The Rot at the Top

The United Healthcare killing, Chomsky's warning, and the man behind Project 2025

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I find myself feeling the same celebratory spirit at the cold-blooded killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson yesterday as many millions of other Americans. I consider this jubilant outpouring a healthy sign — but, also, an ominous and portentous one that makes me uneasy. The response to Thompson’s murder shows people’s rage at our broken system. It has also led to an extraordinary outpouring of memes and jokes:

Plus an instant subgenre of Gen Z folk songs about it on Tik Tok, including this and this.

The collective outpouring over Thompson’s killing makes me wonder if we are closer to an actual socialist revolution than anyone has imagined. People are both fed up and armed to the teeth. Personally, I have struggled with the vile, corrupt, lying health insurance industry and felt fury against them. When I needed an operation, I got shafted by Oscar, which has Jared Kushner as an investor. Feel free to leave your own experiences and thoughts about the American healthcare system in the comments.

When Trump, Musk (who spent a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump) and the rest of the MAGA fanatics start carving up social security and Medicare, blowing up prices with tariffs, removing environmental protections, further deregulating corporations, and forcing the people to invest in shady cryptocurrencies to try to outrun inflation and skyrocketing prices, when those “speculative assets” predictably collapse in value, the whole thing could, very suddenly and drastically, turn against them. Wouldn’t that be sad?

Of course, it turns out that United Healthcare contributed a huge amount of money to Kamala Harris’ campaign. Harris, at one point, promoted the idea of universal health coverage. But she dropped that issue, which, on its own, could have won her the election. As I have discussed previously, the Democratic Party shill for a less extreme version of the same corporate, world-destroying agenda as the Republicans.

For a few days now, I have been trying to write about Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America: The new book by Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation and a central figure behind Project 2025. For some reason, I seem to like torturing myself by reading this stuff. Actually, I feel compelled to try to reach a deeper understanding of the ideology and psychology that operates in these people, so I can analyze and deconstruct it. My goal is to help to define an effective counter-strategy, if such a thing is even possible. Reviewing it has been a difficult task.