We've Been Hacked 2
On November 5, the US May Voluntary Forfeit its Constitutional Democracy and Surrender to Fascism: Can We Still Stop This?
I was in the Bay last week where I saw old friends and attended a few events. I also gave a talk. One gathering was a community of visionaries and activists in the woods a few hours outside of SF with a focus on regenerative economics, systems change, and abstract philosophizing. Another was a party of tech entrepreneurs. In various ways at these gatherings, I tried to bring up the upcoming election and what I believe is at stake. I didn’t get much response. These people have lived so well over the last twenty years, exploring psychedelics, transformational festivals, exotic travel, and polyamory. They can’t imagine the system which has supported them in this vanishing epoch of “peak everything” could, abruptly, turn against them.
This election is an existential threshold for the United States and we are sleepwalking into catastrophe. The MAGA Republicans — not the Democrats — are the villains seeking to destroy our Constitutional system of laws, checks and balances, to replace it with something most of us will deeply regret and despise. I encounter many people, including old friends, who now think the opposite: They have come to believe the Democrats represent a New World Order global authoritarian agenda and pose the threat to Democracy. It is impossible to reason with them.
It doesn’t matter if I point them to this hidden camera interview with Russell Vought, the author of Project 25, formerly on Trump’s cabinet, where he makes it clear Trump is completely on board with this plan, which includes immediately firing tens of thousands of government workers and replacing them with White Christian nationalist hardliners, and instituting a nationwide abortion ban including cases of rape or medical emergency. It doesn’t matter if I send them this article on Larry Ellison of Oracle, a major Trump backer, who says he intends to institute a total surveillance system in the US akin to China’s social credit system if not worse. It doesn’t matter if I point to them to the new book, Unhumans, blurbed by Trump and Vance, which calls Leftists and liberals nonhumans, and praises Pinochet’s helicopter killings as a good way to deal with political opponents.
Succumbing to the disorientation created by a corrupted media ecosystem, people have been psychologically trip-wired into supporting Fascism. Right now, Fascist ringleader Elon Musk is cynically (and probably illegally) handing out $1 million checks to people in Pennsylvania to vote Red while he spends tens of millions on micro-targeted advertisements in Michigan, telling Arab communities that Harris supports Israel while telling Jewish communities she does not. I recommend reading this lengthy dossier on Musk, “Elon Musk: Monarch of the United States of America,” which reveals his extraordinarily ambitious plans to become the first CEO/Dictator of the American Technorate.
On Israel and Gaza: I have many friends who will not vote for Harris because of the genocide there, which I understand. It should matter to them that Netanyahu clearly wants Trump to win and may be intentionally amplifying the destruction to hurt the Democrats. According to Thomas Friedman in The New York Times:
Netanyahu clearly knows that he has Harris in a bind. If he continues the war in Gaza until “total victory,” with more civilian casualties, he will force Harris either to publicly criticize him and lose Jewish votes or bite her tongue and lose Arab and Muslim American votes in the key state of Michigan. As Harris will likely find it hard to do either, this will make her look weak to both American Jews and American Arabs.
Based on my reporting and all my years watching Netanyahu, I would not be surprised if he actually escalates in Gaza between now and Election Day to make life difficult for the Democrats running for office. Netanyahu may do this because, I believe, he wants Trump to win and he wants to be able to tell Trump that he helped him win. Netanyahu knows that many in the rising generation of Democrats are hostile to Israel — or at least to the Israel he is creating.
Trump has promised to give Israel a much freer hand in their ongoing campaig. He actively supports the genocide, and will more directly repress student dissent in the US. According to The Washington Post: “Trump told donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests, deport demonstrators.” The White Christian Nationalist populist movement sees Israel as a model for what they plan to institute here. If we elect Trump/Vance, I personally think eventual mass incarcerations, deportations, and even worse things become plausible if not likely here. Trump has already discussed deporting not just illegal but legal immigrants.
I find it wearying to keep fighting against the stupidity, short-sightedness, historical blindness, naïveté, blithe sense of entitlement, and cunningly crafted mind-control programming that has taken hold of so many people in my extended network. As we near the election, I feel a sense of futility and doom — Cassandra vibes — as I hammer away at this subject. Every time I post on Facebook or open the comments here on Substack, many deluded people argue at interminable length the same insipid, erroneous Trump / RFK talking points which take laborious effort to refute.
