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oligarchy
Authoritarian Clickbait: Trump’s Spectacle Distracts From His Corporate Power Grab
While the world watches Trump’s political theater, his administration is quietly engineering one of the most aggressive transfers of public wealth to private interests in modern American history.
Mar 24, 2025
Traditionally, authoritarian regimes were defined by their capacity to control information. Critics were silenced, press outlets were shuttered, and opposition voices were imprisoned or worse. Power was exercised through fear, secrecy, and violence. But in President Donald Trump’s America, authoritarianism has evolved. It no longer hides behind walls of censorship—it thrives in plain sight.
Trump’s political style isn’t about suppressing attention. It’s about seizing it. Whether threatening to annex Greenland “one way or another,” mocking Canada as the “51st state,” or pressuring Columbia University to abandon free speech protections, the goal isn’t to avoid controversy. The aim is to create it.
In Trump’s case, the provocation is the point.
This shift reflects a deeper transformation in how power is exercised in the 21st century. In a world governed by algorithms, virality, and information overload, authoritarianism no longer seeks silence—it seeks spectacle. Trump’s provocations are not mere outbursts. They are designed and timed to dominate headlines, crowd out serious scrutiny, and keep the public in a state of reactive agitation.
These performances are not without precedent. But in Trump’s case, the provocation is the point. His administration has leaned into fascist-style imagery, with symbolic salutes, rallies drenched in nationalism, and open threats against political dissidents—both foreign and domestic. But this isn't authoritarianism for the sake of totalitarian control. It’s authoritarianism repurposed for an attention economy—where outrage drives clicks, and distraction enables deeper, quieter abuses of power.
The Distraction Machine: Authoritarianism in the Age of Virality
In previous generations, authoritarian leaders worried about hiding abuses. Trump, by contrast, seems to invite public attention to his most outrageous behavior—not in spite of its controversy, but precisely because of it.
What happens when Trump threatens journalists? When his administration cracks down on campus protests, or fans conspiracy theories about foreign states? The media—both traditional and social—explodes with takes, outrage, and analysis. These cycles create a spectacle that consumes public attention. And while Americans are arguing over whether Trump’s statements are ironic, dangerous, or “just trolling,” his administration is quietly enacting policies that concentrate wealth and corporate power behind the scenes.
This is by design. When Trump publicly praised authoritarian leaders while floating the idea of withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, or when he staged a militarized inauguration complete with nationalist salutes and fascist-style imagery, outrage predictably dominated headlines and flooded social media. While commentators debated the symbolic threats to democracy, far less attention was paid to the administration’s simultaneous efforts to expand fossil fuel drilling, dismantle environmental protections, and push through financial deregulations that directly benefit corporate donors and billionaire allies.
This is the sleight of hand that defines contemporary authoritarian populism. Performative controversies act as bait. While political opponents and the press react to each new provocation, policy moves quietly. Headlines focus on Trump’s tone, but not his taxes; on his insults, but not his infrastructure contracts; on his speeches, but not his subsidies.
As Trump escalates mass deportations, including the forced removal of immigrants to El Salvador, the moves are framed as tough-on-crime, anti-immigrant theater—crafted to energize his base and dominate the media cycle through performative spectacle. But behind the headlines, there are real victims: parents separated from children, asylum-seekers denied due process, and vulnerable people sent back to life-threatening conditions. At the same time, while public attention is consumed by immigration crackdowns, the administration is quietly advancing energy deals and deregulation efforts that benefit economic elites.
Rather than suppressing debate, Trump drowns it in noise. His style weaponizes the velocity of modern media, not to clarify public discourse, but to overwhelm it. And in that chaos, the structure of governance shifts: away from democratic accountability, and toward unregulated corporate control.
Authoritarian Theater, Corporate Power
While the world watches Trump’s political theater, his administration is quietly engineering one of the most aggressive transfers of public wealth to private interests in modern American history. The façade of populism masks a policy agenda deeply aligned with corporate elites, billionaire donors, and the industries that stand to gain from the dismantling of public regulation and oversight.
