Bluesky

His success is on the back of 40+ years of the hollowing out of government by the duopoly of neoliberal politics.

Like a Cordyceps, hijacking the brain of its host and spurring it on to engage in self-destructive activity. And you can reasonably claim that cordyceps is dumb as shit. But you can't argue it isn't getting what it wants.

Without his riches, as you concede, he would not have the juice he needed to make a splash on the political stage.

Right. Although I keep seeing liberals cling to the theory that a Gore Presidency or a Hillary win in '16 (or even '08) or a second Biden term would have somehow averted our modern moment, rather than getting here by other means. What it consistently overlooks is the habit of Democrats in leadership - even when they've got the supermajorities and the friendly courts and the big municipal governments and major businesses in alignment - tidying things up and then sitting on their hands until they can pass power back to the fascists.

FFS, Bush Jr had the entire finance system handed to him on a silver platter in 2008. He passed control over to Obama, who politely helps the biggest plutocrats in the country get their books back in the black, and then hands everything right back to the crooks who bankrupted the system. The '08/'09 handover set the stage for our modern economic moment. Guys like Theil and Musk and Bezos couldn't exist in a world without Mega-Banks hyper-inflating tech sector asset prices. Tech monopolies are what created the social media that elevated Trump's fascist movement. And here we are.

If you want to talk about a politician being a dumb-fuck, you have to wonder at what Barry was thinking when he got in bed with both the Wall Street scorpions (who would immediately stab him in the back in the mid-year cycle) and Silicon Valley (which twisted in the wind for another decade before firmly aligning with MAGA).

The guy thought that annotations on an “explainer” photograph were tattoos despite some of the annotations floating off of the guy’s knuckles.

Trump found some useful propaganda to circulate in order to get people to break his way. By the time he was done, it was the Democrats where trying to explain what an AI generated knuckle-tattoo looks like while Trump was happily cashing the checks Bidencrats signed to unleash his ICE paramilitary across the country.