The Roberts Court invited tech fascists to take over America

Tech elites led by Peter Thiel have been imagining how to undermine democracy for decades, paving the way for Elon Musk’s ongoing coup inside our government.

But it wasn’t their perverse fantasies of a world where rich men are worshipped and served like gods, the unfettered explosion of digital technology that exploded wealth inequality, or the creation of free-floating currency that only exists to avoid the law that made this all possible.

It was:

Those five men decided in the majority in Citizens United v. FEC. Let’s call the un-founders of America or the founders of fascism in our time or the shitheads who blew it for everyone who thinks humans should live free. That’s my conclusion after listening to the blockbuster first episode of Gil Durán's new “The Nerd Reich” podcast.

In this episode exploring the goofy intricacies and weapons-grade narcissism behind the tech fascists' vision of “Network States,” everyone’s favorite antagonist of bedbugs, Dave Karpf, succinctly and powerfully sums up a point that cannot possibly made enough:

The thing to flag here is crypto is the best example of it, but it's not the cause. The cause of it is the Supreme Court. In a world where the Supreme Court hadn't made the Citizens United case and said, you know what, money is speech and people can spend basically whatever they want. This level of spending would have been so flatly illegal that we wouldn't have seen it. So, I mean, 15, 20 years ago, it's not that the very rich didn't want to influence politics. It's that there were limits. And then the Supreme Court decided, well, how about if there just aren't limits anymore?

Karpf makes a tsunami of excellent points about how the tech elites decided to declare war on Joe Biden for Biden’s wild belief that government and consumer protection should still exist in the 21st century. 

This episode is littered with landmines of truth from Karpf, Durán, and Brooke Harrington, an economic sociologist at Dartmouth.

Harrington digs deep into the “libertarians are house cats” analogy that will cheer any adult who outgrew Ayn Rand’s worldview while still near enough to puberty to not be totally embarrassing. And she also makes a point about men and messes that cuts through to the heart of this humiliating moment in American history: 

If I could just add, this is where it becomes very obvious that the broligarchs who are leading this charge have never had to clean up anyone's messes. They've never done care work in their lives. Elon Musk goes around impregnating women, like, you know, the way he'd like throw some wildflower seeds in a random yard and just goes on his merry way. There's a very gendered aspect to this. There's a reason that there aren't many women libertarians, you know. Ayn Rand is very much an exception here.

 The only people who would think this was a good idea are literally people who have never had to clean up any messes for anybody, including themselves. And it shows. I wouldn't imagine Elon Musk knows how to do laundry or wash a dish, much less, well, what happens when you move fast and break things? There's an army of people behind all those tech bros sweeping up the broken glass, cleaning the shit off the walls that they leave. Remember the scenes in the Capitol after January 6th? There was this poignant moment where now Representative Kim was on his hands and knees with a dustpan and a broom cleaning up the mess. These broligarchs wouldn't get within a country mile of any of that kind of work. So of course it's easy to fantasize about how fun and cool it is to break things because they don't understand the value of the things that they're breaking and they don't understand what it costs to put things back together because they're never the people who have to put them back together. So what it means for everyday Americans, is living in a house full of broken stuff that doesn't work. Your oven doesn't work. The lights don't turn on. And you're going to have to wait for someone like, you know, the mommy Democratic Party to come on and fix everything.

Notably, as my one-time editor Jill Lawrence reminds us, Citizens United or a similar crack in the dam of our campaign finance system likely would not have happened or not so soon if Sandra Day O'Connor had not retired when she did.

So, in conclusion, blame men. These messy broligarghs would never have been able to make this kind of mess in our country and our lives if it weren't for the messy fascists on our Supreme Court.

If you want to dig deeper into the dick-stopic vision of Network State, be sure to subscribe to The Nerd Reich, check out Gil's fantastic videos, and listen to my interview with him last year when we talked about JD Vance as the Nerd Führer.