GOP draws with its favorite color after Supreme Court's blessing
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This radical solution would end America's fiasco
Friends,
Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted last Thursday on the Ellison family’s purchase of the company. Some 1.743 billion shares were cast in favor of the sale; 16.3 million were cast against it, a ratio of roughly 99 to 1.
1. Great for a Handful of Super-Wealthy, but Bad for Workers and Bad for America
This vote came soon after more than 4,000 workers in the media industry — directors, screenwriters, producers, actors, editors, cinematographers, musicians, and composers — signed a letter predicting an industry disaster if the sale went through.
That’s because, as my friend Harold Meyerson from The American Prospect has noted, such deals typically saddle the purchased companies with gigantic debts that buyers incur to make the deal — in the case of Warner Bros. Discovery, $79 billion — and this debt, in turn, requires that buyers slash costs (especially payrolls) to pay off some of it.
More than 70 percent of all the shares in Warner Bros. Discovery are held by institutional investors — including the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street. These institutions voted for the sale because they believe it will make their shares more valuable.
The sale will also make certain individuals a lot of money. David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, stands to collect some $886 million for shepherding it, in addition to his regular pay package (which was $51 million in 2024). Oracle’s Larry Ellison and his son, David, the new owners of Warner Bros. Discovery, are already among the richest people in the world.
But what about the workers in the industry who’ll lose their jobs as a result of the sale? What about all the people whose wages will be slashed? What about Los Angeles, which may lose a sizable portion of its major industry?
And what about the concentration of so much of the news business — so much of what Americans learn about what’s happening — under these two Trump suck-ups?
If Trump’s Justice Department approves the deal (do birds fly?), CBS News and CNN — along with CBS entertainment (home to Stephen Colbert, whose contract is about to run out and who will be taken off the air because of his criticisms of Trump) and Comedy Central (home to Jon Stewart) and HBO (John Oliver) and TikTok (where 1 out of 5 Americans now get their news) — are all about to become one giant mega-media monopoly under the control of Trump allies, the Ellisons.
2. The Moral Bankruptcy of Shareholder Capitalism
At the heart of modern American capitalism is the assumption that a corporation exists for only one purpose: to make its shares more valuable.
That goal trumps (excuse me) all other goals — such as raising workers’ wages, improving workers’ job security, creating more jobs, enhancing the quality of life for the community where a company is headquartered or does business, making life better for the inhabitants of the nation and the world, even protecting democracy.
In fact, if shareholders can make more money by shafting these other “stakeholders” and destroying these other values, that’s thought to be perfectly fine. It’s simply the way “impersonal market forces” work. It’s “efficient.”
Before the 1980s, American capitalism ran on a very different principle: that large corporations had responsibilities to all their stakeholders. “The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups … stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.”
The sentiment may seem quaint or inauthentic today, but in the three decades after World War II, it laid the basis for rapid economic growth and, with strong unions, an equally rapid expansion of the American middle class.
It reflected the sincere views of corporate executives. Many had endured the Great Depression and the war and felt some responsibility for America’s future well-being. These views helped legitimize the role of the large corporation in the public’s mind.
Today, shareholder capitalism has replaced stakeholder capitalism — and most Americans are excluded from its benefits.
Over 92 percent of the value of all the shares of stock owned by Americans is owned by the richest 10 percent. More than half is owned by the richest 1 percent. And even they have turned over their votes to giant institutions like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, which have no concern for the well-being of anyone or anything other than the short-term value of the shares they buy or sell.
We are witnessing the logical ending point of shareholder capitalism.
As the share values of America’s biggest corporations continue to soar — even as (and in many cases, because) they eliminate tens of thousands of jobs — the goal of “maximizing shareholder returns” is revealing itself to be morally bankrupt and economically rotten.
And as Artificial Intelligence takes over a growing amount of the work Americans do, the gap between share values (including the wealth of top investors and executives) and the incomes of most Americans will widen into a chasm.
3. Toward a New Stakeholder Capitalism
But here’s the good news: We don’t have to stick with shareholder capitalism. We don’t have to be victims of “impersonal market forces” over which we supposedly have no control.
We can have control. The market is a human creation. It is based on laws that humans devise. We can make laws that alter market forces to serve the interests of the vast majority instead of mainly the oligarchs at the top.
Over the last four decades, corporate laws have been shaped by wealthy individuals to channel a large portion of the nation’s total income and wealth to themselves.
If America’s super-wealthy continue to have unbridled influence over laws and gain control over the assets at the core of Artificial Intelligence, they will end up with almost all the wealth, all the income, and all the political power. Under such conditions, our economy and society simply cannot endure.
Laws can and should be changed to produce a new version of stakeholder capitalism that shares the wealth more widely.
How? For example, corporations could be required to provide long-term employees with the same number of shares as are held by investors. Profitable corporations could be required to provide their workers a portion (a quarter?) of their profits.
Corporations whose highest-paid executives earn more than 100 times their lowest-paid employees should have to pay a surtax. Corporations over a certain size (worth, say, $1 trillion or more) or having more than a certain share of their markets (say, 25 percent) should be broken up. Unfriendly (hostile) takeovers should be banned (as they were, in effect, before 1980).
The “stepped-up basis” rule that allows the wealthy to pass assets to their heirs without ever paying capital gains taxes on them should be eliminated. Vast accumulations of private wealth (say, in excess of a billion dollars) should, after a certain number of years, automatically be turned over to a fund providing subsistence incomes — a universal basic income.
State corporate laws shouldn’t empower corporations to make any campaign donations (effectively reversing Citizens United).
Sound radical? Maybe it is. But shareholder capitalism doesn’t work — as illustrated by the Warner Bros. Discovery fiasco. Unless radical changes are made, that fiasco is just a taste of what’s to come. If Artificial Intelligence isn’t to destroy capitalism and obliterate democracy, we’re going to have to come up with something that does work, and soon.
Happy May Day, 2026.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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America's national disgrace got shown up on his own stage
So that’s what a normal leader sounds like.
King Charles helped me remember what an actual dignitary and classy leader sounds like. What a refreshing change from the guy who prides himself on being a thug with only the faintest grasp of the English language.
Mind you, I wasn’t a supporter of Charles’ coming to the United States for a state visit. I thought it would disgrace the crown for the King of England to break bread with a fascist, felonious president — an authoritarian who launched a coup after losing an election.
But Charles changed my mind simply with his low-key presence and eloquent style, showing by example how a man of eminence is supposed to behave. The contrast with Trump could not have been more glaring.
