Four Years After the Capitol Riot, QAnon Remains

   

A man holding a Q sign waits in line with others to enter a campaign rally with President Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. (photo: VOA)

It claims Trump is in a secret battle against a deep state engaged in satanic child abuse

Jude Joffe-Block / NPR 30 December 24

 

After a mob of pro-Trump protesters breached the U.S. Capitol through a broken window on Jan. 6, 2021, a lone Capitol Police officer, Eugene Goodman, diverted the group away from the Senate chamber. The pack of protesters then chased Goodman up a staircase.

The man leading the mob was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with an eagle inside of a large red, white, and blue "Q."

Douglas Jensen later told the FBI he read content about the QAnon conspiracy theory online daily. He said he had worn the shirt and put himself at the front because he "wanted Q to get the attention."

Most of the rioters who stormed the Capitol that day were inspired by then-President Donald Trump's calls to be there. But many also cited or were adherents of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory. Over the past four years, the online extremist community has continued to be subtly courted by Trump and some of his most powerful allies.

The theory, which emerged in 2017, claims that Trump is involved in a secret battle against evil members of the alleged deep state, or in other tellings, a powerful cabal of government and Hollywood elites engaged in satanic child abuse. Some QAnon claims and themes echo longstanding antisemitic tropes. An anonymous source called Q, who supposedly had access to high level intelligence, posted cryptic clues, known as Q drops, on online message boards.

"The QAnon community believes that by decoding these drops, one can understand not just the moves and countermoves in the secret battle, but also essentially predict the future," said Logan Strain, who began reporting on QAnon six years ago after he noticed the movement was not just "staying in the dark corners of the internet." He co-hosts the QAA podcast under the pseudonym, Travis View.

On Jan. 6, many QAnon followers at the Capitol believed they were participating in what is called "The Storm" in QAnon lore. It is supposed to be an apocalyptic-type reckoning when the evil forces are finally punished.

Instead, more than a thousand people have so far been criminally sentenced for participating in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. More than 1,560 people have been charged with federal crimes.

A changing landscape online

In the aftermath of Jan. 6, a number of social media platforms doubled down on their efforts to ban QAnon content.

By that point, there was a rich online ecosystem of QAnon influencers who had figured out how to monetize spreading QAnon-related content and analysis. In response to the crackdown, influencers moved to less moderated platforms, like Telegram and Rumble.

"The movement didn't go away by any means. It was just essentially moved and splintered into various networks," said Katherine Keneally, the director of threat analysis and prevention for the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which studies extremism.

Some QAnon influencers were even recruited to join Trump's social media platform, Truth Social, by Kash Patel, who's now Trump's pick to lead the FBI. Patel previously served as a board member and advisor for the social media platform.

"We also need everybody on Truth Social because it is the only place where we can actually have a conversation without getting shut down by the clown show that is the censorship operation at Titter [sic] and Fakebook," Patel said in 2022, using disparaging names for Twitter and Facebook during an appearance on the MG Show, which has promoted QAnon.

That same year, billionaire Elon Musk, who's now one of Trump's closest allies, bought Twitter and renamed it X. He allowed banned QAnon accounts to return.

Both Trump and Musk have repeatedly shared QAnon-related content on their respective social media platforms, which seems to be a way to wink at the movement.

"It's incredibly dangerous when we do see high profile figures amplify this language and symbols because it provides adherents this perceived legitimacy to their beliefs and their movement," said Keneally, who pointed out that QAnon has been associated with violence, including the Capitol riot.

Trump's brand of politics expanded the Republican coalition to include constituents who believe in conspiracy theories and hadn't previously been reliable voters, said Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami. That gave Republican politicians a strong reason to court these newly energized voters. "And that involves saying things that are prominent in QAnon, but saying all sorts of other conspiracy theories, too," Uscinski said.

Celebrating Trump's return

QAnon adherents are now celebrating the incoming Trump administration and his cabinet picks.

A 2018 Q drop previously mentioned Patel as "a name to remember." That history, along with Patel's rhetoric about the deep state and previous overtures to QAnon – which include signing copies of one of his children's books with a slogan associated with QAnon (he said he learned the slogan in a movie) and promoting an account called "Q" on Truth Social – have made Trump's pick to lead the FBI popular among QAnon followers.

When asked about Patel's past comments about QAnon and appearances on related podcasts, Trump transition team spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer told NPR, "This is a pathetic attempt at guilt by association."

Strain, the QAA podcast host, said the fantasy among some of Trump's most ardent supporters for retribution for Trump's perceived enemies, "very much echoes a lot of QAnon fantasies about a storm of mass arrests."

