Trump tells us what era of America was actually "great"

 So, Trump has finally told us what era of America he's thinking of when he talks about "making America great again." And boy, this is a doozy. 

You know, I can sympathize somewhat with a MAGA voter who longs for the new deal era, without realizing it's left wing policies that made it great. I mean, get a job out of high school, feed an entire family on it, life is easy, life is simple, no having to worry about unemployment or where your next paycheck is coming from, just economic security. I know that's idealized, but that's what I think a lot of people miss about American society. Life is more complicated now, it's hard. We're always at risk of losing our jobs, half of us live paycheck to paycheck and can't even afford a $500 emergency, people dont feel confident in their finances. They're stressed, they're unhappy, they're overworked and underpaid. And they long to return to simplicity.

If that's you, become a leftie. We want life to be like that. I want life to be like that. I have policies to make America like that. So do other progressives. We dont always agree, but generally speaking we understand that the laissez faire economic system is causing all of these problems and want to fix it.

But Trump...does not. For you see, his ideal era of American history was....*drumroll*.....1870-1913. You heard it right, the GILDED AGE. The age where all of the problems with modern American capitalism were amplified many times over because there were no regulations. Workplaces were unsafe. People worked long hours for wages they couldn't live on, and then paid what little they had to landlords who ate it all up, and the working class were slaves. We had kids losing fingers and arms to machines. We had them going down into the mines. But because we didn't have income taxes, we had tariffs, and became we had this weird lebenstraum style imperialism thing going on, Trump thinks that was "great." And of course, the lack of regulations and taxes helped his rich buddies.

Trumpers, regret your vote yet? I ain't saying the other lady was great, but she would've been way better than this.

Either way, I struggle to at least have sympathy for remaining trump voters. If you STILL like trump despite the sheer incompetence, Christian nationalism, and literal longing for the LITERAL FRICKING GILDED AGE, you are lost. Your moral compass is fundamentally broken. You are at best ignorant, and at worst evil. That's how I see it.

This second term of trump is turning into the epitome of evil for me. Fascist anti democratic tendencies, christian nationalism, gilded age economics, raw imperialism, a descent into a possible illiberal techno feudalism. It's insane. It's truly fricking insane. 

This administration is evil. I will just say it. They are EVIL! EVIL!!!!!!! If you like this stuff, you are lost. You are at best stupid, and at worst, your moral compass is fundamentally broken. That's all I'm gonna say.

Dear lefties, can we STOP letting these people be the face of our movement?

 So, Asmongold had a video today about about these SJW types at an LGBT related town hall that was cringe AF. he was reacting to this video of these like blue haired weirdos who obviously look like something is off from them claiming that they can't function like normal people and they need to be protected and blah blah blah.

And uh...as a former conservative, let me just tell you. Right wingers EAT THIS CRAP UP! Seriously. They think that this is what your average leftist looks like. And when we hear all this insufferable talk about throwing people under the bus and how we need to protect these underprivileged people, this is what people are thinking of. It's not endearing. it doesn't make people sympathetic. Your normie is like "wtf is up with you and why do you look like a literal clown? get your life together and stop asking the world to revolve around you." 

Like, really. Over the past 10 years, this social justice zeitgeist has taken over the left, and we have to constantly create these safe spaces to affirm peoples' identities and blah blah blah and just enable this kind of behavior, and anyone who pushes back at all is seen as a bad person. I myself have gotten modded on reddit before for pushing back against these kinds of people. it's insane. But if you dont, you get ripped on online, and you get treated like you're a right winger or something. 

As someone who ISNT a right winger, I just wanna say it. THIS IS WHY WE LOSE! Because people see these people and they know these are the people on the trolley tracks in the hypothetical trolley dilemma surrounding electoralism and people just aren't sympathetic. They're like idk wtf is wrong with you, but we gotta stop enabling it and you need to get your life together. You know?

I'm all for trying to increase freedom, give people the ability to live as they want. I know people like this arent bad people and wanna just live their lives, but what they need to stop asking is that everyone else take time out of their day to accommodate then. That's generally the amount of freedom people tolerate in society. Youre free to do whatever, until it affects them. When you ask people to drop what they're doing to affirm these people and protect them from big bad Trump...they'll just let trump have them. They don't care. Freedom is the default in american society until it inconveniences people.

Which is why, if you wanna increase freedom, like I do, you need to frame it in a way to make it in peoples' interests. And to do a UBI tangent, this is why i like UBI. No one likes conditional welfare they dont benefit from. The average american is like "my tax dollars are going to that? cut that crap", which is how republicans have won from the 1980s onward. You need to frame it in a way where THEY benefit too, which is why i have UBI plans that benefit a good 70-80% of the population. That's how you build a coalition. You DON'T build it by expecting everyone to take time out of their days to care about...people like that. It's a political loser, it's a failure. 

Honestly, i dont care what people do with their lives. I dont think most people care what others do with their lives. Just keep them out of it. SJWs have a bad habit of imposing their crap on everyone else and getting mad when people obviously don't give a crap about it. And even worse, because the screeching SJW is the exact opposite of endearing, people start to take pleasure in these people suffering. And this is how trump win elections. 

So yeah. Can we drop this cursed ideology and cursed framing of issues now? People will act like the mere suggestion of the world not revolving around these people is "throwing them under the bus", but in reality, the worst thing you can do for them is to enable them to this extent, because when a lot of people go to polls, and they think about liberals, they're thinking about people like this. And that's not a good look for us. Sorry, it isn't. I'm not gonna agree with the right on a lot, but again, I'm a former right winger. I know how they think. And I know that this stuff isn't endearing to people.

The last thing I want, when people think about voting for democrats, is this. Because it's an electoral loser, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.

Gotta love kids' honesty sometimes...

 So...we all know Musk gave an address from the white house with trump there. And Musk had his kid there. Apparently his name is X AE A12 or something. You know, like he's a fricking android created by Dr. Gero or something. Or a synth from fallout 4. Anyway the kid has been controversial. people think Musk was using him as like an accessory to make him appear more human. Nothing says "more human" than having his kid's name being a serial number, you know? 

But, and this is going viral, what's interesting is the kid....disrespecting Trump. I'm not kidding. If you look at his behavior closely, he says stuff like "you need to go away" and "I want you to shush your mouth". To Trump. The kid just straight up told Trump to STFU and F off basically. 

He said something before "you need to go away" but it's kind of hard to hear. Some are saying it was something like "you're not the president and you need to go away." That would be too perfect. But yeah, people are wondering, where is he getting this stuff from? Obviously the kid is picking up on some behaviors that elon himself might be cultivating. You know how kids will repeat things to people heard behind closed doors at the worst times. Some are wondering if that's actually how trump is being treated behind the scenes. Like the dude isnt really the president, elon is, and he needs to "shut his mouth." 

Or maybe the kid is just being a kid, and inadvertently saying things that need to be said. Who knows? Either way, this is bizarre. 

Like, and I'll go a bit into my spiritual views here, but uh...kids before the age of 7 can often do and say weird stuff. Like many of them will remember past lives and stuff like that. It's said that they dont fully integrate into this world until they're around 7 and before that remain connected to the spiritual world. So maybe this is like a weird ### synchronicity? Who knows. It's funny though. 

And also kind of concerning. Like, maybe trump really is a puppet and elon is really in charge. That's been suspected for a while. That Elon bought trump's campaign or has dirt on him so elon is using trump to do what he wants. And trump is just a puppet for this radical right wing agenda. I actually believe that to some degree. This second term is WAY different than the first. And I do think that he didnt come up with most of his agenda himself, but rather he's fronting what a lot of republican insiders, donors, etc. want. So maybe X AE A12 here (I hate calling him that, but that's the name his weirdo dad gave him) really is giving the game away because he's a dumb kid who himself doesnt know when to shut HIS mouth. Or for all we know, maybe he's just repeating what his dad told HIM because he himself clearly doesn't know when to shut his mouth either.

Either way, it's funny to see a kid disrespecting such a reprehensible president like this. 

EDIT: after reading other reactions and listening to it again, I don't think the kid said "you're not the president and you need to go away." I think he said "Mr President, I need to go pee." Kids be kids....

Still, he did literally tell trump to shut his mouth later. That one is really obvious and obviously disrespectful, but less bad. Im chalking this up to a kid just telling the wrong person to shut up rather than some indication that elon is secretly in charge. 

Look, guys, the results of the election aren't that controversial, outside of some weird comments from Trump

 So, I notice some on the left keep trying to push their own version of the "big lie" and claim that Trump (or Elon) stole the election. The strongest evidence for that comes from some strange comments Trump made on inauguration day about Musk knowing about PA voting machines or something. Look, on that, I will say, that's a bit suspicious. I do think that maybe we should be investigating such remarks, I mean, worst case scenario we find nothing. But let's face it, are the results themselves that out of the ordinary or implausible? No. A 226-312 victory was pretty expected. If we go by raw percentiles in my model, we were talking a 29% chance. It was the most likely of any single outcome in the distribution. Keep in mind, my prediction was the MEDIAN prediction. 

Keep in mind, this is my model on election day. Median outcome, 251-287, Harris wins Michigan and Wisconsin but loses the other 5 swing states. Trump had a 54% chance to win overall, and the 226-312 outcome ranged from the 16th percentile to the 45th. You know? Nothing is that out of the ordinary, it's expected that the model be at least a little off. it performed on par with my expectations. 2 states wrong, both wrong by less than a 1 point. That's average. 

As such, unless we have extraordinary evidence of some sort of fraud or controversy, can we stop questioning the results? And yes, I do think that Trump's comments raise enough suspicion to talk about the idea that maybe something funky happened. I just don't think, given the actual results, that we can say that it was due to specific fraud in specific states. Trump swept all 7 swing states, he overperformed even in deep red and blue states. he won. It was legit. It was a national trend toward the right, and the polling indicated that this was coming from a mile away. So yeah, unless we can point to specific things, I'm going to say this was a legit outcome.

Note for conservatives: Americans literally did NOT sign up for this!

 So, Elon Musk is trotting around acting like "the American people want this" because Trump won the election and that he has a mandate and I just wanna tell elon to SIT THE #### DOWN!

