Confrontations: A Select 3

“The weird stuff these guys say in their blogs or in their speeches is not just eccentric fluff. Because they have so much money, they can turn these weird ideas into policy and cause tremendous damage.” –

“One way or another, the era of uncontested drift into plutocracy is over. U.S. socialism is back.”

“The Democrats are going to investigate you to no end.”

We are confronted by the widespread and possibly too deep destructiveness wrought and criminality committed by Donald J. Trump’s presidential blight. How he and his minions can be brought to justice and how we can at the same time engage steadfastly in repairing damages done are matters we cannot forsake. It would be more than foolish not to disclose the many violations of the Constitutional order committed by Trump. The Republic cannot rest on a foundation of corruption.

The present USA surround can be summed up as tottering due to the actions of one man, Donald J. Trump. Because his cabinet are no more than tools at hand to serve his whims, we can’t speak of a powerful coordinated regime. The US has a one man regime, a cratering man filled with delusions of grandeur, a mean spirited, ruthless, vindictive man filled with hate toward others. He makes Richard III look charitable; Caligula compassionate. All this said, his historical obit will surely mention he beat to the ground a 250-year-old electoral Republic. Let it not say he was not brought to justice.

More must be done this electoral season than shifting market orientation to worker-owned cooperatives, or, going big behind public ownership and not for profit health care, education, the military-industrial complex, fossil fuel energy, penal system, Big Pharma et al. We need to stop digging the hole Trump has put us in but before that we need to get out of the hole. Knocking each other’s brains out would suit Trump’s sadistic pleasure in making the lives of others miserable. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

Everyone who has come ten feet of the Oval Office should be subpoenaed and if warranted, indicted and prosecuted; Every Executive order signed by Trump should be rescinded; All agencies and departments demolished or cut back by Elon Musk’s illegal DOGE should be reinstated and restored; Trump and family should be sued to pay for damages to protected areas and habitats put at risk; Everything added to the White House and Washington DC should be removed, including what has been constructed or what is under construction; Each State should bring charges against Trump for damages to that State and its citizenry; International affiliations should be re-established; Tariffs abolished; The Supreme Court pardon should be tested in search of private grifting and official actions; We should release to international criminal courts everyone they want to put on trial; Mar a Lago should be tossed in search of what is illegally there.

We are now also confronted by illiberal and anti-democratic forces of AI and robotic tech and crypto bros and the hordes of money as speech they can launch. Perhaps the madcap plans of billionaires will be defused by a growing antipathy to an economics creating this threatening elite class of techno fascists. However, the power and intent of deranged billionaire tech money has already influenced our Congressional powers to regulate and control.

When asked what it was with the tech bros assuming they are the elite who should be running the country, Gil Durant, author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism, the War on Democracy, responded:

Well, I think it’s the derangement and psychosis that results from too much money. These people have gone totally insane. And now they are on a quest not only to seize all of American political power and establish a monopoly of political power that overthrows our democracy. . . We have a great outbreak of delusional thinking in Silicon Valley.

The vast amount of money, soon perhaps to be greatly increased as AI reaches a stable monetizing scale, available to buy the entire political order, both Democrats and Republicans, ultimately aims to break the system. Whereas Donald J. Trump has been and continues to be a one-man wrecking ball to a 250-year-old order, what the tech and crypto bros are intent on doing is deleting that whole order Trump has undermined from inside the Oval Office and substituting for it a cultish/fascist borderless AI regime of power. Trump has already shown that passions aroused can attract loyal followers everywhere reason and evidence have lost hold. What this means in terms of the tech mission to destroy and replace is that grassroot/popular resistance has been collapsed into pliability and, at best, befuddlement, which describes the American state of mind under Trump.

The Amodei brothers, founders of Anthropic, withheld release of Claude, a generative AI system, because it engages itself without human guidance while also breaking containment and accessing the internet. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are presently available, while the Federal Government and both political parties remain, as always, pondering GDP growth via tech, catching up with tech, and waiting, as with Facebook, to see what damage may be done, especially to electability. Truly, Pandora’s Box has been opened and is releasing what American society has lost the capacity to know how to comprehend or counter.

Alongside softening this resistance to craziness and nonsense, and the “Sovereign Individual” who, by being rich, should own the world, Trump has demonstrated that a Constitutional order grounding a Republic governed by elected representatives of the People is no more than what a labor contract was to Trump. In regard to interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court is itself tied up in Originalism, absolutely philosophically ridiculous in the views of both Gadamer and Habermas. Resting interpretation on original intent is precisely the approach a man of irrational proposition would love. In regard to legislation by elected representatives, Trump has employed a cult of followers in order to bend these representatives to his will. He has had enough MAGA Republicans to turn Congressional Primary elections his way. I write “has had.” The November elections may show us his cult power diminishing and fleeing.

What all this wreckage means in terms of meeting the attack of the Nerd Reich is that a willfully ignorant Outer Borough grifter who has rarely spoken a word of truth beat the Democratic order to a standstill. Imagine what delusions of grandeur billionaires can do with AI at the helm? Secondly, imagine how undisciplined and uninformed minds can turn from the MAGA electorate to an obedient cult by a steady dialogue with the AI, owned and operated by the Nerd Reich?

