuff is still frozen people aren't getting paid Things aren't getting, vendors aren't getting paid.

You're starting to see the breakdown slowly and it'll happen much more quickly. So the damage is going to be huge. And as to your question as to what can stop it, I have no earthly idea because the only person I think that can do it is Donald Trump and that would be, he'd have to fire Elon Musk and get rid of all these doge people and say, no, we're not going to do it this way.

And he has shown absolutely no. You know, indication that he might do that. And we've all been, of course, saying, you know, let's, let's humiliate him. Let's try and troll him about Musk being the president, whatever. That's just not going anywhere. The Republicans in Congress, forget about it. The courts, maybe, but that could take what, two or three years.

And in the meantime, the devastation is, is, you know, [02:08:00] monumental. 

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: Let me talk about the courts here because, uh, yeah, you know, they can do all of this and then, uh, you know, somebody might try to clean it up later, but there is this matter of what they're doing appears to be strictly unlawful in that, you know, organizations like USAID are, uh, uh, created by an act of Congress, and it seems like you can't just do away with it.

Um, Drift Glass, you know, if all of this stuff is blocked somehow by the courts, hopefully sooner rather than later, but whenever it is, if it's blocked, uh, potentially even by the corrupted U. S. Supreme Court, uh, and, you know, found to be, oh, this is unlawful, it was stood up by Congress, it must remain, If that happens, if there is such a pronouncement, do you expect Elon Musk and the doge bros and frankly, the Trump administration to actually follow such court orders or will they [02:09:00] simply, you know, defy them with, yeah, you and what army sort of thing?

DRIFTGLASS: The latter. I mean, I don't know. I, oh yeah, I, I, I was in Chicago for 25 years under Richie Daly and I remember vividly him bulldozing Migs field. Weren't supposed to, it was illegal. He said, ah, national security bulldozed. Wasn't supposed to bulldoze soldier field, which he did because a national historical monument.

But he did anyway. And his theory was after it's done, who's going to undo it? It's already wrecked. You can't undo the damage I've done. Therefore I win and take me to court if you want, but it's too late now. And I think that. You know, as someone who wasted a lot of my youth reading Ayn Rand, um, in Atlas Shrugged, the hero of Atlas Shrugged promised to stop the engine of the world.

And once New York had gone dark, you know, he and his friends would rebuild the world in their image. And that is exactly what Elon Musk is trying to do. He's trying to shut down the engine of the United States, [02:10:00] kill everything in sight. And then once that's been laid waste to, he and his hunger force, aqua force team, incel team will rebuild it in their image.

And I think that there's no stopping him, um, unless what happens, and the only thing I can think of is, number one, I understand that a lot of that stuff is written in COBOL, which, you know, hasn't been recompiled since the Carter administration, and I, Good luck to these kids figuring out how COBOL works.

Um, and millions and millions of lines of code. That's how it actually works. That's what the actual pay payment system works. Number two, I remember, I think it was Dan Rostenkowski from Illinois, uh, who decided to do something with social security and he was mobbed by angry senior citizens on television.

And man, he walked that back so fast. If you see a bunch of people from the villages. A bunch of folks who are on Medicare, who are wearing Trump hats, screaming what the hell are you doing to my Social Security, to my Medicare, to, to [02:11:00] my Medicaid, which my, you know, my mom has to have to, so we can put her in a home.

Um, you might see some quick turnaround and Trump is perfectly willing to change his mind on a dime and just lie about everything and say, I never authorized anything, but it's going to take public outrage in the streets to turn this around by the right people.

The Elon Musk Coup 340 - Left Anchor - Air Date 2-3-25

 

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: I suppose there's, there's sort of two levels to this. Number one, you're sort of fiddling with the budgetary authorities, um, of Congress without any authorization, you know, to say that DEI or whatever. And so like that, our DEI allows us to change the budgetary authority, um, of particular agencies.

But then secondly. You know, you just have like a wholesale, uh, uh, grab of Congress's appropriation authority. You know what I mean? This is just [02:12:00] like basic constitutional law, schoolhouse rock shit, you know, that Congress 

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: Madison, uh, federalist paper stuff, right? 

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: Yeah. Congress appropriates the money and the president spends it.

The The president can't just, I mean, this is like fucking Charles the first, this is what touched off the English civil war. And what was it? 1642, right? That, that, that the King wanted, uh, the ability to spend without having to call on parliament very Different circumstance back in those days, but, uh, fundamentally same type of situation in that, you know, you had a king that was like, I don't want any checks on my power.

I want to be able to spend the money whenever I want. I want to be able to spend it on whatever I want and fuck you. And you know, the, the, like, this was a major reason why The U. S. Constitution was set up how it was in the first place. [02:13:00] 

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: I mean, article two is very clear that there's a duty that the president, you know, the take care clause, it faithfully execute the laws.