People elected Trump because they missed 2019, the economy being relatively good, and prices being reasonable. They rejected the democrats for failing to bring down the cost of living fast enough and not really being effective at general. We get it. Dems suck at campaigning. It's something I've said for a decade. They offer little and deliver even less. We get it. You guys were put in charge to fix things. I know you're never gonna fix things, but the least you can do is not make things worse.

They didn't sign up for YOU (Elon) being some weirdo unelected bureaucrat of a new government agency dedicating to finding "waste fraud and abuse" and you just taking a hacksaw to the federal government like my autistic ### trying to dissect a frog in 10th grade biology class (for reference: that did not go well, and my classmates relieved me of the knife immediately). 

The people did not sign up for project 2025. We all know all of this stuff is project 2025. It is. But no one actually LIKES project 2025. Trump won because he promised he wouldn't enact project 2025. To put things in perspective, 57% of voters have strong negative feelings toward the idea, while only 4%, including 7% of conservatives, support it. As such, NO ONE LIKES THIS. NO ONE WANTS THIS. It's amazing. The WORST of my proposals have like, what, 45% support? 

So yeah. Elon, your bull#### does NOT have a mandate, sit the #### down, no one likes you. Of course, we all know you won't. You're a wanna be dictator who wants to turn American democracy into techno feudalism and this is functionally a coup. I hope it fails. I hope to God it fails.

Also, on Trump having a "mandate." He won by 1.7%. That's a relatively narrow win. This isn't 1932 with FDR. This isn't 1980 with Reagan. This isn't even 2008 with Obama. This is a Bush 2004 style victory that really has virtually no mandate at all. And let's face it, Trump has good approval now but once all this stuff Elon's doing affects real people, expect that to drop very quickly. No one actually wants this agenda. Either do what the American people want you to do and magically lower the price of eggs somehow or gtfo. I'm tired of dealing with this administration's BS and it hasn't even been a month. 

Detangling Curtis Yarvin's BS arguments against democracy

 So, I'm researching more into this "dark enlightenment crap with Curtis Yarvin, and ugh, the guy sounds a lot more reasonable when he actually explains his arguments in some ways, but "sounds" is the key word. He's still pushing some pretty crazy ideas that I'd fundamentally disagree with. So I'm listening to his interview with the new york times a few months back. And uh...I wanted to give some thoughts on this. Im about 2/3 of the way through the interview as of writing this, I dont know if I'll finish it, but i did want to respond to what I heard. 

So first, the dude argues about the hypocrisy of democracy and how "FDR was a dictator" and we seem to like dictators when they're people we like, but not when we don't. I admit this is somewhat true. However, and this is a tactic he seems to use a lot, FDR can be argued to do what he did to save democracy, and move society forward. What this guy is arguing against is democracy for its own sake. He's arguing for dictatorship as being superior to democracy, claiming it's more efficient and a better way to govern.

I admit, many historical leaders, including many I like, are a bit authoritarian at times. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt. Some of our greatest leaders. They did things for the people, but sometimes they kinda "broke the rules" and didnt follow the proper procedures. However, here's the thing. This guy seems to think that if you're not on his side, you should be a weak procedure fetishist like say, modern centrist democrats who value the norms and letter of the law, rather than the spirit of it. I admit, sometimes, especially in times of crisis, it's permissible for leaders to do things that normally arent considered fine. However, once again, these leaders ultimately made American democracy stronger and saved it at crucial moments. Had Lincoln not done what he would have done, the US would've broken apart. Had FDR not done what he had done, we would've fallen to fascism or communism. Hell, beyond that, I'll say this. It's the people who wanted that. When you elect someone 4 times in overwhelming margins like FDR was, that's a clear mandate. He did things that the people wanted. The conservatives cynically used procedure to obstruct.

And none of these guys did what Trump is doing with project 2025 and Yarvin's ideas. Trump is basically following Yarvin's playbook, as I discussed in the last article. This whole point is to break democracy, and for what? Rule by corporations? Ridiculous.

Honestly, this is just the hunter vs emissary debate from starfield all over again and how the hunter is like WELL THE EMISSARY USES POWER TOO, ARENT' THEY HYPOCRITICAL? yes, but the emissary uses it in a more restrained and principled way, often acting defensively to stop madmen from taking power. I'm basically the emissary, whereas Yarvin is the hunter. He's just a raw power guy and is twisting things to make it act like emissary like thinkers are just like him. No, they're not. I mean, they KINDA are, but not really. Really, what this guy is doing is mind####ing us and drawing a false equivalence. 

Next, he argues that the US should be run like a corporation. He points out that corporations are little monarchies. yeah, they are. I've noticed. And...I don't exactly like corporate America and the tyranny that they impose on people. My entire ideology is literally opposed to the idea of being forced to work for these guys after all and how wage slavery is functionally a soft form of slavery. If anything, I'm actually at least somewhat sympathetic to the argument for like market socialism and how the businesses should be democratically run. I aint ride or die on the idea but I've been open minded to it, even if i dont think it's an end all be all because I'd rather there be an exit option in the form of a UBI. Yarvin supports exit options for his little corporate fiefdoms too, but if there isn't an actual exit exit, does it matter of we have choices between different flavors of tyranny? Choice doesnt make much difference if one can't just opt out entirely. 

On that front, Yarvin seems to offer rather ghoulish examples. he's "jokingly" said that the poor should be ground up into like biodiesel or something. But again, he said he was "joking." On a more serious proposal, he seems to support like imprisoning them, possibly in virtual reality. As I gamer, to some extent, I dont mind just chilling and spending all of my time gaming and being online. But being forced to be there and imprisoned sounds messed up. And I assume that people wouldn't be there on their own terms either. So...total psycho there...but hey, that's the right for you.

And then there's him arguing that slaves were better off as slaves and a lot of slaves didn't wanna be freed and how a lot died after 1865 from poverty and the like...uh...okay, to answer this one, yeah, because we imposed wage slavery on people. We replaced a system of a whip with one that was like "work or die by the elements" and people...died by the elements. That doesnt mean slavery is good. That just means that the system of wage labor that came after actually kinda sucks. And again, whose entire ideology is built to oppose wage slavery? mine. I mean, my answer is the equivalent of "reparations for all" as a means to accomplish people being able to be free and secure. This guy is just like, "well ackshully slavery was kinda based". No, it wasn't. We just replaced it with a system that while a bit better in some ways, is still pretty fricking bad. And just because some slaves regretted being freed doesnt mean anything because 1) how many of them knew better? it's not like they ever had much experience with anything else, it's a lot like the people of today going on about what will they do with their life if not forced to work all of the time?, that's not an argument for repression for employers, it just means that people are brainwashed, and 2) once again, the system that replaced actual slavery still kinda sucked. 

 Like, this guy is unmoored from the traditions of western enlightenment thought and liberalism. he argues we have a recency bias and how we assume our politics is so much better than aristotle's because our physics are better. It's the overall amount of knowledge actually. What this guy is, is someone who rejects the narrative of progress. Like I'm a progressive. I believe that over time that much like with physics where through science we improve our understanding and advance things, that we should do that with social systems too. That new morality should, in theory, be better than old morality. That we advance and learn from our mistakes, and that many rules that now exist that didnt exist thousands of years ago are there for a reason and fixed things that previous generations did wrong. What this guy is saying is we should just throw all that out the window and maybe the old guys from thousands of years ago had it right. No, they fricking didn't.  

And then he returns to the whole hypocrisy of westerners by defending anders brevik by saying "well ackshully nelson mandela was a terrorist too." Again, we're arguing hunter vs emissary again. A principled, restrained use of power vs a raw dictatorial one and acting like they're the same thing. 

But yeah, that's what this guy is doing. He's like a total moral relativist. And not in a good way. Like, he's the kind of guy who if we were to go back to christianity would actually be like "well ackshully it's fine if people just all kill each other because if you stop me you're just as bad as i am" and then try to muddy the waters that much you actually defend acting like a moral psychopath.

Like, even if i admit morality is mostly subjective, in a way it kind of isn't in some limited ways. I would argue that there are some obvious impulses or directions that morality should flow in. Some goals it should try to reach. Like reducing suffering, extending life, giving people enough liberty to pursue their own ends and self actualize, etc. And this guy's morality almost seems devoid of all of that. he really does think we need a strong man to just tell everyone what to do and that society is actually better that way.

And then toward the end of the video he once again returned to this idea that CEOs just know better than most people and if government ran industries, they wouldn't do so well.

We already have seen government run like a corporation before with Trump. it sucks. it baffles me we're trying this again with a side of this guy's crazy ideas. I honestly think that corporate rule is the whole reason were here. If democracy, true democracy, prevailed in the first place and we didnt have corporations controlling the entire thing from the shadows, we would've worked this out in 2016 by electing Bernie Sanders. 

 We ended up in this cursed timeline because our government is already run by corporations and ignoring the will of the people. And because corporations have captured both parties, we keep flipping back and forth between these crappy options that no one actually likes, and now it's getting dangerous because these guys are trying to use trump to seize power for themselves directly. it's scary. And I dont think most people actually voted for this. They just voted for trump because they rejected the democrats. They vote for democrats because they rejected the republicans.

We need less corporate rule, not more. I hate these stupid elitists who think they know so much better than people.

And yeah, I know I also think people are stupid and I know better too. BUT...i also acknowledge democracy as the "least bad system of government" and dont think the solution to that is to get rid of democracy and let the oligarchs rule directly. Like, why is this a thing? Oh democracy sucks, let's have this small unelected group of people just make decisions for people whether they like it or not. Yeah, like that's gonna go over so well /s. 

Really. I acknowledge democracy is flawed. But that's why I propose like...universal college education? Because maybe for democracy to work properly, the masses need to actually be educated and informed? The problem with our system is its currently stupid people being guided like puppets on a string toward certain conclusions and then this guy is like "the answer to this is to just make the puppet master a dictator." NO! THAT'S TOTALLY NOT THE ANSWER. The answer is to get the puppeteers out of the way and stop them from running the show and let people organically decide what they want without elites trying to force them to predetermined outcomes that suck.

Every problem with american democracy comes from its oligarchic roots, and from ignorance. Problems that the GOP actively fosters and tries to make worse because it benefits them. And now they're going full blown toward illiberalism and trying to do away with even the PRETENSE of democracy. Again, the answer is more democracy, not less.

