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    A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power | Carole Cadwalladr

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    In hindsight, 2016 was the beginning of the beginning. And 2024 is the end of that beginning and the start of something much, much worse.It began as a tear in the information space, a dawning realisation that the world as we knew it – stable, fixed by facts, balustraded by evidence – was now a rip in the fabric of reality. And the turbulence that Trump is about to unleash – alongside pain and cruelty and hardship – is possible because that’s where we already live: in information chaos.It’s exactly eight years since we realised there were invisible undercurrents flowing beneath the surface of our world. Or perhaps I should talk for myself here. It was when I realised. A week before the 2016 US presidential election, I spotted a weird constellation of events and googled “tech disruption” + “democracy”, found not a single hit and pitched a piece to my editor.It was published on 6 November 2016. In it, I quoted the “technology mudslide hypothesis” a concept invented by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, who coined the term “disruption” – a process endlessly fetishised in tech circles, in which a scrappy upstart such as Microsoft could overthrow a colossus like IBM.Whoever wins, I wrote, this election represented “the Great Disruption. With Trump the Great Disruptor.” And, for good measure, I chucked in some questions: “Will democracy survive? Will Nato? Is a free and fair election possible in a post-truth world?”View image in fullscreenThat article was the beginning of my own Alice in Wonderland tumble down the rabbit hole. and I reread it with the sinking knowledge that this next presidential term may yet provide those answers. If it seems like I’m crowing, I wish. This isn’t a valedictory “I told you so”: it’s an eight-year anniversary reminder for us to wake up. And a serving of notice: the first stage of this process is now complete. And we have to understand what that means.We’ve spent those eight years learning a new lexicon: “misinformation”, “disinformation”, “microtargeting”. We’ve learned about information warfare. As journalists, we, like FBI investigators, used evidence to show how social media was a vulnerable “threat surface” that bad actors such as Cambridge Analytica and the Kremlin could exploit. PhDs have been written on the weaponisation of social media. But none of this helps us now.There’s already a judiciary subcommittee on the “weaponisation of the federal government” in Congress to investigate the “censorship industrial complex” – the idea that big tech is “censoring” Republican voices. For the past 18 months, it’s been subpoena-ing academics. Last week, Elon Musk tweeted that the next stage would be “prosecutions”. A friend of mine, an Ivy League professor on the list, texts to say the day will shortly come “where I will have to decide whether to stay or go”.View image in fullscreenTrump’s list of enemies is not theoretical. It already exists. My friend is on it. In 2022, Trump announced a “day one” executive order instructing “the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime … and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified”. And my friends in other countries know exactly where this leads.View image in fullscreenAnother message arrives from Maria Ressa, the Nobel prize-winning Filipino journalist. In the Philippines, the government is modelled on the US one and she writes about what happened when President Duterte controlled all three branches of it. “It took six months after he took office for our institutions to crumble.” And then she was arrested.What we did during the first wave of disruption, 2016-24, won’t work now. Can you “weaponise” social media when social media is the weapon? Remember the philosopher Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”? Well the medium now is Musk. The world’s richest man bought a global communication platform and is now the shadow head of state of what was the world’s greatest superpower. That’s the message. Have you got it yet?Does the technology mudslide hypothesis now make sense? Of how a small innovation can eventually disrupt a legacy brand? That brand is truth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times.You have a subscription? Enjoy your clean, hygienic, fact-checked news. Then come with me into the information sewers, where we will wade through the shit everyone else consumes. Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now. Our information system is London’s stinking streets before the Victorian miracle of sanitation. We fixed that through engineering. But we haven’t fixed this. We had eight years to hold Silicon Valley to account. And we failed. Utterly.Because this, now, isn’t politics in any sense we understand it. The young men who came out for Trump were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams. For podcast bros and crypto bros and tech bros and the bro of bros: Elon Musk.Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news? It’s where the world gets its memes and jokes and consumes its endlessly mutating trends. Forget “internet culture”. The internet is culture. And this is where this election was fought and won … long before a single person cast a ballot.Steve Bannon was right. Politics is downstream from culture. Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, quoted his old boss to me in my first phone call with him. Elections are downstream from white men talking on platforms that white men built, juiced by invisible algorithms our broligarch overlords control. This is culture now.The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied.View image in fullscreenThe challenge now is to understand that this world has gone. Mark Zuckerberg has ditched his suit, grown out his Caesar haircut and bought a rapper-style gold chain. He’s said one of his biggest regrets is apologising too much. Because he – like others in Silicon Valley – has read the runes. PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, creeping around in the shadows, ensured his man, JD Vance, got on the presidential ticket. Musk wagered a Silicon Valley-style bet by going all in on Trump. Jeff Bezos, late to the party, jumped on the bandwagon with just days to go, ensuringhis Washington Post didn’t endorse any candidate.These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed.Our challenge is to realise that the first cycle of disruption is complete. We’re through the looking glass. We’re all wading through the information sewers. Trump is a bacillus but the problem is the pipes. We can and must fix this.