Welcome to the Fascist States of America!

Well, it looks as if they’ve finally done it. Ever since the end of the Civil War, corporate interests in this country have been trying to take it over, to form a capitalist state with no regulations, no taxes (on the wealthy, that is), and no accountability to anyone. The movement hit a major snag when the Great Depression exposed the myth of capitalism for all to see, and the people were having none of it. But by the time the war had exhausted everyone the right-wing began sharpening their knives once again and started waging a covert war on democracy. It was subtle at first, and seemingly went unchecked for the next seventy years. So by the time the stupidest many in history took over the White House and exposed yet again what was happening, it was too late. And let me be perfectly clear, this is not about politics. Politics is theater, a distraction, misdirection at a magic show, to capture the attention of the audience so that they don’t see what is really happening. What we are experiencing at this moment is the complete and total corporate takeover of the United States. The democratic experiment is apparently nearing the end as a corporate oligarchy is poised to completely take control and consign the rest of us to third-class citizenship, whose only function is to make more money for the wealthy elites while they keep us in bondage to a life of servitude as wage slaves—INCLUDING THOSE WHO VOTED TO GIVE THEM THE POWER!

For all the historians out there, professional and amateur alike, who ever wondered what it was like in Germany in the early 1930s as the Nazis were taking over, well . . . now you know. Just like the people in Germany who wanted to vent their anger at someone or something—to whom Hitler offered them the Jews, and to reward him they made him dictator—we now have the Fascist States of America in which corporate-controlled politicians and judges have paved the way for the next Republican president to become a dictator and punish the brainwashed idiots who voted him into office by allowing him to take away all of their rights and freedoms—just like he’s going to do to everyone else. And to those Maggot cult members who still believe that they are going to escape the retribution that has been promised to “others,” they are in for a rude awakening once their corporate masters don’t need their “votes” anymore. They’re going to be right down in the pits of hell with the rest of us. Make no mistake. The only people the corporate oligarchy hates worse than liberals are the gun-toting, bible-thumping, beer-guzzling, trailer trash they’ve had to pander to for the last seventy years. Of course, THEY won’t need to do it directly to the fascist faithful. They only need to ply their brainless cult members with enough guns and indignation that they will do it to themselves.

The reality for most of us after the most recent supreme court decision (yes, purposely without capitals) is that we’ve probably cast our final democratic votes in the United States of America. Even if Biden wins legitimately, there is absolutely nothing stopping Republicans from taking the case to the supreme court to have them overturn the decision of the electorate. That’s always assuming that they haven’t already corrupted enough state election boards to make the exercise unnecessary. Honestly, there’s really only one way out of all this mess. That’s right, just one. Unfortunately, it would require that someone—perhaps many people—sit President Biden down after the election—no matter how it turns out—and acquaint him with the facts of life in our nascent fascist society. The political landscape in the country that Joe Biden once knew is gone—vanished. And someone needs to hammer that home to him—and don’t stop until he gets it. The old rules don’t apply anymore. The right-wing oligarchy is poised to take control, and simply handing over the reins to them in January because it is the “right thing to do” is not only NOT the right thing to do, it would be morally irresponsible and reprehensible, tantamount to treason and a complete abdication of the oath he took to protect and defend the Constitution. Biden has already signaled in his most recent White House remarks that he will not abuse the office of the president. That’s fine; no one is asking him to. What we will be asking, however—demanding, even—is for him to save democracy, no matter what the cost.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was faced with a similar decision. The Southern states had seceded, but there were still sympathetic Southern judges on the Supreme Court who were poised to undo all that Lincoln was going to need to accomplish to see the war to a victorious end. And in that regard he had only one choice. What’s so tremendously impressive is that he did it, with no qualms and no handwringing. To save the Republic he had to pack the Supreme Court, and that’s exactly what he did. By expanding the court he obviated the need to remove justices by making Southern sympathizers a minority and rendering their views superfluous. This MUST happen after the election, or not only will Joe Biden not go down as a great president, he will forever be infamous as the man who ended democracy in America by handing over the government to the fascist, corporate oligarchy. It really is that cut and dried. Just winning the election will not be enough—not nearly enough. The very supreme court he needs to save, has already given him immunity powers that are unprecedented. He MUST use them! Since the court has essentially rendered Congress powerless, they can do nothing, deadlocked as they are. But the slim majority in the Senate enables Biden to put judges on the bench and get them confirmed without the House’s approval.