Red Pill News, an online show and podcast which shares QAnon content, included in a recent episode a fake alert meant to sound like an official notification from the Emergency Alert System.

"Donald Trump is now your president," a monotone voice reads after a series of tones. "All deep state traitors are to report immediately to Guantanamo Bay detention camp for court martial via televised military tribunal."

It's hard to know how widespread belief in QAnon is today or ever was.

One challenge is that QAnon is hard to define. Various conspiracy theories that had been floating around the fringes of American culture for decades became incorporated into the movement. "Everything has sort of been sucked into QAnon at one point or another," said Adam Enders, an associate professor of political science at the University of Louisville who studies belief in conspiracy theories.

As a result, the movement was like a "choose your own adventure book," said Uscinski.

The nonprofit PRRI, which conducts polls on religion, found that 19% of Americans believe in the core theories associated with QAnon, up from 14% in 2021. The poll found the number rose to 32% among Republicans who support Trump.

Mike Rothschild, the author of "The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy of Everything," said the QAnon movement showed there was a market for "instantaneous conspiracy content creators" who churn out fresh conspiratorial content on social media pegged to the news of the day.

Influencers learned they could "make money by getting shares and replies and responses and retweets to this outlandish stuff that they put out," Rothschild said.

There haven't been new Q drops in years and there appears to be less interest in online content analyzing those drops in the way there once was, said Rothschild.

But ideas QAnon helped popularize, like the idea of a battle against an evil deep state, and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, have become common ideas on the right.

"QAnon as a movement based around secret codes and clues and riddles doesn't so much exist anymore," Rothschild said. "But it doesn't need to exist anymore because its tenets have become such a major part of mainstream conservatism and such a big part of the base of people that reelected Donald Trump."

A retort from reality.

No, we are not merrymaking about a CEO's awful death -- we are expressing our pain

 

We are expressing righteous communal pain and anger about unchecked exploitation

"I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction." — Clarence Darrow

By sepia sirenCommunity 

Daily Kos 

Friday, December 30, 2024 at 9:09:39a MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog 

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Upon hearing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's sudden demise after a man in a hoodie shot and killed the policymaker outside a Hilton in midtown Manhattan, the internet erupted in a peculiar cocktail of dark glee and grim satisfaction.

For a man whose company spent years perfecting the art of telling people "no" when they needed "yes," the irony was thick enough to chew—and chew many did.

The killing of Thompson, whose annual compensation package exceeded $10 million, drew instant, sardonic comments from some social media users.

“Thoughts and sympathy today to all of those who have lost loved ones, because they were denied insurance claims by #UnitedHealthcare,” wrote one such user.

Another posted a mock logo for the company featuring crosshairs, along with the question, “Do you think I’d get sued if I made this as a shirt.”

Yet another wrote, “It’s hard to find sympathy for a CEO of one of the worst health care companies in the world…They eat off your family members [sic] grave.”

It wasn’t all random comments from otherwise anonymous individuals, either.

Anthony Zenkus, a senior lecturer in social work at Columbia University, wrote on X, “Today we mourn the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down…wait, I’m sorry— today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

As of Thursday evening, Zenkus’s post had been liked 84,000 times and retweeted 11,000 times.

Those kinds of sentiments spurred a counter-reaction.

Billy Binion, a reporter for libertarian publication Reason, wrote on X that it was “vile” that people seemed to be “gleefully celebrating a dad of two getting shot to death.”

Robert Pondiscio of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote on the same site that the online response to Thompson’s killing “marks a new and ominous low for social media.” — KRON San Franciso

Now, I’m no fan of violence, and murder is neither a just solution nor a moral stance. But as I scrolled through the reactions, I couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling: not sympathy for the man but discomfort at how little I could muster.

And then it hit me—this wasn’t schadenfreude over a life lost. It was something more profound: the collective catharsis of those crushed under the grinding gears of profit-driven cruelty.

Thompson wasn’t simply a man—he was a symbol of an oppressive system that denies life-saving treatments to sick children while celebrating cost-cutting measures with champagne and investor applause. He stood for the modern corporate ethos that monetizes misery and reaps dividends from people’s despair.

CEOs and The Wealthy have killed us off for years

—All for profit, and no one is safe, not even children.

And it’s not just healthcare. Consider Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing legislation to shuffle children as young as 14 into meatpacking plants—a Dickensian nightmare repackaged as “opportunity.”

Supporters of the new law say it gets rid of a tedious requirement, streamlines the hiring process, and allows parents — rather than the government — to make decisions about their children.

But opponents say the work certificates protected vulnerable youth from exploitation.

