1. Both have been around for decades, running behind the scenes.
2. Despite the addition of sleek, public-facing interfaces, behind the scenes both are still around and still going strong.
3. Elon Musk arrogantly presumed he knew how both of them worked, but never actually had a clue, leading him to make big, stupid, public fuck ups.
"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." -- Frank Herbert, Dune
In 2016, voters were offered a choice between a competent, capable, dedicated public servant with a track record of success, and a lying, racist sexual predator. And 62,984,825 of our fellow citizens stared into the lying, racist abyss that is Donald Trump and said, "Hell yes!"
In 2020, voters were once again offered a choice between a competent, capable, dedicated public servant with a track record of success, and that very same lying, racist, openly-fascist sexual predator who had just finished nearly wrecked the country with his corruption, incompetence and unprecedented, non-stop lying. This time 74,224,319 of our fellow citizens stared into the lying, corrupt, racist, predatory abyss that is Donald Trump and said, "Hell yes!"
In 2024, voters were yet again offered a choice between a competent, capable, dedicated public servant with a track record of success, and that very same lying, racist, openly-fascist sexual predator who had now led a violent coup against the government of the United States, who promised to pardon the traitors who had tried to overthrow the government, who had been impeached twice, was credibly accused of serious federal and state crimes in multiple jurisdictions and was now a multiply-convicted felon. This time 77,302,580 of our fellow citizens stared into the lying, corrupt, racist, predatory abyss that is Donald Trump and said, "Hell yes!"
And in handing him absolute control over this country, they gave him the power to destroy it. Which he and his henchmen are, right now, in the process of doing.
From The New York Times:
G.O.P. Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, C.B.O. Says
Analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that Republicans’ new version of the legislation would make far deeper cuts and lead to more people becoming uninsured than previous proposals.
According to a report published late Saturday night, the legislation would mean 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034. Federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare would be reduced by more than $1.1 trillion over that period — with more than $1 trillion of those cuts coming from Medicaid alone.
The fresh estimates make official what many analysts had already predicted and some Republican lawmakers had feared. The size and scope of the health care cuts in the bill, particularly from Medicaid, have been hotly debated, with fiscal hawks pressing for bigger reductions and other Republicans resisting them as they consider the impact on their constituents and health providers in their districts and states.
They are also at odds with President Trump’s vow not to touch Medicaid except to do away with waste and fraud.
The scale of the proposed reductions in Medicaid is unprecedented in the history of the program, which has tended to expand coverage over time since its creation in 1965.
From NBC:
USAID cuts could lead to 14 million deaths over the next five years, researchers say
An analysis published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet projects that cuts to the agency will lead to more deaths from diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
From MSNBC:
Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' will end America’s time as a great power
The legislation guts America’s long-term economic competitiveness — and that's just the start.
From Evergreen Action:
Analysis: Senate GOP’s Updated Megabill is Still a Disaster for Affordability, Jobs, and Clean Energy
It’s official: Republican Senate Leadership has released an updated version of their tax megabill, which will likely be the version that goes to the floor for a final vote. And somehow, it’s even worse than before. Senate Republicans are proposing passing legislation that will lock in higher household energy bills, kill American jobs, sell out the health of working and frontline communities, harm Medicaid, jeopardize food assistance, and torch our future.
If this bill passes, Republicans would be responsible for the loss of over 800,000 jobs, raising the average American’s electricity bills by 10 percent, and in a time of intense heat and grid demand, they’ll be reducing new energy capacity installed on the grid by at least 50 percent. All this—simply to line the pockets of billionaires, fossil fuel executives, and their top corporate backers with massive tax cuts.
All of this and all that is to come aren't the actions of a single monster, or even that monster and his pet Republican cowards and quislings and fanatics in congress.
All of this and all that is to come are the result of a premeditated act of democracide by 77,302,580 of our fellow citizens, and of all their enablers who stayed home or otherwise threw their vote away because they just couldn't bring themselves to vote for the black lady, or because, y'know, Both Sides.
If 77,302,580 feels like too big and too abstract a number for you to get your head around, remember that among all of those tens of millions who affirmatively decided to bind our country hand and foot and turn it over to rapacious degenerate parasites are...
...people who are in the pews with you on Sunday, if you are a church-goer.
...people who are in line with you at the grocery store.
...people who are on the staff of your local school districts
...people who own local businesses.
...retirees living on pensions dining a couple of tables over from you at a local diner.
All of this and all that is to come is their fault.
It is our job to make sure they can never, ever live it down.
-- and he'd be too tall to go unnoticed if he tried to sneak off and go to the beach.Fetterman: I just want to go home. I've missed our entire trip to the beach… I’m going to vote no. There’s no drama… I don't think it's really helpful to put people here till some ungodly hour.