Let’s start with one relatively simple issue: We all know that Trump fomented an attempted coup on January 6 against the government. This, in itself, legally disqualifies him from being President ever again. Section Three of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution clearly states:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
Trump should never have been allowed to run for his office after his actions on January 6. In April 2023, The Atlantic published “The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again,” by J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe, well known legal scholars. They argued the indictments against Trump, even without convictions, are enough to make this clause relevant:
The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again. The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause.
Because of Section Three, the election could still be interrupted before or annulled after November 5. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court essentially took away Section Three with their decision last March, as Luttig and Tribe covered in “Supreme Betrayal”.
Biden, if he maintains the support of the US military, could, by executive decree, interrupt the election and give the Republicans time to nominate another candidate, postponing the election some months. Biden has the right to do this: The Supreme Court, in another deeply unconstitutional move, guaranteed broad immunity for all acts committed by the President. While this seems to be part of the deliberate setup to institute Fascism under Trump, Biden could activate this capacity before he leaves office in January. There are so many reasons to recognize that Trump’s election is unconstitutional, that he is unfit to serve, even if the election results are unclear or if the Electoral College favors the Right.
While I recognize this is unlikely to happen, I am convinced stopping Trump is what must be done if we want to save our country. It might lead to civil unrest. It is better we face that now, instead of what we will face otherwise. Both defense secretaries who served under Trump consider him unfit to serve and a threat to the United States. Only four members of the 44 people who served on his Cabinet now support him.
The wicked problem, of course, is that such a move would fulfill the worst beliefs of mind-controlled MAGA followers. Already outraged, they would be infuriated. They might revolt. The decision to remove Trump from this election would have to be accompanied by something like ongoing teach-ins across the nation, where people would learn how propaganda and disinformation have been weaponized against them.
I know this scenario seems impossible to imagine. We must imagine it. I hope the White House and FBI are gaming it out.
We should never have let things decay to this level. We lost the habit of defending our Constitutional democracy or our freedoms, We didn’t have defenses to the extremely well-funded multidimensional PsyOps executed by the forces of global authoritarianism in the mainstream media (Rupert Murdoch, etcetera) and across social media. Trump/Vance/MAGA is like a fungus that has eaten its way through our already rotten political system, revealing the extent of the decay.
I always hated the two party duopoly in the US. The government is dominated by lobbyists and special interests. I see myself as an anarchist and would like a far more decentralized, horizontal, and participatory system based in mutual aid and cooperation. While that would be ideal, that choice isn’t on the table in this election. Our choice now is between the imperfect, corrupt pseudo-Democracy we are holding onto by a fragile thread, or we go into authoritarianism or full-scale Fascism.
If Trump and Vance win, the US falls into the hands of Christian nationalists who look to Putin, Franco, Netanyahu, Duterte and Pinochet as models for the kind of repressive regime they intend to install here. Trump is the hideous clown-face of American Fascism. Vance is far more dangerous.
Of course I am well aware of the arguments, expressed publicly by Elon Musk, among others, that the Democrats — not the Republicans — seek to end the electoral system. Interrupting this election cycle and canceling Trump as a candidate will certainly fan those flames. This can’t be helped. They are liars and cheats.
Due to the filter bubble effect and the disorienting impact of bots and media hackers, there is widespread belief in a wide range of conspiracies that cast the Democrats and progressives as the enemies of freedom. While the Democrats are mediocre, it is the global populist movement, the Right Wing, which is executing a ruthless conspiratorial agenda. Putin, Murdoch, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Kochs, Israel, The Heritage Foundation, and other authoritarian regimes and trustees of the fossil fuel companies now work together, explicitly or implicitly, to overthrow Democracy in the US. It is easiest for them if we voluntarily surrender it. Incredibly, right now, we are on the verge of doing so.
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I am curious about the reception to the Larry Ellison quote on surveillance. I suppose you were in the SV space, where surveillance is the bread and butter; but in my mind, this message could be used much more widely and more effectively than it is, as could the “Netanyahu wants Trump to win” bumper sticker message for the masses.