As an old guy, I can remember when Charles was still the lowly Prince of Wales — and he was mostly loathed by the public. That was especially true while he was married to Princess Diana. She was beloved, while he was considered dull, boorish, distant, cold, stuffy.
When Charles and Di’s relationship unraveled, the world fully sided with her. No one could figure out why he’d choose Camila Parker Bowles over the ravishing Diana. The public grief was enormous when Diana died in 1997, and it hardened into anger at the royal establishment and Charles personally.
But time healed the gaping wound. Charles spent years focusing on public service. His relationship with Camilla, once so scandalous, gradually became normalized. He grew more comfortable as a public figure – less stiff, sometimes even self-aware and glib.
Once Charles became King, he wasn’t (and isn’t) universally beloved, but he’s broadly accepted in a way once thought impossible. He’s still not terribly charismatic, yet he’s seen as a steadying influence and nothing close to the abomination Trump has proven to be. He’s shown himself to be the new leader of the Free World.
When King Charles III addressed Congress this week, he was a man determined to restore the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States that Trump had seemingly irretrievably broken with his bullheadedness, his rancor, his sheer idiocy.
Charles spoke about alliances as commitments, not as something that could be bought and sold off like a stock. He invoked the name of Ukraine to discuss our obligation to have its back, not pretend to support it until Vladimir Putin crows too loudly.
In short, King Charles came across as the international community’s conscience, the kind of overseer America used to be. He was dignified. He was articulate without being preachy. He was polite. He was quietly magnetic.
And beside him stood Trump, looking and sounding every bit like the oaf he is. He was there physically but in no way spiritually. He delivered his usual bluster, whiny and with a side of stupefied. His rhetoric inflamed without illuminating, as it always does. The man is incapable of genuine elucidation. It was an embarrassment to know this was the best this country can do.
As Charles spoke, I thought back to last weekend and Trump’s speech after the White House Correspondence Dinner and how the president used the occasion of a genuine crisis as a moment to re-pitch his ballroom project, to sell another monstrosity bearing his worthless name.
It was so ludicrous that it’s now become a meme. There is one of schoolchildren cowering beneath a desk as a shooter lurks in the shadows when one of them says, “You know what would’ve prevented this? A ballroom.”
This is a man who values things over people, materialism over empathy, wealth over relationships. If you were to attempt to create a human being with the worst imaginable traits on a 3D printer, Trump is what would pop out.
What Trump really wants, of course, is to completely destroy anything approaching dissent. He would far prefer to have a populace exhibiting phony acquiescence than one demonstrating genuine beliefs. This is why he and his wretched wife Melania want so desperately to quiet Jimmy Kimmel and force ABC to dump him or risk losing its license.
Hopefully, Disney has learned its lesson and won’t make the same mistake it once made. This administration is one that utterly lacks a sense of humor and cannot fully comprehend laughing at itself. This is one of the hallmarks of fascism.
Say what you will about King Charles, but he seems to understand the concept of placing values over all else. Trump does not. This is one of the most reprehensible things about him, though not the most reprehensible. To gauge that, we should hold a contest where everyone gets a vote.
All I know is, one of the key reasons why I don’t want to travel internationally at the moment is that any question tossed at me about living in a nation overseen by our criminal-in-chief would prove entirely too humiliating. I would have no explanation. I’d be worried that customs might stamp my passport with, “Somehow lives willingly in the U.S.”
The truth is that I don’t have a lot of choice at the moment. Oh sure, I could get a visa to spend months at a time in Mexico or Canada, and that’s often tempting. But at the same time, I feel like my leaving would mean Trump won. And I certainly want to be here when he goes so I can dance with frenetic abandon in the country he did his best to ruin.
Do you think about that? About the celebration that will happen once he finally, mercifully is gone? I do.
But to wrap this up, my new thing is now to go through life pretending King Charles is our leader – Charles in charge, if you will. Even just writing that sentence makes me feel better.
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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Shell-shocked Trump finds a new threat
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Trump's arrogant fool may follow a despised predecessor's path — and suffer the same fate
Watching the loathsome Pete Hegseth testify over the last two days in front of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees gave me a slight sense of déjà vu.
I struggled with why, because Hegseth just comes off like such a jerk. And that’s when it hit me. Former President George H.W. Bush once famously referred to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a “jerk.”
Granted, comparisons have been made between Rumsfeld’s arrogance, another word Bush used to describe his son’s Pentagon chief, and Hegseth. But what hasn’t been fully considered is how both approached congressional hearings during failing wars.
I vividly recall Rumsfeld treating his testimony with a prickly, know-it-all crassness. That’s the same way Hegseth came off, over-the-top defensive, slight pun intended.
At the time, Republicans in control of Congress tolerated Rumsfeld’s dismissive attitude. Then came the 2006 midterms, which swung to the Democrats. It’s no coincidence that Rumsfeld resigned the morning after.
His boss, George W. Bush, understood that voters had delivered a verdict on a war they were tired of being spun about, and the system had shifted against him and his abrasive defense secretary.
After watching Hegseth this week, it’s fair to ask: if Democrats regain control of Congress, will he be destined for the same fate?
The Rumsfeld–Hegseth comparison has been duly noted. Both men arrived at the Pentagon radiating egotism. Both treated congressional oversight as an unnecessary inconvenience, even though it’s the law. Both have overseen wars facing strong public backlash, and both showed open disdain for lawmakers tasked with questioning them - that’s their job.
But the comparison ultimately lets Hegseth off too easily. Whether you liked Rumsfeld or disliked him, he built a formidable career as a Navy pilot, a four-term congressman, and White House chief of staff. He became the youngest Secretary of Defense at 43 under Gerald Ford, and later the oldest under Bush.
Hegseth’s credentials can be summed up this way: don’t ask, because he’ll lie; don’t tell, because there’s nothing to tell.
Rumsfeld’s contempt for Congress was more cerebral than Hegseth’s. After watching him closely for five years, he thought he was smarter than everyone in the room and made a show of it. His evasions relied on cutesy wordplay like “known unknowns,” “stuff happens.” It was maddeningly condescending, but he operated within a system he knew well.
Hegseth is about as far from cerebral as you can get. He has little institutional experience, and his fallback replaces wordplay with blunt aggression. When Rep. John Garamendi called the war a “geopolitical calamity,” Hegseth shot back: “Who are you cheering for here?”
When pressed on the nearly $25 billion already spent, a figure many say is far too low, he brushed it off. When lawmakers expressed skepticism, he labeled them “the biggest adversary” facing the United States.