Honestly, there’s no other way. There just isn’t. If Biden doesn’t pack the court as soon as the election is over, the presidency will be taken away from him, one way or another, and in that moment democracy will have been taken away from all of us. This isn’t abuse of power. It’s giving back to the people what the right-wing oligarchs have already taken away from us through their employees on the supreme court. And somebody needs to make him see that! Will the Maggots on the right lose their shit when it happens? Absolutely. But none of that matters anymore. It really doesn’t. What Biden would be doing, he would be doing to save the Republic. Period. If that means calling out the National Guard to quell the right-wing riots, then so be it. If that means activating the military to make sure people are safe from the fanatics who have been so idiotic as to vote away their own freedoms, then that is a step worth taking. It’s gonna get ugly, people, one way or another. So wouldn’t it be better to get ugly in the pursuit of saving democracy rather than losing it?

No matter what happens in November, the bought-and-paid-for right-wing justices of the supreme court are going to remove Joe Biden from office, unless he rights the ship of state first by adding four more justices to the court. In the past Biden has dismissed the idea out of hand because of what the consequences would be down the road for right-wing abuse. Well, we’re way beyond that now. There’s no more road ahead. We are out of runway. This is the most existential threat this country has ever faced, without precedent. Joe Biden will be in power until the end of January. He needs to use that power to save this country. THAT must be his legacy. If he doesn’t, everything he has done in his entire forty-seven years of public service will be seen as nothing more than fiddling while Rome burns. The majority of people in this country—that’s right, the MAJORITY—do not want fascist rule. The people are on his side, and we need him to do what he was elected for. The days of reaching across the aisle are over. There needs to be one-party rule, sure, but that party needs to be the majority of the people in the United States, not the wealthy minority and their brain-dead zombie voters. Joe Biden is the only one who can save the country now. He is all that is standing between us and dictatorship. If he doesn’t pack the supreme court in November, then nothing else is going to matter. But I just don’t know if Biden has the fortitude. At this point, my optimism is gone.

The First Presidential Debacle

Last night was unfortunate, primarily because it was so completely unnecessary. The one hard fact about the choice for president this year is that there is no choice. On one side is the stupidest man to ever enter politics in U.S. history—and that’s saying something—an abject moron who couldn’t find his own monumental ass with two hands and a flashlight, a convicted criminal and con-man, a congenital defect of a human being, a compulsive liar, a deluded narcissist, and an amoral mass murderer: he told the citizens of this country to ignore Covid and therefore is directly responsible for killing over a million of them. On the other side is a man who has given his entire adult life to the service of the people: thirty-six years as a senator, eight years as vice-president, and a three-year stint as president that has helped the country to recover from the unmitigated disaster that was the previous administration. It’s not a choice, any more than it was in 2020. Biden’s four years older now, and it showed. But does that change the metric? Not one bit. And it’s important to remember that Trump’s changed, too. Not only has he been indicted for inciting an insurrection on January 6th, and for stealing classified documents and obstructing justice, but also twice for election interference. He was ultimately convicted of thirty-four counts of the latter in New York, though he’s unarguably guilty of all of it. The contrast, in fact, is even starker than it was four years ago.

What’s so disappointing about last night, however, is that it should never have come to pass. And most of the blame for that belongs to Biden’s team. They let him down—bigly. There was absolutely no reason whatsoever for Biden to get on stage with Tdump. None. Because there was absolutely nothing to gain. But even after deciding to go ahead with it, Biden’s team did him a real disservice. This was not a debate. And more importantly, it was never going to be. Why anyone on Biden’s team thought he should engage with Lie-GPT in any way, is political negligence. The ONLY things Biden should have been focused on last night were two specific tasks. One, getting his message across to the American people on whatever topics he was asked about. And two, calling out the idiot on the other side for the liar he is. That’s it. Biden should not have responded to the moron in any way, shape, or form. When asked a question Biden needed to tell the people what he has done and why he is the only choice, as well as why tRump is a liar and wants to destroy the country. Every answer needed to be a canned response, to the people, that made absolutely no direct reference to anything the convicted felon had to say in the moment. In fact, Biden should never even have looked at him the entire night.