Yeah. And the only types of legislation where that there's discretion for the president to spend differently is if the legislation itself says at the discretion of the president, he may spend or she may spend less. But like that, that's a very narrow kind of thing, right? But you can't. Do more, you can't not do it.

You can, and that's only in those certain circumstances, but like. You know, and, and that's leaving aside all of the other shenanigans that might have to do with, with, uh, corruption that, that Musk is doing in terms of his own, you know, corporate and personal wealth interests, who knows what other interests are being served with whatever's going on, right?

So, so there's like the constitutional crisis and the abrogation of constitutional power, the. Lack of transparency in the power grab by an unelected, you know, and a number of unelected people under Musk. And then God knows what government money and government power [02:14:00] is doing in service of his ends. And who knows what those ends are.

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: It's, you know, thank

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: God we have a great opposition party. 

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: Yeah. They're on

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: top of it. They're on top of it. Don't worry, folks. The democratic leaders are tweeting like crazy. 

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: Yeah. Except they aren't though. I mean, that's 

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: not even that they're not even doing that. I mean, it's trying to make a joke that they're just using like social media, but they're not even doing that.

Only like AOC is maybe Bernie. I don't know. 

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: Yeah. Even, even Bernie had a couple of posts talking about bipartisanship on blue sky, you know, that was like trying to sort of. You know, set themselves up for, it's like if George W. Bush was talking about something and you're like, well, if George W. Bush is talking about that, like it's just a total failure to reckon with.

You know, the, the situation that is in hand. Um, and I think that's, that's more or less replicated across the whole, the [02:15:00] media and the political class. Like nobody can, um, you know, 

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: it's the Yates poem, right? The, the second coming turning, turning in the widening guard, the Falcon cannot hear the Falconer things fall apart.

The center cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Yeah. You know? 

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: Yeah, we've mentioned that before. Um, yeah, I was just, I've been recently reading a book. Burns, right? Uh, no, no, no. Different one. You, you read lots of books. I was trying to guess which book I read. Many books, like one book per year.

At least it's not true folks. No Pacific crucible war at sea in the Pacific, 1941 to 1942. You know, I'm in my dad era and we have to read about naval battles. Um, but, uh, section in this book talks about how, uh, when the Pearl Harbor attack happened, that. Just big chunks of people couldn't believe that it was happening that [02:16:00] was like, Oh, it's another drill.

Even when it was like, clearly very much not another drill. 

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: This is not a drill folks. Yeah.

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: And, um, it was just like a whole class, like a whole class of people who have been raised, um, in many cases, you know, for like 60 years. On this notion of American exceptionalism and the rules of politics being what they are, basically facing what I would say is, you know, a kind of classic, uh, you know, third world, uh, global South oligarch bust out coup attempt, uh, of some description, you know, very straightforward if you think about it.

And that. Context. And people are, they're just like good, good, good, good, good, good. It just, it doesn't compute to them. They don't know. They don't actually believe. I think that what it reveals is [02:17:00] that people don't, they don't actually believe in. The, the, the virtue, the, the civic virtues, the, the morality of the American constitutional order, you know, because if they did, they would recognize when someone was tearing it up.

So it's this kind of combination of a blinkered. Philistine pig ignorance about what's happening and also an unwillingness to reckon with that America is just another country that we can have tin pot dictatorship happen here. It can happen. It is happening now. And um, if it's 

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: not, not only that, there's been a Inoculation against feeling like there's ever just cause you're going after your fellow elites.

Right. Once you're in that echelon of power, sure. You talk a tough game maybe, but you don't really go after each other, especially when you've lost the election. Okay. The other side one. All right. Well, I know my role now until [02:18:00] the next election. Right. But, but they don't actually believe that there's a threat to anything, especially not themselves.

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: Yeah. And it's very one sided, of course, you know, like. Al Gore had the presidency stolen from him, I would think, you know, like, you'd look at the balance of evidence. George W. Bush stole the presidential election of 2000, and yet Al Gore, he did the magnanimous thing. The thing that you do in the context of an, of a, of a political system, which is wholly You know, reasonable where where it's like, okay, I lost.

I lost fair and square. And so my duty is to admit to that and shake hands with the victor. And, uh, you know, we, we all go on our merry way and I'll make some documentaries. But if you don't live in that type of situation to behave in that [02:19:00] fashion. Is stupid, you just, you're just helping the criminals and now we're, we're at the reductio ad absurdum of that type of behavior where instead of like just barely stealing the presidential election by a few hundred votes in Florida, we have an unelected president.

foreign billionaire of fucking white South African, the worst kind of people there are the, the worst race. I'm not racist except against white South Africans. Um, uh, a well earned, you know, yeah. Come at me in the comments. 

