Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.
~~Bill Moyers, Moyers on Democracy, 2008
Candidate Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly called out the excesses of billionaires and how their wealth hijacks democracy. Eric Boehlert of the Daily Kos community asks an important question: Why is our media so obsessed with what billionaires think of Elizabeth Warren? Boehlert lists more than a half-dozen such news articles. He then notes:
The never-ending emphasis sends a clear message that the votes and donations of Wall Street bankers and billionaires matter more than other people’s. But they don't. It's reminiscent of the media's 2016 campaign obsession with coal miners, followed close by its obsession with those who have manufacturing jobs, which sent the obvious signal that white working-class male voters were the ones who counted the most.
There’s been recent talk about why, well before the 2016 election, the FBI and CIA didn’t know or act on information that the nasty guy was a Russian asset? Twitter user Benjamin Franklin linked to a Buzzfeed article and asked:
What if the bad guys had already hollowed our defenses by 2016 so they were powerless to stop it? Something like this, except with the alphabet boys. Would that make more sense or less sense of the world?
Maybe the reason why the NYT ran 100 HRC email stories and zero Trump mafia/Epstein stories was because the bad guys were already inside the media industry helping make 2016 happen?
Does that make the world make more sense or less sense?
This Benjamin Franklin looked at social media analytics and saw that the far right is growing now as it did in 2015. And in these tweets “they” is Big Tech.
I believe that they are deliberately allowing this to happen, a belief only furthered by the fact that Zuckerberg accepted Russian oligarch money, that the google guys belonged to Epstein's billionaire society - a gateway to the international crime syndicate.
The amount of revenue they get from allowing this activity is peanuts. The danger of allowing far right content to thrive is proven. And yet these companies seem to bend over backwards to preserve the content leading to radicalization.
When current Attorney General William Barr showed that, in spite of his oath of office, he would do all he could to protect the nasty guy, people began to ask why Barr would be willing to take that hit on his reputation (which isn’t as sterling as people pretend it is). Sarah Kendzior tweeted a reply:
What's in it for Barr? A s---load of money and power, entrenchment in government with his family members who also benefit, resources with which to buffer his cohort from upcoming disasters like climate change, opportunity to fulfill sadistic fantasies for his crime cult, etc
…
Trump's entire life has consisted of breaking the law without repercussions, and Barr's entire life has been helping the GOP engage in corruption without repercussions, and they all got rich and more powerful. This was a logical gamble. Evil and illegal, but logical!
Steve Silberman is the author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. He tweeted a thread in response to Greta Thunberg being named Time’s Person of the Year. A lot of reporting on Thunberg doesn’t include that she’s proudly autistic.
The "autistic" qualities of Greta's war on the status quo - her visceral distrust of rationalizations and vacuous rhetoric - are precisely the qualities all humanity must emulate at a time when global political discourse is dominated by nonsense and gaslighting. As the author of a history of autism, I've said for years that gut-level loathing for unfairness and injustice could practically be added to the diagnostic criteria for autism.
...
In the case of #climatechange the "social deficits" are all on the neurotypical side, on Greta's opponents and critics, who use misogyny, ableism, and ageism against her. They lie for a living, deceiving millions of fellow neurotypicals in the process. The success of climate disinformation campaigns in sowing seeds of doubt about science is proof of a potentially fatal "truth dysfunction" in non-autistic people. Want to know the role of #neurodiversity in our collective future? We may not have one without it. Go, Greta!
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