To Rumsfeld, the game with Congress was a chess match of wits, where Rumsfeld thought he could fight with one arm behind his back. Hegseth thinks he needs to put both fisted arms out to underscore his warrior ethos.
Rumsfeld treated Congress as an obstacle. Hegseth treats it as an enemy. Both approaches are ultimately self-defeating.
The financial parallels are hard to ignore. In 2003, Rumsfeld told Congress the Iraq invasion would cost under $50 billion. It ultimately exceeded $2 trillion.
Now, two months into the Iran war, there is still confusion about the total cost. The Pentagon’s $25 billion figure seems far short of earlier estimates, suggesting a burn rate near $1 billion a day. If that holds, the cost after 40 days would already be around $40 billion.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is already tens of billions in, with a massive supplemental request looming. Congress hasn’t formally authorized the war and hasn’t been given a clear price tag.
Rumsfeld at least understood Congress would eventually demand answers. His strategy was to delay, push forward until backing out became politically impossible.
Hegseth’s posture is more extreme. He behaves as if Congress isn’t entitled to answers at all. Oversight, in his view, is disloyal.
That stance aligns with a broader theory of executive power: that Trump, and by extension his defense secretary, can wage war with minimal interference.
The War Powers Resolution clock has already run out on the Iran conflict, launched without congressional authorization. Legal concerns are mounting, and Democrats, and some Republicans, in Congress are taking notice.
The political environment is shifting. The war is unpopular. Costs are rising. Voters are focused on domestic concerns. The conditions that led to the 2006 backlash are reappearing, only faster.
Midterms are months away. If control of Congress flips, oversight will intensify.
Rumsfeld understood what a hostile Congress meant, a nightmare really, with loads of subpoenas, hearings, and more exposure to his trickery. He chose to leave rather than endure it.
For Hegseth, if this war drags on without clear victories and public support continues to erode, a Democratic House will investigate, and then some. And when it does, it won’t tolerate his warrior ethos, obfuscation, or that grating arrogance.
So, will Hegseth end up following Rumsfeld out the door?
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Poisonous Trump infected our neighbors — they're now jerks
Friends,
I was driving my car yesterday, heading home after doing some errands, when someone ran a red light and just about hit me. I swerved to avoid him, then stopped my car, got out, and stood in the middle of the road screaming at the vanishing a--hole and giving him the finger.
Are drivers becoming more belligerent, or am I becoming grouchier?
Not just drivers. A few days ago, I was waiting in line at a bakery when someone broke in line ahead of me without even a “Please excuse me.” I tapped him on the shoulder and told him in no uncertain terms to get back in line.
Is our civic life becoming more brutish, or am I becoming angrier about it?
I’ve been seeing more people dump their trash on the street, and telling them to stop. I’m watching parents scream at their kids with a ferocity I’ve rarely witnessed before, and occasionally I suggest they treat their kids better. My neighbor has started using a loud power tool in the evening, and I’ve asked him to keep it down.
I’m aware of more shoving and pushing — in a department store, at a local restaurant, at an airport — which p---es me off. I hear more people using racial, ethnic, and sexist insults, which I just won’t tolerate. Yesterday’s errands included a stop at the neighborhood Safeway, where someone called the cashier a “b---h.” I told him he shouldn’t say that.
Are such small acts of bullying on the rise, or am I becoming less tolerant of them?
Okay, maybe I am turning into a grouchy old man. But there’s another old man in the White House who has lowered the moral tone of the nation. His selfish, bigoted belligerence has signaled to America that it’s okay to disregard social norms in pursuit of whatever you want.
He’s signaled it’s okay to disregard norms, not just in social interactions but in the system as a whole.
CEOs of hugely profitable firms are now laying off large numbers of workers — not because they have to, but because they figure they can make even more money that way. Until recently, highly profitable corporations didn’t do mass layoffs; it was considered bad form.
A Wall Street Journal story calls the past few months “the era of the mega-layoff,” citing Amazon’s recent reduction of its workforce by 30,000 and Oracle’s laying off many thousands of its employees. As the Journal reports,
“Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once. That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly.”
Wall Street, meanwhile, is investing in crypto and private credit, in apparent disregard for the dangers they pose to the financial system. It’s as if the Street is saying: Who cares, if there’s money to be made?
We’re in a wave of selfish assertiveness even worse than the “greed is good” days of Gordon Gekko.
Trump is not singularly responsible for every such breach of public morality, of course. But a president inevitably influences the character of a nation. We’re continuously bombarded by how he acts, what he says and does, the ways he treats others, his style, his attitude.
Trump behavior is disgusting.
This coarsening of American life should be counted among the myriad ways Trump has worsened America.
I for one am going to resist this degradation of our civic life, even if it earns me a reputation of being an old grouch.
Even if it makes me one.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump just got socked in the gut — by the people he hates most
Multiple MAGA bombshells dropped on Wednesday, from the SCOTUS decision to let Republicans keep cheating to steal elections to Punch-Drunk Pete Hegseth’s sloppy House hearing on the Pentagon going off the rails so badly that he had to be shut down by the Republican Committee Chair.
Meanwhile, MAGA is still weakly trying to scapegoat Jimmy Kimmel for making roughly the same “expectant widow” joke Donald Trump did about Melania. Except that Trump did it in front of the king of England instead of on his own TV show.
And there’s still the fallout from whatever happened at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The biggest part of that story should be how we can’t trust anything coming from this White House or anyone supporting its current occupant.
I don’t know why we’re being forced to live in the stupidest timeline ever, but I do know sometimes we still get to enjoy it when the smart kids prevail. One of them got Trump’s biggest confession on camera thus far.
Kudos to Norah O’Donnell of CBS News, who apparently shreds all of the memos from Bari Weiss and instead sticks to her job of asking questions to get real answers.
Her sharp reply of “Oh, you think he was talking about you?” is the stuff of legend. The Smartest Girl in School just shut down the biggest, dumbest bully in eight words.
Trump claimed to have read the White House Congressional Dinner shooter’s manifesto, but of course, he didn’t, because he doesn’t read anything. If he had, he’d know it never specifically names him. His fixation on that part of it, and his reaction to O’Donnell reading it, are also part of the tell.
Trump hates women who tell the truth about him so much because he knows we’re right about him.
Yeah, I include myself in that group, because I got under his thin skin in August 2015, and I remain blocked by Trump on both Twitter and Instagram to this day.