Really. This is gonna be a scary next few months/years. I hope democracy can withstand this. Because this is BAD. Really BAD. People who believe in this guy's ideas are in our government and influencing things. And Trump was bad enough before those guys were in the picture. At this point im not sure whose worse, Trump or the people behind him. Like I thought trump was a unique threat, but its looking like no, the GOP really is just full on going full steam toward rank authoritarianism. it's like every time we think they can't get worse they get worse. Every election more extreme, more dangerous. And now they're an existential threat to the system that even as recently as a decade ago they swore to protect. 

The Trump administration ignoring court rulings is all part of their plan...

 So, with news that JD Vance and Elon Musk are trying to ignore the courts, I just want to point out, after researching all of that dark enlightenment crap that this is part of the plan. They are literally trying to challenge the power of the courts to stop them. They are trying to break democracy. Make no mistake, this is a coup. They are trying to consolidate power in the executive branch via their unitary executive theory and give Trump the power of being a king. This is not normal. This isn't even a rightful challenge of a SCOTUS gone wild from big money and corruption. They are doing this to break our constitution and our democracy. Because they do not believe in it. This has been the plan all along. To break our system of government so that they can force their weird brand of techno-fascism on us. They are illiberal psychopaths. They never should have been elected. God. Even I went for Kamala Harris and I HATE the democrats. Why did people vote for this guy?! All of the signs were there after January 6th. I know the dems have been hyperbolic about trump in the past, but this isn't hyperbole. After years of crying wolf, now the wolf is here blowing our house down and we're just sitting here drinking tea going "this is fine" even as everything is on fire. Wtf?

 Democrats, get off your butts and do something. ANYTHING. Come up with some sort of counter plan. Stop being weak. Stop being useless. You know how you guys were all "the resistance" in 2017? That's the energy we need right now. Or better yet, let's ask the age old question: what would Mitch McConnell do? Because whatever it is, that's what we need to be doing right now. We need that obstructionist energy right now. These guys need to be legally countered in every way possible. Our very system of government and way of life is at stake!

This dark enlightenment stuff is like James Bond Villain type crap

 So, the more I think about this dark enlightenment stuff, it almost sounds like fantasy. And then it hit me. Gee, a bunch of wealthy people having anti democratic ideals, massive organizations that are everywhere, yet no one has ever heard of them, and suddenly they're committing fantastical coups of the US government. Honestly? It almost sounds like a James Bond plot. ya know, like SPECTRE or something? Yeah.

It's freaking weird, man. Like, I can't say I never heard of the dark enlightenment before now, but I can't say I ever took them seriously. I mean, who has? It's just a bunch of no lifers coming up with weird theories of governance on the internet (like I'm the one to talk, right). But then you got billionaires on board with this, including Elon Musk, who is front and center in the second Trump administration, and Peter Thiel, who is less front and center but associated with it. And apparently JD Vance apparently got his ideas from it.

And yeah. It's bizarre. Like, you would think this is weird 4chan crap, like this weird melding of fascism and anarcho capitalism, which despite sounding self contradictory, actually makes perfect sense, because as I've stated from the get go, the two outcomes are either anarchy with roving gangs of bandits taking over everything, or you just end up with corporations running everything. i doubt ancaps would be for the former in practice, so in reality, you get the latter.

And of course, the people would never vote for such ideologies themselves willingly, so it's kept back, but also kinda in plain sight the whole time, but no one takes it seriously, and suddenly, BOOM we get a coup.

I knew trump would be bad, I mean I told you guys that since 2021, this guy has given me Hitler vibes. Like, this is bad news. The dude tried to overthrow the government once, and if we let him in, he's trying again, but yeah. Now he has this weird internet meme of an organization behind him with this weird alt right ideology that no one's ever heard of behind him, and yeah, this is bad. 

Of course, I don't think this is all JUST like Curtis Yarvin and his stuff. We got the christian nationalists who im far more familiar with, having been exposed to that as a teenager through Christian school, and we got the outright white nationalists. And now all of these forces are converging in the republican party and uh...yeah, this is bad. This could be THE realignment, and this is just about the worst one possible. Like we're getting all the bad stuff at once.

I mean, if I went back in time, to when Yarvin was "making a new political ideology in his garage", and pushed this as like a fictional plot, no one would believe me. it sounds completely and utterly insane. But this is what happens when you mix basically christian nationalism, fascism, anarcho capitalism, and edgy 4chan vibes. It's crazy. What the heck is this timeline?

We are screwed, aren't we?

 So, I just watched a new video from Kyle Kulinski interviewing some guy about the origins of Elon Musk's ideas. Apparently, a lot of it goes back to the so called "Dark Enlightenment" and a lot of alt right message boards on 4 chan. I mean, I'm one to talk about getting your ideas from forums on the internet, but let's face it, human centered capitalism is essentially a left wing progressive version of that.

 This...is basically like...what I'd call like "anarcho capitalism in practice." As we know, anarcho capitalism doesn't work, it would eventually devolve into just raw anarchy with no capitalism, or it would devolve into some sort of techno feudalism where corporations run everything. This is essentially the latter. It comes from this strain of right wing thought which is associated with being anti democracy, pro monarchy, and pro laissez faire capitalism. People wonder how people can go from ancaps to being alt right and on board with trump, and it's basically this. What really seals the deal with these people is they have disdain for democracy, disdain for common peoples' opinions or interests, and this belief that capitalism should transcend states. Originally, it can be argued, states exist in order to protect the "rights" and privileges of the wealthy.  But over time, we started ceding power to the people, and a lot of the elites look at this with disdain. They believe they are this ubermensch that only they are qualified to rule, and only they are intellectually fit enough to make decisions that rightfully belong to all of us. We had the magna carta, we had democracy, we had the new deal, etc. And to some extent the wealthy played ball as long as they got theirs in the end. Well...ever since the new deal, they wanted to roll it back. We saw this with the mont pelerin society in the 1950s and 1960s, we saw this with the execution of the shock doctrine to push neoliberalism onto us in the 1980s. And now Musk is kinda wanting to overthrow democracy altogether and implement his vision of techno feudalism that he got off of some far right wing corner of the internet. 

Trump is bad enough. Trump, I dont think he has much of an ideology other than being vaguely nationalistic, he's in it for himself, but he's fronting ALL the bad guys. The christian nationalists, the nazis, and even these weirdo dark enlightenment guys. It's a weird mix of all of the evil right wing ideologies mixed up into one. Christian extremism, fascism, and techno feudalism. The worst each faction of the right all has to offer all at once. 

As the guy Kyle was interviewing said, if people know what's going on, they should resist immediately, this is an attempted takeover of the government, it is an attempted coup. We are now in germany 1933 mode, and we need a left that is willing to actually fight back and not wuss out like they've been doing. Really, what IS our side of the aisle doing? What are the left wingers in power doing? We should be doing what the right does to us and obstructing every little thing the right does. We should be pushing back with everything we got. Screw the actual policy agenda for us atm, we can figure that out in 2028. We need to push back against elon's little coup, NOW. Really, this is some dark psycho crap, and I don't think that the guy being interviewed is wrong at all. Really, this here, is the "final boss" so to speak. The epitome of all that is evil, the rejection of all social progress and a return to the forces of primal authoritarianism. It must be stopped, or we are all screwed.

Ya know the more I think about it, the more this outcome was inevitable...

 So....let's say it. American democracy is a farce. It's BEEN a farce. It's the only way I can explain all that I've seen over the past few months, and really, over the past 10 years. And I've really wondered if maybe if Hillary would have won in 2016 if this outcome was inevitable, and quite frankly, it was. 

What is triggering this? Watching the democrats be so useless on Trump. They're full on folding. They're just saying "welp, Trump won the realignment, it's his world now, let's cave to him on everything." A lot of people are pissed off about Musk plundering the US government and its agencies for "inefficiencies" and honestly, it's a popular issue for the left. Almost no one, including a lot of Trumpers, like Musk and his actions. What's the democrats' response? Well, we can't bash all billionaires. Let's not go after people for their wealth. No, we SHOULD go after people for their wealth. We are literally in a second gilded age and the robber barons are all lining up behind Trump to plunder the Treasury and other departments and reshape the country in their image, whether we like it or not. We need some big D FDR energy in here were he goes after them and "welcomes their hatred." 

But no, they cave to them. Why? Because they're owned by the billionaires too. Our entire democracy is subverted by the ultra wealthy. The whole strong republicans and weak democrats thing isn't a coincidence, it's literally what the billionaires want. Both parties are beholden to campaign contributions with their funding drying up the second they cross the wrong people, so the right brazenly just gives the billionaires whatever they want, including unprecedented access to the treasury department, and then the left just ends up being tone deaf, ignoring what the public wants, and then cozying up to the billionaires too. 

And this is why in every election they offer the same bitter choice. Vote for them, even though they'll do F all for you, because their party is controlled by the billionaires, or cave and let the billionaires get what they want directly. Seriously, this is a recipe for slow walking to fascism as we are. Every election is just a catastrophe to be avoided by going democrat, and every failure to vote democrat just ratchet effects the entire overton window to the right. It didnt matter if clinton won in 2016, it would've been a stay of execution for 4 years before they tried to ram more stuff through in 2020. And then in 2024. We'd inevitably end up in the same place, because the right has been this insane since 2010, and has been trying to push things this way since the 1960s, and the left's job is just to be competent but useless. Do just a good enough job to manage the ship of state, but never push left, only enable the right. 

And we're where we are today because of it.

And now in an age of Trump, it feels like they're just rolling over.  Again, it's like they're just acknowledging that trump is the great realigner of our time and oh well we can't fight, we can only surrender. FIGHT. Heck, the fact that they haven't been fighting is why we got to this point in the first place.

Seriously, had we run bernie in 2016, im confident that's the only outcome where none of the nightmare that has happened since would have happened. He would have been the realigner. The energy would've been on the left. And the GOP would've died as we knew it. We were so close, but the democrats F-ed it up. Why? because they're paid to lose. They're the wrestler who is there only to let the star of the show win. They show up, talk a big game, but it's all a show, it's all an act, and they roll over and let the other guy win, because that's where the money is. Get it?

