Nazi oligarchs have seized treasury control of an authoritarian White House and everyone seems kinda chill about it

For the task at hand – journaling the truth of the world as I perceive it – it is unhelpful just how hyperbolic reality sounds when described accurately. This is the news, not a Paul Verhoeven film, not Wolfenstein, but the distinction grows more meaningless by the day.

In just a single month, Donald Trump has casually threatened war with Canada, Mexico, Denmark, most of Europe indirectly, threatened peace with Russia, and is salivating like a Batman villain over Ukraine’s rare earth minerals and Gaza’s beachfront real estate. Not only are the rules of international power different now, the global anti-fascist opposition hasn’t even learnt to speak the language they’re being written in. The liberal centre does not understand this moment as yet, and is largely capitulating, because it was an integral part of heralding its arrival: the truth of the claim ‘socialism or barbarism’ should be fairly self-evident by now. Welcome to barbarism.   

In salesman mode for his ethnic cleansing plan, Trump yesterday released an AI video of MAGAza, complete with Trump casinos by the Mediterranean, bearded AI-women (highlighting his famous attention to detail) and enough golden Trump idols to make even Richard Dawkins a lil’ jumpy about blasphemy and lightning bolts. No one seems to care how much eggs cost anymore now that systemic racism is legal again, and television’s Dr Phil – Dr fucking Phil – went on an ICE immigration raid for an audience conditioned to boo and hiss and fear and hate. Schools are telling students to carry their papers on them because buses are being stopped for citizenship checks.

As a society slides into darkness, consent for the decline is manufactured across all aspects of public life, from the utterings of deranged presidents, to seemingly reputable news sources, to universities silencing historically accurate descriptions of genocide and apartheid, to creepy mustachioed daytime-TV jackoffs with a kink for human suffering. And there you stand, caught between a democratic apocalypse, a genocidal Western society demonising empathy and piece-by-piece making criticism of Israel illegal, and needing to go to fucking work every day. Needing to keep the kitchen tidy. Shave, parent, socialise, find love and joy while maintaining some semblance of mental health in a truly unhinged world. It feels ridiculous. And yet, what else are you going to do? 

Most-hyperbolic-sounding-but-still-somehow-the-unvarnished-truth: an unelected ketamine-addled Nazi oligarch that owns a powerful behaviour modification platform has seized control of the Treasury on behalf of an increasingly authoritarian White House. You see what I mean about the Wolfenstein thing, right?! 

Last week, inside the Oval Office, one of Musk’s sons told Trump to ‘shut up’ and that he ‘wasn’t the President’. Trump said nothing as a trenchcoated Elon loomed over him, presumably having pissed in the corner to mark his territory before the cameras rolled. 

As loopy as this all is, after decades of deregulating markets, destroying safeguards and privatising everything, we can’t pretend this doesn’t make perfect sense: of course the richest man in the world would get to buy the US Presidency. If anything, this is the apex of what America stands for. It is the logical endpoint of vampire capitalism. Free market nuts could only do one better if Elon manages to loot Fort Knox and blow the world’s money on getting his dick-proxy rocket to Mars. Zombie Milton Friedman just came in his tattered pants. 

Capitalism and democracy, despite what you’ve been led to believe, are not the same thing. Capitalism eats democracy if it is allowed to fester unsupervised – the Western world’s predominant ideology, with a quasi-religious fervour, for the last 50 odd years – and eventually all you’re left with are genocidal shakedown cartels, private schools with multiple polo fields, and a circus to make ordinary people feel empowered while they’re exploited at ever increasing rates.

Dangerous parts of this slide into authoritarian hatred have already seeped into Australian politics, media, and mainstream society. For a morbid laugh, I signed up to CPAC Australia’s mailing list. A local contingent, including Warren Mundine of all people, was sent to the US to hang with Ben Shapiro and watch Elon’s chainsaw hijinx in person. The cursed newsletter gushed that it was ‘Probably the coolest thing I have ever seen in my life’. These people are as cruel as they are lame, but they are networking, they are influencing politics without qualms or restraints, and they are all out for more. We saw this with Advance and the IPA’s meddling with The Voice referendum; there are similar machinations wherever we dare look.

The groundwork is well and truly laid here. We are, after all, if we’re being reallllllly honest with ourselves, a US vassal state paying Mafia protection money disguised as submarine down payments to an American imperial machine, the most murderous power bloc currently in existence. (I feel the need to preemptively qualify that that last statement is not me being a lefty weirdo – again with the reality sounding like hyperbole thing! – it is in fact well documented history: from the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the tens of millions slaughtered in Korea and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, to the invasions and paramilitary coups across much of Latin America in order to overthrow successful leftist governments and replace them with brutal dictatorships, to genocides funded and facilitated in Indonesia, Timor and Palestine. I could go on but we don’t have the time.) 

