As y'all know, I visit a lot of political websites in search of RUNDOWN fodder. Consequently, I see what the fringes are cooking up before it eventually gets served to the mainstream.
One of the more interesting dichotomies I've seen is the way the Right-wing media ecosphere treats tech billionaires. I find anti-Bill Gates stories nearly every morning. He is buying up all the farmland. He is supposedly cooking up a plot to force-feed us bugs. And he's secretly planning the next pandemic, ostensibly to microchip us through vaccines.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk is openly plotting the convergence of humans and machines, and is literally "chipping" human beings by surgically inserting his tech into their brains. But what does the right say about that? Nada. Nothing. Crickets ... which I guess I still hear because Bill Gates hasn't yet turned them into mass-marketed gruel.
Of course, I understand that it's a fool's errand to search for intellectual consistency out there on the political interwebs, but, just like the silence of many Elonites in the face of Musk's constant contradiction of his proclaimed "free speech absolutism," that lack of intellectual consistency (and/or honesty) strikes me as both notable and alarming. It's cult-like behavior and, as Jim Jones noted on a sign hanging over his chair at the pavilion in Jonestown, those who "do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Alas, I am not so sure that they are the only people who will be drinking the Kool-Aid when it finally comes time to serve it. Indeed, evidence indicates that some of the people of Jonestown were forced to drink it at gunpoint. Admittedly, that may be overstating the case a bit in regards to today’s political landscape. Then again, as today’s RUNDOWN shows, America’s body politic seems to be losing its mind. If nothing else, it means that there is little chance of good faith engagement in the public square. Instead, the public is squaring-off in a zero-sum game where the other side is not only seen as a political foe, but as spiritually corrupt and inherently evil.
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We're already drinking (and gagging on) a lot of poisoned Kool-Aid. Most Americans are against the abortion ban, and yet it stands in half of our states. We're already enslaved for perhaps 20 days a year -- check it out: I wish somebody would do the math and make a website where you could type in your yearly income and determine how many minutes (or hours?) per day you work to pay the percentage of your taxes that goes directly into the pockets of the corporate/military-industrial complex.