The Skinny: February 2025 Blogs
February 2025 Fediverse Blogs
The Musk Presidency and Fascist Surveillance
Oh, I’m sure this ends well; Musk’s pack of teenage nazi hackers have been granted access to US Treasury information. Given that Elon is a vengeful nazi techno-feudalist shitlord, this is probably a win for both his bullshit business empire and fascist surveillance in American society.
‘It’s a Coup’: Musk’s DOGE Granted Access to Treasury System That Pays Out Social Security
“In an op-ed published by MSNBC on Saturday, Owens went into greater detail about her concerns, outlining three reasons why Musk might want access to the Treasury payment system.
He could use it to stop payments to certain programs in order to work around the courts’ block on the administration’s spending freeze. He could access the list of blacklisted federal contractors in order to boost his own or his friend’s companies and harm his competitors. (One of the DOGE allies granted access to the payment system, Tom Krause, is also a Big Tech CEO who leads Cloud Software Group, according to The New York Times.) He could use it to reduce Social Security or Medicare payments as part of DOGE’s goal of cutting $2 trillion in federal spending.
Owens noted that Musk wasn’t “chasing these cuts for their own sake. He’s helping congressional Republicans attempt to pay for a new round of tax breaks for corporations and the ultrawealthy—including Musk himself.”
“It’s nice to believe in a fantasy in which Musk and DOGE work alongside civil servants to improve technology and services for Americans and save a few bucks along the way. But all evidence points to the contrary,” Owens continued. “The richest man in the world, whom no one elected to any government position, is seeking unprecedented access to confidential information, including information pertaining to his own business interests, and seems hell-bent on cutting off as much funding as possible for the programs that matter to the rest of us.”
I mean if I’m being honest, I don’t think Owens criticisms or predictions of potential disaster go far enough. Yes, it’s bad enough that a billionaire South African-born nazi who literally believes billions of people are useless eaters who can and should be sacrificed for the goals of creating billions of “artificial minds” and escaping to Mars after rich people have burnt the planet to the crisp, has his fingers inside the payment system that supports America’s most vulnerable people, and sure it’s not at all good that Musk has access to information he can use to make himself even richer. But as long as you’re committed to not actually calling Elon on a fascist, it’s hard to understand the scope of what’s just occurred here.
For starters, there probably isn’t a more identifying clutch of sensitive personal information than the Treasury Department payment system; Musk, a literal billionaire nazi supervillain, now has more personal information on the political enemies of the American fascist movement (read: anyone who isn’t going for this Pork Reich bullshit) than the fucking FBI and we know for a fact he’s a vindictive little fash muppet who absolutely delights in targeting people who criticize or oppose his frankly quite unhinged agenda. If Musk/Trump/America First want to target, detain, or even eliminate whole swathes of their political enemies and people the larger fascist movement thinks shouldn’t exist, they now have access to more than enough information to start rounding folks up and conducting political purges.
Furthermore, and while this might not be “news” to folks who’ve been closely following this fascist movement and Musk’s (successful) attempts to buy it, this makes it absolutely clear that the guy running this shitshow isn’t an elected official at all – it’s Musk. The fact is, a government is at its heart a system of taxation and spending; if Musk and his allies in the tech industry now have their hands on the purse strings (and all the juicy data that entails) they are in all reasonable sense of the words, in charge of the government. Trump might have “won” an election in a rigged oligarchy, but the nazi wearing the pants in this arrangement is very clearly Elon Musk; a guy in a fascist death cult, who can’t run a social media company, builds cars that burst into flames, and wants to eliminate vast portions of the media because they make fun of him for being the most divorced man ever.
Given all that I am once again asking my fellow Americans if they’re sincerely planning to just let this all happen for four years on the off chance a party full of collaborators wholly owned by the same rich people that own Trump, may win a potentially hypothetical election in a rigged oligarchy. Or, are you ready to start becoming ungovernable and shut this shit down, knowing that there will be personal costs involved, the fascist police state will respond with violence, and the liberal establishment which is openly musing that they’re happy to let you suffer under authoritarianism to teach you a lesson about not voting for them, will be of no assistance whatsoever. In fact, they’re very likely help the fascist punish you for fighting back.
The choice is yours, and it’s not a good one; but I still hope you choose wisely.
