Are We in a Time Loop?

Why does our social and political disintegration feel so eerily familiar?

I experience a kind of low-level, continuous deja vu these days. It is hard for me to put this into words exactly. I will try. I am curious if anyone else has a similar, eerie feeling (please let me know in the comments). It feels, almost, like I am in a time loop. Have we lived through this before together? Do we, on some psychic level, know what’s coming next? I admit I feel anticipatory dread.

From my childhood in Manhattan — nucleus of the American Empire — I always felt the United States had a Fascist ambience or undertone. The government, with its overwhelming military might and lavishly funded intelligence agencies, possessed all the elements of a totalitarian system. My mother was part of the nascent, idealistic countercultural Left in the 1960s. The FBI and the government targeted and annihilated this hopeful movement, crushing the little butterfly under its massive tank treads.

I was born three years after JFK’s assassination. In 2001, when 9/11 happened, I was thirty-five-years old. 9/11 felt like an engineered spectacle, a diversionary plot, a simulacrum. My friends and I uselessly protested the Iraq War, launched under such obvious fake pretenses. In their think tank, Project for a New American Century, Rumsfeld and Cheney had stated that the US needed a new Pearl Harbor incident to shock the public and allow the US to take the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East. With 9/11, they got it.

I find it highly unlikely that Israel, with its high-tech surveillance, didn’t identify thousands of terrorists with guns and paragliders massing near the border on October 7. The playbook is so similar: The 3,000 people killed on 9/11 became a media fixation,  embedded like a nail in the American Psyche, while few Americans mourned the one million Iraq civilians who died due to our botched invasion. For Israelis, the lives of the 1,200 Israeli victims and hostages of Hamas’ Al-Aqsa flood are of infinite value, compared to any number of Palestinian lives, of any age.

All of this is to say I totally understand the despair and fury of so many people who have given up on the mainstream political system at this point. Some find it broken to such an extent that they want Trump and his fascist cronies to pillage it, smash it to pieces, destroy it. Whatever it takes to start over again — or just to annihilate it. So why not vote for Thanatos, for Chthulu, for Satan, for unbridled rage and vengeance?

A vast number of Americans have lost their minds. It is hard to fathom, no matter how much you hate the Democrats, and hate them for good reasons, that you can support Trump. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign could have restored the soul of the Democratic Party, but the establishment disemboweled it. Yet, given all of it, I still find it inconceivable that people actually want Trump/Vance/Musk/Thiel/Heritage Foundation/Opus Dei unleashed. Generally when a country voluntarily elects a Fascist dictator, there is no going back.

Trump has created a toxic relationship, based on narcissistic abuse and gaslighting, with the entire country. I feel personally traumatized by him — that I still have to look at him, listen to him, think about him, read the disgusting things he says and does, read commentary on him. Here I am writing about him. Yet I still find myself laughing at times, in some kind of ghoulish, mechanical, gallows-humor-like way, at his next-latest idiotic, impulsive, repulsive, attention-getting stunt. And I realize he is just a willing clown-puppet serving far more dangerous and well-organized forces.

Every day, the media becomes more unbearable. Many years ago, I went on the Joe Rogan podcast to talk about psychedelics and indigenous prophecy. Back then, Rogan seemed to be building a bridge between Leftist psychonauts and mainstream sports fans. Yesterday, Rogan posted his new “interview” with Donald Trump, where he does everything to help Trump except (forgive the language) literally sucking his dick. Trump has now been explicitly outed as a Fascist, a Nazi sympathizer, and a Hitler aficionado by his own former chief of staff. 40 of 44 of Trump’s former cabinet appointees say is unfit to serve, incredibly dangerous to America, a traitor. Rogan doesn’t care. Asks him one softball question after the next. Normalizes and humanizes him. Finds him funny. Likes him.

Also yesterday, the craven billionaire owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times blocked their editors from endorsing Harris for President. As The Guardian notes, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong are cowards who fear retaliation from Trump if he wins. This is part of the “Big Pre-Chill” I am sensing all around me. It feels a bit like being stalked by distant, as-of-yet invisible beasts of prey. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny begins:

1. Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Many wealthy people and influencers seem to be psychologically pre-adjusting to the approaching catastrophe. Where is the outrage, the outcry, from public artists, musicians, celebrities? Why does this feel so much like Weimar Germany? Have we really learned so little from history that we intend do the whole thing again? Inevitably, it ends very badly for all concerned.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal informed us that Elon Musk is in direct, ongoing contact with Putin. This contact is illegal, violating something called the Logan Act, a “federal law that criminalizes the negotiation of a dispute between the United States and a foreign government by an unauthorized American citizen.” Former FBI Special Agent Asha Rangappa writes: “If Elon Musk is secretly in communication with the head of state of a nation with which we have ongoing “controversy,” and is negotiating measures that undermine the U.S. government’s foreign policy, that is a crime..”

While the mind-warped citizens of Trumplandia still believe that Musk bought Twitter to protect “free speech,” it is increasingly clear this is absolute garbage. Musk bought it to enhance his political influence as well as the behind-the-scenes forces he represents. This is why he turned it into a private company, so he would have no oversight. He changed the platforms’ algorithms so his content is inescapably ubiquitous, and he suspends the accounts of journalists he doesn’t like, like Ken Klippenstein who released a dossier on JD Vance assembled by Trump’s campaign team.