"It was wild to listen to adults argue in favor of eliminating a one-page form that helps the Department of Labor ensure young workers aren't being exploited," the group Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families wrote about the law in a legislative session recap. — NPR

If this is what Republicans mean by "protecting children and family values," they can stuff it! Seriously, the so-called "good old days" of unchecked child labor gave us kids as young as six years old who wound up maimed, mangled, or dead.

Is that the nostalgia they’re selling—childhoods spent dodging factory gears instead of playing hopscotch?

“Unguarded machinery was a major problem for children working in factories.

One hospital reported that every year it treated nearly a thousand people for wounds and mutilations caused by machines in factories. Michael Ward, a doctor working in Manchester told a parliamentary committee in 1819:

"When I was a surgeon in the infirmary, accidents were very often admitted to the infirmary, through the children's hands and arms having being caught in the machinery; in many instances the muscles, and the skin is stripped down to the bone, and in some instances a finger or two might be lost.

Last summer I visited Lever Street School. The number of children at that time in the school, who were employed in factories, was 106. The number of children who had received injuries from the machinery amounted to very nearly one half. There were forty-seven injured in this way." - Spartacus Educational

The Healthcare Monster is but a symptom—

Men like Thompson don’t merely profit from suffering; they revel in it. They’re the modern-day Marie Antoinettes, offering non-existent cake to the hungry and quietly counting the coins from picked pockets—look at Elon Musk, for instance.

As he and Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy go over their plan to dismantle much-needed safety nets via their made-up play toy government agency DOGE, Musk jokes that taking money and assistance from the poor will be “tedious” and “unglamorous” cost-cutting work. The cherry on top? “Compensation is zero.”

“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” he wrote. “What a great deal!”

Check out the infuriating article here — Elon Musk’s DOGE Seeks “High-IQ Revolutionaries” Willing to Work 80 Hours a Week for Free | Vanity Fair

Is it any wonder people have asked why the bullet found Thompson and not Musk?

Not that I condone such sentiments—violence begets chaos, and chaos leaves all but the richest worse off. But the sentiment speaks to a deep, festering wound in our collective soul.

The tragedy isn’t just Thompson’s death. It’s the billion-dollar system he represented, one that profits by denying chemo drugs to little girls and tells grieving families their premiums, “don’t cover this.”

As Rick Wilson aptly stated, “Health insurance companies do not make their money by providing care; they make their money by denying it.” And that’s the crux of it: a world where suffering is engineered for profit.

That’s what is vile, Billy Binion.

And there it is

—the American Dream distilled into a cold, heartless business model where the less you help, the more you earn. It's capitalism’s version of “opposite day,” but with life-and-death stakes.

This isn't just a broken system; it's a masterpiece of sociopathic efficiency.

Think about it: there are countless ways to get rich while ensuring people have food, shelter, and basic dignity. But no—someone had to sit down and say, “What if we make wealth-building fun by making misery mandatory?” It’s like playing Monopoly, except the board is on fire, and the only pieces left are a noose and a foreclosure notice.

We’ve lived too long under this abusive paradigm, told to sacrifice, to tighten our belts, to "work harder" while the ultra-rich build empires on our exhaustion. Worse, we’ve been turned against each other, squabbling over crumbs while CEOs pop champagne with the blood, sweat, and tears we’ve unwittingly donated to their bottom line.

It’s the same twisted logic behind child labor laws being rolled back: why let kids have carefree childhoods when they could be mangled in meatpacking plants? Why let adults rest when they could work 80-hour weeks for zero pay to satisfy Elon Musk’s whims? Why let anyone live when so much money can be made from their suffering?

Thompson’s death doesn’t solve this vexing, eternal problem. But the shot outside the Hilton may finally echo where it needs to: in the halls of power, in boardrooms of marble and glass, where men like him make decisions that shape our lives.

The question now is whether that echo will spur change—or whether some will continue eating cake until there’s no one left to serve it.

 

Superstition: RFK Jr.

Ambition: Elon Musk

Ignorance: Donald Trump and MAGAs everywhere

BEST OF DAILY KOS 2024: Trump voters f-cked around—now they're about to find out

Donald (Visor Head)Trump (mouth intentionally covered and therefore muted)

For those unfamiliar, the “leopards ate my face” meme refers to people who suffer the consequences of political parties or policies they supported electorally. It stems from this classic tweet: 

The leopards will soon feast, and most victims will be Trump's MAGA supporters

 

By Kos 

Daily Kos Staff 

Monday, November 18, 2024 at 5:30:08p MST

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog

Quite simply, it is schadenfreude, and thanks to Donald Trump’s voters, we will be swimming in it over the coming four years. 