O’Donnell pushed back a bit when Trump went after her for *checks notes* reading the words another person wrote. But he kept verbally abusing her, and while she didn’t push back against all of it, she gave a textbook example on how to hold your ground when you also have to deal with whatever’s going on under his suit.
Just as the women of the Supreme Court all stood against Trump in the Voting Rights Act decision, another smart woman returned on Wednesday to ruin it for him.
Our Shero, E. Jean Carroll, was once again vindicated in her defamation case. A federal appeals court in New York rejected Trump's request (number eleventy billion, is it?) to rehear his challenges.
You might recall that a jury awarded E. Jean $83 million in damages in 2024 after her lawyers successfully proved that Trump defamed her with comments he made disputing her claims that he sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s.
MAGA loves to blame the judge and the jury for Trump sexually abusing E. Jean, which is weird when you learn exactly who was on that jury. As she writes in her excellent book Not My Type, one of the jurors who slipped through the voir dire process turned out to only get his news from right-wing podcaster Tim Pool. And he still voted to award her the $83 million in damages.
Seems like maybe both MAGA and Trump need to learn how to take NO for an answer already.
Let’s also pour another one out for Virginia State Senator L. Louise Lucas, who withstood horrifically racist and misogynistic bullying from MAGA online while preventing Republicans from gerrymandering their way into stealing House seats.
And then there’s the fruitless pursuit of trying to get MAGA to hold Trump accountable for the Epstein Files. His latest manufactured distraction from the files, along with the stupid ballroom, is indicting James Comey again over an AI screenshot of rocks spelling out “86 47” on a beach.
Seriously, this is what passes as a “threat” to the same guy who gleefully celebrated the death of Bob Mueller.
Not only does MAGA still refuse to believe he’s in the Files, but the way they defend him is the same way he defends himself: by bullying the messengers to make us their scapegoats. They also like to try to move the goalposts back to the Biden administration, but that doesn’t really work when Joe Biden’s name isn’t anywhere in the Epstein Files, but Trump’s is in there tens of thousands of times.
Whenever I tweet something about the Epstein Files, MAGA likes to troll me with “Trump should sue you!”
Trump has never sued anyone for saying he’s in the Epstein Files. The most lawsuit-happy loser in this country’s history will gladly keep people tied up in court for years with his appeals, but not when it comes to Epstein.
Weird, huh?
I realize it’s wrong of me to hope that MAGA will follow our example with Eric Swalwell and hold Trump accountable, but I can’t help but believe that they know what Trump did. They don’t want to have to admit they were wrong.
One more story that broke on Wednesday: it turns out that former AG Pam Bondi would rather not go to jail, so she’ll show up for her Congressional subpoena after all. It’s more likely she’ll perjure herself rather than tell the truth about the Epstein Files, so who knows what consequences she might face.
Any would be good at this point, please.
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The world's most destructive industry is dying — and taking democracy with it
The fossil fuel industry is the most powerful and destructive industry in the history of the world. Right now the fate of our planet hangs on our ability to defeat the political power of that industry. It is ready to do anything, including making alliances with pro-fascist forces to maintain its ability to make profits. Understanding the insidious ways it has worked to undermine democracy will be helpful for protecting democracy and challenging the destructive actions of this industry.
Capitalism is the practice of putting profits at the center of how decisions are made about how to produce and distribute resources. Those with capital are able to shift social institutions to enable them to gain even more capital. Entities, such as corporations, come to be self-perpetuating agents whose only goal is profit making.
Capitalism existed long before fossil fuels. But for over a century, fossil fuels, and fossil fuel-based corporations, have been at the heart of capitalism. Fossil fuels have made energy plentiful, which has led to the development of forms of industry and approaches to agriculture that use a lot of it. As we are seeing with the war on Iran, fossil fuels have become the life blood that keeps the global capitalist economy running. Fossil fuel-centered corporations are some of the most powerful entities in the world.
Over time, and in many places, capitalism extracts profits, exploits labor, and despoils nature with very little force. It becomes a matter of course how the systems function. But the original forms of accumulation that allowed some companies to be enormously powerful, and to shape the regulatory world in which they operated, came from brutal expropriation. Capitalism began with slavery and colonialism and a willingness to do anything to make profits.
As the fossil fuel industry increasingly resorts to attacks on democracy to maintain its ability to profit, an important part of protecting democracy is exposing one of the biggest and most determined players behind the current attacks.
The fossil fuel industry has, from its beginning, supported violent overthrows and encouraged states to install authoritarian governments to ensure its ability to engage in extraction. Many of the places where fossil fuels are extracted have been controlled politically by brutal forces kept in power by so-called liberal democratic forces. We see this story in Mexico in 1911, in Iran in 1954, in Shell Oil’s despoliation of Ogoniland in Nigeria in the 1980s.
Outside of those extraction zones, for many years, and in many places, the fossil fuel industry was compatible with liberal democracy. The US was able to have a liberal democratic government, and most countries in the world could as well, as long as those governments supported political and economic practices that allowed for the profitability of powerful industries. The markets constructed to facilitate capitalist processes can generally function fine in collaboration with governments that allow for high standards of living, social safety nets, and civil liberties, as long as those governments have kept processes in place that allow for the extraction of profits. As soon as any government gets in the way of that ability, the so-called liberal democratic order that dominates the global economic system has been prepared to overthrow those governments to put new ones in place that are willing to act in its interests.
Retired General Wesley Clark has argued that US foreign policy has focused on keeping regimes in power that would support the continued use of the dollar as the currency used for trading oil—the petrodollar. By ensuring that regimes are in power that support the continued use of the petrodollar, the US is able to ensure that it has some control over the continued flow of the lifeblood of the global economic system.
Capitalism is compatible with democracy as long as that form of democracy allows the economic world to be dominated and controlled by markets, which are constructed in ways that make them immune from accountability. The fossil fuel industry has functioned in alliance with a nominally democratic US, as long as the US government has also engaged in military action when it was needed to keep the oil, and profits, flowing. It is new that the fossil fuel industry has been aligned with fascism in the US and other Western countries.
Fascism is a particular form of authoritarianism that grows when a capitalist elite worries that its power is going to be threatened by democratic forces. An authoritarian government is one that tries to control all aspects of society and close down dissent. It holds power closely in a small group and is not accountable to its people. Fascism is authoritarianism that runs on popular support. It emerges in contexts that require elections to hold governmental power, where the people are in danger of not acting in elite interests.
