Random thoughts

I started commenting at Faux News a couple of weeks ago. Today, I was unable to comment. I've been canceled again by America's authoritarian radical right propaganda Leviathan (even bigger than a Kraken!). That makes 10 different sites that have canceled me. And the radical tyranny supporters complain about their free speech being canceled. 

Vox comments about the disaster called the Middle East:

Palestinians fear they’re being displaced permanently. 

Here’s why that’s logical.

In Israel, calls to expel Palestinians have become increasingly mainstream. Many believe an expulsion like the 1948 Nakba is possible

Since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 1.4 million people have been displaced in Gaza following Israeli orders to flee south, according to the United Nations. That’s over 60 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population. In wartime, civilians sometimes have to flee an area until it’s safe to return. .... But many Palestinians worldwide fear that those who are trying to escape the fighting in Gaza will never be able to return to their homes. The displacement, they worry, will become a permanent exile.  

Most of the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza aren’t originally from Gaza. They’re the children or grandchildren of the more than 700,000 refugees who were expelled or forced to flee their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 war that led to the country’s creation. This 75-year-old expulsion — which Palestinians call the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe” — is not a long-faded memory. It’s a deeply felt, visceral, and ongoing pain.

Christian nationalism just got significantly more powerful: Mike Johnson Conducted Seminars Promoting the US as a “Christian Nation” -- The new House speaker called for “Biblically-sanctioned government.”

Christian opacity and deceit:

Kelly's website was taken down shortly after 

Mike became speaker- they tried to hide this, but 

'twas too late

The New Republic writes about the latest mass shooting tragedy: The senseless violence has also tapped into another fruitless round of Republican leaders issuing “thoughts and prayers” to the families of victims while continuing to pocket large donations from gun lobbyists. In the last decade, the National Rifle Association has spent more than $37 million on its political lobbying, with GOP legislators reaping the bulk of it, including Senators Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell, according to data from OpenSecrets.

TNR's feisty headline for that bit is Screw You, Republicans, and Your Stupid, Useless Prayers.

Hm. The news hasn't been very good lately. ☹️

The callous immorality of American authoritarian radical right billionaires

A NYT opinion opines about what authoritarian radical right billionaires want for the rest of us:

It takes a certain kind of person to write grandiose manifestoes for public consumption, unafflicted by self-doubt or denuded of self-interest. The latest example is Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and best known, to those of us who came of age before TikTok, as a co-founder of the pioneering internet browser Netscape. In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a recent 5,000-plus-word post on the Andreessen Horowitz website, Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us — the unwashed masses, people who have either “unskilled” jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both — we exist mostly as automatons whose entire value is measured in productivity.

The vision has attracted a good deal of controversy. But the real problem with Mr. Andreessen’s manifesto may be not that it’s too outlandish, but that it’s too on-the-nose. Because in a very real and consequential sense, this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it. You can see it in the work requirements associated with public assistance, which imply that people’s primary value is their labor and that refusal or inability to contribute is fundamentally antisocial. You can see it in the way we valorize the C.E.O.s of “unicorn” companies who have expanded their wealth far beyond what could possibly be justified by their individual contributions. And the way we regard that wealth as a product of good decision-making and righteous hard work, no matter how many billions of dollars of investors’ money they may have vaporized, how many other people contributed to their success or how much government money subsidized it. In the case of ordinary individuals, however, debt is regarded as not just a financial failure but a moral one. (If you are successful and have paid your student loans off, taking them out in the first place was a good decision. If you haven’t and can’t, you were irresponsible and the government should not enable your freeloading.)

As a piece of writing, the rambling and often contradictory manifesto has the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacks the ideological coherency. It rails against centralized systems of government (communism in particular, though it’s unclear where Mr. Andreessen may have ever encountered communism in his decades of living and working in Silicon Valley) while advocating that technologists do the central planning and govern the future of humanity. Its very first line is “We are being lied to,” followed by a litany of grievances, but further on it expresses disdain for “victim mentality.”  

It would be easy to dismiss this kind of thing as just Mr. Andreessen’s predictable self-interest, but it’s more than that. He articulates (albeit in a refrigerator magnet poetry kind of way) a strain of nihilism that has gained traction among tech elites, and reveals much of how they think about their few remaining responsibilities to society.  

There’s probably a German word to describe the unique combination of horrifying and silly that this vision evokes, but it is taken seriously by people who imagine themselves potential Chief Executive Authoritarians, or at the very least proxies. This includes another Silicon Valley billionaire, Peter Thiel, who has funded some of Mr. Yarvin’s work and once wrote that he believed democracy and freedom were incompatible.

It’s easy enough to see how this vision might appeal to people like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Thiel. But how did they sell so many other people on it? By pretending that for all their wealth and influence, they are not the real elites.

The heartlessness, cynicism and arrogance in Andreessen’s cruel plutocratic vision for America is clear. Corrupt, unregulated brass knuckles capitalism is what the corrupt, modern Republican Party stands and fights for.

Cynical plutocrat Marc Andreessen

(Motto: I've got mine, fuck you)

What America's authoritarian radical right elites want to do

In 2022, the group Documented obtained a 38 minute video that describes what ARR (authoritarian radical right) elites have planned for America. Our future will ugly, unpleasant and constrained if they get their way. The Guardian writes about what the billionaires intend:

‘Get the right cases to the supreme court’: 

inside Charles Koch’s network

Billionaire’s web of rightwing groups works to bring cases to court that could undermine core functionings of the US government

At least two of the biggest cases to be considered by the justices this term have been spurred by groups bankrolled and coordinated within the Koch universe.

