Deconstructing the new American oligarchy (must-read from Brian Merchant)

[highplainsdem]

This is very long, but well worth reading in its entirety (and it isn't paywalled). The scattered excerpts below are just to give you a sampling.


https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/deconstructing-the-new-american-oligarchy

Deconstructing the new American oligarchy
Musk and Trump are showing us what authoritarian rule looks like when everything's computer.

Brian Merchant
Mar 26, 2025

Two genres of image loom large over the news feeds of the Trump 2.0 era so far: photos of shackled men and women, rounded up for detention and deportation, and pictures of various modes of Tesla protest; vandalized Model 3s and assailed dealerships. They are not unrelated, of course, the latter capturing the spasms of resistance to the cruel authoritarian state documented by the former.

-snip-

On X, where so many of these images rain down—the deportation porn promoted by the site’s owner, the posts featuring charred EVs swimming against the algorithmic currents—Elon Musk attacks judges whose injunctions are slowing the mass deportation effort, retweets broadsides against political opponents, and boosts accounts that come to the defense of Tesla, including but not limited to the new Director of the FBI, Kash Patel. On Monday, Patel affirmed on the platform that the bureau would be investigating property crime against Musk’s electric car company as domestic terrorism, and earned himself an RT from Musk in the process. Patel joins US attorney general Pam Bondi, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, and president Trump himself in circling the executive wagons around Musk’s car company, launching a federal task force to investigate vandalism against Teslas and Tesla dealerships.

-snip-

Perhaps it took Silicon Valley’s penchant for disruption to render the tried and true robber baron model of wielding influence from the sidelines obsolete. Power once acquired through corporate lobbying, the funding of influence groups, or via the occasional Congressionally-vetted cabinet post, is now openly and casually seized. Perhaps it took the wealth, ego, and entitlement of a Silicon Valley CEO to push through this final breach, his claims to futurity paving over audible protests and human rights injustices.

-snip-

The tech culture writer Max Read taxonimized, accurately, I think, the predominant strain of the newly recalibrated conservative movement as the Soy Right; the too-online, perpetually aggrieved faction that presents itself as masculine but is also afraid to take the subway or step foot in a city. Elon Musk, of course, is their avatar. A soy right CEO—a man who displays no compunction at all about destroying tens of thousands of people’s livelihoods, but chokes back tears on Fox News when someone mentions his companies’ declining stock prices.

-snip-

Much more at the link.

[SheltieLover]

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