George Carlin said this years ago, well before he died in 2008. There are no huge conspiracies, he said. There are no closet clubs or cabals. They don’t meet in fortified caves or bunkers. They don’t exchange secret handshakes.
They didn’t plan the 9/11 attacks, cook up AIDS, or place microscopic chips in vaccines. They didn’t fake the Moon landings. They didn’t put fluoride in drinking water to…, to…, whatever they are said to have done it for. They don’t run the media behind closed doors. They’re not Masons, the Illuminati, or Papists.
I’ll paraphrase what Carlin said is really happening. There are people who believe they should run things. They believe democracy is a failure. They think the weak are a drag on them. The rest of us, they hold, should shut up and get out of their way.
They are billionaires and those, like Silicon Valley techies, cryptocurrency maniacs, and other idolators, who fawn over them. They see themselves as a special, gifted class who, by dint of their genius deserve more, much more — in fact, more, more, more, more, more — than the rest of us.
Have you seen the meme that says if an animal hoarded all the food around him, much more than he could ever eat, so much more than the rest of his species-mates that they would go wanting and even starve, we would study that animal to try to understand why? We would consider that animal somehow unbalanced. Why, then, can’t we see billionaires who can never spend all the money they’ve made, and continue to make, and steamroll the rest of us so they can make more, in the same light?
For most of our American history, we’ve viewed the richest among us as great men, hard workers, savvy, better than us. John Jacob Astor. John D. Rockefeller. Andrew Carnegie. Jay Gould. Cornelius Vanderbilt. Sam Walton. Henry Ford. Richard B. Mellon. Warren Buffett. Bill Gates.
They might not all have been billionaires but that’s only because inflation has elevated the old school multi-millionaire into today’s rarified air of 10-, 11-, and even 12-figure wealth.
More likely than great, or better, or more gifted, or more deserving than run of the mill humanity, they were — are — pathologically obsessed. Insatiable avarice is good, Gordon Gekko advised his ilk in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street some 40 years ago. That was — is — the billionaires’ creed: greed.
They are of a stripe. They recognize in each other their common philosophy, their common pathology. They don’t need to meet in secret hideaways. When they do meet, they do it out in the open, flaunting their annual Davos retreat as if god himself has bestowed luxury, money, fame, and power upon them.
The rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald observed in his short story, “The Rich Boy,” are different from you and me. This is true. But the real difference is not the one they think. They are twisted. They are warped. They should be studied with the same eye with which we might look into the behavior of the animal that hoards all the food at the expense of all his species-mates.
No matter; they’re different. They see in each other a kinship, an affinity of thought. They know, almost on an innate level, what’s to be done. There is an unspoken bond between them.
Who needs secrets?
Li’l Duce and his Muskrat doppelgänger are in the process of remaking America in the image of the billionaire. Democracy is utterly incompatible with it. Project 2025, to which they wholeheartedly subscribe, laid it all out on the line. The federal government should not be in the business of helping the weak, the poor, the lame, the tired. It should hardly be in existence at all, save for building and running the most powerful military the world has ever seen.
They’re also kin of the eugenicists of a hundred years ago as well as the architects of Neuordnung. There are far too many undesirables, draining wealth, taking up space, wanting. They haven’t come out and said it yet, and they may never, but their actions belie their reticence: the weak, the poor, the wanting ought to go.
Make no mistake, they believe in climate catastrophe just as much as any tree hugger does. This despite decades of their bullshit denialism. Only they’ll be able to insulate themselves against it while, in the future, it wipes a good chunk of those who, because they’re poor, because they’re weak, because they want, fry in the sun, drown in sea-level rise, fight over diminishing resources and shrinking habitable land, suffocate, and thirst.
That’d be good, a thinning of the herd, a cleansing of the gene pool. Just so long as there are enough people to constitute a market for whatever high-tech junk they think of to peddle.
Li’l Duce, the Muskrat, and the rest of their confrères and fanboys, see themselves as the New Royalty. They are neo-monarchists, 21st century oligarchs.
They want to be the new kings. Are we gonna let them?