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: He's a very sensitive snowflake too, right? The, the, the richest man in the world who will probably be the first trillionaire or whatever, because when he does a very clear Nazi salutes, uh, with, with a face that can only be, um, you know, described as, uh, joyfully, uh, angry and righteous and doing the Nazi salute.

Um, [02:20:00] You know, he, he's defended, uh, you know, at all costs because it's ableist to say that he was doing that, um, even though he then soon thereafter, um, zoomed in to the far right party in Germany at a rally and, uh, very clearly was supporting their, um, 

RYAN COOPER - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: yeah, and he did. The, the, yeah, yeah, talking about how, uh, you, there's no need to be ashamed of German history.

Nothing, nothing to be ashamed about being a German. Um, and the, you know, this is something that, that white, well. 

ALEXI THE GREEK - HOST, LEFT ANCHOR: It's weird. Why would a white South African be talking about German history? It seems strange. What's the connection there? I don't, I don't get it. No, but so, but you know, if it wasn't so, uh, Yeah.

Yeah. upsetting it, it would be just, uh, endlessly comic, but it's, you know, first it's tragedy, then it's farce, right? It's, it's like the, the lunatics are running the asylum now [02:21:00] and they're also the richest and powerful people. It's like, so that's right. And we haven't even talked about the crazy tariffs that, that we're not even talking about crazy policy yet.

SECTION C: THE BROS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section C: The Bros.

The Era Of The Broligarch Has Begun | Krystal Ball - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 1-24-25

KRYSTAL BALL : I mean we have so many like genuine civilization level crises I feel like coming to a head right now. Um, there's uh, the crisis you're talking about of this, you know, fake extraction built economy. There's a political crisis under that too, which is effectively neoliberalism was about getting rid of any values and outsourcing them to the market.

So if the market likes it, if it's good for the market, that's what our values are. And that's what leads to this current dystopian economic system that we have. Obviously there's the climate crisis, um, which is becoming, you know, increasingly unbearable. We're already at a point where, you know, they just announced last year, once again, hottest year on record.

Now we've crossed that 1. 5 degree [02:22:00] Celsius threshold. So those disasters are only going to be picking up steam. That of course fuels addition, additional demands in terms of migration, which causes, you know, fuels this reactionary political climate. And then you do have these, you know, this mass inequality that has rendered democracy just, I mean, it's, it's a silly word at this point.

You know, I really have come to a place where I, I feel like democracy and capitalism, they just, they were not able to coexist, certainly not in the system that we have where it's no holds barred in terms of all, you know, all money in politics and very, very few effectively meaningless limits. So, um, that's part of what's so distressing in this moment is all of these pieces coming together.

You know, I sort of go back and forth about which one I'm most. Most alarmed at uh at the present. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, I actually I want to get to that is the how you see how you're you're you're managing Like in the context of of what we do like sorting this stuff out on a [02:23:00] daily basis Like which fire is actually the the more pressing one and or the more relevant one um you mentioned like the the the wealth disparity and the sort of like uh threats to democracy aside from uh You know, we just, we just played a clip of Russell Vogt saying, uh, we may not distribute the funds that the IRA, um, uh, you know, calls for, which is really pretty fundamentally anti democratic.

I mean, there's a law, uh, that you're not supposed to ignore. Um, the, the level, and I know that, you know, we've been throwing the word oligarchy around for a long time. I mean, uh, you know, uh, And, and that, uh, gillian's, uh, study, uh, you know, uh, for 15 years people have been talking about like, you know, when wealthy people's interests come before Congress, uh, and there's controversy, their, their desires went out.

But the, the nakedness [02:24:00] and the sort of specificity of the oligarch that we seem to have almost overnight, like, you know, maybe over the course of the past 16 months is incredible. I mean, when, when. I'm having political conversation with people now. It's all about billionaires. 

Like, 

like it's not, you know, what's the speaker of the house doing?

It's what's Musk doing versus Altman, doing versus, uh, you know, Peter Thiel doing like, this is, it is a full on naked thing. And the only difference is, and we keep saying this is that like, you know, with Putin, he's got his cadre of oligarchs, except for one of them steps out of line. They end up having, you know, stepping into an elevator shaft and there's no elevator there or, uh, their plane seemed to fall from the sky.

Uh, I don't think Trump has that, um, uh, ability, um, where does this, how does this end? Like, I mean, like, honestly, because, you know, [02:25:00] uh, Democrats, I, maybe they'll get the message. Maybe they won't, but they're like, well, we'll, uh, you know, we're going to forefront Mark Cuban and he'll come in and Mark Cuban was taking that role in, uh, The Harris campaign, whether he had it or not, it's unclear, but he was certainly saying out there, like, nah, don't listen about the whole, Lena Kahn's gone.