Techno-Fascist Billionaires and Our Dystopian Future
I mean it’s not that I don’t think nazi billionaires are planning on looting the US treasury, or even that I disagree with people who’re saying they’re crashing the dollar to get rich and obtain more power. It’s just that fascists use “the whole” cow, and constantly searching for reasons why folks in what amounts to a reactionary techno-fascist death cult don’t really mean to transform society into a dystopian sci-fi novel about oligarchic fascism is, in my humble opinion an unhealthy impulse right now. The fact is the fascist takeover of America we’re watching unfold isn’t so much a “master plan” as it’s a bunch of greed-bag nazis hoping to translate Trump’s return to the White House into wealth, power, and the ability to accomplish all sorts of authoritarian objectives of differing degrees of importance, to each of the many folks hoping to profit from the Trump 2.0 era.
In other words, it doesn’t have to be one thing or the other. You’re right, it’s about the money, but if you don’t think it’s also about the power, or their intentions to enact a nightmare Longtermist (read: dystopian fascist) agenda, you’re telling yourself polite fictions. These nazi maggots are absolutely robbing the world, and they absolutely intend to place themselves in permanent control of a fascist police state through force. Both of these things are true; so assuming the fascist stuff is all window dressing and the heist is what matters, is really just another form of wish-casting.
Look I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but this fascist takeover shit is really real. We really have hit the end of the line, the planet really is on fire, and we really are at a point where either capitalism goes or billions of people die horribly. The billionaires are embracing fascism and a technocratic-death cult precisely because all of this is true. They’ve already made their choice; billions of us are gonna die so they can maintain their (capitalist) way of life if they have anything to say about it. And you can’t do that in anything that looks like a democracy, even a faux democracy, without altering the social contract in some pretty horrible ways. For over ten years now people have been telling me I’m talking conspiracy theories but dawg, they say this shit in the open, you just have to take them seriously; even though it’s hard to do so because they sound like Bond villains and keep tossing around cringe-ass terms like “Dark Enlightenment.” How do you march billions of people to their deaths so a tiny handful of nazi billionaires can keep getting richer even as the planet burns? Well you ain’t gonna do it democratically; people aren’t going to choose to die for your profit margin. So you need fascism, and you need to justify that authoritarian system of control; thus the billionaire “Masters of the Universe” have constructed an elaborate belief system and a plan to take over the entire Pig Empire, to generate support for and ultimately enact that fascist takeover.
I get that it sounds like a dystopian fan-fic, but this is reality and it’s unfolding right in front of your eyes. If you’re waiting for for-profit, Pig Empire media owned by the very same fascist billionaires planning to kill you and your family for pennies on the share as the world burns, to tell you that all of this is real, then you’re just a fucking mark. Nothing I’m telling you about this fascist takeover, paid for by billionaire extremists isn’t “about the money” – it’s literally about all of the money; the ability to continue extracting profit on a boiling planet while billions die. Your poverty of imagination and refusal to interpret the news that this is all real, does not change that.
Respectable Pederasts and Ruling Class Solidarity
That awkward moment when *checks notes* the New Orleans Saints, and NFL team, is caught actively working with the New Orleans Archdiocese and the Catholic Church to cover up and minimize a massive sexual assault/abuse scandal involving priests in the region:
Emails detail Saints’ assistance to New Orleans Archdiocese in sexual abuse scandal
“Among the key moments, as revealed in the Saints’ own emails:
• Saints executives were so involved in the church’s damage control that a team spokesman briefed his boss on a 2018 call with the city’s top prosecutor hours before the church released a list of clergymen accused of abuse. The call, the spokesman said, “allowed us to take certain people off” the list.
• Team officials were among the first people outside the church to view that list, a carefully curated, yet undercounted roster of suspected pedophiles. The disclosure of those names invited civil claims against the church and drew attention from federal and state law enforcement.
• The team’s president, Dennis Lauscha, drafted more than a dozen questions that Archbishop Gregory Aymond should be prepared to answer as he faced reporters.
• The Saints’ senior vice president of communications, Greg Bensel, provided fly-on-the-wall updates to Lauscha about local media interviews, suggesting church and team leaders were all on the same team. “He is doing well,” Bensel wrote as the archbishop told reporters the church was committed to addressing the crisis. “That is our message,” Bensel added, “that we will not stop here today.”
The emails obtained by AP sharply undercut assurances the Saints gave fans about the public relations guidance five years ago when they asserted they had provided only “minimal” assistance to the church. The team went to court to keep its internal emails secret.”
