Dark, Darker, and a Different Kind of Dark...and then there was Light

We are thinking about Trump, Musk and the rest of the chaos far too narrowly. Time to blow some minds, or at least tweak them...

You arrive to the basketball court with your neighborhood pick-up team to play against your rivals from the other side of town. You know the other team is dirty, but their “dirty” is cheap shots, flopping, working the refs, and exploiting traveling and double dribble rules. You also know that they are a bunch of slugs, or at least most of them. There are a couple who are maniacally fit, but they are outnumbered by guys who look like they spent the last two years eating cheese doodles while playing Murder Challenge 3.

So, you are there waiting and the other team shows up. They look the same, but there is something off. They possess a special kind of anxious energy that you just can’t peg. The pick-up league referees confer with the team leaders at center court. The players take positions, four players from each team surrounding the two in the center, everyone waiting for the opening jump ball.

The ball goes up and your team’s center jumps to meet it. The other team’s center – along with the rest of his team – pull out Bowie knives that had been concealed under their clothes and start slashing at anything they can reach. Their bench players rush the court with their knives, slashing at whatever is in the way. They go after your team, for sure, but also the spectators, many who are there to cheer on the slashers. When one ref yells, “Stop! Put away the knives!” he gets slashed. The other refs clam up.

The bench players move to the tennis courts and start their slashing. They go after the nets, the players, hell, every tennis ball found gets stabbed. Then it is off to the soccer pitch and the baseball field. When everything at the park is cut to shreds, the mob goes off to find more – another park, a rec center, the neighborhood gym.

You call the league commissioner to get him to stop the chaos and restrain the slashers. He says that there is nothing he can do. The rules of basketball say nothing about slashing and stabbing people with knives. If they aren’t trying to stab you while you are taking a shot, you’ll have to figure it out yourselves.

Consider me one of the schlubs who showed up to play basketball – tough, rough, dirty, chippy basketball but a basketball without knives. What did I know? I was looking at the game as the game has been played more than a century and I wanted to play that game. My expectations and desires, as well as history, got me thinking that today’s game would be like most games, perhaps rougher and a lot dirtier than usual, but I can do rough and dirty, hell, I like rough and dirty.

What I didn’t expect was the opposition showing up with one goal, not to play basketball but to destroy everything and everyone, to break every rule until there were no rules to enforce and they were the only ones left standing, not on a pile of destruction, but with the space and freedom to rebuild things however they wanted to. Basketball? They never cared about basketball. All they wanted was a game rigged so that they could win every time they played, and since sports weren’t set up to fulfill their wish, they would destroy until they and only they could redefine sports.

Welcome to American Politics 2025!

We went into the 2024 election with two expectations of what would happen if Donald Trump won. The first was that we would see a repeat of his first term: Incompetent bumbling and half-assed, hateful gestures that caused people a lot of pain. The country would muddle through and, come 2029, we’d start putting shit back together again.

The second expectation was much darker – actually, the darkest of the dark. It involved concentration camps, complete patriarchal control, show trials, coerced conversions, forced confessions, torture, and so on. Trump was to bring some combo of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale as assembled by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. And, we might get this dystopia, but not now, not for quite a while.

Politics is primarily about power, so many of us assumed that would be the case with Trump. Not so. With Trump, politics is about wealth and money, what Trump uses to measure himself and others. Wealth is the lens Trump’s dad saw through, using it to measure the value of his sons. “What are you, young Donald, willing to do to make money? I hope the answer is ‘Anything.’ It is? That’s my boy!”

Through Roy Cohn Trump learned that perception is more powerful than truth. He learned that power is perception and molding perception is power. Through Vince McMahon and Mark Burnett, Trump learned the dark secret of the entertainment industry, that, through lies, manipulation, and public relations, he could control the public’s perception of him. Thus, Trump could mold the perception of his wealth to his ideal and then, through repetition, make that perception some people’s reality.

And because truth, rules, regulations, laws, mores, and traditions matter little to a narcissist intent on winning, what’s bringing a knife to a basketball game?

Incidentally, Silicon Valley operates much the same way. It’s a land of amoral hustlers and bullshit artists. It’s where the phrase “Fake it tile you make it” became a business plan and a code to live by. Silicon Valley is crowded with wizards, each maintaining his or her own private Oz, working to get enough buy-in on bullshit so that the buy-in becomes currency, which can be used to attract money and, subsequently, extreme wealth…and perhaps at the end of it all, a product.

Truth, rules, regulations, laws, mores, and tradition are just “obstacles to success.” If the obstacles can’t be destroyed, ignore them. Which brings us to the second part of the Silicon Valley business plan/code: Better to ask for forgiveness than be denied permission.