Tax policy remains one of the clearest examples. The tax law passed during Trump’s first term overwhelmingly favored the wealthy, while doing little to stimulate broad-based economic growth. Now, in his return to power, he’s doubling down. His 2025 budget proposal slashes funding for housing, food assistance, and healthcare. Meanwhile, Trump and Elon Musk gleefully proclaim they’re slashing government waste in the name of efficiency, yet remain conspicuously silent on the bloated corporate excesses of defense spending—where billions vanish into unaccountable contracts, overpriced weapons, and Pentagon boondoggles cloaked in patriotic branding.
The U.S. faces a dangerous convergence: a political class that performs populism while practicing plutocracy.
Trump’s cabinet and advisory circle are drawn from the ultra-rich—CEOs, private equity barons, and political megadonors. The revolving door between his administration and industries like oil, finance, and private prisons ensures that public policy is crafted not to serve the electorate, but to entrench elite interests. The prison industry, in particular, has seen surging stock prices and expanding contracts as Trump ramps up deportation efforts and privatizes detention infrastructure.
Energy policy tells the same story. While the administration rails against international climate accords and environmental “wokeness,” it is quietly threatening to sell off public lands and roll back environmental policies as a windfall for the fossil fuel industries. The beneficiaries are not small businesses or working Americans. They are multinational corporations and a handful of ultra-wealthy shareholders.
This isn’t an accidental byproduct of Trumpism—it is its core. Despite branding himself as anti-elite, Trump’s political machine is funded and sustained by America’s richest families and corporate lobbies. His alliance with figures like Elon Musk reflects a broader trend: the convergence of authoritarian populism with a new form of oligarchic capitalism—one where billionaires publicly attack “the establishment” in order to pursue their own profitable agenda.
As inequality deepens and democratic norms erode, the U.S. faces a dangerous convergence: a political class that performs populism while practicing plutocracy. This is the new authoritarianism—not built on repression alone, but on distraction, deregulation, and the strategic manipulation of spectacle.
Looking Beyond the Noise
Donald Trump’s political style is often dismissed as chaotic or unserious—a constant stream of tweets, outbursts, and provocations. But behind that chaos lies a deliberate structure: a feedback loop of distraction and policy, performance and power.
What looks like madness is often method. The attention-consuming controversies, the culture war posturing, the outlandish threats and statements—all function to consume public focus while his administration executes a radical, elite-centered program of capitalist plundering.
The real danger of Trumpism is not just what he says and does, but what it prevents us from seeing. As media cycles churn and social media outrage erupts, entire layers of policy are being written to serve corporate interests, privatize public goods, and redirect national wealth upward.
This isn’t just about optics or inflammatory rhetoric—it is a substantive and growing form of authoritarianism. Trump is using real tools of state power to target dissent, intimidate opposition, and punish vulnerable communities, turning repression into a political strategy. From aggressive crackdowns on student protesters to the mass deportation of immigrant families, these actions are not symbolic—they are deliberate mechanisms to consolidate control and clear the path for a hyper-capitalist plutocratic agenda. The victims are real, and the consequences are structural, not theatrical.
To resist this model of governance, we must not only confront its authoritarian aesthetics and the very real victims it creates—but expose its oligarchic foundation. It requires dismantling the capitalist plutocracy that thrives within—and actively sustains—this viral authoritarian political and media culture. That means cutting through the noise, tracking the money, and asking not just what Trump is doing, but who is benefiting too often in the shadows while the cameras roll.
In the end, Trumpism thrives not on silence but on spectacle—a new model of power built on authoritarian clickbait, where outrage fuels distraction, and distraction clears the path for profiteering.
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The Dark Enlightenment: the Tech Oligarch Ideology Driving DOGE’s Destruction
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t just tearing down institutions—they’re laying the groundwork for an experimental new kind of authoritarian rule.
Mar 23, 2025
The future of American democracy isn’t being dismantled by accident; it’s being systematically replaced to prepare the way for something entirely new.
A radical ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment is fueling a billionaire-led movement to gut our government, erase democratic norms, and install a technocratic elite in their place.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t just tearing down institutions—they’re laying the groundwork for an experimental new kind of authoritarian rule.
The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on—which Trump probably doesn’t even understand—involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.