Everyone knew what the seditionist-in-chief was going to do last night. Everyone, it seems, except Biden’s team. What the hell were they thinking? The former White House dunce uses words like good and bad, great and terrible, best and worst—which mean absolutely NOTHING when it comes to governance, and even less when they come out of Tdump’s mouth. He uses NO statistics, NO numbers, NO facts, and NO evidence in any of what could only be euphemistically called “arguments.” And that’s because there are none that even remotely back up his assertions. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is either and ad hominem attack on the other side, or a brag about himself. And they’re ALL LIES. He projects one hundred percent of the time, so every attack on the left is something he has already done, and every boast is something the left has done and the right has absolutely no intention of ever doing. Which means there’s absolutely no way to “debate” someone like that. Every time tRump’s lips moved last night, he lied. Lies are not arguments. So if the second debate ever comes off, his team needs to drum that into Biden’s brain. BE presidential—because you ARE the president—by not engaging him. Get your message across and ignore the addle-brained ranting of Fat Man and Little Hands.

The facts are beyond dispute. Trump wants to end democracy, to end civil rights, and end any corporate responsibility to the workers they employ. But all of that is just to placate his worshipers, his deluded followers who don’t realize he has every intention of punishing them right along with the rest of the country. The ONE THING Trump wants is to use the White House, once again, to enrich himself. That’s it. Full stop. Because he’s broke, the worst businessman in U.S. history, the only way he can stay afloat is to use the office of the president as a base of criminal operations to extort as much money as he can from whoever he can. Rich or poor, it doesn’t matter to him. He’ll first use the office to rid himself of all legal cases against him, then open for business by allowing the worst right-wing radicals to gut this country of every right the Constitution affords—if not the Constitution itself—as long as he gets a cut of the action. Fox “News” won’t have to lie about Biden’s performance last night. He came off as a tired, confused, doddering old man. But does that make him a worse choice than Trump? Are you kidding? Right now Jimmy Carter is a better choice than Trump. And Fox is going to have to lie its propagandistic ass off when it comes to their candidate, backing up and repeating his litany of untruths.

So, is this the end? Are we doomed? I don’t think so. Idiotic ideas like having Biden drop out of the race, however, don’t help things. That would be a suicide move by the Democrats, as it would assure a Trump victory. Even with someone like Gavin Newsom—as tempting as that would be—the optics would be so bad we would probably lose all of the swing states. And that’s not even factoring in what to do about Kamala. How do you ignore her? Right now, the Republicans are losing in every important metric in the campaign, despite the poll numbers. Abortion and civil rights top the list, but the economy and inflation are close on their heels, and the Republicans suck at making the case for their pro-wealthy, anti-democratic agenda. So it’s not time to panic. There are still over four months to go, a Democratic convention and perhaps another “debate,” that might be able to turn around the perception—which is all that needs to happen, because the reality is on our side. Unfortunately, voters on the right are living in an alternate reality in which they are being urged to vote for their own destruction, and seem perfectly willing to do it, taking the rest of us off the cliff with them. So it’s incumbent upon the rest of us to remember that presidential elections are NOT about the candidates. They are about ideology. Whether or not you “like” Biden is immaterial. In fact, it’s destructive thinking. Basing your vote on personality is what the other side is doing—and look how that turned out. If we want to keep our democracy, if we ever want to vote again, we MUST vote against the Maggot, whether Joe seems up for it or not. Because, in the end, it may be the last presidential choice you get to make.

Corporate News Networks

I used to watch the online commentary of former CNN journalist Chris Cillizza on occasion, which was called The Point, though I rarely do anymore because he's a complete tool—which is probably why CNN let him go. But after watching him this week he made an error of omission so glaring that I had no choice but to respond. In his most recent video, called “The simple reason why Nikki Haley is voting for Donald Trump,” Cillizza comes to this conclusion: “She is ultimately a political realist, in a Trump-controlled party.” No, no, no, no, no!!! That is NOT why she has endorsed the worst president in the history of the United States, a five-year-old masquerading as an adult, a crybaby criminal who makes Richard Nixon look like a candidate for Mount Rushmore. Unfortunately, Cillizza’s greatest disability in attempting to provide an answer to this question for his viewers is that he doesn’t actually know what the answer is. In explaining his rationale he goes on to say,