No modern-era president did more for organized labor than Joe Biden. Among other things, he was the first president to walk a picket line, bailed out the pension for 600,000 Teamsters at a taxpayer’s cost of $36 billion, helped radicalize billionaire Elon Musk by excluding him from an electrical-vehicle summit at the apparent behest of the United Auto Workers union, increased funding for the National Labor Relations Board, and stocked that board with labor advocates. 

In return, the Teamsters refused to endorse a presidential candidate, and the union’s president, Sean O’Brien, spoke at the Republican National Convention, and 45% of labor households voted for Trump, compared with 40% in 2020, according to exit polls.

Meanwhile, Trump said this to Elon Musk: “I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you say, ‘You want to quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike, and you say, ‘That’s okay, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone.’” And Project 2025 is an anti-union corporatist’s wet dream. 

In other words, the leopards will soon feast. 

One of the election’s most bizarre developments was that many Muslim Americans abandoned the Democratic ticket for both Trump and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, largely due to the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas. In fact, Arab-majority Dearborn, Michigan, went from a 69% Biden majority in 2020 to giving Vice President Kamala Harris just 36% of its vote this November. Trump got 42%, and Stein got 18%. Boy, did they send a message for peace! 

In fact, the leopards are already dining out on this one. Reuters reported this on Saturday:

U.S. Muslim leaders who supported Republican Donald Trump to protest against the Biden administration's support for Israel's war on Gaza and attacks on Lebanon have been deeply disappointed by his cabinet picks, they tell Reuters.

"Trump won because of us and we're not happy with his secretary of state pick and others," said Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump.

These people are so devoid of common sense that they’re begging Biden to help them before Trump takes office. Yet the reason Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s far-right prime minister, ignored Biden’s peace efforts all year was precisely because he bet that Trump would be reelected, giving him an even friendlier U.S. government to let him do whatever he wanted. And these Arab voters played right into this transparent scheme. 

Rural America has been the bedrock of MAGA support. This year, 64% of rural voters went for Trump, and just 32% for Harris. And the nonprofit news outlet Investigate Midwest finds that Trump won over 77% of the popular vote, on average, in the nation’s most farming-dependent counties. So you know the leopards are hungrily circling that crowd. 

NPR writes about alarm in the farm industry over both Trump’s proposed tariffs and his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A former head of Missouri’s Farm Bureau called the Trump-Kennedy pairing an “unholy alliance.” 

On the tariffs, NPR writes:

A study released last month by the National Corn Growers Association found a tariff-driven trade war with China could cost U.S. soybean and corn farmers as much as $7.3 billion in annual production value.

"This burden is not limited to the U.S. soybean and corn farmers who lose market share and production value," the study's authors predicted. "There is a ripple impact across the U.S., particularly in rural economies where farmers live, purchase inputs, utilize farm and personal services, and purchase household goods."

Democrats need to oppose the inevitable taxpayer-funded efforts to bail out farmers affected by Trump’s economic policies. Remember, farming counties heavily backed Trump on average. If they want to start voting out their elected Republican officials, we can revisit.  But there’s no reason for Democrats to repeatedly mitigate the consequences of those voters’ poor electoral choices. 

And speaking of poor choices, what about the immigrants who supported and/or voted for Trump? The leopards just can’t believe their luck. Examples abound, like this immigrant family who thinks Trump won’t go after their undocumented relatives because they aren’t “criminals,” or this undocumented Guatemalan migrant who thinks he’s safe because “Trump wants to deport those who do bad things. … I haven’t broken any laws.” 

And it’s not just Latinos. Arabs will be heavily targeted, as well as Trump-loving Filipinos. 

How about all those women who voted for abortion-rights amendments while voting for Republicans who oppose those very same rights? Harris got 43% of the vote in Florida, yet the state’s abortion-rights ballot initiative got 57% of the vote (it needed 60% to pass). In Arizona, an abortion-rights ballot initiative got nearly 62% of the vote, while Harris got just under 47%. That’s a lot of people who support a right that Republicans have vowed to eliminate. You know that won’t end well. 

And get ready for new headlines like this one from February 2017: “She voted for Trump. Now she fears losing the Obamacare plan that saved her life.” After all, shortly before the election, House Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged that Republicans plan to kill the Affordable Care Act.

Amazingly, eliminating ACA subsidies and other such programs helping out low-income Americans will most affect Republican voters. Of the 30 states with the lowest household income, Trump won 28 of them, according to data compiled on Wikipedia. Of the 20 states with the highest income, Trump won three. 