That's American politics. I've been fearing things getting worse because of Trump turning us fascist, but honestly? In retrospect, this kind of takeover in inevitable. Because the billionaires run the show and the politicians are just there like the wrestlers to talk a big game, but then let the correct outcome that the people paying for the whole show want. Our democracy is a farce, our nation is corrupted to the core, and it seems like no one is there to save us. And now the billionaires have free reign, while Trump just lets them do whatever he wants, because he himself is a puppet, and a dangerous one at that. But he was allowed to win again and is playing ball, so yeah. Our rights are gonna be shredded, our living standards eroded, and the billionaires enriched, while the democrats look on and tell us that if only we cared more about underprivileged groups and voted for them that none of this would have happened. 

But without an electoral mandate, they're never gonna win more than twice in a row. because no one likes them. You only get that kind of energy during realignments when the energy is on their side, and once again, paid to lose. If they win, meh, they win, and nothing happens. If they lose, the billionaire agenda goes forward. Give things enough time and things were always going to get this bad. They're just shredding any pretense of democracy we ever had at this point. But they don't care. They just wanna go back to like the gilded age of feudalism or whatever when they were in charge, everyone knew they were in charge, and they could just openly buy out the system. 

Government, especially in the west over the past thousand or more years, but also probably universally everywhere, has always been this. You got the leaders, you got their wealthy buddies who enjoyed special privileges, and everyone else is just a serf and a nobody who exists as the leisure of this privileged class. We had it like this in the middle ages. It only changed to be more implicit as we shifted to democracy/capitalism, we had a temporary reprieve as the workers organized and pushed back a century ago, and now since the 1970s and 1980s we've been slow walking it back to the way things were. And now we're basically here.

 Like, I hate to be doomer, but this is where I'm at with this crap right now. It's like what George Carlin said, we have owners, they own you, they own everything. They control every aspect of your life. And they want to make sure the masses remain too stupid to figure out that they're getting screwed in the first place. Work your lives away, retire when too old, and then die. That's life in this system. And at this rate, we might not even retire...

Trump can go F himself (again)

 So, today, Trump announced an "anti Christian task force" to "root out anti Christian bias" in the government. For those who understand Christian nationalist speak, basically, this is probably gonna be a task force to root out anything that isn't christian. You know how crazy these people get with their persecution biases after all. 

Look. I don't speak for "the woke" who probably DO wanna control your life to some extent. But I do speak for my own brand of the left. Many of us do not care if you are Christian. If you keep it to your personal life, that's fine. Just keep it out of government. Secularism isn't so much anti religion as much as it is religious neutrality. When dealing with government, we have to make laws that affect all of us, Christian, non Christian, alike. You wouldnt want, say, Muslims pushing Sharia law on people. Likewise, we dont want Christianity to be forced on people. I am a believer in the lemon test. Laws should have secular legislative purposes. The law's primary effect should neither promote nor inhibit religion. And we should avoid excessive entanglement with religion. Again, religion is a personal affair. I dont want to regulate your private lives, just stop trying to regulate mine (the fact that you guys do is why i have such an "anti Christian bias" in the first place). 

Of course, Christian nationalists don't want that. They believe that we're a Christian nation and want ideological supremacy including the right to morally police our lives however their bible (or their interpretation thereof) recommends. 

This cannot stand. F Trump, F his coalition, and F the horse he rode in on. We all know that this isn't about getting rid of legitimate bias against christians, it's about ensuring that only christian bias exists in government. These snowflakes can't stand it when we lightly tell them no they cant do that when trying to shove their morality down our throats. And that's what this is about. 

Again, secularists want neutrality. Sure, neutrality looks like an "anti christian" bias, but in reality, it's just telling you guys no you cant make laws in the name of your religion and your god to police everyone else's life. You have every right under the free exercise clause to believe whatever you want and practice it in non harmful ways that dont negative affect other people. And I will defend that, including against the woke and their own left wing brand of moral policing. I just dont like moral policing, no matter which side it comes from. Okay? okay. 

But yeah, as you can tell, not a fan of trump. I know I cant reasonably cover every dumb thing this idiot does or I'd be on here all day, but yeah. Let's just say, I dont like this guy at all. His second term is worse than his first.

F Trump (more tariff talk)

 Okay, so Trump just imposed a $32 tariff on all packages coming from China on top of the tariffs he already implemented. Apparently, this is to "stop fentanyl" or something. And...I'm not happy. 

Like, a lot of electronics come from China. I recently got an android gaming handheld. Most of those are made in china and shipped to the US from there. I actually ended up getting a razer edge with is a more established American/Singaporean company, but a lot of people get stuff from like anbernic, or retroid, or ayn, etc, and yeah, now those are going to cost more. This will especially harm the low end. While it might raise the cost of a more premium device only 10-20%, a lot of people like to get these chinese handhelds that are only like $30-70. And now they're gonna cost $60-100. So 40-100% more. Yay! Thanks Donald!

Not...seriously. F this guy. Like, it's been said recently that we're like this late stage capitalist hellscape and the only thing holding us together are "little treats from china." Like, the only thing that makes this consumerist nightmare tolerable IS the consumerism! And now we're getting taxed on that stuff so rich people can pay less in taxes. Let's face it, that's what it is. Trump wants to cut taxes on wealthy and have this "external revenue service" get taxes from tariffs on foreign goods. It's a consumption tax. This is the same thing as that "999" plan that Herman Cain had, which actually helped radicalize me to be a progressive at the time. Because I kinda realized that these policies ultimately benefit the wealthy at your average american's expense. Raise OUR taxes while lowering the wealthy's. That's the real reason they're pursuing this IMO. That and some weird aesthetic of making things in America, which outside of jobs, i dont think anyone cares about. And in terms of jobs, I literally dont care about that given my politics and would rather focus on making the jobs we have actual tolerable. Which you dont do if you wanna strip any and all worker protections like Trump wants to do. 

Oh, and don't get me going on fentanyl. I'm going to be blunt. This is gonna be a somewhat politically incorrect opinion, but I LITERALLY DON'T CARE ABOUT FENTANYL. I dont know why trumpers are so obsessed with it. They have this fear that ERMAHGERD ALL OF THESE DRUGS ARE COMING OVER THE BORDER WE GOTTA STOP THIS and you know what? Stopping this comes from YOU. If you dont do drugs, and never come in contact with illegal drugs, ever, you're never gonna deal with fentanyl. The reason this fentanyl crisis is happening is because people get involved with illegal drugs, and it being this illegal, unregulated black market, sometimes that stuff gets tainted with some serious crap. Like, sometimes they'll use low quality ingredients to make it cheaper and they're toxic. Or, they'll add heavier stuff to make it more potent only for it to kill people. And I'm going to be blunt. If you mess around with that stuff, you're putting yourself at risk. it's literally just "FAFO" as far as I'm concerned. I'm not gonna moralize and say people deserve to die. I'm not going to pull that weird crap. Obviously we should minimize harm when possible and practical. But...these tariffs aren't it. As I always say, you cant force people to care, and if Americans hate anything, it's being inconvenienced for some greater cause they dont give a crap about. And that's where I'm at with this. if you wanna stop fentanyl, fine. if you wanna tax my hobbies and make me pay extra for it, F off. I don't care. Again, dont do illegal drugs and you'll never touch fentanyl ever. 

If anything the fact that we have a fentanyl crisis at all is literally just more evidence that the war on drugs is a failure. For some reason the right keeps on fighting it, and getting more and more draconian in their pursuit of it, but here we are, 50-100 years later, and the drugs won. it's the same thing as prohibition and people poisoning themselves with some weird toxic moonshine that jim bob grew in his garage somewhere in tennessee. Literally the same thing. Same thing with the cartels too. Remember al capone and those guys? Yeah. Alcohol. Moonshine. We had all this happen before. All making this stuff illegal does is cause all of these externalities. Im not saying we should legalize all drugs, but the less harmful ones, yes. And honestly? If people wanna F around with the heavy stuff, they can find out. I really don't care at this point. It's not my problem, and I don't want the government to make it my problem by taxing me over their stupid BS.

Seriously. The only thing that made the first term of trump tolerable was me checking out mentally and focusing on my hobbies like PC gaming. And now that trump is making gaming political with his BS tariffs, well, F that guy. And I know some SJWs are gonna be like "he targeted gamers, GAMERS" in a sneering condescending attitude, so I'll just kindly say F off, this is why no one likes you guys either and why we got this idiot in charge in the first place. 

When glados is insufferable, we get wheatley. When wheatley almost blows up the place, we get glados again. And this is our post 2016 politics. We just happened to put wheatley back in charge, but that doesn't mean anyone likes glados.

Also, because I dont expect SJWs to get gaming references, that's portal 2. 

But yeah. F Donald Trump. He's the worst president ever. The other 80 year old was MUCH better. And with him, the market raising prices wasnt even his fault. It was an unfortunate consequence of reopening the economy post COVID. These tariffs ARE Trump's fault. Presidents dont control prices, but when they impose tariffs they kinda do, and they deserve ALL the hate for that.

So yeah, this is getting psycho

 So, I knew the second term of Trump would be bad. Like, I could see the GOP was gearing up for something, and Trump would be absolutely horrid if he won, trying to dismantle democracy. But this time, Trump is actually going for broke on a lot of long term GOP promises. We got bills in congress for stuff like "terminating the department of education", "abolishing the occupational safety and health administration", as well as many anti abortion acts. Just today, as it turns out, elon musk has access to all of our social security data and is evaluating the agency as part of his "government efficiency" thing. We just put tariffs on mexico and canada for no fricking legitimate reason and started a trade war with them. We are in hell. Wtf is wrong with this country?

And it seems like the dems are just rolling over. Like the narrative is basically that this is trump's country now and he has a mandate and we gotta just roll over and give the right what they want. They're literally likening Trump to Reagan and FDR. While Trump is arguably a realigning figure of sorts, he doesn't have ANYWHERE near the mandate of Reagan or FDR. THose guys had like 60% of the country behind them and electoral college mandates that were overwhelming. Here, we lost 226-312 and by a margin of 1.7%. We can come back from this. Get over yourselves. He doesn't have a mandate. His agenda isn't even popular. he won because everyone hated the last guy for being old and perceived as ineffective. His approval rating is contentious and no higher than any previous president in my life time, most of whom werent realigning figures. And honestly, i expect that number to drop. The more crazy crap trump does, the lower it will go. Yeah, he will always have that 40-45% of die hards, but if he goes far enough he might lose a lot of those guys too.