          There’s this myth that I think the media like to sort of present, that there’s still sort of two wings of
          the Republican party. There’s the Trump wing, and there’s the kind of establishment wing, for lack
          of a better word. There aren’t two wings of the Republican party, there’s just the one wing, the
          Trump wing, the Trump party. There are some people . . . who criticize Trump, and say maybe this
          isn’t the best direction for the party. But those people have no power. All of the power, all of the power,
          is consolidated in the Trump wing of the party. Donald Trump is the king of the party.

Where to begin? First of all, Trump does not have any power, any more than Hitler did in Germany in 1930. What he does have, like Hitler, is a voting block loyal to his hatred that he can wield either against his enemies or alongside his allies. That is why no one I’ve ever heard speak about Trump and his followers has never been able to adequately explain what is going on with them. But the reason is fairly simple. In a word: hate. Trump hates who they hate. He hates immigrants, he hates blacks, he hates Hispanics, he hates women, he hates gays, lesbians, trans people and the rest of the alphabet, he hates liberals, he hates intellectuals, and because he hates the same people they do, they don’t care about the rest. Stealing classified documents, shopping them around to our enemies, weaponizing the Department of Justice, giving tax cuts to the wealthy, trying to rig a presidential election then trying to steal it afterward when he lost, inciting an insurrection? They don’t care about any of it . . . because he hates the same people they hate. Trump’s followers want only one thing from him, the very same thing the antisemitic voters in Germany wanted from Hitler: for him to punish other people, and punish them hard for perceived ills in those voters’ lives. That’s it. Deportations, imprisonment, concentration camps, extermination, they want everything he’s promised them and more.

And lest we forget, in another salient comparison to Hitler he also hates Jews. Trump’s stance on the Israeli Gaza crisis in support of Israel is only because he wants to wipe the Muslims from the face of the earth. Once that’s accomplished, he would gladly turn his hand without a second thought—like Hitler invading Poland and then neglecting to stop—to doing the very same to Jews in the Middle East. And he doesn’t try to hide it, either. Keith Olbermann, in a recent episode of Countdown, gave this completely uncontroversial description of Trump:
“He’s . . . a Nazi.

          Trump plays your roundup of the great antisemitic hits. He has insisted, repeatedly, that American
          Jews, “have to get their act together before it is too late.” He has repeatedly pushed the calumny
          that Jews are loyal to Israel and not the United States. At the White House on Hanukah, he
          referred to “your country.” He meant Israel. He had dinner with the avowedly antisemitic Nick
          Fuentes and Kanye West. He praised Hitler to former chief-of-staff John Kelly . . . This is not a
          complicated calculation. If Trump determined today, that he could get elected by beginning a full-
          fledged attack on Jewish people, Jewish influence, he’d do it. When we speak of him as having
          the soul of a mass murderer, that’s what we mean. People do not have any actual value to him.
          Reenact the Holocaust in whole or in part to get reelected, to stay out of jail? Of course he’ll do
          that—and to any group you could name.

When Hitler made a pact with the Soviet Union to partition Poland, he knew from the start he was never going to honor it, and intended all along to continue on into the Soviet Union and conquer the Russians as well. Trump’s implicit pact with his followers, that if they vote for him it will be the “others” who are punished, not them, means no more than Hitler’s. What Trump’s followers don’t understand—and have never understood, because Trump lies about it every chance he gets—is that he hates the people who vote for him just as much as he hates all the rest.