A fascist government generally creates in-groups and out-groups in order to get people to bond emotionally with its movement. It uses the power of the government, violence, and threats of violence to intimidate people into compliance. It acts in the interests of an economic elite while pretending to be anti-elitist. And it uses anti-intellectualism and attacks on media and other cultural systems to pull people into its way of thinking and feeling. It often harks back to a mythical past where the in-group had more power and prestige, and society was stable.
In the middle of the 20th century, Germany, Italy, and Spain had nominally democratic governments that were in crisis. The governments were not able to keep the economy functioning in the interests of elites. In the political chaos that comes from an economy that is not functioning well, parties emerge that use extreme racist nationalism to consolidate popular support for authoritarian regimes. It is that move, of using hatred to consolidate popular support, that distinguishes fascism from other forms of right-wing or authoritarian politics.
As the climate crisis has developed, people all around the world are working to shift how we meet our needs in society away from a dependence on fossil fuels. With clean forms of energy fully developed and ready to take over as the energy sources running our economies, the fossil fuel industry is in a fight for its survival. It is aligning itself with fascist forces to remain profitable. To survive, it is prepared to take the whole planet, as well as liberal democracy, down with it.
In the past, the industry has impacted US politics by donating to and leaning on both Democratic and Republican politicians. For example, the industry remains the largest donor to California’s politics, even as that state has a two-thirds Democratic majority. But as renewables become more economically competitive, and many forces are challenging their ability to profit, the industry is seeing a bleak future. And so, for many years, it has been participating in a broad set of challenges to democracy as a strategy to maintain the conditions needed to maintain its profitability.
The move toward fascism in the US has come as a result of the success of the Reagan Revolution’s attack on the New Deal and anything that remotely resembles socialism. The fossil fuel industry has been a part of that revolution every step of the way. There is a line of thinking that was crystallized in the 1971 memo “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” written by the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. The Powell Memo outlines a blueprint for how to fight back against emerging challenges to corporate power. Oil barons and political activists the Koch brothers were influenced by the memo and went on to found the think tank the Cato Institute to promote a free-market ideology that argues against regulations on industry in general, and especially against environmental regulations that might impact the fossil fuel industry. It also argued against social safety net programs, such as the programs put in place under the New Deal. Other powerful think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, have worked assiduously to promote that set of ideals. That organization was founded by Richard Melon Scaife, heir to a Gulf Oil fortune.
The work of these forces paid off with the election of Ronald Reagan and the triumph of the Reagan Revolution. That revolution challenged the power of unions, destroyed the social safety net systems developed under the New Deal, and rolled back environmental regulations and other limits on corporate power. It allowed inequality to flourish.
Part of what fueled popular support for the Reagan Revolution was the mobilization of racial resentments, used to encourage white voters to blame their precarious situation on people of color, especially on Black people. The Democratic Party decided to ride that wave, and Bill Clinton ran for the presidency on the idea that he would get rid of social safety net programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children and get tough on crime, coded in the public imagination as Black. The Reagan Revolution led to extreme pro-business decisions by the Supreme Court, such as Citizens United, which have further eroded our democracy. Many other court decisions over the past decades have allowed monopoly power to go unchecked.
The extreme free market form of capitalism engendered by the Powell Memo and the Reagan Revolution have led to a crisis in capitalist democracy in the US. As people’s lives have been made increasingly precarious by the lack of a safety net and by extreme inequality, they have been ripe for a revolt against the dominant system. In the 2016 election many voters favored populist Bernie Sanders and others favored right-wing pseudo-populist Donald Trump.
The democratic party decided to make its peace with the populists and began working for a return to support for some New Deal social programs as well as strong action to address the climate crisis. The Republican Party went all in on a pro-corporate fossil fuel dominated pseudo-populism, and won in 2016. That coalition won again in 2024. It did this by leaning hard on people’s resentments against the system and elites, and by mobilizing people’s passions against imagined enemies, such as immigrants and trans people.
As the US has traveled this destructive path, the fossil fuel industry has walked right along with the Republican Party. The fossil fuel industry contributed heavily to the climate denial movement and the right-wing think tanks that linked climate action with the bogeyman of socialism. It has funded extreme right-wing politicians, including President Trump. It wrote the chapter on energy in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 policy manifesto. It is pushing for legislation to make itself immune from lawsuits to hold it accountable for the destruction it causes. Many of its former industry executives are in Trump’s cabinet. The only way for this dying industry to maintain its hegemony is to hide behind the mask of nationalism, a way to get people to vote for politicians who clearly act against their interests.
As we fight to protect democracy, we need to challenge any attempts to distract our attention from the forces causing our precarity. We need to engage in deep forms of solidarity, where we encourage others to not fall for political rhetoric that blames the wrong people for why we are experiencing extreme inequality, ecological devastation, war, and the unraveling of the systems that support stable lives.
As the fossil fuel industry increasingly resorts to attacks on democracy to maintain its ability to profit, an important part of protecting democracy is exposing one of the biggest and most determined players behind the current attacks: the fossil fuel industry. The future of democracy requires an end to the political power of the fossil fuel industry.
At this crucial moment in world history, it is incumbent on all of us to fight for accountable democratic politics, and to challenge the political imperatives being driven by an industry that is flailing and causing unprecedented devastation to our planet and our politics. It is up to us to consign it to the dustbin of history before more damage is done.
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Melania's repulsive zinger outdoes even her odious husband
The first lady’s war on “corrosive” rhetoric has a massive blind spot — it’s her husband, the king of corrosiveness.
On Monday, Melania Trump took to X to demand that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel because he told a joke about her having the “glow of an expectant widow.” His words, she fumed, were “corrosive.” He was spreading hate. He was dividing the country. ABC needed to act.
And, she laughably said Kimmel engages in “atrocious behavior.” As recently as last month, former Vice President Al Gore called her husband “atrocious” — and he’s just the latest.
On Sunday evening, her husband was the epitome of the word atrocious when he sat down with CBS correspondent Norah O'Donnell on “60 Minutes” and called her a “disgrace,” twice, simply for reading aloud from a shooting suspect’s manifesto as part of an interview.
Melania’s statement about Kimmel was nowhere close to a defense of civil discourse. It’s hard to imagine she practices it at home. What do they talk about? Inquiring minds want to know, as the old axiom goes.
She was not taking a high-minded, principled stand against rhetoric that wounds because, only hours earlier, there were literal wounds after a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Instead of showing humility after the shocking incident, she attacked, metaphorically, with guns blazing.
And beyond how tone-deaf it is, if Melania Trump actually believes public figures have a responsibility not to use language that “deepens the political sickness within America,” she would have said something, at some point, about the loathsomely corrosive man she married.