Americans are baffled by the brutal, relentless attack on the institutions of America that they’ve launched.
Why would they destroy our reputation around the world by shutting down USAID? What’s wrong with the federal government helping poor school districts or giving college students Pell Grants? Why gut billions in scientific research that’s kept America at the forefront of the world and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives?
Paul Krugman recommends a psychiatrist weigh in; Dr. Bandy X. Lee (a frequent guest on my program) points that out, noting, “How exactly this plays out is, as I have said, a spiritual question.” Three New York Times writers even had a lengthy back-and-forth on the topic, under the title: “Is Destruction the Point?”
- Some speculate that Musk and Trump are both tight with Putin and they’re destroying our government at his direction, helping achieve the goal he’s had since his KGB days to destroy America from within.
- Others think it’s just a way of crippling government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and the Post Office so they can now be profitably taken over by private industry.
- Democratic politicians tell us Musk and Trump are just trying to cut government spending to pay for the $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will be introducing in the House in the next few weeks.
They’re all wrong.
The simple answer is that these people intend to replace the 240+ year “American Experiment” with a brand new governance “experiment” of their own. One that was largely developed in computer rooms around San Francisco.
There’s an actual ideology behind all this, and it isn’t the old-fashioned Ayn Rand libertarianism that was such a rage during the Reagan era.
This hot new experimental ideology, enthusiastically embraced by Silicon Valley billionaires and their “tech bros” dismantling our government, is called the Dark Enlightenment or the neo-reactionary movement (NRx).
And it’s not entirely new; they believe they have proof that it works, which can be found way over on the other side of the planet. I’ve been there, in fact, and it does seem to be working just fine… if you don’t care about freedom.
Back in 1994 I published a book proposing that ADHD wasn’t a brain disease or disorder but, instead, a form of brain wiring that would be highly adaptive during humanity’s long hunter-gatherer period but can present a struggle for people in today’s factory-like school systems. Time Magazine did a cover story about it, including an article featuring my book, and suddenly I was in demand literally around the world.
One of the countries I visited during the book tour that ensued (the book’s available in more than a dozen languages) was Singapore. A parents’ group had reached out to my publisher and set up an opportunity for me to talk about my theory and ways schools could be reinvented to work for both “normal” and ADHD kids.
I gave the speech and laid out a series of suggestions, and during the Q&A that followed, one of the parents asked how to best convince schools to adopt some of my ideas. I suggested they should “become politically active,” a standard answer in most every other country I’d visited (and here in America). Little did I realize the significance of that phrase.
When I got back to my hotel, an internationally famous five-star tower with a beautiful atrium, my room had been torn apart. The mattress and box springs were on the floor, as were the contents of my suitcase. Every drawer was pulled open. My toiletries kit was all over the bathroom floor.
I called hotel security to report what I thought was a break-in or robbery, although I couldn’t immediately see that anything was missing. The head of security showed up in my room five minutes later with the hotel manager. They looked around the room with neither shock nor alarm.
The manager explained, with a hint (but only a hint) of apology in his voice, “The police were here,” as if that explained everything
“They did this?” I asked, as I recall.
He nodded and said, “Presumably.”
“Why?” I demanded.
Both men shrugged. The head of security asked me if I’d engaged in anything illegal while in Singapore, particularly bringing illegal drugs into the country, and I indignantly denied even the possibility. They shrugged their shoulders again and offered to send a maid up to help make put the room back together.
The next morning, I had breakfast with some of the parents I’d met the afternoon before and told them what happened. They explained, in a whisper, that I never should have mentioned “politics” in my speech.
“It is not allowed here,” as I recall one telling me.
Singapore has come a ways from the mid-1990s, but is still an authoritarian state. As Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein wrote for Mother Jones:
During his reign, [Lee Kuan Yew, aka LKY, Singapore’s former leader] successfully fused pro-corporate libertarian economics and state socialism, creating a distinctly conservative mishmash of social and political control.
Singapore has banned all kinds of free speech; intervened in marriages and family planning; encouraged eugenics; caned people for minor crimes; created an ethnically homogeneous ruling class; treated the migrant worker population as second-class citizens; and, famously, banned chewing gum.