But the unvarnished truth is, these people who hate do not represent the majority of people in this county—just like they didn’t in pre-World War Two Germany. Trump lost in 2020 by nearly eight million votes, a landslide repudiation by any estimate. Unfortunately for all of us, however, the election was actually much closer than that because of an archaic voting system we have been saddled with, designed by wealthy elites in order to control the will of what they considered the ignorant masses. Democracy, sure, but representative democracy, a democracy that can be manipulated at the state level for the benefit of those who are really in charge, the corporate and wealthy donors who essentially employ politicians to work directly on their behalf, and only incidentally—if at all—for the voters who believe they have elected them. In the end, however, Trump was so objectively bad as a president, making the country pathetic in the eyes of the world, twiddling his thumbs while nearly a million people died of Covid-19 on his watch, and using the White House as his own personal base of criminal operations to benefit him and his children, that the majority of the people in this county had had enough. Therefore, when Biden won the election, church bells all over the world rang out with relief. So in that way, at least, Trump has no power at all. But that may not last much longer. Political machinations at the state level have ramped up considerably since 2020, in a desperate bid by Republican politicians who control state governments to rewrite election law in order to throw out votes they don’t like and install Trump as president even if he loses by another eight million votes, or more. The desperation comes from the fact that, if they don’t get Trump back in the White House in 2024, they very well might find themselves voted out of office.

It’s important to note, however, that this isn’t happening just because Trump lost. Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the electoral hijacking that is happening all across this country. Right-wing oligarchs, whether in the form of wealthy individuals like Charles Koch and his ilk, or the corporate-industrial complex that is run by those individuals, have been working to wrest complete control of the political system from the people for decades. And they’ve been playing a long game, in some ways going all the way back to 1789 and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But ever since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of a new war on the New Deal, Republicans have relied on stealth to achieve their aims. Subtle retraining of jurists to be friendly to big money, as well as not-so-subtle gerrymandering of state districts, have been accompanied by brainwashing of the electorate through a lengthy and elaborate system of propaganda designed to conflate the ideas of democracy and capitalism as if they were inseparable. Trump, however, was something they hadn’t counted on, much like Hitler. The right-wing hadn’t anticipated that his bugling ineptitude would expose for all to see the naked greed of the oligarchs controlling the entire Republican party apparatus. But while it has been exposed, that doesn’t mean that the electorate has been able to see it for what it really is.

At the same moment Trump kicked over the rock and sent the capitalist oligarchs scurrying for cover, a new system of propaganda had to be implemented by the right in order to obfuscate their takeover from within. That is when Fox New subtly shifted the message to their uneducated and mentally malleable right-wing voters from inuendo and implication to outright lies. Rather than suggesting that the truth may not be all it purports to be, instead they began simply lying, about everything, with no fear of rejection once a critical mass had been achieved. What’s interesting is that the same technique unleashed by Trump is now being used across the world by authoritarian dictatorships against their own people. Anne Applebaum, in a recent article in The Atlantic called “The New Propaganda War,” details how the trend in these countries mirrors what is going on in American right-wing propaganda.

          When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when
          anyone accused them of lying. But in Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s
          Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly,
          obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed. (pg. 34-35)

Sound familiar? That’s why Trump’s followers will never hear a retraction from the propaganda networks they watch when those lies are exposed and debunked elsewhere. They just move on to the next barrage of lies. Internationally, the disinformation has a very different objective. “This tactic—” Applebaum notes, “the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many [lies], how can you know what actually happened” (pg. 35). The difference in the U.S. model is that the lies are meant to produce outrage, so along with the lies the anchors and hosts of Fox and their ilk also tell viewers how to feel about the lies. The real goal, of course, as far as the network is concerned, is simply to make money. The more viewers they can regularly deceive, the more they can charge for advertising, and their corporate clients—who don’t give a damn what this does to our country as long as they make money, too—are more than happy to have their brands associated with the propaganda if it’s going to increase their customer base.

What both flavors of deception have in common, however, is a decidedly anti-democratic agenda. For players like Putin and Xi of China, the goal is to discredit democracy in the eyes of their citizens so that they won’t get the idea that there’s something better out there. For the U.S. market, the goal is to pave the way for a right-wing authoritarian shift that will make the government manifestly beholden to corporate interests instead of barely concealed the way it has been for hundreds of years. The primary thrust of these lies has been through projection, disingenuously blaming the left for everything that the right is already doing. In that way they get on the record first, so if the propaganda networks are actually caught in their lies—as Fox was in the Dominion voting machine case—they can still make it seem as if is really the left that is attempting to shift the blame to them rather than anything the right is actually doing. Once the floodgates had opened on unfettered lying, other networks like Newsmax and OAN gleefully joined in to provide Internet-style unfiltered disinformation to their viewers on a twenty-four-seven basis. But it isn’t just the obvious right-wing lie machines that are participating in this deception, it’s also mainstream media as well.