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      Here’s how the American press can survive four years of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      Everything we know about the next US president suggests that the press in America will be under siege in the next four years as never before.After all, Donald Trump has portrayed the media as the “enemy of the people”, has suggested that he wouldn’t mind seeing journalists get shot, and, in recent months, has sued CBS News and the Pulitzer prize organization.Now, with what he considers a mandate, he’ll want to push harder.“He’ll use every tool that he has, and there are many available to him,” predicted Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post and the author of Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, published last year.Baron told me on Wednesday that the president-elect had long been on a mission to undermine the mainstream media, and that he would be more empowered in a second term.Every would-be autocrat sees to it, after all, that an independent press doesn’t get in his way. Often, it’s one of the first democratic guardrails to be kicked down as a nation moves in an authoritarian direction.“Trump is salivating at the chance to sue a journalist for a leak of a classified document,” Baron said, perhaps using the century-old Espionage Act to exact a harsh punishment, even a prison term.With an aggressive attorney general – more combative than Jeff Sessions, whom Trump criticized for not being tough enough – that may be doable.And if even more source material is deemed classified, almost any story based on a leak can be depicted as a threat to national security.Another tactic: Trump’s allies will bankroll legal actions against the press, as the tech investor Peter Thiel did in a lawsuit against Gawker in 2016, forcing the media company into bankruptcy while portraying himself as a champion of quality journalism.Baron also sees Trump and friends threatening advertisers whose revenue keeps media companies in business – “and they will run for cover”.Then, if media outlets become sufficiently weakened, his allies may buy them and turn them into propaganda arms.Another likely move is to stonewall the press, making the job of informing the public much harder.Trump’s true believers, installed throughout the government, from the intelligence agencies to the IRS to the defense department, will anticipate what Trump wants and be hostile to reporters, Baron predicted. “Journalists will hit roadblocks constantly.”Toward the same end, legislation that weakens the Freedom of Information Act – which allows the press and the public the right to see much of what their government is doing – would be easy enough to enact with a Trump-friendly Congress.How to defend against all this?Baron hopes that media lawyers are already working on contingency plans to combat these moves, and that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press will have the resources it needs to help as challenges arise. The non-profit provides pro bono legal representation to news organizations, reporters, documentary film-makers and others; and often contributes court documents to support journalists’ fights to protect their newsgathering.On Wednesday, the Reporters Committee sent out a fundraising email with a dire message beginning: “We won’t mince words – the next Trump administration poses a serious threat to press freedom.”I spoke on Thursday with Bruce Brown, the non-profit’s longtime executive director, who told me it will be important “to separate the daily indignations from the true legal threats” that are likely on their way. But, he said: “We have to prepare and be clear-eyed and get ready to act.”The organization is ready, though, with 20 lawyers on staff, many who worked on these issues during the first Trump administration. “In 2016, we were a third the size we are now, and we have lawyers with vastly more experience.”Major media organizations, he said, “need to stick together and not let him peel them off one by one”.More broadly, Marty Baron believes that the mainstream press needs to work on its trust problem.It needs to improve how it presents itself to the public, given that so many people are willing to believe that today’s journalism is part of the problem rather than a pillar of democracy.Bezos’s decision to quash a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris certainly didn’t help with enhancing trust, though the owner claimed he was motivated by wanting his paper to appear non-partisan; about 250,000 subscribers disagreed, cancelling in anger or disgust.Baron (who was critical of the decision to yank the editorial) urges the press to be “radically transparent” with the public.For example, journalists should provide access to full versions of the audio and video that their stories are based on, and should allow people to examine original documents or data sets.“The message,” he said, “should be ‘check my work’.”Baron also believes “the press has a lot to learn about what people’s genuine concerns are,” and should try harder to reach audiences of all political stripes.Trump’s messages about immigration, he believes, have found such fertile ground partly because of people’s worries, whether evidence-based or not, about jobs and salaries.Rebuilding trust is a long-term project. But the Trump-induced challenges are immediate.To survive them, the press needs to get ready now.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Mass production of genetically selected humans: inside a Pennsylvania pronatalist candidate’s fantasy city-state

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      When Simone Collins, a Republican running for a seat in Pennsylvania’s state legislature, and her husband, Malcolm, were privately asked last year about their ideas for the model “pronatalist” city-state, they sensed an opportunity.With their own YouTube channel, online education platform and foundation, the couple are among the most high-profile and outspoken proponents of the pronatalist cause, which is centered on the belief that the developed world is facing a demographic collapse and that birthrates must rise to stave off disaster.The couple, who have four children, were approached last year by an individual posing as a wealthy donor willing to finance their work. In response to his request, they created a 15-page slide deck entitled The Next Empire: Leveraging a Changing World to Save Civilization. It contained ideas that seem plucked out of a dystopian science fiction movie. According to their presentation, the city-state they envisaged would become a magnet for “no-holds-barred” medical research, which in turn would open the door to the “mass production of genetically selected humans”.The voting rights of citizens of the city-state would be linked to their value to society, according to the Collinses’ presentation. The proposed city-state government would have “incentive systems that grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents” and would be run by a single “executor” – which the proposal also called a “dictator” – with full control of the government’s laws and operational structure. The executor would be replaced every four years by three “wards”, according to the slide deck. Wards would be elected by previous executors.It may appear that the Collinses’ views are so far outside the mainstream that one could shrug off pronouncements as eccentric and alarmist. But the Collinses are part of a movement they call the “new right”, which rejects some aspects of traditional conservatism and bills itself as pragmatic, family-oriented and anti-bureaucratic. They staunchly support the Republican ticket, Donald Trump and JD Vance, and billionaire Elon Musk.Last year, Malcolm Collins said he thought the Isle of Man would be the best place to begin.