But she won’t, since Donald is her cash cow, and for Melania it’s never about decency, it’s all about the money. Donald is her personal slot machine, albeit an atrocious one.
There’s no reason to rehash all the corrosiveness that spews out of her husband, Donald Trump, 24 hours a day, literally, and seven days a week, even a “vulgar” one on Easter.
Let’s just focus on what he said to O’Donnell, the night before Melania decided to be a hypocrite by assailing Kimmel.
O’Donnell was doing her job, asking relevant questions about the shooting Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton.
During the interview, she asked Trump about Allen’s assertions in his manifesto because understanding a shooter’s motive is, self-evidently, relevant journalism.
Trump’s response was to call her “horrible,” a “disgrace,” and “disgraceful.” He told her she “shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes.” He told her she should “be ashamed” of herself.
He told a veteran journalist that asking about a shooting that happened 24 hours earlier, and involved him, was shameful behavior.
Then came Melania’s zingers at Kimmel. Was she trying to one-up her husband’s vulgarity? Did she even see the irony in declaring that “words are corrosive and deepen the political sickness within America”?
Melania, Donald called, and asked why you are stealing words that describe him.
Maybe Melania really doesn’t pay attention to her husband, and once again went rogue after mysteriously pontificating, overly so, about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
This is a couple that has made the degradation of journalists, and others in the public eye, routine. Trump has called reporters “enemies of the people,” “scum,” and an avalanche of vomiting “fake news” — so many times that we’ve sadly become immune to his insults.
He has mocked reporters’ appearances, intelligence, and patriotism.
The Society of Professional Journalists has noted his attacks follow “an unmistakable pattern of hostility, often directed at women.”
And Melania, who gives every indication she’s not wildly in love with Donald, wants ABC to fire a comedian over a widow joke. God forbid he tells a divorce joke, but we all know that’s a whole other story.
When Kimmel makes an off-color joke, which is his wont, and it’s about the thin-skinned Melania, it’s a national emergency requiring corporate intervention. When Trump calls a CBS correspondent “disgraceful” on live television, well, that’s fine.
Kimmel was joking. Trump was serious, and Melania clearly can’t differentiate between the two.
Her motto is simple: words are only dangerous when they come from someone with Trump Derangement Syndrome. When they come from the deranged Donald, they don’t mean anything.
And then there’s the absurdity of the Kimmel complaint in the context of this weekend.
Cole Tomas Allen traveled by train from Los Angeles to Washington. He checked into the hotel the day before. He ranked his targets. He sent a 1,000-word document to his family 10 minutes before the attack. He referred to himself as the “Friendly Federal Assassin.”
He came dangerously close to creating a horrific, deadly nightmare. You’d think Melania might want to address the emotional havoc that was an outcome of the incident. The nation is still grappling with what happened.
In any ordinary time, the first couple would try to lower the temperature. Instead, Melania raises it.
Her calling Kimmel a coward was rich. She said he “hides behind ABC.” That’s sanctimonious from a woman who has stood silently behind a husband who wanted to wipe out a civilization, celebrated the death of Rob Reiner and Robert Mueller, and posted an image of himself as Christ, arguably the most atrocious insult of all.
He did that in a matter of months, along with a litany of other inappropriate remarks and posts on Truth Social. Her husband is the one who does the hiding. He hides behind everything @realDonaldTrump posts.
Kimmel doesn’t hide. He goes on television five nights a week and says exactly what he thinks about the most powerful family in the country. That’s not cowardice. That’s his job.
What would actually be cowardly is if ABC sided with Melania’s hurt feelings and decided to can Kimmel, or if Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon thought twice about joking about her.
However, the real joke is Melania, especially her documentary, Melania, which was more offensive, especially to the working class, than any joke a late-night host could tell.
Melania Trump wants Jimmy Kimmel fired for saying she looked like a woman expecting to become a widow, while her husband treats women like trash.
So if she’s opening the door to a contest of “corrosiveness,” the joke is on her, because she and her husband would win by a landslide.
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This terrifying Trump DOJ lunacy sounds like the plot of a twisted fairy tale
In an Eastern North Carolina federal courtroom today, the United States government unbelievably indicted a former FBI director for posting a picture of seashells on the beach on Instagram.
That’s right, seashells on a beach spelled out, in an artsy way, “8647,” which means that Trump needs to go away, and in a nonviolent way. That’s the honest-to-goodness meaning.
But, Todd Blanche’s idle hands are the Trump devil’s workshop.
This seashell lunacy sounds like the plot of some twisted fairy tale written by someone smoking 420 (marijuana). But the 411 (scoop) on this case is that acting Attorney General Blanche is so over-the-top desperate to get rid of "acting" that he is twisting himself in knots to placate the 5150 (mentally disturbed person) living in the White House.
Donald Trump’s Justice Department, in its infinite vengeance and bottomless dumbness, is giving America a 101 (quick lesson) in lawlessness, deciding that “8647” constitutes a threat on the president’s life. And Blanche had a 404 (unavailable) look on his face when he was asked to talk about Comey’s supposed intent to 187 (murder) Trump.
The whole situation is a 6-7, because there is no way to explain it. I think that’s what 6-7 means, but nobody really knows, so it fits here.
I know there are plenty of people, and I count many friends among them, who never forgave James Comey for that October 2016 press conference about Anthony Weiner’s laptop and the Hillary Clinton emails found within. They blame him for handing Trump the presidency, and their animosity runs deep.
Fine. Hold onto that grudge if you must. But right now, to set it aside, because what’s happening to Comey is an attack on every one of us.
This is the second time Trump has come at Comey with charges that would make a first-year law student drop out because of their obvious tomfoolery of the charges. And any first-year law student, by the way, would know what 86 means.
I was a short-order cook at a restaurant outside Pittsburgh in high school. When we ran out of steak on a Friday night, I hollered, “86 the ribeye,” across the diner’s greasy kitchen. Nobody called the police on me.
Because “86” means gone, out of stock, no longer on the menu, and time to move on. It has meant exactly that in American restaurants and slang for almost 100 years.
Now consider this. Etsy sells “8646” T-shirts. And there are “8647” T-shirts worn by smiling models. I’m not sure why models aren’t wearing the “8646,” but the point is: do we call Todd Blanche and tell him to arrest the handsome guy and the cute women pictured in their “8647” T-shirts? Scan social media platforms and the internet, and you’ll see plenty of things being 86’d in a friendly way.
