Manufactured Illusions and the First Amendment
Fascists consider their lies to be at the service of simple absolute truths, which are in fact bigger lies. --Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies.
The Musk/Trump administration is running into roadblocks in the courts and getting pummeled in public opinion polls. Much of legacy media has succumbed to their madness and we’re seeing more instances of gorilla dust* being kicked up. (* A term popularized by Ross Perot referencing the tactic of male gorillas kicking up dust to confuse challengers.)
While many seemingly tactical actions are being called out, the larger strategic aims of the government takeover in progress are proceeding.
They aim to replace government operational capabilities with artificial intelligence systems armed with algorithms favoring the wealthy and removing social imperatives introduced after the 1950s.
In practice this means enabling corruption and resegregating society.
The dystopian novels describing a future where robots/computers take over mostly missed the paths now being followed to seize power. We’ll see where this goes if and when civilization passes its “singularity” moment, when automatons start writing self-aware algorithms.
Lies intended to bolster a narrative are mothers milk to Donald Trump and those around him. And now those falsehoods are being strung together to create a parallel reality as the Musk crew of hackers smashes their way into the federal bureaucracy.
Part of creating and maintaining a parallel reality involves making up problems that only the Dear Leader can solve. Another part are outrageous proclamations aiming at distracting both the media (which will attempt to legitimize the speaker) and the public.
The insane claims by Trump about GAZA strip and evicting the Palestinians got sanewashed in a New York Times lede:
President Trump took the world aback with his declaration that the United States was going to “own” Gaza and move out the Palestinians there to build “the Riviera of the Middle East.” As unrealistic and bizarre as it may seem, Mr. Trump was pointing to a serious challenge: the future of Gaza as a secure, peaceful, even prosperous place.
Dartmouth Political Scientist Brendan Nyhan re-wrote that lede, putting it in another historical era to show just how ridiculous this kind of coverage is:
Emperor Caligula stunned the Roman Senate by announcing his intention to "promote" his horse Incitatus to consul. As outlandish as this proclamation appeared, Caligula was highlighting a genuine issue: the declining relevance of Rome's traditional political institutions and their need for reform.
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The FCC’s continued pursuit of something bad that will satisfy Trump against CBS News involved demanding and getting raw footage from a 60 Minutes interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump called for CBS News program 60 Minutes to be “immediately terminated” and its network shut down.
Supposedly the CBS tape was edited in a manner making Harris look better, something the President continues to say was illegal election interference even though he won the contest.
Here’s what was found:
In the Face the Nation clip, Whitaker asks Harris about Israel's ongoing war in Gaza and the Biden administration's dealings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When Whitaker notes that it seems Netanyahu "is not listening," Harris responds, "Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region."
But on the 60 Minutes broadcast, in response to the same question, Harris replies, "We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end."
The worst part of this story are reports that CBS’ parent company Paramount+ is looking to “settle” a Trump lawsuit, and admit wrongdoing in order to protect the company’s mergers and acquisitions.
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DOGE staffer Marko Elez has now resigned after being linked to a deleted X account that was posting racist stuff going beyond what even the aggrieved white men taking over the government would stand for (publicly, anyway).
Elez’ advocacy included repealing the Civil Rights Act, praising the idea of a “eugenic immigration policy,” and bragging that he was racist before it was cool to be racist.
Mind you, this sort of stuff made it through Xitter’s moderation policy; the 25-year-old co-curating America’s payment systems apparently believed that deleting his account would erase it from the internet. And, think how racist you have to be to get fired by DOGE.
Now Elon’s hackers are digging through USAID records and providing “evidence” of wrongful conduct. The destruction of that agency (14,000 employees down to 249), charged with projecting American soft power internationally, is deeply personal for Elon Musk.
Not only has he ended an investigation into his enterprises, he’s putting his innate racism into practice to the point where Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s attendance at the G20 summit in South Africa was deemed not possible because of that nation’s alleged DEI practices.
As they’ve shoveled through USAID records, a cornucopia of misunderstood data is being fed to the press; over-the-top accusations are appearing on MAGA/conspiracy platforms.
Some poor guy (he’s actually the Chairman of the Kaiser Health Foundation) had the misfortune of having the same name as perver Jeffrey Epstein, and because his organization received a grant from USAID in 2023, this is a major SCANDAL, since the guy who was Trump’s buddy died (shortly after being visited by then-US Attorney General Bill Barr) in 2018.
Since Politico isn’t pro-MAGA enough, it was another SCANDAL that USAID “gave” the publication millions in funding, according to a White House press briefing. The feigned outrage over that publication’s ‘leftist’ slant looks particularly ignorant in light of Politico’s record of favorably reporting (or omitting) news with a center-right stance.
The information on this OUTRAGE has been available to the public on USASpending.gov., and the dollar amounts mentioned included the “pro” edition and access to proprietary information.
In FY2024, member, committee, and administrative offices in the House of Representatives disclosed 117 payments totaling $1.4 million to Politico LLC. This included the offices of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who should have looked in the mirror before taking to Xitter to mock the publication.
"LOL. @politico is trying to attack @elonmusk because he's exposing their grift," Boebert tweeted. "NEWS FLASH: No one trusts media funded by the deep state!!"
