Maybe this isn’t all going away as so many of us hope. Maybe we’re going to have to learn how to overcome, again. It is certainly true that we should not respond the way Trump and his people expect that we will. Ours is not the path of chaos and knee jerk reactions, or of blistering freak outs.
But we are dealing with an extraordinarily powerful force, one that has been lurking in our culture from before we were single cell organisms. It’s not that evil exists, it’s that good has been eroded.
We see the clash in our most fundamental documents and traditions. It is front and center in perhaps one of the most repeated expressions we know. The Lord’s Prayer speaks to it directly, in the one line that defines it entirely. Aside from platitudes and simple wishes, sincere as they are, its most profound substance is contained in the line, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Some scholars of languages say it should not be “evil,” but “the evil one.” But simply “evil” is truer. Evil exists in the world around us, but also in us. We fight with the moral and psychological sword of the Archangel Michael to fend off the often insidious ways that evil creeps into our lives. As with good, evil permeates the substance of our lives, and it has been allowed to grow in its influence too far now. It is arrogance, it is deception, it is holier-than-thou, it is selfishness, it is greed, it is power over the weak.
The forces of mass evil have been lurking among us since long before but inclusive of the Nazi ovens, and what we are encountering now is only its latest manifestation. There is nothing that says these times are going to be any less cruel or horrible than we’ve read about in the darkest days gone by.
Now we have an emerging generation of tech Nazis, drunk on their excessive wealth and the power it brings them over others. They study the philosophers of self-centeredness and they are caught in the grips of their euphoria, strangely victimized by the addictive force that overtakes them, while lacking awareness of any of the traditional means of restraint.
Yes, they are today’s Nazis. There is no remorse, no humility, no second thoughts in their behavior. If they feign religious sentiment, it is toward the false gods that will enslave them in their own mental and more pettiness.
There is a prophetic podcast running on YouTube that tells the story of “Dark Gothic MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America.”
In that half-hour expose, you can learn about, as one observer puts it, “How far-right neo-fascism influenced tech billionaires are using Trump as a pathway to crumble democracy in the U.S.A. and build an autocracy.”
Here are the names identified in that podcast: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Brian Armstrong, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, David Sacks, Balaji Srinivasan, Curtis Yarvin, Larry Elison, Stephen Miller and Mark Zuckerberg. Their plan is called the Butterfly Revolution. And yes, J.D. Vance is in on it deeply.
The steps they are utilizing are to 1. Campaign on autocracy, 2. Purge the bureaucracy, 3. Ignore the courts, 4. Co-opt Congress, 5. Centralize the police, 6. Shut down the elite media and academic institutions and 7. Turn out your people.
Among their sacred texts is the book, “The Network State” by Srinivasan, billed for its vision of “building a state out of your computer.”
That’s it, the ultimate alienation of a sexually-impotent class of misogynist youth with no friends but a computer screen that gets unleashed on the world.
As Gil Duran states on his Nerd Reich website, “Everything Elon Musk and his tech cronies are doing to our government is what Balaji Srinivasan spelled out in his network state cult manifestos – a tech CEO takeover of government, the purging of institutions, the rise of crypto corruption as a dominant economic force, the quest for new territory.”
It’s not as simple as wishing Trump less than well. It’s why unless we come at this from a different perspective, we’re going to lose.