KRYSTAL BALL : That's in the rich. Lena Kahn, she's not really going to do that stuff. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I mean, it is, it's a, it's a problem. 

KRYSTAL BALL : Yeah. It's a problem. No, I mean, it is, it is on a scale, like. Look, Democrats, I'm not letting them off the hook. They're complicit. They're the ones that also embraced this big money era, made it bipartisan, and made it very difficult for them to be able to criticize Trump's corruption, criticize the rise of this billionaire cadre in his myth.

I mean, his first cabinet, Was the wealthiest cabinet in history and this one dwarfs that by far not to mention, you know The lineup on the dais behind him as he's giving his speech like this is his administration It [02:26:00] is a level of control and um brazenness that we've never seen. I I we have not seen before in american history You know, um You could maybe go back to like, you know, the days of JP Morgan when the federal government was much more, maybe there's an analogy there, but I, we've never seen this before. And Elon Musk specifically, not only is he the richest man on the planet, not only does he control a major communications network.

Yep. Not only is he himself a public figure with a follow this, you know, cult following, but he also is one of the largest federal government contractors, pentagon contractors specifically is in all kinds of legal and regulatory trouble with the government. I'm sure that's all, you know, imminently going away, including the alleged SEC violations, the labor violations and environmental violations.

But now he's been given. This whole of government mandate to do whatever he wants and you know I know when doge [02:27:00] was first announced people were like, oh, this is just a make work project I never really bought that because to to bring it back to to russ vote who's you know Going to be once again at the office of management and budget It's like sort of you know nerdy budgeting agency, but actually very powerful and very important He was uh, you know behind project 2025 And they spent the four years when they were out of power figuring out how they could maximize their use of power when they were back in government.

Now that looks like, of course, installing cronies across all agencies who are willing to follow even unlawful and unconstitutional orders. But it also looks like things that, that, like what you were referring to, Sam, which is saying, you know. Yes, Congress passed those funds, but we don't actually believe we don't, we have an obligation to spend them.

We don't believe in it's called, I think the impoundment control act of 1970 something. We don't believe that was constitutional. So that means even if you want to spend money on the department of education, Congress, we can cut it at will because we're [02:28:00] under no obligation to do that. Oh, you may want to spend money on food stamps, but we don't want to.

So, you know, we're just going to unilaterally slash that. Those are the sorts of powers that they are looking at exercising. So this is another way in which this Trump administration is different from the first one. They are much more organized and they are much more focused on achieving radical right wing libertarian conservative goals in service of the oligarch cadre.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And I'll just add to that, they have 270 more judges. Then they did at the beginning of their administration last time, including the six, three Supreme court. So their ability, the, the, the things that slowed their role the first time, like you guys did not do the 60 day, you know, a period or a, a comment period, or, uh, you don't have the authority to do this.

I mean, we've seen examples, particularly out of the fifth [02:29:00] circuit of judges is basically, Twisting themselves into pretzels, um, because they know, I mean, they're now part of this sort of like, um, uh, feudal system, the way that they will rise up and go from, uh, you know, uh, Duke to a Prince or whatever it was back in the day is that they will, you know, start pumping out these decisions that will not inhibit the administration.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And they're auditioning for Trump.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Totally. Totally. And, um, and so there are just. Less institutional breaks and also even political ones because when Musk out there, you know, and we're gonna, Musk and Trump are gonna have their arguments, but they're never gonna break up because they're just, their incentives are just too well aligned.

That's what I think, um, uh, this whole thing that Musk is gonna tire or Trump is gonna tire of Musk and get rid of him. I think that's honestly, like, that's, that was, that's, that's JV Trump, that's 20, 20 16 [02:30:00] resistance. Yeah. Honestly, this time around. Because, Musk can literally deploy sums of money in these Senate or Congressional races and maintain a discipline that we just have never seen in American politics.

JD Vance, Curtis Yarvin, and the End of Democracy - Wisecrack - Air Date 10-18-24

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: Now, Yarvin has been called the house philosopher for billionaire, Silicon Valley guy, Peter Thiel, and his extended feel verse, which includes Vance among others.

He's argued that one of the problems with democracy, which, which he hates is that the masses suck. It's like a limp biscuit lyric. He thinks government should be turned into smaller entities, controlled with absolute rule by tech corporations and their CEOs. who act as dictators ruling over these new despotisms, monarchies, and feudalisms.