From Social Security cuts to curbs on press freedoms, and from higher grocery prices to raw-milk illnesses, and to say nothing of the return of measles, polio, whooping cough, and other once-eradicated diseases—these next four years will be awful. And those bearing the brunt of the awfulness will be disproportionately Trump voters. 

And the rest of us? For now, all we can do is look on and ask every time a leopard takes a bite, “Is this what you voted for?” 

Some people are too far gone and will say “Yes!” and blame Democrats for their sad lot in life. Good for them. Trump will always have his 20-30% deplorable base. But the rest of them? We can remind them there is a political alternative, both in 2026 and 2028. (Hint: Calling them stupid and racist won’t do the job.)

There are no capital-D Democratic guardrails to mitigate the effects of Trumpism. The best we can do is see this as an opportunity for people to see what it really looks like, and plan for better days ahead.

One of the sterling Americans Trump is placing in a position of power over you and me.  Her dog was a bad boy and now rests unceremoniously in a South Dakota landfill.

Democrats will lean on this tactic to take on Trump during his second term

President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have reportedly been planning how to use the courts to combat Donald Trump's second term since Biden took office

Pres. Biden recently surpassed Trump in judicial appointments​​ during his presidency

By Morgan Stephens 

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday, December 26, 2024 at 1:00:03p MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Democrats are sharing their secret weapon to combat President-elect Donald Trump’s second term: the courts.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently spoke with POLITICO Playbook, during which he signaled that, heading into Trump’s second term with little to no power, Democrats plan to go through the courts to fight back.

“I don’t know exactly what [Trump will] do. But I can tell you this: The judiciary will be one of our strongest—if not our strongest—barrier[s] against what he does,” Schumer said. 

It’s a strategic shift that reflects the limitations and opportunities Democrats face as they try to safeguard constitutional rights and hold Trump’s second administration accountable. Schumer acknowledged that the courts—specifically federal courts, which President Joe Biden worked to reshape—are poised to be a key battleground in the next phase for both the Democratic Party and the American people. 

Democrats’ national strategy comes as attorneys general across the country prepare to use the courts in their states, threatening lawsuits as a shield if and when Trump breaks the law—similar to what they did during his first administration. 

But Democrats aren’t the only ones who have used the courts to their advantage. One of Trump’s legacies from his first administration is the appointment of three young conservative Supreme Court justices who will be able to stay on the bench for a long time. ​​

“We like people in their thirties, so they’re there for 50 years or 40 years,” Trump said at a rally for the National Rifle Association in May. 

In response, Biden appointed a significant number of young and Black judges to federal benches, and he recently surpassed Trump in the number of appointments​​ during his presidency. This was no accident; it was a plan he and Schumer reportedly made four years ago at the start of his term.

Biden greets Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who he nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022

“When we started out, we knew it would be a very difficult job to do more than Trump had done,” Schumer said. “But we did: We got 235—more than a quarter of the federal judiciary was appointed by our Senate and by the president.”

Biden flexed this muscle on Monday when he vetoed the JUDGES Act, which would have given Trump the ability to appoint two dozen judges. 

And who did they get the idea from? 

“The GOP,” Schumer said, citing how Republicans came up with “a strategy in the George W. Bush [years]. ‘We’ve got to control the bench,’ and they made every effort to do it. When I became majority leader, I said, ‘This is something we have to work on.’”

While using the courts to thwart Trump might seem like a defensive move rather than offensive, it’s also part of the long game. Schumer and Biden are banking on these judicial appointments outlasting any individual administration, serving as legal armor against Trump's existential threat to democracy.

Joltin' Joe Biden: Fighting back.

Pres. Musk Inaugurating New Era of Billionaire Rule

   

Elon Musk in Washinton, DC, on December 5, 2024. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty)

Shades of Russian Oligarchs: Massive Yachts Sure to Follow

Ben Burgis / Jacobin  

24 December 24

 

The world’s richest man, just used his political influence to shut down a bipartisan deal to keep the government open. It’s obscene — but it’s just one example of the ways billionaires dominate American democracy.

During the first Republican debate in 2015, Donald Trump positioned himself as a bold truth-teller, almost a whistleblower, about the corrupt influence he’d exercised on politicians as a wealthy donor. The moderators asked why he’d given money to Democrats in the past, and he replied:

I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

As Andrew Prokop dryly noted at the time, it was an unusual pitch. “Reformers usually present themselves as blameless.” Trump, instead, almost sounded like he was bragging. He presented himself as someone who’d played the system himself, knew it inside and out, and could thus be clear-eyed about what needed to be fixed.

Nine years later, Trump is preparing to start his second term as president. And one of his closest associates (and by far his most important political donor), billionaire Elon Musk, just used his wealth to influence the political process in a far more flagrant way than anything Trump was talking about on that debate stage in 2015.