Here's the thing. Trump is the realigning figure because no one on the democratic side stepped up. We got this neoliberal technocratic wing of the party that wanted to realign it along the lines of centrism and doing F all for the working class as we enter a second gilded age. I think the problems with the country in general right now are laid bare. The right is beholden by a billionaire class with a radical anti working class agenda, and they're going for broke. They're doing the stuff all the crazies have been wanting since the FDR era when the working class got good things in the first place, and they're taking advantage of the disaffection of the populace toward politics to push their agenda. Look at who was in trump's front row, ahead of his cabinet...it was the billionaires. Who is basically the shadow president? it's elon musk. Like, really, this administration is literally by and for the billionaires. Musk is just the face of it, but they ALL seem in on it. Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, the google guy, etc. They're ALL in with the trump administration. This is an era of rank political corruption and an oligarchic class dominating politics.

And you know what? The democrats are the same way. maybe they're not "as bad" but it seems that the reason they're so useless in responding to trump is because they're beholden to that billionaire cash too and they're too busy appealing to donors instead of the people. That's why clinton leaned into wokeness and the party has been a bunch of lukewarm centrists.

Ideally, we would've had a real working class movement in 2016 take over and run things. And that would've been the real realignment. But the billionaires diverted the energy away from that populism toward this hitler lite crap. And they defanged and detoothed the democratic party giving us the biden administration, an administration that no one actually wanted, but we got whether we liked it or not.

You know, I've been reflecting lately. Should I have just bit the bullet and voted clinton in 2016? It did occur to me that maybe trump wouldnt have won and it would've shifted the GOP in a different direction as well. But...here's the thing. I'm not convinced it would make a difference. here's why. It's because of the dynamics between the parties, the dominant, bold in your face republicans, the passive, weak, and feckless democrats. That dynamic would still exist. While a third term of democrats would've likely sealed the fate of the GOP in some form, looks are deceptive. Clinton would have won like Biden did, by the skin of his teeth. She would've gotten into office, done nothing, and by 2020, when COVID hit, everyone would be dogpiling on her and hating her. And the dems' legacy would've been ruined anyway. hell, that's kinda why in a sense I actually did want clinton to lose and felt schadenfreude when she did. Because I honestly believed if the dems won 2016, the party would've been screwed. The GOP would've come back, and they would've pushed the same realignment moment bullcrap they're doing now. And I feared that. 

But...the dems didn't learn, we got that clinton presidency in the form of joe biden, he was about as useless as i anticipated he would have been, approval for his administration tanked, and here we are, with trump winning again and this time the GOP being bold and psychotic. And now they're framing this as a massive realignment. 

2024 is not a realignment. it's 2016 part 3. 2016 was a realignment. Trump's first term was realignment. ANd electorally, it's not really that the people like the GOP. Support for them is tepid at best. People honestly hate both sides, they're exhausted of a government that doesn't do F all for any of us, and they keep trying to throw a brick through the window to show how dissatisfied with the status quo that they are. If people like trump for any reason, it's because he's a populist. It's more a rejection of the democrats than anything in all honesty. No one likes these tepid technocrats who don't do anything. But the dems just act like they're paid to lose. They're beholden to the billionaires too. Both parties are just puppets of the billionaires. it was always gonna end this way. Because what matters is the dynamics between the two parties. Unless you break the dynamics, nothing changes. ANd the only way to break the dynamic is for the democrats to be strong and bold and progressive. Otherwise, as long as the democrats remain weak and centrist and useless, this was always the outcome. it doesnt matter who won in 2016, or 2020, or 2024, because the same thing will happen every election cycle. It just happens in a different order. 

If Clinton won in 2016, we'd have the GOP win in 2020. We might have the dems win in 2024, but it really depends who the GOP runs and how crazy they are. 

But because trump won, we got biden in 2020, the GOP and Trump radicalized to literal fascism lite, and now we elected them in 2024. Maybe this leads to a dem victory in 2028. maybe if clinton on we would see continual GOP support through the 2020s. Who knows? I don't actually know. All I know is we got these dynamics where the GOP is radically right wing and the dems are so centrist they're useless, and the combined effect of the two means we get an ever shifting overton window to the right. 

All I can hope is that trump is so crazy, and his presidency so disastrous, that it shocks people to the point that they correct in the other direction and ensure we never elect him again.

Of course, that's what i hoped would happen when he won in 2016. I likened it to smoking a whole pack of cigarettes all at once. Ya know how some people used to suggest kids who started smoking do that so that they would be so turned off they never do it again? Yeah. Well...we just elected that psycho again. And people are nostalgic for the guy. They genuinely like him, wtf. like, not everyone does, again, we only lost by 1.7, but still. 

Either way, this country is just so screwed. It's ridiculous. Like, wtf is going on any more? Even I dont know. All I hope is that we get some real leopards eating the voters' faces energy where the country turns on trump, but it really does seem like a significant portion of the country is satisfied to just let the psycho be psycho. I don't even know any more. I'm just so over this crap. Ugh. 

Really, blogging in the trump era is depressing. Theres just so much stuff to cover, it's all bad, and honestly, I just wanna do other stuff. I aint fully stepping away. But like ive been doing lately, I'm not really making this my main focus. It's too depressing. And what more can I say other than "yes, trump is bad" like 50 times? We all know hes bad. It's boring. it's played out. I dont like covering the guy because he's so stupid and so psycho that i just feel like I'm literally writing.

Bad things bad. bad things bad. hey did you know bad things bad? Did you know idiot is idiot? Like, I keep saying it, the reason i spend more of my time talking about the left is because it's more interesting and intellectually stimulating. Like we can actually have discussions and it energizes me. This stuff doesnt energize me. it drains me. Because it's just like "hey, trump just did the 10th batcrap insane thing today!" and we are literally talking that scale any more. 

It's like we just put wheatley back in charge of aperture science. Again. After portal 2 already happened and he almost blew up the place. Because we decided yeah, glados sucks. Again. And she does suck. But is the answer to that to give us wheatley again? No. Now give wheatley a german accent and a funny mustache and that's where we are. Yeah.

Anyway, I don't know how to end this. So...yeah. That's all i guess.

Donald Trump can go F himself

 So, it's officially past midnight, which means, IT'S TARIFF TIME! (No, Donald, no!) Stuff from canada and mexico is now gonna cost 25% more, and there's an additional 10% on tariffs from china. 

This is gonna make electronics go up, isn't it? So if you're a PC gamer, or you want a new smartphone, handheld, or tablet, you're screwed, and you're gonna have to pay more money now. And I know, i know, some petty SJW is gonna be like HURR DURR, THEY'RE GOING AFTER GAMERS! GAMERS! But yes, as a gamer, I kinda got a beef with this. hardware is already expensive enough these days. I don't wanna have to pay even more. Thankfully i upgraded my PC during the Biden administration and kinda reached a point where I'm gonna be comfortable with what I have for the next few years, but will I make it all the way to 2029 without buying anything new? Probably not. Not with how fast this stuff normally becomes obsolete. 

So yeah. Hope you got teched up for now. Because this is gonna suck. 

Even with non tech stuff it still sucks. This just sucks all around. And why do we need more jobs? We're at 4% unemployment or thereabouts. As I said, we cant get more jobs without causing inflation. And then this causes inflation. Honestly, if we wanna do anything, we should be investing in UBI, not moar jerbs. 

And then Trump is going on deranged crap like fentanyl. Idk why everyone is so obsessed with fentanyl. Just dont do drugs and you'll never even touch it. Either way way for us to start bullying our neighbors for no reason. God, I hate this guy. Like, first term, it was like, whatever, hillary sucked, she kinda deserved to lose, hopefully the public will learn this guy sucks and say "we'll never do that again" next time. This time it was like WHY DID WE ELECT THIS MFER AGAIN WHEN HE'S THIS UNHINGED?!

Yes yes, I know it was inflation, BUT HOW DOES THIS HELP?! IT DOESN'T. Really. I hate how kneejerk stupid this country is sometimes. I admit, the democrats suck. Like, again, I'm not gonna actually defend them too hard and say they were good. But they were better than THIS. At least they were sane. At least they didn't give a middle finger to our allies. At least they didn't actively make inflation worse with their policies. Wtf people? Well, you get what you vote for. Hope you're happy. Morons. 

Me the next four years.

Reflecting on the state of the country/world, the transition to the 7th party system, and whether we just lost for a generation

 So...with the second inauguration of donald trump, the country is not in a good state. I've been reflecting on it and I'm kind of realizing how screwed we might be. 

First, there's Donald Trump himself. I'm not kidding when I say he's American Hitler at this point. He really is, and he's already trying to break every check and balance in his way. He's trying to do what only the constitution can do via executive order, and while so far the checks and balances seem to be holding, uh...given both congress and the courts are controlled by republicans, we are on thin ice.

The democrats, well, they're nowhere to be found. We should be breaking out the mitch mcconnell playbook, but they seem to be rolling over for trump, doing things like doing a press conference like a week after we pardoned the January 6thers. Pathetic. As Kyle Kulinski has been stating on his channel, it looks like they're rolling over, acting like we're now in the "trump era" the way we were in the FDR and Reagan era. THAT is a VERY bad sign. When the opposition decides to align themselves with the opposition and stops fighting, that is often the realignment being sealed. The GOP won. We lost. And the democrats just seem to be surrendering. This is now the Trump era.

But beyond that, there's yet ANOTHER problem that we havent been touching on. And that is who is pulling the strings behind Trump. It was pretty noticeable that those in the front row of Trump's inauguration were actually...the robber barons. All the biggest billionaires. I've heard it said that this weird plan to invade Greenland might be being pushed by billionaire Peter Thiel. Heck, most of Trump's agenda is directly being guided by billionaires. The austerity, the tax breaks, all of it are just to enrich some oligarchic robber barons.

You know, I've been working on a book expanding my political philosophy. This isn't really any surprise, and when I really lay out the argument, it seems clear that the core way the world is as it is is because of the will of the ultra elites. We work our lives away because the rich want us to. They dont want us to wake up and realize that they're the ones making our lives miserable. They want us to be good little wage slaves. When I first approached the topic, I thought it was just christianity. And I have no doubt, it is, but the wealthy have always been the one pulling the strings, and they're the ones who impose this right wing hellscape onto us. 

