Venting

If you are in a good mood, don't read this!

We are plunging into a truly horrible technocratic / political reality. I don’t know about you, but I have a very bad feeling about what is coming. In “We’ve Never Been Here Before: The Zero-Accountability Presidency”, New Republic editor Michael Tomasky writes:

To say we’re in an unprecedented place is vastly understating it. We are in a place where no proper democracy has ever been or should ever be. We are about to have a president for whom there are utterly and literally no expectations. No one expects him to behave well. No one expects him to uphold normal standards of decency. If he muses one day about bombing London, or bombing Vancouver, or for that matter bombing Detroit, he will surprise no one. The panelists on The Five will just joke that there are certain sections of Detroit that a good bombing would only improve. Ha ha.

Trump will enter office facing no accountability, and with virtually no chance that he will ever be held accountable. You think I’m exaggerating? OK. Let’s play out a hypothetical. Let’s say President Trump gives nuclear secrets to North Korea. The New York Times breaks the story, let’s say. What would happen?

We know all too well what would happen. One of two things. Either he’d lie and call it fake news, in which case the right-wing agitprop machine would grind its gears in his defense. They’d unload on the Times. They’d snoop around and find out that the reporter on the story cheated on an algebra test in tenth grade. Fox and the others would have the story “debunked” within about two days, and the Times and the rest of the mainstream media would be overpowered.

I found it painful to watch some of Zuckerberg’s interview on Rogan yesterday, where he talked about his decision to do away with fact-checking on Meta, which Rogan approves of. Through the interview, Zuck radiates guilt and the craven gutless greed for which he is famous. The once putatively independent Rogan has become a beast, slavishly supporting the destructive project of the Right Wing billionaires now running the US.

In “Bare Facebook Liar” for Air Mail, Carrie Monahan, a former fact-checker for Meta (paid $22 an hour for her efforts) writes:

Nine months after an attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, a joint study by N.Y.U. and the Université Grenoble Alpes, in France, found that fake news on Facebook got six times more engagement than factual news during the 2020 election cycle. Validating criticism that the company’s algorithms promote the spread of misinformation, the study also determined that right-wing publishers were far more likely to share false information than publishers of other political leanings.

When it comes to content moderation at Meta, those who have “destroyed more trust than they created” are not its third-party fact-checkers but Meta itself, Zuckerberg chief among them. For the company’s top brass, efforts to course-correct its damage to democracy were little more than window dressing, despite all the good work of its fact-checkers.

In the very immediate future, people will find it increasingly difficult to separate truth from delusion. We see this, right now, in the instant politicization of the LA fires, which are being blamed on DEI, liberals, lesbians, Democrats, etc. Musk and his minions have been beating this drum since the moment the city started burning, evincing zero empathy for those impacted.

The Right Wing media site Unherd parrots this bullshit, putting it in the form of more legible essays. In “LA’s dreams went up in flames”, Joel Kotkin writes:

This disaster reflects the failure of the one-party progressivism currently dominating governmental structures. In this worldview, basic infrastructure is less important than addressing climate change and “social justice”; measures such as building dams or hardening the electric grid are demoted to a secondary role, with catastrophic effects.

Red states have not shown better disaster preparation than Blue states, as far as I know. But also, if we want to pin blame, blame belongs to the Republicans who, over decades, did everything they could to stall and stop any serious effort to deal with accelerating warming caused by fossil fuel emissions. 2024 was the hottest year on record. The last ten years were the ten hottest years on record.

But soon, we may not even know about this anymore. Trump intends to use the same tactics modeled by Victor Orban in Hungary to crush the independent press or any dissent in the mainstream media, while demolishing government departments that monitor the environment. You can already feel it in the Times and elsewhere. They are already changing the tonality of their coverage, trying to “duck and cover,” to prevent legal assaults, which will be aided and abetted by a corrupt judiciary.

We’ve ended up in a situation where capricious, vengeful narcissists are in full control of the government and big tech. I have friends in the “regenerative movement” who say we should focus on creating mutual aid networks in local rural and peri-urban communities. Obviously I have no problem with that. But I don’t think it will help in the long term or work as a meaningful survival strategy.

We need to build a larger social movement, to find a way to voice collective outrage and build a coherent response. At the moment, it doesn’t exist. The pathetically compromised and corrupt Democratic Party is not going to be the vehicle for this.

As of yet, I don’t see any serious challenge to the dominant, new, rhetorical and ideological mode unleashed by Musk, Rogan, Trump, and their allies. The collective celebration over one desperate, act of solitary vengeance is not a sign of a healthy society. It reveals we’ve reached an extreme, dire impasse.

To me, it feels a bit like the U.S. has gone into a collective possession trance.