Musk bought the social media platform then known as Twitter (now X) for $44 billion dollars in 2022. There’s every reason to suspect that he’s manipulated the site’s algorithm to boost his own posts. However that may be, he’s Twitter/X’s most popular user, with 207.9 million followers. Even the president-elect only has 96.2 million. 

Starting in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he used that megaphone to post 150 times about his opposition to a bipartisan spending deal intended to stop the government from shutting down just before Christmas.

During the election, Musk spent well over $200 million on two pro-Trump PACs, making him by far the highest-spending donor on either side of the race. 

He was rewarded with such a prominent place by Trump’s side that a casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that Musk rather than J. D. Vance was Trump’s running mate. 

The combination of the close association he bought with the president-elect and his prominence on the social media platform he had purchased would be enough, all on its own, for Musk’s noisy opposition to the spending deal to turn the heads of many Republican lawmakers. Not content with this level of influence, though, Musk used his day of rage-posting to publicly threaten that he would personally finance a primary challenge against any Republican congressman who voted for the deal.

When Money Talks

That’s not a threat any Republican with an instinct for political preservation would take lightly. Musk is the world’s richest man, with a reported net worth of $455 billion. To put that into perspective, it’s more than sixty-nine times Trump’s own estimated worth of $6.61 billion. Musk could finance a lot of primary challenges before he would feel his wallet getting lighter.

The combination of this threat, and a desire to be seen as siding with a figure who has bought himself prestige with Trump’s base, was enough to kill a spending deal that the Speaker of the House, Republican Mike Johnson, had spent months negotiating with Democrats. Even though a shutdown has been averted, this was a remarkably blatant way for a billionaire to flex his political muscles, and it should deeply bother anyone who takes democracy seriously.

Allowing billionaires to exist in the first place is absurd. A million and a billion are both amounts of money that greatly exceed what most of us can ever hope to have in our bank accounts, so it’s easy to forget the enormity of the difference. But to put this into perspective, if we imagine a long-lived being (perhaps a vampire) who came to the western hemisphere with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and somehow managed to earn and save the equivalent of a thousand contemporary US dollars every day since he arrived, the vampire would have $1 million by sometime in 1495. He wouldn’t even be a fifth of the way to $1 billion dollars in 2024.

It’s hard to stretch your mind to even imagine how much money $455 billion is. As a matter of distributive justice, letting one man have that much while others struggle to make rent or afford groceries is an abomination. But when we combine that kind of wealth with letting billionaires buy political influence, the consequences for anything resembling meaningful democracy are grim.

A Bipartisan Plutocracy

The problem, however, goes much deeper than Musk himself. The ultrapublic nature of his intervention in the political process made the reality of billionaire rule blindingly obvious, but most of the ways billionaires spend some of their wealth on securing political outcomes are less like that than they are like the process Trump was describing in 2015 — whereby he’d establish relationships with politicians of both parties, and both sides of that relationship would do each other favors. Or like the way Jeff Bezos can influence the political discourse through his ownership of the Washington Post. Or the way anyone rich enough to own businesses that employ lots of people and generate lots of tax revenue can make politicians sweat bullets by threatening to move their operations to a different jurisdiction or overseas.

At this moment, as Musk is rubbing the political power conferred by his wealth in all of our faces, many Democrats may be tempted to make populist hay out of this. That’s a good instinct in the abstract: the talking points write themselves. But Democrats’ own credibility on the issue of billionaire influence is in the gutter. 

As of the end of October, Forbes estimated that eighty-three billionaires were backing the candidacy of Kamala Harris, compared to only fifty-two for Trump. Of course, given that one of those fifty-two was the man in the world with the most billions, and that he gave more lavishly than any of Kamala’s eighty-three, Trump was still in the better position. But there’s only so much populism you can pull off while cashing checks from eighty-three billionaires.

Of course, many plutocrats prefer to hedge their bets and spread their influence far and wide. They would say what Trump said in 2015. “I give to everyone. When they call, I give!” As long as politicians of both parties keep making phone calls to the ultrarich, rule-by-billionaire in the United States will continue.

When he comes out with own Bible for sale, we'll know the end is nigh.

Why Is Musk-Trump the "Mump Regime"? Ask the Mumpers and the Mumpets.

    

Donald Trump hugs Elon Musk at a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show on October 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

 When the two men's ideas clash, as over China in the recent shutdown dispute, Musk gets his way.

Timothy Snyder / Thinking About 24 December 24

 

ALSO SEE: Timothy Snyder: Thinking About (Substack)

For a new world we need new words.