I've read articles sent to me by friends in which the wealthy appear to believe they are untouchable. That they mock us behind closed doors. Because they're part of the elites and we're not. They look down their noses at everyone else and laugh at us for not being them. They know that climate change is screwing the planet, and they dont care. Enjoy society while it lasts, it doesn't matter what comes after, they'll be dead. 

I've seen a video today about how the biggest corporations have more wealth, and functionally more power, than most nation states. We are literally in a world run by this ultra rich who dont give a crap about any of us, and who basically enslave us for profit, and trash our planet, while they fricking control the world. It is no secret by this point that US foreign policy has done the will of these corporations for decades, and will actively intervene in and overthrow any government that steps out of line. 

Like, corporations are the fourth branch of government, and they have no checks and balances. If anything, in the US we just gave them all the power with citizen's united. Unlimited campaign contributions, and within 6 years, our political system was broken, if it was ever not broken. Since 2016, we've had the republicans controlled by donald trump, and the billionaires clearly control trump and are ramming through radical right wing agendas whether we want it or not. The democrats? Dependent on campaign contributions, and been running to the right ever since trying to appease this billionaire class. Like, really, them rolling over and being so useless isn't a mistake. It's literally weaponized incompetence, or controlled opposition. 

Our democracy is a farce. It's been corrupted by big money. We basically live in the billionaires' world now, and the mask is basically slipping off. I mean, in all fairness, some would say this has always been what capitalism is in the west. Even FDR compromised with this wealthy establishment class. And now they're rolling everything back, and we find ourselves in this new gilded age, where the billionaires run everything and F all of us. We are their slaves. They are ruining the planet, and our lives for profit, and laughing the whole time. 

Everything feels so hopeless. It's like 2024 was this I HAVE BEEN IMPRISONED FOR A THOUSAND YEARS AND I AM FREE energy. And it's not just the robber barons. It's also THE FRICKING NAZIS. Like what the ####, America?! Like, in retrospect, we had this latent nazsm here the whole time. Ya know, the south, the confederates. I was thinking of that one guy whose videos I watched 10 years ago who used to sound so progressive and how somewhere he just went full rightoid. I read the article i wrote about him recently and how he was a progressive because of so called "civic nationalism." I also hear the trumpers say we need this "civic nationalism" myself. And let's call it what it is, nazism. This weird nationalist thing where we all serve the fatherland or whatever. Like what the hell people. Didn't you learn history growing up? Don't answer that, if you're from the south, of course you didn't. You did NOT learn the same history we yankees did. But yeah. We got people fricking doing seig heils OPENLY NOW. And speaking of that, Elon Musk did the same trajectory as that guy. 

There was a time when Elon Musk was just a goofy tech nerd and I actually kinda respected him. 10 years ago, he was talking about robots automatic the jobs and UBI. Now he's doing fricking seig heils and it's coming out that he may have held these beliefs all along. Holy crap, this modern political environment is wild. 

I really hope that this isn't the realignment itself. If it is, we are ####ed. I really hope this is just some weird end of the previous alignment thing where in the next election cycle or two, something snaps and the people push HARD in the other direction. Again, if not, we're screwed. Idk how else to say it. We are SCREWED. 

I hate to be a bummer. When I left christianity, despite realizing how messed up the world was, I had faith that if only we left religion, came together, and realized what mess we were in, we could improve things. At one point of time, I really thought the biggest problem with this country was actually ignorance. It still is, in a sense. But it's becoming increasingly apparent that no, the world is the way it is because powerful forces want it to be the way it is, and we're powerless to stop it. So, for people like me, it's just...the mask is off, I realize how screwed we are, and we really can't do anything about it. This sucks. I wish I could be more optimistic than this. But really, this SUCKS. 

And before any leftist thinks Im radicalizing, um, you do realize i can understand how bad things are, without advocating for your solutions, right? Socialism isn't gonna solve crap. And anywhere it's been tried, it just makes the situation worse. So no, communism isn't the answer. We just need like, our institutions to actually be democratic. Our economy to actually respect freedom. The fact is, the theory behind our institutions are noble, and are worth having. It's just that they've been massively corrupted by several key design flaws. We dont need literal communism to fix that.

Just throwing that out there since leftists think the second you realize the above about the world, that you're magically gonna become one of them. No, I'm not. My views are my views, I'm just kinda realizing how bad things are getting with the direction we're going in. 

Bad things should be bad, and we should reject them. Good things should be accepted. How screwed are we that it's like everything that is evil, we are embracing as a society? What the ####, people...

Once again disagreeing with Kyle on the subject of work

 So Kyle had a video yesterday in which he was talking about how it's bad that these tech oligarchs want to take away all of the jobs and they dont want to pay employees anything, and uh, I just wanna go into this a bit.

Dude. I've been doing my own studies into the history of capitalism, how it works, and the whole reason we linked property to work and forced them to take on jobs from the glorious "job creators" in the first place is basically to enslave them. This worldview came from christianity, where it was screwed up enough, but then it was adopted by the oligarchs to functionally create a slave class in which we forcefully try to make everyone take on jobs that serve them and make them money.

They NEVER wanted to pay us. The whole reason capitalism sucks is because they will literally make us do the most work and use us like dispensible cogs in a machine for the least amount of money possible. That's literally what our system is set up to do. And now we fear transitioning to a world where they dont need us any more and we can use robots to do the work instead because then they won't pay us? Dude. That's when we develop a new system of property rights and distribution to ensure that everyone can be fed, and we do it WITHOUT work.

Either way, I dont think work is disappearing any time soon. We act like omg the robots are taking our jobs, we need a basic income. But if robots took all of the jobs and there was NO work and we ONLY gave people like a $16000 a year UBI or something, that would be a pathetically low amount. No, by then, we should be redistributing resources even more widely to ensure that every individual can live a dignified middle class life without working. Where every family ends up with some variation of the highest sustainable median income possible under capitalism. The UBI should probably be DOUBLE what I propose in that situation. It would literally NEED to be double to hit around $70k for your typical 2 adult 1 child household (my 2025 plan doubled would give such a household $75k). But yeah, if we literally find ourselves in a world without work, that's what we would have to do to keep America going. Everyone would make the same amount, minus the ones who own the means of production, who would get profits, and even then, without any labor to justify ownership at all, we could probably start talking some form of socialism or something by then. 

I don't think we're gonna reach anything close to such a reality any time soon. And if anything one of the reasons we keep the farce that is work going is to prevent having these kinds of discussion. We insist on work forever, so we can have capitalism forever, so that we dont have these discussions. And even if we did wanna do away with work, like I do, we're likely gonna be in something resembling some form of transition phase for the next one hundred years, in which my ideas are perfectly suitable. After that, we can likely decide. Do we wanna do away with work altogether and transition to socialism? Do we wanna keep working and growing? How much do we wanna work? Etc. Those questions aren't in the purview of my ideology. I'm just interested in getting the transition going, and recognize that in the mean time, we will never likely actually run out of work. Most people want to work, they wanna consume, they wont be satisfied sitting around with the bare minimum, so it's up to them. 

Either way, we shouldnt fear automation. What I fear is actually the opposite. Jobs forever and eschewing all further progress on the issue because we fear we might change our institutions if we do. We are functionally slaves in this society we have, where everything revolves around work and work ethic. Our entire lives revolve around work, and it often isn't a choice for most. It's do it or you starve. We shouldnt want more of THAT. So yeah, let them automate the jobs and implement UBI. Revisit the issue in like 100 years and see if society needs further progress (which it probanly will, in one way or another). 

100 years ago, the issues of the time were just making work tolerable. 40 hour work weeks, labor rights, etc. Now, it's reducing that work week, and giving people their freedom through a UBI as far as Im concerned. That is the issue that should define our times, not whatever the heck we're doing. So yeah. Hard disagree with kyle on this issue. I just have to say it.

What our real message should be on social issues

 So...someone asked online just after I posted that last article, that how can we convince Americans to shift the argument away from red vs blue and culture war issues, to being about class. You do it by just doing it. As I said, the democrats used wokeness in order to divide the democratic party in order to promote their band of economic centrism. Their goal is to keep us so entrenched and embroiled in a culture war with each other, that we stop focusing on the real issues which are the economic ones, particularly those of the wealthy employer class vs the not wealthy working class.

One part of this message stood out, they said, that we need to convince right wingers that trans people and immigrants arent the problem with their lives, billionaires are. And yes, that's the message that we need to convey. And this is what I wanna say to the right. Look, immigrants and trans people, what have you, they're not the problem with America. They're just people who wanna live their lives for the most part. They want their rights, we should give them their rights. And yeah, mind your own business. 

Really, why the excessive focus on social issues in the first place? As a right winger, what do you get out of trans healthcare being banned or immigrants being deported? If anything, deporting all of the migrants is gonna cause inflation in grocery prices again, and trans healthcare does nothing for you either way. Here's the lesson we millennials learned about gay marriage. What does gay people living their lives do for us? Nothing. What does it hurt? Nothing. Why should we ban people from enjoying their lives if it doesn't affect us? We shouldn't. But that's the thing. The right, the hard right, they're moral authoritarians, and sometimes we HAVE TO push back vs the right and say "nuh uh, these people are just living their lives and not hurting anyone, mind your own business." And that's our message at its best. We dont wanna impose anything on the right. If the right wants to live their little traditional lives, all the power to them. Get married, have kids, do whatever nuclear family stuff you wanna do. Heck, here's some paid family leave while we're at it, as that's popular for many on the left. 

Like, we wanna make peoples' lives better. And we gotta defend against those who wanna make them worse. Yes, we do have to defend people on social issues, but our interest in the culture war is purely defensive. I would love to say we reject "woke" ideology and this wierd cult of caring crap we wanna impose on others. We reject being moral authoritarians ourselves and trying to impose our way of life on you. We just want people to have rights, and you to have rights, and then we wanna make YOUR life better through economic policies that help you. And that's what our message SHOULD be. This isn't rocket science. This was a pretty mainstream left wing position until 2016. And we were WINNING until then. I dont think us losing over the past decade is a coincidence. Our priorities are mismatched with the public at large, and despite what the reddit power mods think, we don't wanna force our way of life on people. So don't force your ways onto us. If we can come to that agreement, we will advance significantly in this country, and get out of this horrific rut where one side are becoming nazis and the other side are basically that but with the complete opposite viewpoints.