So, take Fake it til you make it, add Better to ask for forgiveness…, stir in Move fast and break things, and add a pinch of self-delusion (Do no evil) and you have Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Jeff Besos, Mark Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Google Guys. If Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried were not in prison, you could add them to that list, along with Martin Shkreli, Adam Neumann, and the directors of Silicon Valley Bank. Oh, and wade into the political swamp and you’ll find a friend in Donald Trump.

The advantage of living in the belly of the digital beast is that, if you haven’t smoked Valley dope, you know who and what Big Tech and their aspirants are. You’ve seen Fake it… Better to ask for forgiveness…, and Move fast… in real life and have seen how those things impact politics and economics for everyday people. You know a tight, expensive housing market thanks, in part, to letting short-term rental companies move fast and break things. You dealt with extreme traffic congestion caused by digital taxi companies asking for permission later. And you’ve heard the bullshit justifications, the claim that Tech does not and will not “do evil” and that ultimate we all benefit by letting Big Tech do whatever it wants to do. You know exactly what is up.

However, outside the Bay Area, what most people hear and believe is hype, hype filtered through American mythology, that of the rugged individualist, the scrappy entrepreneur, Think and Grow Rich, the “up by the bootstraps” guy, Howard Roark, meritocracy, and The Art of the Deal.

Until recently, in America’s mind, Elon Musk was a visionary, a genius, a businessman, and the “Richest Man Alive.” He became the Richest because he worked the hardest and won, not because he worked the system to find the biggest government teat he could find. In the Bay Area, outside the Tech Cult and those who a moved by PR, Musk is and has always been an annoying twit, a braggart, and a scourge. We’ve had a front seat to Musk using every dirty trick and illegality to keep workers at his Hayward Tesla plant from unionizing. We know about the atrocious safety record his company has, and how he not only abuses employees who work for him but goes after people who report on his abuse. We know that the guy is scum.

What we didn’t see is how damn similar both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are, and, more important, how they could find common interest in each other, something that is far easier to do if nearly all your relationships are transactional – which is the case for both men.

We assume that Trump letting Musk do his DOGE trip is quid pro quo for Musk supporting Trump’s candidacy with PR and big money. I think we were wrong. The quid is of much more value than we assumed, and so is the quo. I’ve no direct proof, but it is my sense that Trump and Musk’s first conversation about politics went a bit like this:

Elon: You know, Don, I can help you out.

Donald: Money? I can always use money! Money, money, money, gimme more money!

Elon: I can do more than that, I can get you the most money in the world, more than I have. You can be the “World’s Richest Man”!

Donald: Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well, oh-uh! Tell me more! Tell me more!

Elon: Let me at the government! I will strip it to the studs and then seduce the studs. And from there we will build whatever we want, a corporate state, perhaps, with a CEO instead of a president. Where the citizens are workers, and the economic elite are the shareholders. Everything that happens happens to serve the shareholders, who are, after all, the most valuable members of society.

Donald: Sounds great, but what if we fail?

Elon: If we fail, we still win. We might not get a corporate state but, shit, we got rich using this stupid democracy thing, so we will be fine. Besides, when I’m through there will be no rules or regulations, not ones that get in our way. Product safety, anti-discrimination, pronouns, HR departments, common courtesy, all gone. The cops, we keep, and we give them more power so that they can protect us from them. And while we are tearing things down, we get them to fight among themselves while trying to expose all of us as Hitlers. Oh yeah, they will focus on me, which is great, better me taking heat than you. I can handle it. Hell, I love being the bad guy. Bring it on, fools.

Donald: And all I have to do is let you do your thing?

Elon: Yup, you don’t have to lift a finger…and I will make sure that you are the “Richest Man Alive.”

Donald: Deal! Now give me that chicken bucket.

And the reason why I think that a conversation like this went down is because this kind of arrangement is typical of both men. It’s much simpler and easier to pull off than the creation of a totalitarian state. And it is exactly the kind of system that JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and the rest of the Big Tech Oligarchs promote, ideas you are familiar with if you pay attention to the dark side of Silicon Valley.

So, what do we do? I hate to say, but I agree with Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall. Marshall points out that systemically our options are limited. Donald Trump and the Republicans won the 2024 election. They have the presidency, and they have majorities in both chambers of Congress. They can do – or try to do – whatever they want, and the Democrats can’t stop them.

