The country is about to be handed over to a gang of fascists, and the top Democrats are just lying around and waiting for the Republicans to tickle their bellies.
Donald Trump memorabilia is on sale at I Love DC Gifts ahead of the January 16, 2025 inauguration. in Washington, DC.
(Kyla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
On Wednesday, Joe Biden delivered a farewell address to the nation. If you missed it, you’re not alone. Biden has slipped into the history books with astonishing speed, his presidency already reduced to a footnote between Trump’s chapters, his personality diminished to the point of irrelevance.
As usual, Biden’s message was spot on. Channeling Eisenhower and his warning about the rise of an unaccountable “military-industrial” complex, the outgoing president warned that America today is increasingly ruled by oligarchs spawned “techno-industrial complex.” These oligarchs, Biden noted, use the high-tech infrastructure they control to corrode public discourse, to confuse the public about what is true and what is false, and to deliberately promote disinformation to gain more power and more wealth.
Elon Musk’s personal wealth is now almost half a trillion dollars. Given the rate at which he is growing, he could become the world’s first trillionaire in the not-too-distant future, and his business empire controls everything from the cars of the future to satellites vital to civil and military infrastructure around the world. This makes him a one-man superpower. Mark Zuckerberg is not far behind him.
Cumulatively, Trump’s cabinet and a close circle of billionaires it is by far the wealthiest leadership cohort in the country’s history, combining economic power and political influence in quintessentially oligarchic fashion. These men and women, some in government, some just cheerleading from the boxes they sit in to enjoy the show, will for years to come use their political power to give birth to more economic power and then turn around to use their economic power to strengthen their power over the political process.
As I said, Biden’s message was spot on. After all, one cannot look at Musk’s enormous and utterly destructive current public role, his trolling of leaders around the world, his commitment to neo-Nazi politics, and not cringe. You can’t look past Zuckerberg’s cowardly embrace of Trump’s “If I say it, it’s true” philosophy, nor his holding inauguration day parties to honor Trump rather than to be horrified by the tech titan’s reincarnation into the enthusiastic midwife of fascism. But Biden’s message, delivered in the hard-to-hear monotone that has come to define his image, no longer carries weight; the public expelled this man a long time ago.
And this is where I get really angry. Joe Biden had exactly one task when he took office after the 2020 election, and that was to develop policies capable of neutralizing the MAGA movement and all the extremism spewing from its leader’s mouth. He had one mission: to do everything in his power to make sure that Donald J. Trump will never again be able to come close to power, and never again will he be able to use the powers of the presidency to launch an all-out attack on American democracy. And Biden screwed up. Not little by little, but in the eruption of a volcano of incompetence. He failed time and time again to sell his message, and when it became clear that the public wasn’t buying what he was selling, he failed to step aside in time to give another Democrat a real chance at victory against a resurgent Trump.
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This is one of the most stunning displays of political negligence in the history of democracies; and I really hope that in the history books, Biden, who reportedly cares immensely about his “legacy” and his small circle of confidants, should be held accountable.
I doubt that a hundred years from now anyone will remember the Deflation Act, but they will certainly remember Biden’s late Weimar dance of ineptitude as the forces of darkness gathered to storm the citadel of American power. Because on January 20, Trump will have virtually unlimited power, thanks to the Supreme Court, and at the same time he will have a high-tech praetorian guard of social media moguls who magnify his every word and attack anyone who dares to speak out against him. the way
So, while Biden is absolutely right to warn of an approaching oligarchy, he is wrong to not apologize for leaving the country in the mess it is in now. Where was the humility, the recognition of simply unfathomable political mistakes in recent years?
Speaking of Democrats who aren’t exactly on the side of decency and building a firewall against extremism, where senior party figures who are willing to sit out an inauguration that crowns a would-be tyrant, a convicted felon, a sex offender as a freedman above the law of the president ? As far as I know, only Michelle Obama plucked up the courage not to participate in the ceremony in which a lawless man swore to protect and defend constitutional government. Her husband Barack Obama was last seen filming an animation small talk with Trump at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, will attend. There will also be Bill and Hillary Clinton. It’s an extraordinary act of legitimization for a man who has repeatedly spread blatant lies or falsehoods, not to mention threatened jail time, or worse, the very leaders who now promise to attend his ceremony and whose supporters would likely go to if he lost the election in November.
am i angry Hell yes. The country is about to be handed over to a gang of fascists and oligarchs; and mainstream Democrats, inept even by my most pessimistic expectations, roll over and wait for Republicans to tickle their bellies instead of championing the concept of a pluralistic, rationalist, empathetic body politic.
It’s MLK Day on Monday, a day when we usually pay tribute to our pantheon of extraordinary progressive, radical men and women who have moved this country along the path of justice in the most profound ways, even in the face of the harshest forms of repression. This MLK Day, I will resolutely ignore the dismal news about the inauguration, and I will certainly ignore those Democratic leaders who are sympathetic to a man they correctly identified as a fascist less than three months ago. Instead, I’ll be thinking of America’s better angels and hoping that a new generation of Democratic leaders will soon emerge who have the wherewithal to fight back against the behemoth of Trump.
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