This is LKY’s model: economic development above all else—even human rights. A “soft” authoritarianism, as Fareed Zakaria has called it. “The exuberance of democracy,” LKY explained, “leads to indiscipline and disorderly conduct, which are inimical to development.”
According to the philosopher-king of the Dark Enlightenment movement, the guy who woke up JD Vance, and the billionaires who support him, Singapore is their explicit model for America’s future.
As Kaiser-Schatzlein writes about Curtis Yarvin and the other Dark Enlightenment thinkers who have inspired Musk, Theil, Vance, et al.:
For a new breed of right-wing thinkers, politicians, and activists, LKY’s approach to government is appealing. Curtis Yarvin, Silicon Valley’s resident neo-monarchist, compares LKY to FDR—both good examples, he says, of a unilateral leader.
And Nick Land, an accelerationist philosopher, calls LKY an “autocratic enabler of freedom.”
To them, LKY is the paradigm of an illiberal ruler who created a paradise for his subjects: a freedom without rights, a prosperity without disorder.
Sure, Republicans are going to gut government spending to pay for tax cuts for the billionaires who own them. And they definitely want big Wall Street banks to run Social Security just like George W. Bush handed more than half of Medicare (so far) over to giant for-profit insurance companies. After all, both industries represent such big campaign donors.
But this goes way beyond merely making billionaires richer or giving corporations more power over our lives. The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on—which Trump probably doesn’t even understand—involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.
And once AI reaches the ability to think with the intelligence of a genius-level human—Artificial General Intelligence or AGI—some of these guys believe that most of the decision-makers and agencies of the federal government can simply be replaced by banks of computers, deciding who gets what, when, and why.
All it’ll take is a monarchical leader who, like KLY, brooks no dissent.
Trump could be that leader—or at least the useful-idiot-frontman for the technocrats like Vance and Musk who are really running things—and the gutting of federal agencies opens up a space to replace them (and their workers) with AGI-based computer systems.
Rana Foorahar explains it in The Financial Times:
The philosophy argues that democracy inherently leads to social decline, because of the development of deep state bureaucracies that are unable to control oligarchic forces, and that societies should be run like corporations, with a kind of CEO Monarch in charge.
As Yarvin has said, “If Americans want to change their government, they need to get rid of dictator phobia... One way of dealing with that is... hire two executives and make sure they work together and there is really no other solution...”
And they’re much further along in the process of both gutting government and seizing total control of our political system to implement this experiment than most Americans realize.
- A new site that lays out exactly how they’re progressing toward their goal of kneecapping the federal bureaucracy is project2025.observer; according to the site, they’re about 40% of the way there, although the courts may set them back temporarily.
- And the project for billionaires to take complete control of our elected officials (and thus our government, at all levels) is also nearly complete: Fully 18% of all spending on the 2024 elections was done by just 150 billionaire families who represent a mere .00000045% of the American population.
The Dark Enlightenment has little use for democracy; openly disdains notions of equality as proposed in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution (viewing them as unnatural and counterproductive); and rejects what they call “Whig historiography,” which assumes history inevitably progresses toward greater liberty and enlightenment.
Instead, like Julius Evola, Thomas Carlyle, and Oswald Spengler, they argue that “classical” societal structures that ruled the world for millennia (like feudalism, monarchy, or cameralism) are superior to democracy and, completely ignoring the history of the development of modern democracy, should—with a high-tech AGI twist—replace today’s democratic “experiment.”
(Ironically, a large portion of the infrastructure that this movement is using was financed by fossil fuel billionaires who simply wanted to avoid paying income taxes and to have their oil companies deregulated so they could make more pollution and thus more profit. Similar to the people who funded the rise of Hitler—including Fritz Thyssen who wrote the book I Paid Hitler after WWII as an apology—many are now surprised, and some even frightened, by the turn of things.)
They are pushing forward with the “move fast and break things” slogan of the Tech industry that Mark Zuckerberg popularized. And they are having breathtaking success, between that strategy and the billions of dollars they are easily able to spend to seize the political power to fulfill their vision. They call themselves “Masters of the Universe” without a trace of irony.
