Springtime for Musk and Thiel

Winter for Freedom and Democracy

Mel Brooks’ brilliant 1968 film, The Producers, centers on the production of a musical, “Springtime for Hitler”, meant to be a flop, that turns out to be a smash success. Perhaps today, we could see a non-ironic Broadway version of that fictional musical?

I don’t know to what extent most people fully understand what is happening right now with Elon Musk and the US government — what ideological rationale drives this unconstitutional intervention, and, also, what Musk and his allies, including JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison, plan for the immediate future of America and the world. We truly are on a path of self immolation as a society right now. It isn’t clear if this can be stopped. It is crucial we get the full picture and then intervene, to the extent we can.

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According to The Atlantic: “Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has declared war on the federal government, rapidly slashing its size and reach by leveraging his social media platform and financial power.” AP News writes: “Elon Musk, with the support of President Donald Trump, is rapidly gaining control over various aspects of the federal government, sidelining career officials, accessing sensitive databases, and dismantling humanitarian programs like USAID.” New York Magazine notes: “Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been granted full access to the U.S. Treasury's federal payment system… Critics… are worried about Musk's intentions, given his unprecedented access to the payment system, which handles over $6 trillion annually.”

My approach to our current situation encompasses psychological as well as prophetic / esoteric dimensions. It seems extraordinary — almost unbelievable — that these oligarchs who were among the greatest all-time beneficiaries of the American system, based on a more-or-less functional rule of law and the various protections enshrined in the US Constitution, now seek to dismantle and destroy this system that made them. This stands as one of the greatest examples of hubris and arrogance in human history. May it backfire upon them.

As massive beneficiaries of our legacy system, these tech oligarchs were, in retrospect, greatly over-rewarded. This amplified their sense of arrogance and entitlement, which has now reached Thanos-like proportions. As Ben Tarnoff chronicles in Internet for the People, the Internet was built as public infrastructure with taxpayer money, but then simply given away to corporations who could profit from it, who basically took it over without public participation or democratic oversight.

While he criticizes government hand outs such as social services for poor people or public education, Musk lives off a steady flow of government largesse, tax breaks, and regulatory incentives. Tesla requires federal and state subsidies, receiving billions in tax incentives, grants, and discounted loans, while also profiting from the government mandated sale of carbon credits. With lucrative NASA and Pentagon contracts, SpaceX is a private company sustained by public money.

Musk and Trump are narcissists themselves, and the sons of narcissistic fathers, making them extensions of their fathers’ broken psychologies. In everything they do, they seek validation and approval. Deprived of love as children, they lack empathy, remorse, or conscience in their actions. They cover up underlying shame and insecurity with an absolute faith in themselves and their ideas, as they pursue limitless wealth and power, which will never address their underlying misery.

As one friend writes: “At the core of narcissistic leadership lies a particular psychological mechanism: the externalization of internal states. These leaders consistently project their inner turmoil onto the world around them, creating a distorted mirror that reflects their own unacknowledged struggles.” For reasons we can explore at greater depth, the post-industrial Capitalist and “cognitive Capitalist” mechanisms of social media and virtual technology have impelled these particular kinds of destructive and parasitic character types into central roles in our society. We do not know, at this moment, how to dislodge them.

To provide a quick overview on the most recent news about Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), many journalists and politicians now believe we have entered a full-fledged Constitutional crisis, unlike anything experienced since the Civil War. While many of the moves undertaken immediately by the Trump regime were plotted out carefully far in advance, there also seems to be a massive overreach happening — a kind of manic ersatz quality to the entire spectacle.

My sense is that Trump himself is now irrelevant — he served his function — and Vance/Musk/Thiel call the shots, along with Kevin Roberts from the Heritage Foundation, influenced by their allies in various anti-Democratic and authoritarian regimes around the world. Using the “shock and awe” tactics pioneered by Fascist regimes such as the Nazis, they seek to transform the underlying functioning of the government and the economy before the people can grasp what’s happening.