Brett Weinstein: "Something is at war with us, “us” being regular citizens who want things to work and to be left alone. We’re slow to react because we think in terms of nations. Our enemies are mafias that wear our governments like a cloak to defeat our eyes, and fly our flags to disarm our minds."
Why have so many of our institutions have become so dysfunctional? Further, many of them have become Orwellian, which you can see when you compare their official mission statements with what they actually do. Dylan Ratigan offers this thoughtful analysis:
The Billionaires Are Not VictimsOne of the great distortions in American political discourse is the idea that populist anger emerges from nowhere — as if millions of people simultaneously became irrational, tribal, or extreme for no reason at all.
I don’t believe that.
I think what we are witnessing across the United States — on both the political right and the political left — is the consequence of a society that increasingly understands, correctly, that its governing institutions are not primarily organized around the public interest.
They are organized around capital concentration.
And until that changes, populism will continue to grow.
Not because people are stupid.
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If only I could conjure up a sprawling, complex, monied and politically-interconnected system of prophylactic gaslighting in order to protect me from any criticism at all for my own egregious misconduct. I don't have those resources.
I would need a very powerful social and economic system, indeed, to sell "logic" as idiotic as this: Whenever you criticize me for despicable things I actually did, you are criticizing my puppy, the Apple tree in my backyard and my second grade music teacher. That sad state of affair is where we currently are, as Glenn Greenwald describes.
Truly, it would take an immensely powerful political/economic force to sell that level of bullshit on a nationwide basis. It would take the kind of overwhelming power capable purchasing CBS and TikTok, as well as purchasing hundreds of members of Congress through AIPAC. With that kind of power and money and reach, we now see that one could even incentivize (or frighten) a college president to implore to her college students that 2 + 2 = 5.
What we are seeing in these modern times is that sufficient money and power can dispense with the simple logic and clear meaning of this Venn diagram:
“We will not solve our problem by electing the right people. We will only solve our problem by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”
— Milton Friedman
Used to claim that they were the party of the working class. That is not true anymore based on the following graph.
But to be fair, I'm not sure that either party is the party of the working class. I would think that virtually all of the issues that the working class would vote for overwhelmingly are being resoundingly rejected by both parties, Democrats and Republicans. As George Carlin noted, they don't care about us at all.