Why reddit being left leaning is actually problematic (sort of)

 So...someone asked this on a sub I'm on, given how reddit is overwhelmingly liberal/leftist, and as someone who used to be a conservative, and who hates the current left wing zeitgeist on reddit, I wanted to give me answer for why this is problematic.

Reddit has ALWAYS had a left bias. However, this hasn't always been a problem for me. Even as a conservative, I've been used to being outnumbered. My city is blue, despite my state being purple. I went through colleges as a conservative in a social sciences major of all things. I'm USED to being the minority. And while ultimately, reddit did play a HUGE part in shifting me left, the left that used to inhabit reddit was much different than it was today. 

Like, back in the day, say, 10-15 years ago, reddit was left leaning, and I'd say the ratio was about 2:1. But it was mostly FAIR. Reddit was a platform dedicated to free speech, and there was a strong undercurrent that lasted there until the 2016 election. People mostly just gave their own opinions, and honestly? The reason reddit seemed left leaning seemed to be because it was full of intelligent millennial redditors who debated issues, and the left wing perspective was generally objectively correct. This is also why colleges lean left wing too. Reality actually does have somewhat of a liberal bias, and my belief was that as time went on, conservative beliefs would eventually die out and be replaced with a liberal zeitgeist. What seemed to drive this was the digital divide. Older generations got their news from traditional media, with all of the biases associated with that. Fox news was rotting boomers' brains, and as it turned out, MSNBC and CNN werent a ton better. So a lot of young people turned to the internet, and once again, given this culture of free speech and debate centering around actual objective facts, after a while it became difficult NOT to shift toward liberalism, because within the two party confines that existed, the left wing position was typically the objectively correct position to hold. Conservative views mostly seemed justified in appeals to tradition and authority, logical fallacies, and ignorance. And as long as that dynamic held, I honestly believed that left wing ascendancy was assured, and that if anything, the triumph of the left was a good thing. It would end an age of ignorance and lead to a new golden age of more rational discourse, where we could develop actual solutions to our problems and move society forward.

However, like is my theory of everything these days, the world went to crap in 2016. And this affected reddit too. Up through 2014 or so, reddit seemed to mostly be organic. Like, the stuff that rose did so because it was popular. But when 2016's election cycle ramped up, reddit took a darker turn. Democratic operatives from the democratic party and associated with clinton's campaign started functionally astroturfing the crap out of it. They literally promoted narratives that clinton was the best candidate or else, and that bernie couldn't win, and you HAD to support clinton or else the GOP would win. Because they couldn't win people over through reason and logic, they did so via brute force and fear. They promoted it as OMG THE GOP IS SO BAD AND YOU HAVE TO SUPPORT US OR ELSE THE GOP WILL WIN. And again...we also saw social justice ideology become part of it. I dont think the introduction to social justice ideology was mainstream. It was used by these democratic operatives as a cudgel. Why? Because that was clinton's one strong suit. She could play the identity politics game and appeal to her womanhood and her husband's legacy with the black community and then use social justice stuff to bully all of those "bernie bros" into line. And that's what they did. So, basically, reddit, which was originally filled with sanders supporters, became astroturfed and filled with OMG YOU HAVE TO VOTE FOR CLINTON OR YOU'RE THROWING MINORITIES UNDER THE BUS, BLAH BLAH BLAH. And social justice became the uniting force of the left, whereas prior to this, it was secularism. 

Seriously. Early on in this site's history, r/atheism was a premier default sub. And given me questioning my faith at the time of joining reddit, it appearing in my feed every day when i went to look for memes...made me think. It made me question, and ultimately, it led to me losing my faith in Christianity. The left won me over not through bullying me, but through logic and reason, and that open minded "reason and evidence" "free thinking" mindset actually contributed to the basis of my post christian worldview. I stopped being a christian because i ran out of logical and evidence based reasons to be one. I was won over via debate.And I respected that tradition. Reddit's original founders were hardcore free speech advocates. They believed in the openness of the internet and as a bastion against censorship.

But...when social justice ideology took over, that went out the window. SJWs are a cult. They're literally a cult. They're a cult of caring. A cult of inclusivity, a cult of promoting their ideology. And they value the furthering of their own ideology above the ideals I outlined above. If you arent with them, you're against them. They believe in the paradox of intolerance, that we cannot tolerate intolerance, and that if your views happen to go against them, you should basically be censored. And this mentality makes all of the difference. 

I mean, here's how the secular free thought, free speech version of reddit approached right wingers. "You're free to have your views, just keep them out of our lives." We didn't try to correct for the views of the right. If anything, we realized, being ex christians ourselves in many cases, that trying to censor christians will just rile up their overtuned persecution complexes. So we had a compromise. We won't try to censor and oppress you, but we have to fight your ideas being implemented in government. We played defensively, recognizing the right had a right to whatever views they held, no matter how disgusting they may be, but we had to defend against them implementing them. The idea was simple, if you wanna live YOUR life that way, that's fine, but don't impose that crap on anyone else. And largely it worked.

But 2016 was the year that broke the internet. And it was the year that the left became authoritarian. Again, astroturfing was part of it, the introduction of SJW ideology was part of it, but another part of it I didn't discuss yet is the policies on censorship. I honestly believe that the takeover of reddit by the democratic party left is more complete than it seems. Because around that time, not only did reddit become FLOODED with what seemed like artificial pro clinton content, but also, the mods on the big subs became complicit. And when normal users, like me, started calling out obvious shills and astroturfing, we would get banned from them. Subreddits changed overnight, and between this shock and awe fear mongering and brute forcing a narrative, mods seemed to start becoming complicit in removing content that went against their narratives.

After the 2016 election, when Trump won, the knives REALLY started coming out. That's when we really got into the hardcore rise of wokeness. Everyone was so fearful of OMG HES GONNA TAKE AWAY OUR RIGHTS and stuff that early in trump's first term, around 8 years ago now in early 2017, we started seeing this social justice left morph into something more toxic. Suddenly people were talking about beating up nazis and banning people for daring to express right wing views. Again, it was this paradox of tolerance crap. The idea that we can't tolerate the intolerant or it will lead to the downfall of society. IN a way, I kinda feared the SJW left more than the right at the time. The right, in office, can do damage, yes, but authoritarian is never the way to handle it on the internet. You just can't ban entire viewpoints, and as an ex conservative, I kinda realized that the lines that the social justice left were so extreme that they would functionally ban right wingers from the platform. If you disagreed with them on say, homosexuality, or trans issues, you would be considered a bigot and banned. And then apply that to racism, sexism, etc. Like these guys became a cult where anyone supporting anything remotely similar to "traditional values" was no longer welcome, because the mere idea that a person hold such values is against their rights.

The problem is that we live in a pluralistic country, and literally half the country doesnt see things their way. So basically, on reddit, expressing socially conservative viewpoints became a bannable offense. And over time, the amount of conservatives dropped to levels of being endangered species. The social justice left not only now controls most major subreddits and will ban people for petty reasons like daring to disagree with them (as we see over the elon thing), but they'll also organize to change site TOS to make such behavior bannable on the entire site. And then these people will literally go around and find right wing subreddits with people expressing right wing opinions they disapprove of, and mass reporting them to get them off of the site.

As a result, while conservatives always were minorities, now they're pretty much an endangered species on reddit, and every sub, even non political subs, often become insufferable circlejerks of social justice ideology where anyone who expresses right wing opinions gets banned from the subs in question, possibly the platform, and even if they express them in their own safe spaces, the subs set up bots to auto ban people who post in subreddits that they dont like until someone actually blocks said bots, which most dont know how to do (u/saferbot is one of said bots). 

All of this is done in the name of "inclusivity." Because we can't tolerate the intolerant, as they're an existential threat to our way of life, and because any wrong think on social issues needs to be punished, people of non left wing persuasions end up functionally being unwelcome on reddit. Instead, they inhabit right wing spaces like meta, X, 4chan, etc, where they radicalize and fester. Lefties won't bother going into those spaces to debate. If anything, in the modern era, they'll literally leave those spaces voluntarily, and now we're seeing the reddit SJW power mods trying to ban even linking to such platforms. Again, because we need to create an "inclusive" safe space for people. No wrong think is allowed. We cant tolerate the intolerant, and after a while, everyone is intolerant but us! 

Honestly, I think the real paradox of intolerance is that those who say they're tolerant, aren't. They care only about furthering their side, and banning and punishing anyone who thinks differently. In this case, they're literally made of the same cloth as trump himself.

Tolerance is about TOLERATING. It's not about liking someone's views, or agreeing with them, it's about agreeing to LET THEM EXIST. To TOLERATE them, despite the differences. It's actually a key part of free speech and the whole idea that I might not like what others say, but I defend their right to say it. Which is the stance i officially hold on say, the elon musk situation. Do you honestly think I like elon? HELL NO! But would I try to ban all content from his platform in the name of ending hate and bigotry? Also hell no. This isnt "the resistance" to trump that we need. We need organizing and actually pressuring people in congress to resist trump's tyrannical impulses. We don't need some stupid virtue signal combined with further erosion of our freedom of expression on reddit.

Honestly, this is why reddit being as left wing as it is is such a bad thing. It's because reddit these days allows for nothing else. For all of its talk of diversity, that diversity is limited to agreeing exclusively with the social justice hive mind that exists on there. I legitimately thought, and legitimately hoped that losing the 2024 election would "end wokeness" and on the few subs where genuine political discussion with conservatives exists, this idea comes up a lot. But the problem is, these guys are so dedicated to their cause, and so entrenched into the power structure of reddit, that they'll literally drag reddit down into the abyss before they give up power. They literally have an attitude that they cant be wrong, everyone else is wrong, and if you disagree with them, speak up so they can permaban you from their subreddits. That's literally how this "resistance" to trump's second term is going so far.