It took about three nano-seconds before Reason journalist Billy Binion posted documents showing Boebert's office paid Politico LLC $7,150 for a yearlong subscription starting on Jan 27 last year. (And three years prior to that.)
In reality, just about all government agencies subscribe to Politico’s high end services, including (mostly Republican) members of Congress. The publication’s editor said that revenue from the federal government's various entities amounted to 10% of their subscription income.
Now, the General Services Administration has ordered ALL federal agencies to cancel ALL subscriptions to publications. Their AI Big Daddy doesn’t need no stinkin’ facts.
All kinds of organizations and individuals have been caught up in the SCANDAL over federal monies supposedly being doled out willy-nilly , including New York Times, the BBC, the Associated Press, Ben Stiller, Orlando Bloom, Jean-Claude Van Damme–the celebrities were victims following a fake video from a Russian misinformation source that was shared on social media by… Elon Musk.
Never-Trumper Bill Kristol, one of the editors at The Bulwark, was targeted because of an overlapping relationship with a donor-advised foundation. According to a document I saw, he received death threats as a result of Musk’s minions’ mischief.
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For employees working with health related projects, the threats have become real, since a right-wing outfit, the American Accountability Foundation, has created a website listing the names and photos of more than 50 federal workers on what it is calling a “watch list” related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Via the New York Times:
The list included “dossiers” about individual staff members, listing what it called their “D.E.I. offenses.”
For example, one 24-year-old C.D.C. staff member was singled out for a social media post she published on her 20th birthday about “the harsh truths of racism,” and for reposting a social media item about pain equity — an issue underpinned by research finding bias in how women, Black and Latino people are treated when in pain.
The foundation previously published “watch lists” of workers at the Defense, Education and Homeland Security Departments. This latest list, published on an affiliated website, includes workers from federal health agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, many of them in programs aimed at improving the health of people of color and other vulnerable Americans.
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Special federal employee Elon Musk has been exercising his constitutional rights in an effort to deprive companies of their First Amendment rights to reduce//boycott/or eliminate advertising with his social media business.
Last Saturday, Musk filed an amended complaint adding Nestle, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive Company, Lego, Pinterest, Tyson Foods, and Shell to a lawsuit filed last August against the World Federation of Advertisers and the companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health, and Orsted.
Here’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s newsletter Sex and Tech:
The fact that these companies acted in tandem, not alone, is at the core of Musk's complaint. But it shouldn't make a bit of difference. Acting in tandem is how boycotts work. And boycotts—by individuals or corporations—are a form of protected speech.
Musk likes to style himself as a defender of free speech and free markets, but he's shown time and again that this principle falls to the wayside when it conflicts with his self-interest. This lawsuit serves as a perfect example.
The stories reported in today’s post are mostly representative of the “gorilla dust” being kicked by the tech/MAGA gangs roaming in the federal government. Their Dear Leaders are addled by the sense that their wealth and fame have somehow made them into superior beings.
While dumping water on the circuit boards running the federal government destructo machine may cause pauses, beating them will involve rewriting the neural circuits of Americans who’ve been conditioned by decades of rich guy nihilism. And we need to grasp that the pathways to political change run through both the head and the heart of the populace.
How Disney Became One of the Largest Transit Agencies in North America by Haydin Clarkin at The Transit Guy
Cities like Atlanta, Houston, San Diego, Las Vegas, and the Twin Cities all have lower transit ridership than Disney World. Even Orlando’s entire metro area sees only one-fifth of Disney’s transit ridership— 20%!
It is undeniable that Disney World operates the largest private transit system in the world. But when we think of the "happiest place on Earth" and Walt Disney’s original vision for an experimental city, we have to wonder:
Could America have embraced walkable cities and robust transit systems if we had followed Walt Disney’s vision instead of Robert Moses’s?
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Did the L.A. Fires Start in D.C.? by Joe Mathews at Zocalo Public Square
The clueless national media allows you to get away with this game—blaming California for fires you’ve helped make worse, as part of a larger strategy of political “retribution”—but that doesn’t mean California has to.
Let’s be clear: Our firelands are actually your firelands. And you’ve managed your California land so poorly for so long—suppressing fire instead of managing it, letting fuels accumulate, providing insufficient personnel and resources to handle our national parks, monuments, forests, trails, wilderness, and recreation areas—that you’ve helped turn California into a tinderbox.
When you and your leadership—President Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, members of Congress—blame California’s land and natural resource management for our fires, you aren’t just lying or playing dirty politics. You’re trying to shift blame.
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Stop Worshiping the American Tech Giants by Lina M Khan at the New York Times
It should be no surprise that our big tech firms are at risk of being surpassed in A.I. innovation by foreign competitors. After companies like Google, Apple and Amazon helped transform the American economy in the 2000s, they maintained their dominance primarily through buying out rivals and building anticompetitive moats around their businesses.
Over the last decade, big tech chief executives have seemed more adept at reinventing themselves to suit the politics of the moment — resistance sympathizers, social justice warriors, MAGA enthusiasts — than on pioneering new pathbreaking innovations and breakthrough technologies.
There have been times when Washington has embraced the argument that certain businesses deserve to be treated as national champions and, as such, to become monopolies with the expectation that they will represent America’s national interests. Those times serve as a cautionary tale.
Did you intend to write 'seeing' in this line: "...we’re seeking more instances of gorilla dust* being kicked up...."?