Now, there won't be any voting or democratic processes here, although the dictator's CEOs might be appointed by property owning shareholders. We got into this sort of thing in our recent video about weird billionaire Bitcoin guys building countries. Now, in case this doesn't have you ready to turn in your democracy card and move into one of Yarvin's [02:31:00] imagined patchwork cities, he also espouses pseudoscientific racism.

In which, quote, White people are congenitally smarter than black and brown people, and that Chinese people may be the smartest of all. Sounds cool, right? Now trying to summarize the core of his project is difficult, as it's scattered over a series of disjointed, even incoherent blog posts and interviews.

And I will say, as someone who's read and graded, Like thousands of philosophy essays in my day, um, it's bad writing. It's writing that wouldn't even, you know, cut the mustard in an undergraduate course. You know, it's not mysterious, it's not, oh, it's not, you gotta really figure out what he means. It's just poorly written.

But the overall gist here seems to be that Yarvin rejects the foundational premises of the Enlightenment. You know, among other things, that's like a humanist ethic, the universality of reason, you know, democracy is a political project to the aim of a egalitarian society. He also disdains modern systems that he believes perpetuate these ideals.

Now for him, this is journalism plus [02:32:00] academia, which he calls The Cathedral, and he thinks these are the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society. Now this worldview is informed by 19th century Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, a reactionary who hated the democratic masses and wrote that man, little as you may suppose it, is necessitated to obey a superior.

Whereas other philosophers of Carlyle's era called for humans to be free from monarchy and oppression, Carlyle thought folks needed to just suck it up and accept their subordination. And Yarvin has said, I will always be a Carlylean. These ideas congeal into neo reactionary thought, which combines anti enlightenment preferences for monarchy over democracy.

CURTIS YARVIN: To answer your question very directly, um, I'm a monarchist. 

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: With what Jacob Siegel calls a post libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means of administering society. Now in this school of thought we don't have some grand arc of history. That's that's progressing towards justice and you know, pursuing Liberty and equality as [02:33:00] political goals is just a sign that you're stupid.

CURTIS YARVIN: If we let elected politicians run the state we get demagoguery We get Hitler. It's all true. That's what happened. That's what we got. 

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: Now, according to YouCui, for the New York reactionaries, the equality, democracy, and liberty proposed by the Enlightenment and their universalization led to an unproductive politics characterized by political correctness.

One, therefore, needs to take the red pill to renounce these causes. And you know, once you do, you'll be ready to seek out alternatives. 

CURTIS YARVIN: By starting to think this way, I felt myself, you know, sort of, as one might say, exiting the matrix. 

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: This obsession with the idea that political correctness is an oppressive outcome of Enlightenment thought is all over Yarvin's work.

CURTIS YARVIN: Democracy is basically considered one of the worst forms of government until, um, the 18th century. It's, it's a, it's a sort of becomes the reverse of a slur in America around that time, but it had traditionally been like, Oh, this was [02:34:00] tried and it doesn't work. 

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: At times. It honestly seems like he's constructing a whole philosophy that just justifies the belief that white people are smarter and that the smartness makes them superior to others and that these others should have to listen to them.

You know, in this way, the underlying psychology of this is analogous to the Theo bros and integralists who think that women and non Christians need to get in line and follow their lead. And like those theologians, Yarvin's work is grounded in an anxiety about the decline of the white West marked by the rise of globalization, which has chipped away at its economic and cultural dominance.

CURTIS YARVIN: One of the things that's really surprising and unpleasant about kind of China beating the West at its own game. Aim in sort of so many ways is the number of ways in which things in China just obviously work extremely badly. And so like, yeah, you know, the place is still kind of a third world country in a way.

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: To me, this all has the vibes of an aging high school quarterback. You know, he's now sitting at the local bar four beers in talking about how he could easily get back in shape, throw the game winning touchdown and take Kelly McDonald to prom. 

UNCLE RICO: How much you want 

to make a bet? I can throw a 

football over the [02:35:00] mountains.

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: Kelly MacDonald's been, been married to a computer programmer named Chip for 10 years now. They have a vacation home in Bermuda. She doesn't even remember your name. But this sort of anxiety, especially in as much as it's hostile to the Enlightenment Project, doesn't really make sense. Because the Enlightenment Project itself, with its champion of equality and the embrace of reason, It was never really completed.

Instead, it was derailed by the rise of industrial capitalism and then pushed off a cliff by modern neoliberal economics. As Hui writes, the neoreactionary critique exposes the limit of the Enlightenment and its project. But surprisingly, it may only show that the Enlightenment has never really been implemented.

So, so in other words, like, they think that They're ruthlessly critiquing the political philosophy of the Enlightenment when in fact those values aren't the thing that's shaping modern culture in the first place. Okay, let's delve into headier territory here and follow Hui's argument, in which it's tempting to argue that Yarvin and the Neo Reactionaries are stuck in what philosopher [02:36:00] George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called the unhappy consciousness.