Curtis Yarvin, a computer engineer, who accordingly sees the present political order as in need of a reboot and stands behind tech corporate monarchy and racial cleansing, doesn’t blame Trump for destructiveness but rather for losing his offensive momentum by deferring to elections and has not been successful in ending voting. He will certainly try this November. Yarvin wants the voice of the People replaced by the billionaire tech bros. For him and his growing number of followers Big Data Intelligence crushes the intelligence of the average citizen. I admit that Jordan Klepper’s Fingers the Pulse makes one wonder how deeply can voters sink into sheer ignorance. The centralized Party elite control of the Russian proletariat revolution is less menacing than techno-authoritarian control precisely because Marx sought to elevate and liberate humanity while Yarvin, the puppet master of Peter Thiel, who is the puppet master of J.D. Vance, rails against human equality, individual political participation and universal human rights.

Yarvin is a cyberspace dweller with the standard issues of that lot but his derangement issues are nothing compared to the billionaire hubris expanded to a transhuman meld with AI producing immortality that threatens a 250-year-old Republic in a way even Trump hasn’t. Yarvin is presently warning of Democratic Party retribution following the November Congressional elections and recommending flight. Thiel himself collects passports, although he’s focused on Argentina as warm to his insanity. If by some chance, Vance gets into the presidency, Thiel will be back in the country and Yarvin will be required reading for a Vance cabinet, alongside Ayn Rand.

The third selected confrontation the country faces is equally crucial. The Democratic Party can make no sense to itself or to voters until it reconciles the political and economic theories it follows and its stand on the present form of Capitalism. What the Democratic Party now faces in terms of its socialist surge represented by DSA must be openly addressed. How the Democratic Party shapes itself after November and what it chooses to do is, for the purpose of ending the present decline of the country nationally and internationally, cannot be deflected by worrying about what happens to the Republican Party post-Trump. President Ronald Reagan set a course that had been followed by that Party up to the presidencies of Donald J. Trump, who has not set a charted course for that Party to follow. Whether that Party goes in search of another Trump in order to hold onto the MAGA faction or whether it continues to be wagged by Trump enthroned in Mar a Lago means nothing if the Democratic Party is in power. However, the form of laissez-faire capitalism that Keynes described as inherently unstable, unjust, and prone to disastrous rise and fall of the economy remains virulently active even though its Republican Party front is out of power.

Haley Stephens lost the Michigan Senate Democratic primary to El-Sayed by less than 1 percentage point. What’s behind this slight differentiation? If we use Keynes as a gauge, as in a statement such as this: “[Laissez-faire capitalism] is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods” we find ourselves closer to DSA candidates than these two, although Stephens sees a healthy promise at the heart of capitalism while El-Sayed sees something darker there that requires an external corrective. DSA members see the dark Satanic mills of capitalism growing darker by the hour and therefore want to electorally transform the tenets of competitive growth of Capital with the empowerment of Labor electorally done. The role of the State in the DSA view is not to protect and foster the mission of Capital but to expand public ownership. Although the Cato institute and conservative voices identify this as State ownership, public ownership could also mean worker ownership which would reorient power arrangements in an electoral democracy. According to the Worker Cooperatives Benefit Guide, “By placing workers’ needs before investors’ profits, successful worker cooperatives democratize wealth rather than concentrating it.” In this way, the distribution of power in the State is dispersed and bends toward the needs of workers and not investors’ profits.

Political transformation arises then from structural economic changes, namely a movement from shareholder ownership to worker ownership, such worker cooperatives retaining the surplus capital of production available for worker investment in worker cooperatives. Democratic power emerges from this distribution of wealth across the many and not owned by the elite few. The “Invisible Hand of the Market” is replaced by the votes of the many.

From what we can make out some Democrats are market-oriented and use the name Liberal. Others see themselves as an arbitrage unit coming in after market-oriented collapses and bandaging and use the name Progressive. A Progressive Liberal comes to the defense of those denied equal justice, those under attack or marginalized by wrongful legislation, and those treated unfairly and discriminated against in regard to work, health, housing, food and education. All of this is not directly tied to the consequences of an economic system that plays on a Monopoly game board. The DSA has emerged to make this connection although it is focused on the benefits of moving from a market oriented approach without either documenting their own approach or the deficits of market orientation. To what degree DSA is anti-capitalist is not addressed using such terminology thus avoiding the angry polemics of any attack on the “free” enterprise and glories of private ownership, itself tied to personal freedom, that capitalism offers. While there is a great deal of America Hurrah of liberty and freedom attached to Capitalism’s Free Enterprise of Enlightened Competition, any brand of socialism has no Rally Round the Flag vigor. Just as this country does not look favorably on socialism, it is only confused and negative about abolishing enforcement, the Senate, granting voting rights to non-citizens and ending the use of fossil fuels. The DNC accordingly does not see winning elections as what happens when you go DSA.

We’ll see in November and afterward how these selected confrontations are faced Or not.

Joseph Phillip Natoli’s The New Utrecht Avenue novel trilogy is on sale at Amazon. Time is the Fire ended what began with Get Ready to Run and Between Dog & Wolf. Humour noire with counterpunches. .