Some high-profile observers of American politics are alert to this takeover-in-progress that most of our media has completely missed. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for example, recently wrote for his Substack newsletter:
Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.
Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.
In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure.
Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
He notes that these tech-bro “oligarchs of the techno-state” want to replace “inefficient” democracy with “an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.”
Rachel Maddow has similarly featured stories about Yarvin and others like him on her program, albeit infrequently. The New Yorker has written about the movement, as have multiple other publications.
Lefty intellectuals and progressive thought leaders are suddenly waking up to the Dark Enlightenment experiment that, like a glacier finally reaching the sea, has been slowly consuming the GOP as it moves along and is now—with hundreds of millions from Elon Musk buying the White House for Trump—suddenly cleaving off massive icebergs of damaged governmental institutions.
But a much wider understanding of what’s really animating Trump’s and Musk’s experimental destruction of our government is needed.
If Americans don’t wake up to the Dark Enlightenment’s creeping grip on the people who control our democracy, we may soon find ourselves living in a country where elections are meaningless, the government serves only the ultra-rich, and freedom exists in name only.
Pass it along… and get into the streets!
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Sanders, AOC Draw Biggest Crowd of Their Careers at Rally to Fight 'Oligarchy' in Denver
"The American people will not allow Trump to move us into oligarchy and authoritarianism. We will fight back. We will win," said Sanders.
Mar 22, 2025
On the heels of record-breaking attendance at a "Fighting Oligarchy" event in Tempe, Arizona earlier this week, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York held a rally in Denver, Colorado on Friday evening that drew more than 34,000 people—making it largest event that Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez have ever held.
Sanders, an Independent, wrote on social media on Friday that the turnout is a sign that "the American people will not allow Trump to move us into oligarchy and authoritarianism. We will fight back. We will win."
According to Anna Bahr, Sanders' communications director, the senator's largest rally prior to Denver took place in Brooklyn, New York in 2016, when he was running for president.
Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, wrote online that "something special is happening... Working people are ready to stand together and fight for our democracy. Thank you Colorado!"
At the rally, which took place at Denver's Civic Center Park, the two lawmakers hit on the same themes they spoke about in Arizona.
"The American people are saying loud and clear, we will not accept an oligarchic form of society," Sanders said, according to Colorado Public Radio. "We will not accept the richest guy in the world running all over Washington, making cuts to the Social Security Administration, cuts to the Veterans Administration, almost destroying the Department of Education—all so that they could give over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1%."
"If you don't know your neighbor, it's easier to turn on them," said Ocasio-Cortez, per CPR. "That's why they want to keep us separated, alone, and apart. Scrolling on our phones thinking that the person next to us is some kind of enemy, but they're not."
Sanders launched his "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here" tour in February, with the aim of talking to Americans about the "takeover of the national government by billionaires and large corporations, and the country's move toward authoritarianism."
The series of "Fighting Oligarchy" events have been taking place as some Democrats have gotten an earful at town halls back home, where constituents have come out to implore them to do more to counter efforts by the Trump administration.
Earlier in the day, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders also held a rally in Greeley, Colorado—which is represented by Republican Gabe Evans in the House of Representatives—which drew more than 11,000 people.
Semaforreporter David Weigel, who attended both the Greely and Denver rally, posted online that at the Greeley rally it wasn't easy to find people in the crowd who had voted for Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary. Weigel also wrote that the Sanders team told him that half of the RSVPs to the rallies were not from the lawmaker's supporter list.
Eric Blanc, an assistant professor the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, wrote on Bluesky on Saturday that it is "pretty remarkable how AOC and Bernie have become leaders not just of lefties, but of the Democratic Party's mainstream liberal base."
While its dangerous that "establishment liberals" are yielding to Trump, he wrote, "the silver lining is that this has enabled anti-corporate forces such as labor unions and AOC-Bernie to set the tenor of Resistance 2.0."
"Because today's anti-Trump resistance is more focused on economic concerns, more rooted in labor unions, and more anti-billionaire, it has the potential to sink much deeper roots among working people and, in so doing, to definitively overcome MAGA," wrote Blanc.
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