And this describes the moment that one looks back on history and sees a contradiction where they previously saw a straightforward and unified whole. I saw this in friends like myself who grew up religious or like flirted with evangelicalism, but then went to college and started reading a lot. And then you see that elements of the narrative you grew up believing are just inherently.

It can be very confusing, it can be very upsetting for some people, you know? 

RIGHT WING JESUS: Whoever welcomes one of these little ones in my name! Might be letting in a murderer or a drug. Let's get her to a detention center, you know, so we can figure out what's going on 

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: Now initially this moment is tragic because the unhappy consciousness can't make sense of this contradiction They can't see how what they thought was whole and complete is actually fractured and unfinished faced with this intellectual inconvenience one can either get stuck [02:37:00] in the feeling of unhappiness or And realizing that these narratives are unfinished and contradictory, or they can move forward, understanding that these contradictions are just a part of the development of consciousness and history.

We actually got into some of these contradictions in our video on political speech, uh, from a few weeks back, where we talked about this language in which, you know, um, we want to do what's best for, for workers and bosses, but of course, we look into that, uh, what's best for workers isn't what's best for bosses.

And vice versa, you know, stuff like that. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you a story about my two best friends. I won't say their names. You know, we all at different points we're, we're religious in different ways. And like one of these guys has more of a vibe of, okay, so there was problems with the stuff I believed then.

I now see that. But moving forward, I also see how those things I learned then are a part of a larger narrative about the way I relate to myself and the world. Another one of those guys is like, no, that stuff was all bad. And if I wasn't so religious, I would have had more sex in my early twenties. Um, so those are like two ways people deal with [02:38:00] consciousness.

Those friends ever watch this. I love you both. I love you differently, but I love you both. The neoreactionary mind is unable to accept the contradictions inherent in, you know, the post enlightenment era. So they instead curse the whole thing as damned from the start, and then long for a pre enlightenment past where strong men ruled and the weak followed.

As Huy writes, The will towards such radical change leaves them with the illusion of a beautiful story on the other side of the world, and with elaborate speculations about a superintelligence that will save human beings from politics. And while Jarvan's philosophical enemy is the Enlightenment and its legacy, his more immediate cultural enemy is the Cathedral.

Which is that mixture of academia and journalism. 

CURTIS YARVIN: The cathedral to refer to these kind of the mainstream intellectual, basically newspapers and academia. 

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: And he sees the academia media complex as holding the same influence as the church once held in medieval society. 

CURTIS YARVIN: This system does not work like the Vatican.

It basically [02:39:00] works as if it had a pope. And it's as unanimous as if it had a pope. 

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: Now here, I really cannot help but see the irony in a self constructed philosopher. One who was able to do all his reading and writing initially because he got a six figure payout from a tech company, acting as if the modern university is an elite system of influence on society and culture.

I'm gonna say more about this later in the video, but from personal experience, um, teaching philosophy at a contemporary university does not feel like a position of Powerful cultural influence, you know, at the rate that humanities programs are being shut down It seems like financial interests might have a slight edge Over this ideological one as one of yarvin's critics notes Nowhere on yarvin's list of things that are controlling the world and setting up a political center is finance Whereas in reality finance turns out to do an awful lot So he's either, you know missing the point or maybe just afraid to upset the finance guys who fund his lifestyle. 

UNHEARD PODCAST: So I noticed You don't mention big business in [02:40:00] that context or the tech tech powers.

Why is that not on your list? 

CURTIS YARVIN: Because the influence over of those over the world outside them is much smaller than the influence of the world outside them over them. 

MICHAEL BURNS - HOST, WISECRACK: Now, just like the Theo bros, there's a sort of self invented persecution complex here with a well educated upper class white guy claiming oppression because the rest of the world doesn't see how smart and special he is. It's like an unfunny version of Dwight Schrute, believing that if he were in charge, everything would be better. Unfortunately for us, this, uh, version of Dwight Schrute has the ear of some very powerful people, including Vance, Steele, and the folks that run some of the wealthiest tech companies and investment funds on the planet.

And it makes sense why these folks, most of whom are also well educated, white, and incredibly rich, would be attracted to Yarvin's thought, as it justifies why no one cool in the culture. 

DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America Part 2 - Blonde Politics | The Silly Serious - Air Date 11-13-24

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Yavin writes a lot of strange things, but one thing I'm particularly interested in is the blueprint he wrote for Donald Trump.

It's called The Butterfly Revolution. It's quite radical and another [02:41:00] thing that would be easy to dismiss, but here's a clip of Yavin talking about why he thinks it would be successful today. 