Now, the models pictured in those shirts aren’t calling for Trump’s murder. And anyone who argues otherwise would be laughed out of the room, the city, the state, and perhaps end up in a banana republic like Nicaragua.
Although the seashell “death threat” charges certainly put the U.S. in the same category as Nicaragua.
The wild-eyed, brown-nosing leaders of this farce are Blanche, who is so transparently auditioning for a permanent title that he’d apparently indict a beach umbrella-toting seashell collector to get it.
The other, of course, is Kash Patel, whose breathtaking incompetence and alleged boozing at the highest levels of law enforcement is stupefying. Together, he and Blanche held a press conference today so thin on evidence it could have fit on a post-it.
There was no credible evidence offered that Comey was inciting violence.
Anyone who has known James Comey throughout his long career in federal law enforcement knows one thing with absolute certainty: the man is an intellectual, and constitutionally incapable of threatening a president’s life.
This is a Justice Department lifer. A former FBI director. A man who, whatever his faults, dedicated his professional life to the institutions Trump is now using as a weapon against him.
Comey took down the seashell post. He apologized. It was over.
Except it wasn’t, because for this administration, the retribution campaign never ends. People get arrested for drinking on the beach, having sex on the beach, public urination on the beach, and Comey gets arrested for taking pictures of seashells.
Even J. Edgar Hoover, the most scandalous, paranoid, vindictive, file-keeping, closeted megalomaniac ever to run the FBI or any government institution - besides Trump, is sitting in a dress somewhere laughing hysterically. He would have never brought these charges because he would have been laughed out of the bureau.
What Blanche and Patel are doing is sinister. They say the FBI won’t tolerate threats against the president, or threats against anyone, for that matter. So when Trump threatens to wipe out a civilization, I guess he gets a pass because he didn’t write it in seashells?
At its core, Trump is forcing his minions to use the machinery of justice to punish a man for a beach photograph. And instead of standing up to him, they are folding like a beach chair.
So whether you loved Comey or loathed him, the time to stand up for him is now. Because if the federal government can indict a former FBI director over seashells, they can indict anyone for anything.
Summer’s coming. That means beach time, so be careful what you do with the pretty seashells scattered around you.
They could put you in prison.
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Chaos of America's mad king on full display as British royals visit
Friends,
As much as he’d love to be, Trump is not king of America. Which makes Charles III’s visit here a bit odd. It’s billed as a state visit but Charles isn’t a head of state; his function is purely symbolic.
Most Americans disapprove of Trump but there’s something special about the relationship between the Brits and their Royal Family. For it is in fact their royal family – not just an archaic symbol of what remains of the British Empire but a living, breathing, soap-opera of a family that in the minds of many Brits represents modern-day Britain.
To those who say it’s bizarre for one of the world’s major democracies of the twenty-first century to cling to the fiction of royalty — and it is indeed a fiction because Charles III has no tangible political power — I say this: It’s a relatively harmless fiction, and one that arguably meets the needs of people to gossip about, project upon, and vicariously live the lives of a storybook family that tries to be of service of their nation.
Here in America — at least before Trump — some of us romanticized our presidents and their families. Remember Camelot?
But because our presidents also run the executive branch of our government, the two roles – the projected glamor and the political reality – have often gotten confused, leaving us disappointed on both grounds.
After Camelot came Lyndon Johnson who pulled up dogs by their ears. And then, eventually, Donald (“Grab ‘em by the p---y. You can do anything”) Trump. You can’t get any further from a romanticized Camelot.
Britain’s government may seem drab and boring, but is at least free to do its drab and boring best.
Here, we demand that our presidents and their spouses throw formal balls (Trump is trying to build the biggest ballroom anywhere) and state dinners, decorate the White House like a castle, appear in person at every major national anniversary or memorial or funeral, and always symbolize the nation.
I’m certainly not suggesting America should have a royal family. Count me in the “No Kings” camp.
It’s just that Britain’s infatuation with its own royalty may have some social utility there that we Yanks don’t fully understand. Keeping the trappings of royalty separate from the daily slog of governing makes some sense.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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The real catastrophe in DC Saturday had nothing to do with a gunman
My first thought after I found out there had been gunshots at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday was quite possibly the same as yours and can be summed up in a single word: staged.
The fact that enough information about the shooting suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, has emerged to mostly tamp down the suspicion of it being bogus doesn’t in the slightest minimize what was so disturbing about it. This administration is so deceitful, corrupt and insincere that our default is now that we’re probably being played — because most of the time, we are.
In this case, however, the shooter doesn’t fit the typical lone wolf profile. Allen, 31, is a Caltech engineering graduate from Torrance, CA, with a master’s degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills. He’s a mechanical engineer and computer scientist as well as a game developer. This isn’t some loser dude living in his parents’ basement playing Mortal Kombat and firing out hateful messages to his fellow malcontents. He was Teacher of the Month at a tutoring and test prep center.
What caused this guy to snap and allegedly rush the Washington D.C. Hilton with a shotgun, a handgun, and a bunch of knives — driven by a manifesto to target administration officials — isn’t yet clear. But the truth is that he was no random wacko. He’s a very bright guy who evidently gave this a lot of thought before making an unfortunate choice.
This is not to say that I or anyone reading these words would ever consider a similar violent act of trying to burst into a fancy event attended by hotshot journalists with the goal of tallying a body count. But many of us surely understand the frustration and anger that can lead to it.
Anyone sticking to the “It was staged!” charge would at this point have to account for a lot of significant question marks. Chief among them is why a guy of Allen’s evident intellect and progressive politics would decide on something of a whim to throw his life in the trash to help President Trump with another timely diversion from the growing quagmire in Iran and the still-looming saga of the Epstein Files.
Yet Trump sure didn’t seem shaken up in the slightest by this incident that we can’t yet seem to easily categorize. Was it an assassination attempt? A lax response to one man’s mental breakdown? A simple security breach? All of the above?
Trump pivoted so seamlessly from the abrupt cancellation of the dinner to the necessity of building his White House ballroom/bunker pronto that it left many heads spinning. He talked about drone-proofing and bulletproof glass and 150 years of presidents purportedly demanding the ballroom and all of his usual blah blah blah.
Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt on Saturday, much less killed. You see more injuries in a typical Sunday of NFL Football. That doesn’t mean the incident wasn’t entirely genuine. But everything this administration does is so designed to mislead that it’s impossible to trust anything it tells us.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s the shameful reality of 2026.
