(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Venal and Vindictive continue their crime spree [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-18
It’s a Dad joke White House at its best. The reality is that the federal government is being destabilized to allow greater neoliberal exploitation. It is a form of backward cost-shifting that pretends to be deregulation. The difference between now and those who planned to overthrow the FDR government, is that the tech-broligarchy are a legion of reactionary followers, led by a draft dodger and a fan of apartheid.
Trump/Musk neo-reactionary austerity seems more Cronenberg than Chainsaw Massacre. The latest is a DOGE raid on an NGO.
I was at USIP tonight to conduct congressional oversight over DOGE’s break in. I spoke with Acting President & CEO Moose. USIP is an independent, non-profit entity and I will work to stop DOGE’s illegal power grab. [image or embed]
Now James Bond is owned by Amazon, he's going to be made to do two missions in the time it would take to do one, and his Aston Martin will be fitted with a bespoke receptacle for him to piss in to avoid stopping while in pursuit of the bad guys.
Ruskin was right that taste is not a question of morality, but the only morality. It's possible that Yglesias and Cowen enjoy Trump's shtick. I don't. But acknowledging that he is funny to many people, can explain why he is so effective and not subject to the same standards as regular politicians.
x 🔴Silicon Valley Whistleblowers Warn Elon Musk ‘Hijacking’ Republicans to Control Entire US Government Former followers of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ say a planned ‘neo-reactionary’ hollowing out of government is happening in real time bylinetimes.com/2025/02/07/s...
[image or embed] — Byline Times (@bylinetimes.bsky.social) February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
Elizabeth Sandifer
Neoreaction is one attempt of modern far right philosophy—we can just go ahead and call it fascism—to create an intellectual basis. It was formulated by Curtis Yarvin, who writes under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, or formerly wrote.
Nathan Robinson:
The artist formerly known as Moldbug?
Elizabeth Sandifer
These days he uses his real name Curtis Yarvin, but I still think of him as Moldbug because that’s what he was going by when I wrote about him. Yarvin has been quite influential on a number of key people. He has a demonstrably huge influence on Peter Thiel. We know he’s got influence on Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, as that Vanity Fair article makes clear. We have very strong evidence that he’s had influence on Steve Bannon. He’s just a guy a lot of these people look to as kind of an intellectual light. He’s been on the Tucker Carlson show, which did a fair bit to mainstream him. So a lot of people look up to him as something of an intellectual light, which is interesting if you actually read any of his work, because, well… I call him outright stupid in my book, and I’m gonna largely stand by that.
I think that there is a long tradition of right-wing “philosophy” that’s really popular among right-wing nutters and as soon as it gets outside that little bubble, it gets absolutely shot to hell by other philosophers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would probably take as a compliment—and I very much mean as an insult—he’s kind of a modern day Ayn Rand.
So his broad philosophical idea is he’s just really obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can happen. Chaos, unruliness, rebelliousness—all these things are inherently very, very bad.
And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Moldbug days—and he’s not really backed down off of it in any substantive way—is that basically, California should secede, become its own nation, and simply impose a CEO with monarchic, godlike powers. At the time, he suggested Steve Jobs would be a particularly good pick for the absolute monarch of California and that the purpose of owning California and running it as a corporate monarchy is explicitly for profit. That was also a part of Yarvin’s philosophical vision for what the world should do.
I don’t want to pin him too much with the slightly satirical and deliberately over-the-top clickbait-y idea of making Steve Jobs king of California—that is him using a rhetorical device to get attention. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute control of everything, and people who are not landowners and do not have a ton of money should basically be thought of as the equivalent of slaves.
www.currentaffairs.org/…
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/18/2296434/-Venal-and-Vindictive-continue-their-crime-spree?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