Let’s join some dots because the willfully unseeing Australian media seems reluctant to do so. In the disconnected news world, where day-to-day occurrences have no context and therefore no causality, none of this is a problem. China has a WARSHIP?! ARGGHHHHH. Look over there!! But in the real world, a place where history exists, there are red flag precedents flapping in our faces everywhere. History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes, and as far as I can tell it does so in an increasingly dumb, infuriating, decaying fashion. 

Every authoritarian regime in the world, as it comes to power, seeks to damage the public service, purging it of dissidents, shrinking it, making impossible the day-to-day operations of running the government as it once stood. On Saturday, Elon Musk sent an email to every federal employee asking them to list five things they did this week. On his Nazi blog, X, he tweeted that failure to reply by the deadline would be ‘taken as a resignation’. This, a few weeks after offering all federal employees a chance to get out on the ground floor. While dressed up as ‘cutting red tape’ and a genius capitalist seeking ‘efficiencies’, this is in fact a direct assault on the operational abilities of the United States government. 

Every authoritarian regime in the world creates its own myths and justifications for the horrors it wants to commit. On  X, on Facebook, in The Washington Post, and on the Fox News branch of warped media – including rabid offshoots OAN and Breitbart – reality will be distorted and inverted, up will be down, offence will be defence, and the rich will be fighting on behalf of the poor (by taking all the money, somehow). Foreigners, people that aren’t white, women, trans people, the disabled, and those broken by society will be to blame. It doesn’t matter who, just someone else. This has happened so many times before.

But there are differences this time, and some of them are troubling. The world’s richest oligarchs, some of them Nazis, one of them addled with a regular horse tranquilizer habit, now own highly addictive and extraordinarily effective behaviour modification platforms – reality bending timesinks such as Twitter and Facebook – and have goose-stepped their way into the White House. No one is omnipotent, and there are limits to their power, but the left has not even begun comprehending how asymmetrical this influence war will be now that wealth is so  monstrously unequally distributed and information technology has become so effective at wringing your dopamine stores for all they’re worth. 

Propaganda has always existed but we’ve never been addicted to it before. 

The three richest men in the world all own social engineering platforms of a sort. Elon Musk ($364.3 B), Jeff Bezos ($227.5 B) and Mark Zuckerberg ($227.1 B) own X/Twitter, The Washington Post and Amazon Prime, and Facebook and Instagram respectively. Even if you’re incapable of observing the impacts these platforms have on your mood, attention and thoughts – and imma be real with you: lots of us are incapable of this – this fact alone should be some indication of how effective they are at their unstated, off-label purpose: behaviour manipulation. 

This is a species-level problem. At what point does any resistance become impossible? We’re not there yet, but these are questions people smarter than I need to start reckoning with. 

Bezos’ influence stands apart from the two social media owners; his fingers are placed on the scales of more traditional forms of media and propaganda, but he similarly peddles in influence, vetoing the anti-Trump stances of his Washington Post editorial staff on multiple occasions. The opinion section has been re-jigged to feature only pro-market (pro-Bezos’ business interests) op-eds.

Australians haven’t quite clocked all this yet: if you’re waiting for Peter Dutton to usher in a similar age of authoritarian crackdowns on anti-imperial dissent, you’re missing what’s already happening right now. It is well underway, and old maps of power structures need updating. This rot transcends political parties. 

This week all 39 Australian universities ruled that any criticism of Israel could be considered antisemitic. Can you name me another genocidal state that it would be illegal to criticise in a history thesis? This is an authoritarian assault on anti-imperialism, on standing for humanity, on truth, and it was put through Parliament by the Australian Labor Party’s Josh Burns.

True alternative governments to this corrosive order – like a no-genocide option, an actually fixing the climate option, an actually addressing real wealth inequality option – are never on the ballot in the United States, the UK, or in the duopoly presented to Australia. Yes, parties claiming to be the left-wing option pose around some of these possibilities, but their track records prove they never do more than tinker around the edges while ultimately serving the needs of a gorging, immoral establishment. This is why more CEOs will get shot as the decades roll on – people are looking for real, big picture solutions, and this system does not offer that. No matter how hard a leader may pretend to like Midnight Oil, no one fronting the present-day Labor Party would ever tell Gina Rinehart to get fucked, would ever tell Zionists to stop silencing the truth around their genocide, would ever dare act in our national interest and tax major corporations remotely adequately. 

We have chances to arrest some of this democratic decline at home, but now is the time to start seeing it for what it is. All of this will get worse if major party duopoly entrenchment cannot be overturned at the next election.