CURTIS YARVIN: Kins of 2024. are incredibly frivolous, incredibly ironic. It is the most ironic society in history. I imagine people trying to cope with a film like the matrix or inception and like 1960 total frame breaking of this kind in some ways is actually easier.

Then the sort of incremental political logic that people have employed in the past they can sort of more easily imagine Oh, man, it's all the Truman Show. In fact, they mostly already believe that it's all or all the Truman Show They just don't understand the implications of that 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Something I find concerning is the many ways that the butterfly revolution perfectly aligns with Project 2025.

Not a huge amount of the tech bros in Silicon Valley are religious, but that doesn't really stop these kinds of groups working together. Definitionally, both of these movements are fascistic. Fascism has [02:42:00] never been a fully coherent ideology. That's one of the things that gives fascism its strength. Its ability to bring together groups from different movements, all of whom see fascism as a viable mechanism to achieving their own program.

And that's why some people say that fascism is always hyphenated. So it's always going to be tech fascism and Christian fascism, but these people can work together, and they do. 

PETER THIEL: One of the things that, um, evangelicals and libertarians should agree on is that the political order is not divinely ordained.

Amen. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Project 2025 has similar stated goals to the tech industry. In particular, the dismantling of the administrative state and the return of self governance to the people. Project 2025 is made up of four pillars and pillar four is The Playbook. It is a transition plan for the President's Eyes Only. It will be rolled out upon the President's utterance of So Help Me God.

We don't know what's in this playbook, but given the alignment of talking points, key figures being involved in [02:43:00] both, it wouldn't surprise me if it was similar to the Butterfly Revolution. And I think that's worth investigating.

DONALD TRUMP: He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no. Other than day one. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Yavin says that Donald Trump should run on his autocratic ambition, but he should frame it as destroying an inefficient and unworkable system. 

JD VANCE: We are in the late Republican period. If we're going to push back against it, we have to get pretty, pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.

KEVIN ROBERTS: We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless. If the left allows it to be. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Step two, purge The Bureaucracy. Courtesy, Arvin refers to this as Rage. 

CURTIS YARVIN: RAGE stands for Retire all government employees. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: And he has clearly influenced some very important people. 

JD VANCE: I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice.

Fire every single mid level [02:44:00] bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: And we know that Donald Trump would be open to rage because it sounds a lot like Schedule F, an executive order issued by Donald Trump in October of 2020. Schedule F would have essentially stripped protections from civil servants who didn't show enough loyalty to the president of the day, which is why Joe Biden rescinded this order the second he came into office in January of 2021.

But Trump has said he plans to reinstate it. 

DONALD TRUMP: First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: But how could you accomplish that so quickly? I mean, you need civil servants. Don't worry.

Project 2025 is already on it. Pillar 2 of Project 2025 could be considered MAGA LinkedIn. This platform is designed to pre stream candidates for their loyalty and streamline the appointments process. 

PROJECT 2025 SPEAKER: We talk about conservative warriors, but we want people who've been cancelled, or who've [02:45:00] kind of They're, you know, figuratively giving blood for the movement.

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Then pair that with Pillar 3, which is an online education platform known as the Presidential Administration Academy, and you have preemptively educated all future employees on what is expected of them from the conservative administration. Step 3. Ignore the courts. According to Yarvin, the president should simply state that he believes Madison v Marbury was decided incorrectly Declare a state of emergency, and that way, Supreme Court rulings would be merely advisory.

JD VANCE: When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: But thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions, he may not even need to do that. 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The high court has just issued one of its most consequential rulings in recent decades.

A decision that not only affects the 2024 race for president following last week's contentious debate, but also the future of the presidency itself. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Trump v. United States has laid the groundwork to ensure that Donald Trump can ignore [02:46:00] the court. Now, the president has Absolute immunity for court official acts and presumptive immunity for all other official acts.

A distinction that has not been clarified by the court with only a few examples being provided and absolutely no guardrails to stop the misuse of this decision being put in place. 

JOE BIDEN: Today's decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what the president can do because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law even including the Supreme Court of the United States.

The only limits will be self imposed by the president alone. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Step four, co opt Congress. Yarvin suggests that Trump hand pick candidates for every single seat, with the sole criterion being personal loyalty to him. Because you can't have a parliamentary dictatorship. If you don't have Congress, and while it seems like a big task, Yavin assures us, you only need a couple of billion dollars.

I know some people with a few billion dollars. While [02:47:00] Peter Thiel may have decided to sit this election cycle out, Elon Brian Armstrong have not. 

DONALD TRUMP: We gotta get the congressmen elected, and we gotta get the senators elected, because we can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret, we're gonna do really well with the House, right?

Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a secret. We'll tell you what it is when the race is over.

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: In this declared state of emergency, Yarvin suggests that Trump take direct control over all law enforcement agencies, federalize the National Guard, and effectively create a national police force that absorbs local bodies. 

Speaker 62: I think that actually the support of the democratic public is a cipher. I think that actually all you need is command of the police.

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: This is so that a centralized police state can be created to back the power grab, and I'd say there's no way this could happen if Donald Trump hadn't tried to do it before. We know that he sent the National Guard during the George Floyd [02:48:00] protests. 

DONALD TRUMP: And that I was insistent on having the National Guard go in and do their work.

It was like a miracle. It just everything stopped. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: And we know that he wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act. 

DONALD TRUMP: Your state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property. of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Now, there are of course protections within the law, posse comitatus, to stop a president from doing this, but Donald Trump has found a loophole before, I'm sure he'll find one again, especially in a state of emergency where he has absolute immunity for core official acts. Step 6. Shut down elite media and academic institutions.

Yavin has explicitly said that you cannot have a New York Times or a Harvard past April. He has a popular theory that true power in America is held by something he calls the cathedral. a term that should alert you [02:49:00] whenever you hear it to this kind of thing. The cathedral is made up of elite media and academic institutions that according to Yavin set the bounds of acceptable political discourse and distort reality to conform with their ideological beliefs.

Speaker 62: The cathedral is essentially performing the functions that a ministry of truth would perform in a classic Orwellian, you know, environment. Um, and it's performing the functions that a religion would in a classic theocracy. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Therefore, existing media and academic institutions need to be dismantled. Vance has been quite vocal about his disdain for academic institutions despite graduating from Yale and often repeats Yavin's ideas in his own words.

JD VANCE: So much of what we want to do in this movement in in this country I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions specifically the universities which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity. [02:50:00] That provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exists in our country.

And so I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Trump has said that if elected he will reclaim the universities from the Marxist maniacs and lunatics who currently control them.

How will he do this? 

DONALD TRUMP: When I return to the White House I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors. Who will impose real standards 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: on colleges. In his Agenda 47, Trump has proposed a law to monitor universities for civil rights violations.

DONALD TRUMP: I will advance a measure. to have them fined up to the entire amount of 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: their endowment. That means he could essentially put an institution like Harvard out of business overnight. [02:51:00] Elon Musk spends a significant portion of his time trying to undermine existing media in favor of his own platform X. Trump has absolutely no problem getting rid of legacy media.

He has repeatedly talked about the government's licensing of broadcast airwaves and about 15 times threatened to revoke licenses of existing stations. 

DONALD TRUMP: And it's frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write and people should look into it. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: Step seven, turn out your people.

Get your people out in the street. to show their support for you anytime a government agency tries to obstruct you. Yavin says this should be like the post Soviet revolutions. It should be masses of people. It should be joyful. And we know that Donald Trump has no problem in asking people to physically show their support for him.

DONALD TRUMP: We're gonna walk down to the Capitol

because you'll never Take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength. 

JOANNA - HOST, BLONDE POLITICS: [02:52:00] Once this butterfly revolution has taken place and the presidency looks more like a CEO or a king, the court of tech geniuses will have a much more realistic shot at getting what they want. One thing I can tell you about these Silicon Valley tech bros is that they are long term thinkers.

They are planning for years and years and years into the future. In case you needed more evidence that Silicon Valley and Project 2025 are in bed together. There is this strange tech conference called Reboot. And in September, at the last Reboot conference, which is all about creating a new reality, there was a special secret guest speaker.

That secret guest speaker ended up being Kevin Roberts, who gave a speech titled, Tech and the American Republic. The point of trying to put Vance in the VP position wasn't just to have him one heartbeat away from an old and ailing president. It was to introduce him to [02:53:00] the world as the new blueprint of the Republican Party.

To provide a strong option for a post MAGA Republican Party. A party that will co opt the government to destroy the country in order to allow self described great men to install themselves as mini kings. 

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or our upcoming topics: a broader look at the long list of ways Trump and company are working to dismantle the government, followed by a dive into the deportation regime that is currently revving up.

You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991. You can now reach us on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the username bestoftheleft.01. There's also a link in the show notes for that. Or simply email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from Legendary Lore, Velshi, The Thom Hartmann Program, Jacobin [02:54:00] Radio, The Mark Thompson Show, Up Front, Chris Norlund, Revolutionary Left Radio, The Bradcast, Left Anchor, The Majority Report, and Wisecrack. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Lara for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. 

And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can [02:55:00] also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all new social media platforms you might be joining these days. 

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, And this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.Com.