We have been conditioned now to treat everything we’re being told, every line we’re being fed, as suspect. The one thing we never hear is any accountability. We’re supposed to believe them and not our eyes. Instead, it’s about deflection, justification, branding. A security failure is cast as a further reason to build an unnecessary golden monstrosity onto a structure that once symbolized class and distinction but now stands for tackiness and hideous overkill.
At a moment when a normal human being would be counting his blessings for literally and figuratively dodging another bullet, Trump is consumed with construction, camera angles, ratings, profits.
Why would we buy a single thing he tells us about this or anything else? He contends that the economy is the strongest in history when it’s teetering on the edge of freefall. He says his approval ratings are high when they’re at historic lows. He insists we’re winning a war in Iran that all indications are the opposite. He struts around telling us he’s been “totally exonerated” in the Epstein Files when nothing of the sort has been confirmed. Down is up. Cold is hot. Fake is real.
We’re a populace that’s always being spun some new pile of bull. When that happens, every crisis feels like a con. We’re now the country that collectively cried wolf. The greatest danger is that if a real emergency were to befall us, at this point, no one would believe it. The suspicion would be that the president must be up to something again.
Here is also the truth about the White House Correspondents' Dinner: the event shouldn’t have gone on in the first place. No serious journalist should have been in that room. After all, the guest of honor was a man who has spent the past decade claiming journos are “the enemy of the people,” dangerously soiling reputations and unconscionably putting lives in danger. His assault on the First Amendment has been unrelenting.
This is the man that the association honored with its members’ presence, like so many victims of Stockholm syndrome bonding with their captor. Before shots rang out, the attendees were planning to raise a glass to Trump, laugh with him, celebrate with him, break bread with him — the same guy doing everything in his power to erase their existence.
In Trump’s Washington, this is apparently what passes for “celebrating a free press” when there is no longer a single free thing about it. He labels every story that he doesn’t like as “fake,” and yet these professionals still clamor for access.
It’s all pretty sick. In that sense, Cole Allen did them all a favor with his hostile act over the weekend. He cleared a room they should never have entered. The biggest catastrophe of the night is that the journalists themselves were complicit in their own demise.
Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
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This lesson will smash billionaires' grip on America
The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry.
Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.
The Republican Party writ large has also benefited from all this, since it was reinvented mid-20th century by Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy and Reagan’s embrace of “states’ rights” as the party of Christian white male supremacy. (The last four Black Republicans in the US House of Representatives are ending their political careers this year.)
Because every right-wing movement in history has been founded on hate and/or xenophobia, the openly neo-Confederate MAGA movement was simply the logical end-point of this turn the Party took a half-century ago. History shows that when the right wants to seize power, it reaches for the oldest weapon in politics: teach people to fear and then hate their neighbors, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.
Finally, the billionaire class and the massive, monopolistic corporations that made them rich benefit from the hate industry because when working-class people are mobilized to hate each other based on race, religion, gender (and gender identity), nationality, or political affiliation, they’re far less likely to organize together to demand union rights, benefits, healthcare, education, and/or better wages.
Some even argue that the current state of GOP corruption, billionaire greed, and societal hate in America proves that democracy has run its course. Oddly, most arguing that are the billionaires themselves, or the lickspittle “dark enlightenment philosophers” they celebrate and fund.
Billionaire Peter Thiel famously wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and the CEO of his company Palantir recently released an arguably neo-fascist 22-point manifesto claiming that America must resist “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism” and — without a trace of irony about today’s billionaire subculture that’s working to capture our government and crush worker’s movements and unions — that “certain cultures and indeed subcultures” are “regressive and harmful.”
There’s actually a long history for this antidemocratic worldview.
Plato himself argued that democracy would always ultimately lead to tyranny because democratic rule could so easily be co-opted by authoritarians using the tools of democracy itself. Karl Popper rebutted this extensively in 1945, arguing that democracies must become “intolerant of intolerance,” essentially putting limits (like the German people have done for themselves) on “free speech” when that speech is being used to undermine and ultimately destroy a democracy.
The European option would run afoul of our First Amendment, so America must come up with a different way to deal with the hate-industrial complex. There are a few options.
While corporations will argue that they are “persons” protected by the First Amendment (an argument I rebut extensively in my new book Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told) and will say that their algorithms that favor outrage, hate, and division are merely corporate “free speech,” it should still be possible to regulate these bits of computer code.
I’m not proposing that people lose their right to speak online. The real issue is whether giant social media corporations should have the unlimited right to use their top-secret algorithms to pour gasoline on hate, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, and political violence just because outrage keeps people clicking and that drives engagement/ad-views and thus profits.
That’s not free speech in any meaningful human sense: it’s just a democracy-destroying business model.
Thus, one obvious reform is to separate hosting speech from amplifying it. If somebody wants to post something vile but lawful, that’s allowed under the First Amendment. But when a corporation’s software algorithm identifies that vile content as profit-promoting and shoves it into millions of feeds, that’s no longer passive hosting: it’s active promotion. And active promotion can be regulated.
Another fix is to require transparency. Make these companies openly disclose what their algorithms reward. Do they boost rage reactions, conspiracy content, fear, tribal conflict, and endless doom-scrolling just because it increases ad revenue for their billionaire owners? Let independent researchers audit the systems so the public can see whether hate is being engineered for profit behind the curtain and use public shame to discourage it.
And finally, give social media users real choice. Break up the social media monopolies. Require a simple chronological feed, for example, and an easy opt-out from manipulation-based recommendations, along with a legal duty of care when platforms knowingly drive people toward extremism or violence.
You still get free speech; what corporations lose is the right to use the invisible part of their machines to poison our minds, our children’s minds, and our democracy for money.
None of this deals with the problem of right-wing billionaires acquiring massive media platforms and then requiring their employees to also spin the news in ways that are anti-democracy and pro-billionaire.
But reversing Reagan’s 1983 decision to largely abandon our anti-trust laws and his 1987 decision to abandon the Fairness Doctrine could go a long way toward mitigating the damage Australian-billionaire-owned Fox “News” and others have done to America.
Combine these steps with rational gun control and a re-commitment to teaching civics and critical thinking (as several European countries have done and we did before Reagan gutted federal education spending) and there’s a good chance America can rise again from the ashes of the hate and violence that today’s conservative movement and billionaire subculture have imposed on us.
The choice before us is stark. We can continue letting right-wing billionaires, monopolists, gun merchants, and hate-profiteers pit Americans against each other while they strip wealth and power from working people, or we can remember the oldest lesson of democracy: when ordinary people refuse to be divided, no oligarch or billionaire can stand against them.
Tag, we’re it!
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