The next four years will be a nightmare. On Sundays, I'll be highlighting a few articles and ideas that I've found useful—and that might help us figure out how to get through it all.
"I Just Listened"
If you only read one thing today, I'd suggest you start with Gil Duran's "The Network State Coup is Happening Right Now," which begins:
Elon Musk's attempt to destroy the United States government isn't random chaos. It's the methodical execution of the "network state" blueprint.
Yet even as tech billionaires openly implement their well-documented playbook for dismantling American democracy, no one will dare say the words "network state" – except for Steve Bannon, unfortunately...
... Everything happening now has already been spelled out by the Nerd Reich tech bros manifestos, podcasts, and conferences: the tech CEO takeover of government, the institutional purges, crypto corruption becoming a dominant economic force, the quest for new territory. I didn't guess this stuff – I just listened.
The Network State Coup is Happening Right Now
Elon Musk’s attempt to destroy the United States government isn’t random chaos. It’s the methodical execution of the “network state” blueprint. Yet even as tech billionaires openly implement their well-documented playbook for dismantling American democracy, no one will dare say the words “network state” – except for Steve Bannon, unfortunately. In
Gil Duran
Bannon's Last Stand
As Duran points out, the only place you'll hear about "The Network State Coup" in The New York Times is if you sit through an hour-plus of Ross Douthat yukking it up with ex-convict Steve Bannon.
What the NYT frames as "The Battle for Trump's Ear" is, says Bannon, the battle for the fate of America and all of humanity.
Sounding at times like Biden making his exit speech, Bannon makes clear that MAGA's nationalist and populist agenda is about to be incinerated by Elon Musk and the tech "broligarchs," who are globalist and elitist, not nationalist and populist:
"The oligarchs are not conservative. They’re certainly not on the right. Everything they’re doing — crawling on their bellies, to try to get into and pollute this movement — is because they see the raw political power of this movement. I find it disgusting and revolting."
Describing them as "tech feudalists," Bannon correctly points out that the broligarchs have zero interest in what's best for American workers:
"Andreessen and Musk... are hard-core technofeudalists. They’re not populist.... they’re not with us when it comes to the little guy...
"In technofeudalism, you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit — they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them...
"They don’t give a flying fuck about the human being. And I don’t care if you’re Black, White, Hispanic, Chinese — they don’t care.
He also points out the dangers of their cultish belief in "transhumanism" and how they share a similar, childish sci-fi fetishism:
"They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist.... And that’s why they’re all rushing — whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it — to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life.
You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction 'Dungeons & Dragons' guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every fucking step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that."
Bannon also agrees with me about one thing: the American people are unprepared for what's coming:
"The fundamental questions about... the direction of humankind are... going to play out in the next four or five years. It’s going to be the most intense part of modern political and social history."
And that's why they must be stopped:
They have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world.
Or, as The New York Times put it, there's a battle for Trump's ear.
Elon Now Controls the Purse
As we saw during the campaign, when Elon Musk openly committed crimes to help Trump win the election, the world's richest man now sees himself as too big to jail.
Trump's new Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just gave Elon access to the government's payment system, meaning he can now "unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks."
In a thread on Bluesky, University of Michigan Professor Beth Popp Berman spells out how Elon now has unprecedented power to "coerce" people into doing his bidding:
If you take control of the federal spigot —what was previously apolitical plumbing—you... don’t need to move a whole bureaucracy or deal with lawyers. Elon and his team just turn it off. Law doesn’t play into it at all.
Illegally manipulating funding could allow the Trump Administration to, for example, "fully control how schools teach history."
And it doesn't stop there, says Berman:
"Want to end resistance from blue states who won’t facilitate sending immigrants to Guantanamo? We’re turning off Social Security payments to your residents until your police start to comply with ICE."
The thread concludes with these three posts:
The payment system Elon now controls—without no one, apparently, looking over his shoulder—is not just a checkbook.
It also gives the man who poisoned Southwest Memphis to build "the most powerful data center in the world" access to a new treasure trove of data, including sensitive personal information about American citizens served by a system that dispenses trillions of dollars in government funds every year.
This is not a drill. We are officially on the road to digital totalitarianism. And Steve Bannon is the loudest voice raising the alarm.
Let that sink in.
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P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.
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