freelansing in Seattle

Imagine being the richest man on the planet, with more wealth than any other human has ever had before. What would you do with that much wealth? You could single-handedly eradicate world hunger. Or house the homeless across the United States. Or do many other things that would benefit huge numbers of people around the world. What would you do?

Would you use your wealth to install a fascist president who would then give you the power to punish poor people so that you and your richest cohorts could become even richer while the majority becomes poorer? Would you make it your main mission to illegally break into government databases just so you could fire career civil servants and cut funds to poor people so that rich people could pay a little less in taxes? Is that what you would do?

Of course you wouldn’t do that unless you were a sociopath. Most of us are not sociopaths. Unfortunately, “most of us” recently voted to put sociopaths in charge of the US government. So here we are. Witnessing the richest punish the poorest in real time. DOGE stands for Disgusting Oligarchs Grab Everything. Not what most voters thought they were voting for. Nobody voted for Musk, and his lack of an official government position makes him accountable to no one but the president. And he’s mostly operating in secrecy.

Will public opinion turn against this lawless rampage? Perhaps, but as I’ve noted in recent posts, the new regime has begun with destroying mechanisms of transparency and accountability. We can’t oppose actions we don’t know about.

Another factor to consider that I also wrote about recently is that a right-wing media ecosystem of mis- & disinformation now dominates public discourse and effectively manufactures an alternate reality divorced from actual reality. This massive malevolent media misinformation machine is busy manufacturing false narratives of heroic dismantling of an evil deep state instead of the reality of criminals illegally accessing government databases, destroying programs duly constituted by Congress, and withholding payments to various parties that cannot survive without them.

With misinformation replacing real information about what this regime is doing, how do we effectively resist the worst of it? A challenge for our time.

[Image created with Freep!k AI]