I was at the Bitcoin conference where arguable 95% of people in attendance, tuning in, and generally aligned are voting Trump. Tens of millions. And it’s all about government control and surveillance. Edward Snowden beamed in and gave a chilling speech about the dark road we’re heading down. If Dems really want to promote freedom and disavow the new world order shit, they have to really walk the walk and, as Audrey Tang puts it, radically trust the people. I think if we do some kind of non-electoral Trump-squashing move inside of this brainwashed moment we will never again be able to claim that we are the party of democracy. We kind of let this happen. We didn’t do enough, over decades and yes, against extraordinary forces of determination, to prevent this. We didn’t run for school boards until 2018, fight for working class, show up in Michigan,etc (obv oversimplifying). It’s not our fault, but it’s not not our fault.
We are in a codependent relationship with republicans. Like Javert needs Valjean. Without a threat, we lose our fucking focus.
Well, here’s the threat. I think surveillance is a huge issue that maybe wouldn’t alienate dem voters but could win some others if we came out strongly against. Pair this message with the Kroger “flexible pricing” and “eye tracking” dystopian shit that ppl would viscerally recoil against, and claim that anti corporate/pro freedom message as our rightful inheritance
Here's what I've posted on social media in case anyone wants to repost or repurpose:
In the last few days, Trump has repeatedly said that his political opponents —and he mentions explicitly Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff to make it clear he is not talking about immigrants, etc —are an "enemy within" and that he will use the national guard and the military to deal with them. Trump is explicitly saying that he intends to be a military dictator.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-democrats-enemies-within-rcna175628
Here is the "Truth" Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, where he says he is entitled to suspend the Constitution:
"Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution," Trump wrote in a post on the social network Truth Social and accused "Big Tech" of working closely with Democrats. "Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!"
The whole idea of America was not to be ruled by a king and to have checks and balances to keep a would-be despot from seizing power. The founding fathers warned us that democracy was a fragile experiment that could fail if a despotic demagogue fooled voters.
From:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-12-26/demagogues-constitution-impeachment-washington-hamilton
Less than two weeks after the start of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, George Washington wrote to his friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, on June 6, 1787, explaining that his critical purpose in attending the convention was to prevent a demagogue from gaining power in the politically unstable young nation and thus destroying it.
Washington described how he was pulled out of retirement by an urgent risk to the United States. "Anarchy and confusion" were threatening the security of the American people and the rule of constitutional law. But this was only half the danger.
The deeper risk, he wrote that early June, was that the political chaos created fertile ground for exploitation "by some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his country so much as his own ambitious views."
Washington, of course, was not the only framer who viewed our Constitution largely as a bulwark against demagogues. In the surviving records of the speeches given at the Constitutional Convention, the word "demagogue" was used 21 times by the framers as they crafted the Constitution's essential checks and balances against despotism and tyranny.
Voters in this country are on the verge of giving an Electoral College victory to a man who tried a coup to hold on to power and is explicitly telling you that he intends to suspend the Constitution and be a military dictator.
This is not time for "what aboutisms" related to Biden/Harris. Yes, Biden had some disastrous failures. Yes, Wokism is a motherload of stupid ideas. Yes, Harris said stupid things in 2019. Yes, we have a mass psychosis in this country on both the left and on the right--the left version is more obnoxious, but the right version is far more dangerous.
As a well-informed, lifelong Republican said in 2016 on why he was going to vote for Clinton,
"I disagree with Clinton on almost everything, but she's within the normal range of being wrong."
Trump is far outside the normal range of being wrong--he has explicitly announced his intentions to end democracy. Anyone voting for him or failing to vote for the only viable alternative will be complicit in ending America's fragile, 240-year experiment with democracy.
Besides voting for Harris, here's what you can do. This election will be decided by about 75,000 people in seven swing states--Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Search your contacts for voters in those states who might not vote or are not fully committed to a candidate. DO NOT waste time debating someone who is fully intoxicated by the Orange Koolaide. Research shows that offering facts to those who are ideologically captured only causes them to harden and double down on their position. I've tried that experiment. When I was fourteen, I was a champion debater on the #1 debate team in the country year after year, the Bronx High School of Science Debate Team. Winning the debate will only motivate them to get off the couch and vote for the Orange Goblin. I was able to turn around one vote so far, someone who is a classic liberal but turned off by the mass psychosis on the left (Wokism). If you don't want to call your contact in a swing state, PM with their number, and I will cold call them.