 Honestly, trump is a threat to the country, and he is a threat to our freedoms. In a lot of ways, the social justice left is right about trump and his movements. BUT....they are ALSO a threat to our liberties and our freedoms to express ourselves, and creating echo chambers where any opinion but the approved ones are functionally banned from the platform. And that's why reddit being left leaning these days is a bad thing. If it were organic like it was in the old days, fine, but 2016 and trump broke peoples' brains so bad, that now we're just to the point of banning people who we dont agree with. And I agree, debating can be exhausting. I dont debate like I used to either. But that's when you start a blog, like I did. Or you just block individual annoying posters without banning them from an entire platform. Like, what you dont do is ban them from said platform. But again, that's the SJW way, we can't tolerate intolerance, so everyone but us must be banned. And then we wonder why we end up being out of touch when it turns out the majority of the country isnt on the same page as us any more. But hey, they must all just be nazis, right? Over 50% of the country, right? They voted for one, so they must all be complicit, right? I mean, we can't just be doing something wrong or unpopular or something, right?

 Welcome to politics in 2025. Give me the time machine back to 2010 already. 

Oh HELL NAW!

 So, some republican congressman has proposed a resolution to allow Trump to run for a third term. It's highly likely that this will never pass, as it would require a constitutional amendment like most stuff the trump administration is proposing it seems, but still, guys? I gotta say this. This is how it starts. When Russia got Putin in, he ran for 8 years, did his job, and then ran for prime minister while his puppet Dmitri Medvedev ran for president. Then Putin's party amended the constitution, and allowed Putin to run again. Then they crushed all opposition and started rigging the elections there. This is how you break democracy. You start with a functioning democracy, and then you make weird power grabs like this. You dont take away the democracy altogether, but you erode the mechanisms of it to render it inert. Most dictatorships are actually democracies on paper that aren't. The US is already, by my estimation, a very flawed democracy and functionally an oligarchy, we only got 2 parties, they've gamed the system to centralize power in those two parties, and they crush the opposition. But if we let trump do the stuff that he wants to do, we might trend toward a one party state, where Trump and the republicans control everything, elections are a sham, and then Trump is dictator for life, followed by another Trumpian figure (possibly a son?) who picks of the reins and continues the movement. This is scary. 

With all of that said, the democrats gotta use all of their power to push back here. Thankfully we have a robust system of checks and balances where for better or for worse, it would take vast supermajorities to make this a reality, and if democrats hard oppose them, they can beat them. But yeah. This is why I keep saying we gotta resist trump and show him no quarter. Shut down and obstruct as much as possible. You know, just like they do to us when we're in power. We cant let this madman succeed in remaking the country in his image. If he has a legitimately good idea once in a while, eh, maybe think about jumping on board, as I said, I'm not hard opposed to EVERYTHING this guy proposes. But the vast majority of it? Yeah. And anything that will remake the country into something we dont want it to become? Yeah. 

Democrats, do your jobs, shut this crap down. Dont let them gain ANY steam here. This is the do or die moment for America, "the resistance" needs to be resisting. Thankfully a measure like this should be extremely easy to defeat, but yeah. Again, we can't give trump ANY room here. I've said it for a while, this dude wants to be putin. Don't let him be. We contained him last time, we gotta contain him this time.

So let's address this elon thing once and for all

 So, Elon is now responding to the criticism against him with literal nazi jokes, and I figured since this crap isn't going away, it's good to address the controversy more directly. This is gonna be more Q&A style than anything.

Was Musk's gesture a Nazi salute?

Yes, it basically was. Here is the salute posted along side literal Nazis giving the same salute. Corporate needs you to find the difference between the two pictures. They're the same picture. 

Does this mean Musk is a nazi?

While it was possible he was joking or being ironic, he also has come out in support of the AFD, which is basically a nazi or at the very least nazi lite party. He also has ties to apartheid south africa from when that was a thing. 

So yeah, given that the salute is just the topping on the cake and his statements have been controversial for a while, let's just say that if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and gives certain salutes like a duck, that he's a duck. He is at the very least doing a bad cosplay of a duck, which is concerning in and of itself given how touchy that subject is.

NOOOO BUT IT WAS JUST A ROMAN SALUTE!

First of all, you realize nazis used a lot of roman aesthetics in building their "reich" right? Vaush talks excessively about this whenever I watch him, going on long diatribes about how fascists have no actual artistic mind of their own and just coopt the aesthetics of others. They love the roman stuff because it makes them feel strong and powerful.

Second, okay, well....I've heard some people say it's the same kind of salute that Benito Mussolini gave back in the 1930s...um...you realize you're literally not helping your case, right? Mussolini was a fascist, and he was literally aligned with Hitler. So you're literally not helping your case at all.

NOOO BUT HE WAS JUST SAYING MY HEART GOES OUT TO YOU!

Okay, some people are saying that maybe he got a little carried away. Okay. Maybe he did. WHY DID HE DO IT AGAIN? WHY IS HE MAKING JOKES ABOUT IT? WHY DOES HE SUPPORT THE AFD WHO ARE BASICALLY LITERAL NAZIS? Like, eventually you gotta stop indulging this guy's behavior or you start sounding like this. When someone shows them who they are, believe them.

NOOOO HES JUST AUTISTIC AND A LITTLE ECCENTRIC!

So...as an autistic person who has been hearing this BS a lot, I'm just gonna say, STOP ASSOCIATING US WITH THIS GUY! Okay, actual autistic people? Not saying Elon isn't one, I'll get to why he is why he is in a minute, but okay, actual autistic people who aren't billionaires? WE DONT ACT LIKE THAT! Many of us are so scared of being interpreted the wrong way and construed that we try to overcorrect and go out of our way and NOT do that. And if Elon realized what he did and was like "oops, sorry, got a little out of hand with the gesture there, i didn't mean what it looks like", i could be like okay. But let's face it. The dude is from the upper class of apartheid of south africa, ya know, the one that benefitted from its policies. He is playing footsie with the AFD. He's in with the Trump administration, who, as I stated, basically is a fascist lite, even if he's a little boorish and doesnt have the thought out ideology of an actual fascist, but is nevertheless about 75% compliant with the definition and should be treated as such. He's doing the salute. He's joking about the salute. He's a nazi. The dude could grow a short mustache, put on the uniform, do a seig heil and start screaming racist things in german and people would still act like he's not a nazi somehow and that it's all "ironic." No, it's not. This is scary. On day on of the trump administration, they're outing themselves as what they are. BELIEVE THEM. 

Here's the real problem with elon. It's the same problem with trump too. He's a rich ###hole who has never been told no in his life, and doesn't know how to take no. As such, he's never developed the boundaries that a normal person would, including high functioning autistic individuals like himself, and because there is no power structure to ever hold him accountable, because quite frankly, when you're that rich, you ARE the power structure, he just does whatever he feels like.  He has no boundaries. 

So why do you crap on the reddit mods doing their cancel X thing? Aren't you supporting elon by doing that?

No. If anything, and this is what people need to understand, I'm holding yet another petty tyrant accountable here. Here's the thing. The SJW reddit mods who think this stuff up and shove it down our throats, they're made of the same petty tyrannical cloth as these rich people. They get a little power, and then they start tripping and abusing it for their own stupid virtue signalling and vanity projects. 

It's one thing to say, I refuse to use twitter because he's a nazi. it's another thing, to force your little boycott on everyone else, and to ban those who disagree with you (since some mods are explicitly doing that). 

As a liberal, one who believes in freedom of speech, the rule of law, what have you, Elon does have a right to his opinion, as do you. And I don't really like any incursion into free speech in the name of some weird mob mentality or to appease some petty power tripping mod. Quite frankly, i think reddit mods are just as pathetic as elon and trump are. And cut from the same cloth, they might bat for the other side technically, but as we know from WWII, is the answer to nazism really like...communism, or even SJWism? No it's not. Stalin is no better than Hitler. I will oppose any weirdo power trips no matter what side they come from. That's how you actually oppose this stuff and stand up for freedom.

So what should be done about Elon?

Well to some extent, what can we do? Either way, I would support a voluntary exodus from twitter/X. We've seen some people move from X to bluesky since the election in order to accomplish this and stick it to elon, and quite frankly, given elon's poor management of the site, I think it's a good move even without the nazi stuff. For the record, I'm not a fan of twitter. I made an account there in like 2010 but never used it because what's the point? IMO any platform with a 280 character limit or whatever it is isn't one for serious discourse. 

I just dont like weirdo petty reddit tyrants forcing their stupid little virtue signals on us and thinking the answer to this is to try to force everyone to stop using twitter because they have a statement to make. You're free to not use twitter, again, I actually encourage the movement on a voluntary level. I just dont like people forcing it and then power tripping banning anyone who doesn't think their way. Quite frankly those kinds of people are liabilities to the left and make us all look bad. Did these guys get the memo that their "wokeness" is unpopular? Maybe if they shut the heck up, we wouldn't have just elected fascists to public office in the first place (nah, inflation was the real reason, but to be fair, this woke crap ain't popular either). 

Like...that's the thing. To some extent, the trump phenomenon comes as a backlash to wokeness. It actually does. It's that whole "own the libs" thing. The trevor's axiom from south park thing. The whole people hate these idiots on the left so much they're enabling fascists as a way to retaliate thing. And that's why we're losing the culture war. We didn't lose it during the obama years. because the left was sane during the obama years. No one likes this "woke" zeitgeist except for these petty internet powermods who really need to touch grass (yes, I know its january just....go touch snow instead, yes, florida man, that means you too). 

Conclusion

There isn't much of a point to this post, I just wanna point out that yes, Elon Musk is a nazi, and if you actively support him, uh...you might wanna reconsider that. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot we can do about it right now. We just unleashed evil upon this earth for the next 4 years. All we can really do is try to plot a comeback in 2028. Use the power we have to resist the trump administration in the next 2 years, including pulling out all of the stops with obstructionism like they do to us, try to win seats in 2026 to increase our power to resist him, and then in 2028, kick him out of office for good. 

Really. People dont like that answer, but that's all we can do. We can do our virtue signals. Like, for example, my profile pic on my sites is bernie's picture from the inauguration. I was serious. In a world of trumps, be a bernie. I just dont think that these virtue signals should involve censorship, eroding our rights further, or empowering petty tyrant reddit mods looking to power trip. You can oppose trump/musk, and also think this boycott is stupid. It's called nuance, and people should try it some time.