There will be a lot of finger pointing in the coming days. Our sense of betrayal is fierce and deep. The Corporate Media, the SCOTUS, Merrick Garland, Dem leadership, social media, techbros, incels, pollsters, apathetic voters, neo-liberalism, and many more I am too tired to name. We will never again look at co-workers, friends, family, and even strangers in the street the same way. Did you do this? Are you one of them?
The truth is the rot has been going on for decades. The oligarchs have been buying this country, our institutions and our politicians on the installment plan since the late 70s. The final payment was yesterday.
The billionaire class had too much riding on this election. A Trump loss would have meant that the senators, congressmen, judges and supreme court justices they had slowly corrupted over the years, and had bought body and soul, would face arrest and trial for their crimes. Those same people would have rolled over and implicated the billionaires, people like Musk, Thiel, et al, who would have not only lost lucrative government contracts and multi-billion dollar monopolies, but would have been looking at being arrested, tried, and possibly convicted for their criminal collusion with this countries enemies, and their subornation of our public officers. This could NOT be allowed to happen, so they invoked denari uber alles.
Over the last 60 years the 0.1% have accumulated wealth, bought into newspapers, TV stations, TV networks, cable networks, radio stations, software companies, and ultimately into social media companies with the ability to reach billions of people. They bought religions, universities, hospitals, medical practices, pharmacy chains, funeral homes, and bought up massive swaths of housing (single and multi-family). They bought regulators, PR companies, scientists, lawyers, and created astroturf organizations populated with these corrupted people. They lowered their own taxes, demonized the government, stripped away rights, and regulations, and manipulated their various industries to make life miserable for the bottom 90% of the our society, while using their media holdings to pit the rest of us against each other.
And of course, they lied the whole time.
The lies slowly became bigger, and more brazen. But they had the media muscle to sell the lies, or at least “normalize” them. They chipped away at the guardrails, worked the refs, beat the people down, and turned them on each other with scapegoats.
This country was founded on a very flawed concept: That slave owners should be free. That cancer was treated, but never completely excised. For over a century after the Civil War’s attempt to stamp out the hatred and avarice that fueled slavery, it persisted in the form of slavery light, Jim Crow laws and other state sanctioned oppressions. As the Civil Rights era dawned, the old tactics started to fail, so they gave ground, but found new scapegoats and new allies they could buy/bribe/corrupt. Then they systematically eroded rights, laws, norms, and morality. They also distracted the people with spectacles. while carefully, gradually, inuring them to the loss of civility, empathy, and morality. They re-branded compassion, tolerance, equality, education, and fairness as weakness, grievance, and even perversion. They twisted facts into lies, then sold lies openly as facts. They accumulated more and more wealth, and they used that wealth to consolidate their power and influence.
Wash rinse, repeat.
And now, here we are, trapped in the world of 1984, way behind schedule, but with half our nation in love with Big Brother.