Although the bloodless language this has all be reported in does a good (read: disgusting) job of minimizing how serious this is, the fact of the matter is via the Saints own emails we have evidence that an entire NFL team worked with the local Catholic Church power structure to protect known pedophile priests and the Church’s own reputation. Furthermore, their reason for doing so is literally that the billionaire owner of the Saints, is Catholic and has close ties to Church leadership; the same Church leadership actively engaged in covering up sexual assaults against minors by its own priests – a position shared by numerous other powerful people in New Orleans, including it sounds like a District Attorney’s office. Don’t sleep on the fact that while the Saints are denying it today, their OWN internal emails, which they fought to keep from seeing public light, indicate that they successfully pressured local media (who depend on a good relationship with the Saints for their sports coverage) to actively remove the names of multiple offender priests on the list that was going to be published. In other words, the Saints, an NFL team who has no jurisdiction in this matter, actively protected pedophiles on behalf of the Catholic Church; and the NFL itself, an entity that will suspend the shit out of players for using medical marijuana to treat serious injuries, seems to be dragging its ass in terms of doing anything about all this.
Of course the sad truth here is that this story is really only major news because an NFL team and its owner are involved. The reality is that rich and powerful people all over the Pig Empire frequently band together and use their outsized influence to cover up for heinous crimes like this, committed by other powerful and influential people in our communities on the regular; and you often don’t read about those stories in the newspaper because they don’t involve a multi-billion dollar sports team. which is an organization that has no business manipulating media coverage to protect pedophile priests and the Catholic Church in their community. If you want to know why guys like Diddy and Mohamed Al Fayed get away with predatory, criminal sexual behavior for as long as they do, look no further than the network of powerful people who support them and the army of public relations minions they maintain precisely to cover this sort of shit up. In this case, the Saints of all people got caught red-handed protecting rapists who harmed minors; but they are not alone, and when push comes to shove powerful people will band together to protect their own – no matter how heinous the crimes, and those acts of protection, really are.
Trump Builds Camps in a Familiar Place: Gitmo
Very Serious PeopleTM: “You can’t run around pushing alarmist ideas about fascism and saying they’re gonna build concentration camps!”
Me: “Are you kidding me? You already live in a fascist police state with a fully-functioning carceral industrial complex that actively profits from racialized warehousing of “undesirables,” and nobody even blinks. The camps are already built; they’re all around you, we just call them prisons!”
Trump: “Lol, no; we’re literally going to build concentration camps and put them in places where there is no law.”
‘He’s Building a Concentration Camp’: Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo
“Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison,” said ACLU deputy director of immigrant rights Lee Gelernt. “It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing.”
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, said Friday that expansion of operations at Guantánamo “is especially alarming given its remote location and the decades-long documented history of abuse and torture there, which will only be exacerbated by the well-documented abuse inherent to the ICE detention system, including abuse, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect. In no uncertain terms—lives are in jeopardy.”
I’d say between this and the Trump administration’s brazen deal with El Salvador to jail even U.S. Citizens in their “mega-prison,” it’s very clear what this government’s plan for purging people they don’t like is; and yes that plan is every bit as cartoonishly fascist as even Trump’s most ardent critics have suggested. Furthermore, I would note that as many observers at the time predicted would happen eventually if we embraced a fascist police state to “fight terrorism” in the wake of 9-11, the Trump administration is clearly borrowing heavily from both a bipartisan migrant carceral complex pattern, and a bipartisan history of using offshore prisons in places where American law doesn’t apply to commit human rights violations against “bad hombres” – the major difference here is that Trump is now planning on doing that to your neighbors and the lady who works at the nail salon up the street.
“According to critics like Robinson, “There’s no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don’t think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It’s easy to put tents in Florida. But they’re putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why.”
You can’t even say Robinson is speaking about a hypothetical situation because the American security state has already done this, for this precise reason, in slightly different circumstances; most people just weren’t paying that much attention to how we fought the so-called “War on Terror” because “we gotta get Bin Laden.” At this point the entire apparatus and justification for that apparatus already exists in “reasonable” American thought along bipartisan lines; the only thing we’re missing from the literal Nazi Party in Germany’s blueprint is organized mass extermination campaigns and are you prepared to promise we won’t get there? I sure couldn’t.
While obviously this must be opposed vigorously, it’s going to be pretty hard for a mainstream establishment that embraced the road to concentration camps in the name of national security, and has wholly surrendered to the idea that migrants are a “problem” that must be met with “carceral force” (that happens to make certain people very rich) to argue that this scenario is somehow different than the previous mind-numbingly fascist scenarios our entire state apparatus has supported in the past; both to stop migrants, and to prosecute the so-called “War on Terror.”
You can’t have a little fascism; and if you try sooner or later you’re going to have a lot more fascism. And let me tell you, America has been trying for a very long time.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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