Facing the coming Musk-Trump regime, we will have to be creative. It will not be enough just to rely on the standard terms that come to easily to our lips and pens ("administration," "presidency", and the like). That normalizes the abnormal.

And to repeat unreflectively the words that Musk and Trump and other mumpers use is to take part in the transformation that they bring. Opposition requires clarity and clarity requires concepts. "Mump regime" is one I propose.

Musk+Trump, keeps the two men who currently matter the most, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, in the proper order.

Musk matters more than Trump. He is the one with the money, the one to whom Trump owes debts. Musk also has a much more lively sense of his own interests and more energy generally. When the two men's ideas clash, as over China in the recent shutdown dispute, Musk gets his way.

"Mump regime" also keeps front and center the basic issue of illness. Democracy is closely connected to health. The historic path to modern political peace and the rule of law led through two stages: vaccines and institutions of public health. Americans have never broken through to a universal health insurance system, and the associated disease, death, fear and poverty is a central problem for our democracy. Now the mumpers and the mumpets are threatening to take away vaccination, which could kill millions of people. One of the diseases it would bring back is, precisely, mumps. Some of the others are far worse.

"Mump regime" is also better, at this point, than "MAGA." That term was always Trump's propaganda, and Trump simply does not matter as he once did. So “MAGA” is not only misleading but obsolete.

MAGA stands for "Make America Great Again." "Make" -- no one is going to make anything. "America" -- the people in charge are largely from elsewhere, and America is no mumper's object of concern. "Great" -- small and fractures is more likely. "Again" -- this level of oligarchy is new, as is the fascist language. We have moved on from a politics of eternity, an obsession with an imaginary past, to a politics of catastrophe.

"Mump regime," on the contrary, helps us to confront a real future. We are heading for a situation in which the fracturing of the government is deliberate and the weakness of the society desired. Some people talk of being the change they want to see in the world; the mumpers are the catastrophe their ideology tells them is inevitable.

And "Mump regime" prepares us mentally for the very real possibility that this form of politics can go on without Trump.

Musk himself is obviously completely unconcerned by the results of elections; it means nothing to him that people voted for Trump. Indeed, the fact that he was able to use a meaninglessly small portion of his wealth to get Trump in office can only breed contempt of both the man and his electorate.

Musk’s current public humiliation of Trump may very well be part of a plan. Make the man look weak; and then make him look crazy; and then invoke Article 25 of the Constitution and put him to bed. I am not saying that I am sure that this will happen: but rather that it is the kind of thing that would be normal in a Mump regime but would be all but unthinkable in a "presidency" or an "administration."

Trump is a fake rich person, and Musk is the richest person on earth (except, possibly, Putin). Trump is crazy like an improv comedian, but Musk is crazy like a guy with satellites. Musk surely understands, even if Trump does not, that the welter of policies we will see in the first six months of the Mump regime will be contradictory and chaotic.

Where does popular sentiment go when tariffs increase prices, as they must? When Canada and Mexico enforce countermeasures which push prices still higher? And when government spending on deportations (which would, at least as planned, cost about a trillion dollars) also brings inflation?

And that is just one example. Will Americans actually like a defense department and an FBI designed for domestic conflict? If all of this goes crazily wrong, Trump will be to blame. It is at least worth considering the possibility that Musk foresees all this.

At the moment, left-wing commentators laugh that J.D. Vance has disappeared from public view, displaced by Musk. Thinking of a Mump regime helps us to see Vance's absence differently. There cannot be MAGA without Trump, but there can be Mump without Trump. 

For Musk and for kindred oligarchs, Vance is a more natural ally than Trump. He speaks their language and seems to believe the libertarian-fascist amalgam according to which government itself is doomed and therefor a strong man must rule. Vance was chosen by the oligarchs to be vice-president.

In the two scenarios above -- Musk drives Trump visibly crazy; six months of chaos is blamed on Trump-- Vance would be the successor. Staying in the background for now thus makes perfect sense for Vance. A quiet Vance does not look crazy, and is not tainted by Trump's six months of chaos. He is available when Musk is ready to move on from Trump.

As Musk once tweeted, "we will coup whoever we want." Whoever we want.

We also need a term like "the Mump regime" to classify Republicans. It offers a vocabulary that helps us to sort people out according to their involvement in and fealty towards Musk. The people who are active in the Mump regime are mumpers. The people who go along are mumpets.

But not all Republicans are mumpers, only a select few -- and, indeed, Musk and Trump and Vance lack a traditional Republican background. The mumpers are a select group, like a politburo: a few people, who can be brought in and pushed out. Those beyond the small circle of mumpers who support the Mump regime are mumpets, a much broader group.

