In the near to medium term, the only reliably profitable enterprise in the United States is likely to be influence peddling. In the long term, the singularity may also be turn out to be profitable, but not for our species. Invest wisely accordingly.
NB: I am not Warren Buffett, and I did not approve this message.
…try keeping tabs on people who are already living there:
From Federico Thoman in the America-Cina Newsletter from today’s Corriere della Sera:
Ma anche dagli Stati Uniti abbiamo parecchi spunti: un’analisi su come Trump ha cambiato la retorica di un presidente americano e di come l’amministrazione abbia imposto una «censura» a termini come «cambiamento climatico» ed «emissioni» al dipartimento dell’Energia. Se, come diceva il filosofo tedesco Heidegger, «il linguaggio è la casa dell’essere», non siamo messi benissimo.
But we also have plenty of insights from the United States: an analysis of how Trump has changed the rhetoric of an American president and how the administration has imposed a “censorship” on terms like “climate change” and “emissions” at the Department of Energy. If, as the German philosopher Heidegger said, “language is the home of being,” we’re not in a good place.
There are some fine things still to read in the world, especially if you’re lucky enough not to be trapped in the prison currently being fashioned by MAGA zealots out of American English.
The Supreme Court has finally finished booby-trapping every legal exit from our national fascist nightmare. For the moment at least, Trump’s Gleichschaltung appears complete. In a country of 340 million people, though, that’s almost certainly an illusion. Only the profoundly ignorant can rejoice in what comes next. Does Tommy Tuberville, for example, realize what his bodyguard bill is likely to look like from now on? Does he imagine that the Republican Party or the Trump administration is going to pay it for him?
*A previous version of this text appeared in the comments section of the Crooked Timber post The end of US democracy, by John Q
This is more like it, Governor Newsom. Keep it up. If responsible government officials do their part, we citizens will do ours. Our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor—we all know the drill.
We’re a quarter of a century into our new millennium. The Germans are eating less sausage, the French are drinking less wine, the Russians are trying to reverse-engineer 1991, and in the United States, our self regard has been abruptly terminated by an opera buffa Mussolini with a mouth like a guppy, and a face dipped in what looks like orange finger-paint. (Mussolini was an opera buffa character himself, of course, but the Italians invented opera, and they’ll always be better at it than anyone else.)
Despite what our newly-minted neofascist pundits are screaming at us these days, it isn’t time to re-think our principles, especially not at the behest of people who openly despise both thinking and principles. We already know what we need to know, namely that while we may not outlast them, our principles most definitely will. The rest is just noise.
George Packer seems to think J. D. Vance may still have a future.* I’m not so sure about that. J. D. made his bid early on, trading his shuck for Donald Trump’s jive, but he may not find it so easy to reverse the process when he needs to, and given the current state of US politics, at some point he’s definitely going to need to.
Not so many years from now, when Peter Thiel is safely tucked away in his New Zealand bunker, Musk is on his imperial pilgrimage to Mars, and the Donald is dead, the Sons of Trump will surely have no further use for J. D. He’s smarter than they are, to be sure, and he seems to have convinced the MAGAsphere that he’s as big an asshole as they are, but in the end he lacks the Trump boys’ financial resources.
Besides, even Fox News seems to have noticed that a Julio-Claudian-style War of Assassins may already be more in vogue in Washington than the fascist frenzy of Trump’s first hundred days. J. D.’s currency is still good at the Times, the Post, and—Packer’s stylish hit piece aside—The Atlantic, but there’s still many a banana peel left between him and the White House, every one of them with a Trump logo stamped on it right next to the Chiquita sticker.
*The Talented Mr. Vance, in the July, 2025 issue of The Atlantic
Rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance …, not only in ages in which it easily prevails, but also, even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree.
—Bertrand Russell, as quoted in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Chapter 23: The Sociology of Knowledge
Here again is that key insight we saw in The German Ideology: in totally changing a society, people must inevitably radically change their own ideas, and the nature of being human itself. Under communal ownership and democratic control, it would be socially impossible to be someone whose selfhood is predicated on the exploitation of others. A subjectivity that would desire such power would be meaningless, and have no social traction. Marx and Engels repeatedly stress that revolution is the transformation of people and ideas as well as social structures.”
— China Miéville, A Spectre, Haunting (analysis of The Manifesto of the Communist Party)
Political posts on social media often seem little more than rehearsals for what we’d like to see engraved on the tombstones of our friends and allies, if not on our own. Fair enough. No matter what form we choose to embody our resistance, la lutte continue:
