How shooters swim in big tech’s swamp of hatred |
The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us.
Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American – and only American – schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry.
Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii.
Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements more than 850 times just in the past seven months.
The Republican Party writ large has also benefitted from all this, since it was reinvented mid-20th century by Richard Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan’s embrace of “states’ rights” as the party of Christian white male supremacy. (The last four black Republicans in the US House of Representatives are ending their political careers this year.)
Because every right-wing movement in history has been founded on hate and/or xenophobia, the openly neo-Confederate MAGA movement was simply the logical end-point of this turn the party took a half-century ago.
History shows that when the right wants to seize power, it reaches for the oldest weapon in politics: Teach people to fear and then hate their neighbours, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.
Finally, the billionaire class and the massive, monopolistic corporations that made them rich benefit from the hate industry. When........