Musk was recently forced by legal action to release a list of the investors who helped him buy Twitter. The list includes P Diddy, Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, Jack Dorsey, and investors tied to Russian oligarchs. According to Rolling Stone:

Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud of Saudi Arabia is listed as a shareholder along with Kingdom Holding Company, of which he is CEO and 95 percent owner. The billionaire royal and Kingdom Holding had purchased a 3 percent stake in Twitter for $300 million back in 2011. According to Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia’s monarchy works to strictly limit freedom of expression online and is “brutal” in its crackdowns on citizens, using the internet to voice opinions they find unacceptable, even sentencing some to extensive prison terms. Q Tetris Holding, another of Musk’s investors, is a Qatari company; its leadership overlaps with that of the nation’s sovereign wealth fund, Qatar Investment Authority. Qatar, too, is known to filter and censor internet data.

Another investor in Twitter is 8VC, “a venture capitalist company co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of intelligence contractor and data analysis platform Palantir.” According to Deutsche Welle News:

8VC has invested in US defense projects with Lonsdale arguing that China's growing influence is behind his firm's move to back military startups.

Speaking at an event in March, Lonsdale said China is “building really advanced things that they're starting to compete with the US.”

“That became a very scary realization to us about 10 years ago so we went hard into defense,” he said.

On the fund's website, Denis Aven and Jack Moshkovich pop up in the staff section — the sons of sanctioned Russian oligarchs Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich. The former is co-founder of Alfa-Bank, Russia's largest private bank, and LetterOne Holdings investment company. He's been sanctioned as part of the measures imposed on Russian individuals in the wake of Russia's war against Ukraine.

I am spending time to spell this out because I think it is important for people to fully understand our current situation: The forces seeking global autocracy, oligarchic power, and technocratic control are circling the almost-broken American Democratic system like a pack of wolves waiting to pounce. While the Democrats are far from inspiring, they are all we have now to prevent a free-fall into Fascist dictatorship. I recommend supporting Harris/Walz in the next ten days, however you can (donate to Move the Vote, Seed the Vote, and you use relational outreach to find uncommitted swing state voters via the Reach app).

It is now clear that Musk — who brags about his lack of empathy and demonstrates it in his brutal mistreatment of workers and family members — is a real-life James Bond villain seeking to amass unlimited power. He is playing the world like a video game, where the goal is dictatorial control, Artificial Super Intelligence, and the Singularity. To win the game, you reach some type of ego-based immortality, either uploading your consciousness or building an imperishable body. This is the absolute zenith of egomania. I can’t see this situation ending well for any of us, unless we awaken and dehypnotize the people, and organize to break the power of the billionaire class. After all, there are only a few of them, and many of us.

This video from Robert Reich, “Why do so many Americans support a neofascist”, explores how we got into this nightmare. Reich argues that popular support for Trump reflects deep-seated economic grievances, exacerbated by decades of policy choices that widened inequality, undermined the American middle class, and created a sense of resentment and powerlessness. In the 1990s, Reich warned that growing inequality would lead to social and political strife, as disenfranchised Americans sought to blame immigrants, government officials, and other groups. He was prescient.

Trump is symptom rather than cause of America’s current state: Like fungus growing on an already rotting tree stump. Populist rage is based in structural changes that began in the 1970s, including wage stagnation, the decline of union power, globalization, and the rise of shareholder primacy. Unfortunately, Clinton and Obama forfeited the Democratic Party’s working class base, seeking support, instead, from middle managers and financial speculators. This was a gigantic mistake.

in the mid-1950s, about 35% of US workers belonged to a union. Today it is less than 6%. As traditional manufacturing jobs moved overseas and unions lost influence, workers’ real wages plummeted. The American Dream became a Fentanyl-laced nightmare for many. We transitioned to a gig economy where younger people have little hope of attaining security or buying a home. Wealth and power concentrated in fewer and fewer hands — a trend that Artificial Intelligence is accelerating. Tech companies like Uber and Amazon only exacerbate these trends, fighting against unionization.

Since 1980, the compensation for the average CEO went from 30 - 40 times that of the average worker to 400 times. In 1980, average CEO compensation was $1.2 million. Today, it is $20 million annually. The US experienced a period of progressive taxation and shared post-war prosperity from the 1940s to the 1970s that created the “Great Society.” Due to financial deregulation and the breakup of unions, U.S. wealth concentration has skyrocketed. Today, we’ve surpassed Gilded Age levels, with the top 1% controlling 90% of the wealth, and the top .1% owning 20% of everything.

It is ironic and devastating that so many people have their minds warped to believe all kinds of conspiratorial insanity coming from Far Right and Russian PsyOps. In fact, the real, terrifying, overt conspiracy happening now is that of autocratic power from across the world — dictators, Right Wing tech magnates and oil company heirs — to intensify their control and destroy our future.

We still have time to prevent the debacle here: I hope we use it.