We can sue them in the courts, and we should, but ultimately everything could go to the Supreme Court, a court that is right-wing and sympathetic to Trump. SCOTUS? Who knows how they will deal with Trump’s appeals, but I am certain they will deal with them, and that, in itself, is not good. Prior high courts would have laughed Trump’s appeals dead. Not so with the current court.

Here, we take a lesson from Trump. If we are limited politically and legally, we adjust our goals. Rather than fight every fight to a knockout, we drag things out. We slow the fight down until we understand what is going on and adjust for that fight. We sue him, we obstruct, we use arcane Congressional rules to knot things up. We also understand that politics and the law are just two ways to change things – two ways that we spend far too much time relying on.

Aside from politics and the law, change can happen culturally, through music, art, and literature, which is what we used during the 1980s and 1990s when Reagan was running wild and the Democratic Party, under Bill Clinton, were trying to be GOP, Jr. It is what was used during the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 1960s and 1970s alongside civil disobedience, protests, marches, rallies, electioneering, lobbying, and legal action. Using culture, we moved the country socially to a better place, which eventually provided us with political and legal gains.

There’s civil disobedience, protests, marches and rallies – mass public action that puts pressure on the system and frightens the establishment to act. Mass public action means violence, mostly violence aimed at active dissenters. Not good? Well, being quiet and working behind the scenes also invites violence, especially when the opposition is eager to use violence. Best to deal with the fear by preparing for and facing blowback – violent or not – and then using their fear of us to force them to make change.

We ignore our strength as workers, mainly because we’ve been conditioned to believe that as laborers, we have little or no power. We are starved our history, a people’s history of organizing and dissent, of activism and strikes, of withholding our labor until we get what we want, what we need. This wasn’t always so.

Until the last half of the 20^th Century, we knew our labor history, we knew that our labor power got us the end of child labor, the eight-hour day, the weekend, higher wages, and safer working conditions. We believed in the union and in ourselves as workers. We believed that we could use our role in the economy – the immutable power of labor – to counter capital and make things better for all of us. And despite having to fight very wealthy corporations, the government, and the cops, we won a hell of a lot of fights. Nothing has changed other than our perception of unions, how we think about our power, and what we think of our personal power.

Curiously, we also ignore our strength as consumers. As much as we bitch and moan about customer service and product quality, we rarely organize as consumers to use our money power to create change, which is crazy. Our money is what they want. Getting our money shapes nearly every decision the Bosses make. And collectively we have a hell of a lot of money, spending power that can be used to crush companies.

You want to stop Elon Musk, stop buying Tesla products and organize to get others to boycott the brand (and whatever else he owns). You want to blunt Jeff Bezos, refuse to use Amazon. Trust me, they will change their ways or their power will fade. I’ll give you two examples. The first one involves organized action, the second not so obviously organized.

One the the most powerful tools used to fight South African apartheid was the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, something that was briefly used to move Israel’s government to a more humane position vis a vis Palestinians. BDS – which is essentially targeted refusal by consumers to spend money (and companies to invest) – worked so well on South Africa that the Israeli establishment and pro-Israel American politicians have demonized and tried to outlaw it, even though, legally, spending money is considered expression. They don’t do that if our money has no power.

The second example is the tobacco industry. Lawsuits against the Big Tobacco during the last part of the 2000s helped expose just how dirty the industry is. While we knew that smoking could cause cancer, We knew that Big Tobacco knew this, but we didn’t know how long Big T had this knowledge or how deep it was. Through the courts, we discovered that we had been deceived for decades, that early on, Big T knew that they were dealing in cancer and heart disease. Not only did Big T not care about the deadliness of their product, they worked to suppress the facts and punish those who tried to expose them.

States who struggled paying for the health costs of smoking used the information exposed by these lawsuits in public interest campaigns designed to get people to stop smoking. These campaigns were not Advertising Council soft balls, but strong and aggressive, with the goal of destroying Big Tobacco. State legislatures also passed tobacco taxes, intent on putting a price on their tobacco-related health expenses.

Taxation, public interest campaigns, and the lawsuits prompted millions of Americans to quit smoking. Even the use of smokeless tobacco dropped. And, while there’s been a steady increase in sales of vaping products, with tobacco company earnings on the rise, the industry’s “recovery” is nothing compared to its decline and fall.

Not only do we have more ways to fight Trump, Musk, and the rest of them than we have been presented, these strategies have as good if not a greater rate of success than relying exclusively on politics and the law and enhance our chances of success when used in conjunction with political and legal fights.

This is not false hope. It is knowing our history and thinking clearly about strategy. The next step is organizing, which is the willingness of people like you and me to get a little dirty and perhaps come to our next pick-up game with clubs, shields, and a hell of a hook shot.