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2025
pic.twitter.com/ZJTAYBI74u
...so I'm wondering how this all worked out?
Everything sorted now? Everybody happy?
...there were countless, low-budget films about oppressed minorities kicking the shit out of corrupt cops.
It was part of the Blacksploitation genre and it was glorious.
And I am moved to wonder, as the Trump administration turns masked goons loose in American cities to go full Gestapo, if we might not also be looking forward to a renaissance of indie films about urban heroes, spin-kicking and cock-punching ICE thugs until, at last, they face off against a cowering, sniveling Mr. Big Forehead, who will be played by Pauly Shore
Fun Fact: Believe it or not, before they ran out, one could buy a (reproduction) Superfly movie poster at Bed, Bath & Beyond. Because capitalism.
As most of you already know, thanks to his ability to squint really hard and conjure mirages into mountains, and daydreams into deliverers, decade after decade, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has complied an unbroken record of manifesting, out of thin air, one Republican savior after another and one rising Conservative reform "movement" after another.
Of course they're always juuuust around the corner, "deep in the bowels of the G.O.P" or laboring industriously but anonymously away in statehouses, but always on the verge of springing into action. And thanks to Brooks' insider knowledge and special powers of observation, over and over again he has confidently reassured his readers that salvation was definitely heading our way at speed, so ignore those Liberal crackpots and alarmists in the steeple of the Old North Church, shouting and hooting and waving three lanterns.
(You remember the Longfellow poem, right? One if by land. Two if by sea. Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News teevee...)
Down through the decades as the danger from the Right very publicly loomed ever closer, the legacy media's message never changed: Don't you little people worry your little heads about any of that noise, because the Conservative Establishment (whose spokesmodels found a welcoming home on every channel and in every newspaper) has got this!
By 2009, David Brooks' Republican party was already doomed to eventually become the instrument of some monster or another. It was a roiling shitpile of bigots and imbeciles finishing out their first year of what would be an uninterrupted, eight-year-long hysterical racist primal scream: their reaction to the Democrats electing a Centrist Eisenhower Republican named Barack Obama who wasted his entire first term and much of his second trying to reach out to a mob of angry, racist lunatics who would have none of it, but which the Conservative Establishment kept insisting did not exist.
From his vantage point comfortably ensconced in the Acela Corridor quiet car, Brooks remained willfully oblivious to all of it, leading a legacy media cottage industry dedicated to looking right past what was obviously happening right in front of them, and instead focusing on a series of Conservatives saviors who were just over the horizon and therefor invisible to mere mortals
Instead...
Serious people.
Quiet conversations.
"austerity brigades". Heh.
Even as the Rough Beast -- the end-product of decades of Conservatives handing their politics and media over to monsters like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater and on and on and on -- slouched towards Election Day to be born, this avatar of the legacy media refused to behold what he had helped to create
Brooks, September 2015 with emphasis added for entertainment purposes:
The outsiders are about to slide. Trump’s Don Rickles act wears thin. His ego may be galaxy-sized, but his policy ignorance is a void that overspills the known universe. He’s the Wizard of Oz. When the bluster curtain falls down, what’s left is pathetic...
Instead, the party will veer on a course midway between outsider and establishment. It will probably end up with some hybrid candidate — sharp of tongue, gifted in self-expression and yet still anchored in the world of reality...
That’s where Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio come in. So far, Fiorina has looked like the most impressive candidate. She has a genius for creating signature moments. (“If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them to name an accomplishment of Mrs. Clinton’s.”) But her spotty record at Hewlett-Packard probably means she can’t start at the top of the ticket.
Dig this coo-coo diagnosis of Little Marco:
Rubio is young and thus uncorrupted, and he is a genius at relating policy depth in a way that is personal. He has clarity of mind and can sum up a complex subject — Russia, the Middle East — in a way that is comprehensible but not oversimplified.
This debate was one moment in time, but you can see the vectors of where this campaign is headed. This is no longer Bob Dole’s or George H.W. Bush’s G.O.P. But it’s not going to completely lose its mind, either.
Narrator: Brooks' Republican Party had, in fact, already completely lost its mind long ago.
It’s going to be somewhat the same, but edgier and more renegade. Right now, Rubio, Fiorina and maybe Chris Christie are best positioned to occupy that space.
Sometimes the amount of money, time, energy and professional integrity that legacy media has been willing to burn through -- and is still burning through -- to keep people who wrong all along in the spotlight, and, as a corollary, the keep people who were inconveniently right all along the hell out of the spotlight...takes my breath away.