It’s important for the American people to finally realize, once and for all, that the media is NOT objective. And it never has been. The media are corporate entities. They are businesses. And in a capitalist society their only function is to make money for their owners, executives, and stockholders. Their function is NOT to keep the public informed by telling the truth. In fact, it has been this fealty to the financial bottom line that finally broke CNN. Their misguided goal of appealing to both sides of the political electorate has backfired spectacularly. Viewers on the right, hardened into false beliefs by an amoral leader who lies every time he opens his mouth, are not going to sit still when presented with viewpoints that oppose the disinformation that has atrophied their already weak intellect. At the same time, intelligent viewers on the left are not going to abide a news network that regularly gives equal time to “opposing viewpoints” that are inherently and demonstrably false. Not when, at the very least, they can watch MSNBC or PBS and see Trump’s lies actually called lies—rather than legitimizing the lies by not calling them out, or worse yet, showing them in the first place. Yet even the most left-leaning news network, MSNBC, is still woefully inadequate in terms of the information they convey to viewers. And that is because MSNBC is a business, just like CNN, just like Fox, and just like the networks. What that means is that they are limited in what they can really say about politics in this country, because they are only allowed to talk about the politics itself, instead of who really controls that political process.

All of which brings us back to Nikki Haley and Chris Cillizza. The one statement Cillizza makes that contains an element of truth, is when he says about right-wing politicians, “The only path that exists for you to maintain some credibility with the Republican base is to be for Donald Trump.” That is true for the vast majority of Republican politicians, but it in no way explains Haley’s complete reversal of nearly everything she said in her campaign—or to a lesser extent the other Republican presidential candidates now kissing the former idiot-in-chief’s ass as if they are contestants in some kind of perverse, vice-presidential version of The Apprentice. He then goes on to emphasize that Haley has never been a politician who placed principles over pragmatism. But once again, that is not what’s going on here, and the fact that absolutely no one in the media is addressing the real reason why—though not surprising at all—is maddening. Haley is no different than any other politician in this country. They work for the people who pay them, and their employers are not the voters. Politicians work for the rich, corporate elites who pay them in all sorts of ways, from under the table bribes, to above board gifts from lobbyists, job offers and golden parachutes if they have done well for their employers. Their salary for working in government is the least of their reward and therefore gets the least of their effort. But the oligarchs made a serious miscalculation when it came to Trump, because they hadn’t accounted for his ability to tap into right-wing hatred. They believed that, like themselves, people can be controlled best through their desire for money—or in this case the illusory promise of money.

Then there is the fact that Trump is, objectively, the stupidest man to ever hold public office—perhaps in all of world history. While the oligarchs were willing to hold their noses during his first term, especially after he gave them trillions of dollars in tax cuts, the disastrous elections every two years since have convinced them that they need someone more traditional in the role, someone more in the mold of George W. Bush—a tool who could be controlled just like senators and representatives. They couldn’t really put anyone up against him in 2020 when he ran as an incumbent, but once he had lost they began to back alternatives like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley to forestall an inevitable rematch against Biden. That is the role that Nikki Haley played in the 2024 Republican primary race. She was a test balloon, a trial case. She was told to let Christie do all the heavy lifting—pun intended—at the beginning of the race, and after he dropped out to assume his role as the anti-Trump candidate in order to see what kind of numbers she could split off from his coalition of hate. She did well, probably better than expected and may have continued to do so. But while the rich are willing to spend liberally on things that will benefit them down the line, they don’t like to throw their money away. In this case they did not have the stomach for an entire drive to the convention if it was only going to come up short, and so they pulled Haley out of the race before her numbers could continue to build momentum. Demonstrating that it is the oligarchs who are actually the “political realists.”