Plenty of Republicans follow Musk. But these are not the same people, exactly, who would follow Trump. And as we have seen from recent votes on the shutdown, there are Republican elected officials who are not mumpets. Not all Republicans actually want to see Congress rendered obsolete by one-man rule and the United States cease to exist as a republic.

With terms like "Mump regime," "mumpers," and "mumpets" we can parse the present reality and prepare for the future much better than we can with "presidential administration," "Republicans," or "MAGA."

"Mump regime" also gives us adjectives, like "mumpy," "mumpier," or "mumpified." Beyond domestic politics, it can help us towards understanding (topic for another post) the United States as "the sick man of the world" in foreign policy, as we will likely be.

Musk is right that he is bringing something new; what he is not bringing is a tyranny so great that we cannot think for ourselves and name things for ourselves. Indeed, holding tyranny back begins with just that.

Trump is crazy like an improv comedian, but Musk is crazy like a guy with satellites.

Merry Christmas from the new Musk/Trump regime

Donald Trump speaks at AmericaFest, Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024, in Phoenix.

VP Trump kicks off Christmas week with a bonkers speech to his cult

By Emily Singer 

Daily Kos Staff 

Monday, December 23, 2024 at 10:30:12a MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Donald Trump gave a speech to a bunch of right-wing Turning Point USA freaks on Sunday, in which he threatened to take control of the Panama Canal, spewed dangerous anti-vaccine garbage, said he would once again name military bases after Confederate traitors, and seemed annoyed at the “co-president” chatter about Elon Musk.

The speech in Phoenix was the headline of Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2024, which celebrated Trump’s victory and the coming Christian holidays with speeches from accused statutory rapist Matt Gaetz, Russian puppets Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson; and convicted felon Roger Stone, among others.

Trump rehashed the greatest hits of his campaign rallies, including the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the lie that undocumented immigrants are escaping mental institutions to come to the United States. It wouldn’t be a Trump speech to his echo chamber if he didn’t denigrate windmills.

He also made some new bizarre and incendiary comments.

For one, Trump threatened to take back the Panama Canal from Panama.

“We’re being ripped off at the Panama Canal like we’re being ripped off everywhere else. He just said ‘take it back,’ that’s a good idea,” Trump said, referring to a shouted suggestion from a random audience member.

Trump continued: “It was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions — you’ve got to treat us fairly. And they haven’t treated us fairly. If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America in full, quickly, and without question. I’m not going to stand for it. So to the officials of Panama, please be guided accordingly.”

Panama's president already responded to Trump’s comment.

“As president, I want to clearly state that every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjoining zone is Panama’s and will remain so,” Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said on Sunday, according to Politico. “The sovereignty and independence of our country is non-negotiable.”

This is the third country Trump has threatened with annexation since November’s election, along with Canada and now Greenland—which Trump wanted to buy during his first term in office, an idea which Greenland’s prime minister has rejected.

It’s as if Trump is seemingly taking a page from his favorite dictator hero Vladimir Putin, who Trump said he will likely meet with “as soon as possible” after he’s inaugurated.

But back to AmericaFest. After threatening sovereign nations, Trump went on to spew anti-vaccine garbage, falsely accusing vaccines of leading to increased autism diagnoses—when it’s actually advancements in autism understanding, treatment, and acceptance that has led to more diagnoses.

"Look, something is going on here. When you look at, like, autism from 25 years and you look at it now, something is going on, and I nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Trump said, referencing the anti-vaccine lunatic who has vowed to go after life-saving vaccines and bring back deadly viruses.

Trump also suggested that the growing narrative that right-wing billionaire Musk is running the show is clearly getting under Trump’s skin. Musk nearly led the country into a government shutdown last week, after tanking a bipartisan funding agreement over a misunderstanding of what was in the bill.

"No, he's not gonna be president, that I can tell you,” Trump said of Musk. “And I'm safe—you know why? He can't be, he wasn't born in this country. Haha."

Lastly, Trump said he wants to rename Alaska’s Denali to Mt. McKinley, after former President William McKinley, whose disastrous tariff policies Trump wants to bring back. Former President Barack Obama in 2015 officially named the mountain Denali, the name Native Alaskans had used for years before it was renamed Mt. McKinley in 1917.

"They took his name off Mount McKinley," Trump lamented.

"He was a great president," Trump added, saying he will "bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it."

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski did not respond kindly to Trump’s idea.

In a post on X, Murkowski wrote: “There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali - the Great One.”

Trump may wear the crown, but we all know who is calling the shots - President Elon Musk.  With the Muskrat shooting for Mars, Trump aiming for lowly Panama just doesn't cut it.