Tiny bubbles

This country has a big problem: Billionaires. Billionaires and white evangelical Christians. Amongst this country’s problems are billionaires, white evangelical Christians, and an almost fanatical devotion to Donald Trump.

I’ll come in again:

Not sure it makes sense to divide crypto and gambling into two categories but it’s not my graph.

What’s going on here? Krugman explains:

Why are the billionaires doubling down in support of a hugely unpopular president and his hugely unpopular agenda?

This partly reflects a change in the nature of billionaires’ relationship with the extreme right. Twenty years ago American conservatism was dominated by a “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” strategy in which corporations and the wealthy used racism and bigotry to advance their goals — tax cuts and deregulation — without necessarily being racists and bigots themselves. Today Elon Musk isn’t putting on a show of being a neo-Nazi, because that’s who he really is.

Beyond that, Trump’s second presidency is so pervasively corrupt, abusive and destructive that it will be virtually impossible for anyone who supported him to move on and rehabilitate themselves. Outside of MAGA, who will ever be willing to trust Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos again? Frankly, what political hopeful would be stupid or venal enough to associate with them?

Indeed, I believe and hope that if Democrats regain power, they won’t repeat past mistakes by trying to “move on” from the corruption and scandals of the previous regime. It’s now clear that Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, enabled Trump’s return to power by slow-walking the investigation of January 6^th. Earlier, Barack Obama let Republicans off the hook by not pursuing the lies that led to the Iraq war. Let’s hope that this time the Democrats, once in control of one or both houses of Congress, will quickly initiate investigations, hearings and, where warranted, prosecutions. And it’s unlikely that Trump’s billionaire money men will escape unscathed.

So rather than trying to mollify the Democrats and defuse the coming political reckoning, the billionaire class is opening the money taps, going all out to prevent Democrats from being elected. And why not? For Musk, the Koch Brothers, Ken Griffin, Alex Karp and others hundreds of millions is pocket change, while billion-dollar business interests and, in some cases, possible criminal charges are at stake.

I’m feeling pretty pessimistic this morning, after reading Dave Wasserman on how badly Democrats lost the gerrymandering wars (pretty badly, as in a half dozen seats worth). My main concern is that Democrats take the House with something like a seven-seat majority, and this is close enough for Trump to go all in on a bunch of bullshit about how the election was “rigged,” which will lead to who knows what sort of chaos when it’s time to seat the new Congress. The bigger concern is that extreme polarization created by practically impenetrable epistemic bubbles — many created quite intentionally by billionaires buying up the media — has made something like a true wave election almost impossible anymore, even in a situation where Donald Trump’s approval is down to 30% or whatever it will be in three months, after eight more total victories and seven final peace deals in Iran, and five dollar a gallon gas etc.

Speaking of bubbles:

In an age in which many prominent public intellectuals and pseudo-intellectual celebrities seem to have lost their grip on sanity, we need to develop some metrics in regard to how far gone any individual in this troublingly large group has gone.

For example, besides Naomi Wolf, we have Aaron Rodgers, who thinks the Sandy Hook massacre and 9/11 were fake, that Anthony Fauci created HIV, and that the Tartarian empire is real, as opposed to a pseudo-historical fraud perpetrated by Russian nationalists.

Then we have Lara Logan, former Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for CBS News, then subsequently a Fox News personality until she went too far even for them.  Her beliefs include that Pizzagate and QAnon are real, that Volodymyr Zelensky is a Satanist, that the Rothschilds hired Charles Darwin to invent evolutionary theory, and also started the American Civil War.  (She also subscribes to most if not all of Aaron Rodgers’s views listed above).

Moving right along, there is James Delingpole, who used to be an at least semi-respectable “climate skeptic,” but has subsequently flipped out completely, embracing flat Earth theory, the idea dinosaurs are fake, the moon landings were faked, and so forth.

The key thing to keep in mind here, in regard to the way crankery and crank magnetism work in the cyber-age, is that these were all people of very considerable professional success and public respectability.  Aaron Rodgers, besides being a genius at reading NFL defenses, is quite verbally adept, and is talented enough in that regard to have done a credible job hosting the popular Jeopardy television game show.

Wolf was not only a highly regarded author in the 1990s: she was one of Al Gore’s key advisors for his 2000 presidential run, insisting that he don earth tones to win over crucial electoral demographics.  Logan was at the top of the TV news journalism world.  Delingpole wrote regularly for lots of fancy British newspapers, as well as National Review and the like.

Somehow, they all went completely nuts.  It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ready availability of all sorts of online cognitive garbage helped them slide so far down the crazy hole.  You can, in fact, do a lot of your own research a quarter of the way through the 21^st century, and we see the results.  If you are or choose to become sufficiently credulous, despite evident cognitive gifts of various sorts, there are quite literally thousands of online videos, fully footnoted manifestos, cyber-communities of mutually reinforcing true believers, and other forms of internet mental poison, that can turn you into the kind of person Wolf, Rodgers, Logan, Delingpole, and so many others like them have become.

From the chapter “Who’s Afraid of Naomi Wolf?”, in The Triumph of Stupidity