They not only calculated that Haley would probably not be able to win the nomination, but also realized there was a point at which her candidacy might actually hurt Trump in the general election. Pragmatists to the core, they took her out of the game and forced her to eventually endorse the man-child she had been railing against for months. And she did it, not because she has any principles one way or the other, but because her employers told her to. Her role now, like that of all her other rivals in the primary, is to help get Trump elected, because while he is loathed by the very oligarchs who support him, they also stand to make more money with him in office than they will with Biden. Trump’s only real advantage in dealing with the oligarchs is their own greed. They could get rid of him if they wanted. It would be relatively easy, but it also might take a few election cycles to do it, if they had the will, which they don’t. Corporate elites are motivated by their greed and the lust for money and control, so being out of power for too long is an anathema to them. To be clear, they will continue to make obscene profits under a second Biden administration, just as they have during his first. After all, it was the oligarchs who infused the Biden campaign in 2020 with enough cash to overtake Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. That was because Bernie is a socialist. Biden, on the other hand, has been a friend to Big Credit his entire political career, and Delaware has become the headquarters for nearly every major credit card company in the U.S. But since the oligarchy can make more money under Trump, who plans to dismantle as much of the regulatory structure in government as humanly possible, the choice is really no choice at all.

The real reason that Republican politicians continue to support Trump, despite anything and everything derogatory he has ever said about them, is because they want to keep their jobs—their jobs working for the oligarchy, that is, not the people. You see, the oligarchy doesn’t really care who is in office. One Republican senator or representative is pretty much as good as the next. But if individual politicians don’t stay on Trump’s good side, then they risk losing their place at the trough. And if this sounds if it sort of reinforces Cillizza’s point, it doesn’t, because my point is a much larger one. The news media has been going on and on about Haley’s hypocrisy—just as Cillizza does—but never get to the real point, about who is really controlling her, and by extension every other politician in Washington. And that’s because those same oligarchs also control the media. The way they limit discourse isn’t by telling reporters what they can and can’t say, but by limiting the range of the discussion. Their anchors and pundits can talk all they want about the politicians themselves, and make any ideological point they wish. Right-wing or left, it doesn’t really matter . . . as long as the discussion doesn’t extend beyond politics to the oligarchs themselves. And they do this, not by direct coercion, but by making ideas like the “Deep State” synonymous with conspiracy theories like microchips in vaccines or Democratic pederast pizza rings. The only thing deep about the Deep State, however, is the deep pockets they have.

I realize all of this makes me look like a socialist crackpot with my own pet conspiracy theory. But how else can one explain the complete and utter lack of policy in today’s Republican party? There is no other explanation. The only thing they are committed to is dismantling democracy in order to facilitate their complete control over the citizens of this country. So the next logical question has to be why? Why are they doing that? Who benefits? The individual politicians benefit, of course, but exactly how? They certainly aren’t getting rich from their government salaries. So how else to account for all of the multi-millionaires in Congress? There’s nothing else that makes sense. But it’s not as if any of this is a secret. I continue to promote Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains, because it lays out the entire blueprint for what we are seeing acted out in Republican politics today . . . and in the oligarch’s own words. Big money capitalism is very close to owning this country. And if Trump gets reelected—for what promises to be the rest of his life—they will have gone a long way toward achieving their goal of a completely unregulated and untaxable haven for large-scale capitalism . . . the corporate state. But if anyone expects American news media to expose this scandal, and shine a light on the dystopian chasm we are on the precipice of being herded into, they are naïve at best, and deluded at worst.

The news media is the propaganda arm of capitalism. Thus, from their point of view everything political ends with politics. Politicians are simply out for themselves, or kowtowing to Trump in order to keep their jobs. Trump has taken over the Republican party and he controls everything because he’s a criminal, or crazy, or both. And right-wing politicians who support him have simply lost their minds. It doesn’t matter what the narrative is. In the news media everything ends with politics, because for them there is nothing beyond politics but a fictional Deep State that would be the height of journalistic irresponsibility to even suggest. And yet, even this is not new, as prescient voices from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to the Frankfurt School to Noam Chomsky have been warning us about this for nearly two-hundred and fifty years. But the news media has also successfully marginalized those voices of truth by characterizing their ideas as no different than the belief in Bigfoot or Atlantis. Sports and entertainment keep us distracted, smart phones and the Internet keep us addicted, culture wars keep us fighting with each other rather than the true enemy. And all the while the news media keeps reporting on politics like it’s the equivalent of a sports contest. Trump must be defeated in November, and I’m fairly hopeful that the American electorate will do its part to ensure that outcome. Just don’t expect the media to assist by providing voters with the truth, because the truth is, they have a very different agenda.