Footage of an internal panel discussion between senior operatives from Koch entities held in the summer of 2022 reveals that the network has been quietly planning the current assault on the “administrative state”. The groups are seeking to exploit the supreme court’s new six-to-three rightwing majority secured by Donald Trump to dismantle vital executive powers.

Regulatory controls in their sights include environmental standards to combat pollution and the climate crisis, consumer protections against predatory lenders, and safeguards for workers’ rights. At stake is what the Strict Scrutiny podcast has called “the future of government as we know it”.

The footage, which is made public here for the first time, was obtained by the investigative watchdog Documented and shared with the Guardian. During the 37-minute panel discussion, legal strategists with several Koch-related groups expressed excitement that the new hard-right supreme court supermajority had created the potential for a concerted attack on the functions of federal agencies.  

Casey Mattox, a legal strategist at the main Koch advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, argued that the supreme court was now “primed for a real change in the law” on federal regulations which he said amounted to a “paradigm shift”. Mattox said: “That’s why we are partnering with organizations that can get the right cases to the supreme court.”

The effort appears to have borne fruit. Two of the most significant cases before the court in the 2023-24 term, brought with the backing of Koch-linked organizations, attempt to rein back the government’s power to impose regulations on corporations.

The prominence of the cases underlines how the libertarian empire created by the Kochs is still a force to be reckoned with within US politics.

Warning 1: This is just another warning about what wealthy authoritarian radicals intend for us, regardless of their denials, deflections, distractions, lies and slanders. The USSC alone has the power to destroy democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. That is what the billionaires want. The rule of law will be changed to protect special interests at the expense of the public interest, including the environment, honest government and civil liberties. We will have a kleptocracy where vast corruption is legalized and honest citizens have few or no protections from rape and oppression by unregulated, rapacious corporate, plutocrat and theocrat power.

Warning 2: Always keep eyes on the flow of power. When government regulations are gutted, as the ARR elites want, power flows from government and the people to wealthy special interests, dictators, plutocrats, theocrats and kleptocrats. Anyone who believes that corporations, billionaires libertarian ideologues or Christian nationalist zealots will look out for us is completely mistaken. They look out for themselves and only themselves.

News bits: The bad new speaker; American radicalization update; Etc.

New House speaker Mike Johnson is a radical right authoritarian, a traitor who voted to stop the 2020 election and a deeply corrupt climate crackpot: 

New House Speaker Champions Fossil Fuels 

and Dismisses Climate Concerns

Representative Mike Johnson comes from Louisiana oil country and has said he does not believe burning fossil fuels is changing the climate

Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the newly elected House speaker, has questioned climate science, opposed clean energy and received more campaign contributions from oil and gas companies than from any other industry last year.  

Since 2018, Mr. Johnson has received about $240,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, according to Open Secrets, a campaign finance watchdog.

The vote for Johnson was reported to be unanimous. That's evidence that there are no moderates left in the radical right authoritarian GOP. All that's left is radical right authoritarians and extremely radical right authoritarians.

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This year’s Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) annual American Values Survey indicate that the MAGA movement has radicalized millions of Americans. The WaPo comments in an opinion piece:

The survey’s great value comes as a warning about the radicalization and alienation of a segment of the major parties’ followers. “Today, nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,’ up from 15% in 2021,” the survey found. “PRRI has asked this question in eight separate surveys since March 2021. This is the first time support for political violence has peaked above 20%.” A full third of Republicans believe this, compared with 13 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, QAnon believers have jumped from 14 percent of Americans to 23 percent, with Republicans twice as likely as Democrats to buy into the extreme conspiracy theory.

Clearly, authoritarianism has made greater inroads among Republicans than other groups. “About half of Republicans (48%) agree with the need for a leader who is willing to break some rules, compared with four in ten independents (38%) and three in ten Democrats (29%).”  

Most frightening is how many Republicans buy into white Christian nationalism, a racist ideology that rejects the basic premise of our democracy: “All men are created equal.” One-third of Americans but 52 percent of Republicans agree that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” The number is even higher among White evangelical Protestants (54 percent). Americans who subscribe to white Christian nationalism are more than twice as likely as other Americans to say true patriots might have to resort to violence to save the country.  

When a sizable portion of one of the major political parties, aided by a right-wing propaganda machine and infused with religious fervor, rejects the basis for multiracial, multicultural democracy, we face a severe crisis. Even if Trump does not return to the White House, this radicalized segment will not disappear. How we reintegrate millions of Americans into reality-based, pro-democracy politics in a diverse country remains the great challenge of our time.

On the encouraging side, an overwhelming majority of Americans support teaching the good and the bad of American history, trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum, and strongly oppose banning books that discuss slavery or banning Advanced Placement African American History. A solid majority of Americans opposes banning social and emotional learning programs in public schools. The poll data indicates that Republican “anti-wokeism” messaging is deeply unpopular. 

Even more encouraging, public sympathy for radical right authoritarianism, denials of racism and abortion bans, especially among the GOP’s main base of White evangelical Christians, are opposed by a solid majority of Americans.

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The Hill writes about how one House member sees the election of the authoritarian radical Mike Johnson:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) held up newly-elected Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) as a shining example of the strength of the “MAGA movement,” after every GOP member of Congress voted for him to be Speaker on Wednesday, ending three weeks of chaos in the House.

That jives with how the WaPo opinion describes the effect of the MAGA movement on the now fully radicalized, authoritarian GOP in the House.