“I actually think that’s the most viable place to do it. You’re near the center of Europe, you’re in a rapidly depopulating area, you can tell them look, this will obviously bring a lot of technology and investment to your country. But the great thing about a proposal like this is even if they turn it down, you can take it to other countries,” Malcolm told the man purporting to be an investor at the time.The funding never materialized and the proposal was never pitched to the Isle of Man, a British crown dependency located in the Irish Sea, because the man who claimed to be a wealthy investor was actually an undercover researcher with Hope Not Hate, a UK-based anti-racism group. It shared video recordings of the encounters with the Collinses – and a copy of their presentation – with the Guardian.Asked about the slide deck in an interview with the Guardian last week in their home in Audubon, Pennsylvania, Simone and Malcolm, who work together and appear rarely to be apart, acknowledged that their proposal “wasn’t supposed to be public”. But Simone Collins nevertheless said she stood by its core tenets “100%”, including the idea of mass-producing embryos, and of giving people who they deem to be less productive members of society less voting power.“If you are draining resources, you should have less influence,” she said.Asked about how it felt to be the subject of undercover research, Malcolm Collins said: “The experience was quite validating for both us and our movement.” He added: “Now I think it is pretty clear that despite us not socially isolating people with toxic views, the worst views we actually have are being slightly elitist and weird eccentrics (which isn’t exactly surprising to anyone).”The couple say their ideas were meant to be experimental and fit for a city-state, not a democracy such as the US. But the views are not dissimilar to ones expressed by one of Simone and Malcolm’s political heroes, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. In a July 2021 speech, Vance said parents should be given “an advantage” and “more power” in the voting process than those who don’t have children.Simone Collins previously worked as managing director of Dialog, which she describes as an exclusive secret society, co-founded by Peter Thiel. Thiel, the PayPal founder, helped launch and fund Vance’s political career, and has supported the rightwing blogger Curtis Yarvin, who in 2012 said he believed the US should install a monarchy and “get over their dictator phobia”.‘We do target the elites’The Collinses often describe their pronatalist agenda in humanitarian terms – part of a wider bid to save the developed world from impending social and economic catastrophe. Their website outlines their desire to work with “any person or organization that shares our goal to preserve as much of civilization and as many cultures as possible”.But in the recordings made by Hope Not Hate, Malcolm describes their pronatalist agenda as being principally designed to transform the current socioeconomic elite into a future biological elite.“It’s easy to forget how small the population of people in the world who actually impacts anything or matters is,” he said. “When we do our campaigns we work really aggressively on how do we spread ideas within that narrow network, because also they are the people we want having kids and we want in the future.”View image in fullscreen“When we talk to reporters we’re very ‘Oh, this isn’t just for the elites’, but, in truth, we do target the elites – ha ha – unfortunately.”Malcolm said he and his wife are working to create a network of other pronatalist families, with whom their children can go to summer camp, grow up alongside “knowing this isn’t weird, what we’re doing” and, ultimately, marry. But this goes beyond the average desire to find family friends with shared values and be part of a community. “What I’m really trying to do is ensure that my kids have an isolated and differential breeding network,” he said.The so-called “elites” appear to be a central preoccupation for the Collinses and it is a theme they return to repeatedly and unprompted. “The very few families – and I think we might be talking about a hundred, 500 families in the world today – who are high fertility and really technologically engaged and economically engaged … own the future of our species,” Malcolm said.When the Guardian asked the Collinses about the remarks, Malcolm said they were “not incongruent with our other messaging”, and that they were better off “convincing Taylor Swift to have kids than John Doe on the street if we want to create ripple effects society-wide leading to more kids”.Race for the statehouseSimone Collins’s run to represent Pennsylvania’s 150th district in the state’s house of representatives was born, she said, out of frustration with traditional political campaigns. She acknowledges that her odds of success are low and that she has eschewed traditional local campaign tactics, like investing in ads or mailers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut she is a big supporter of Donald Trump’s run for the presidency and has sought through her own candidacy, which has mostly been self-funded by what she calls the family’s “what the hell” savings account, to encourage so-called low propensity voters in her Pennsylvania district to boost the former president’s chances.“We are very interested in tipping the election [in Trump’s favor] and one of the most meaningful ways I can do so is as a Republican candidate running in a key, key swing spot,” she said. The Collinses have done this, she said, by printing out “hundreds and hundreds” of mail-in ballot applications, filling them out, and sending them to potential Republican voters to sign and send back so that they can be sent mail-in ballots. She said it is part of an effort to examine whether there are “low-cost and highly effective ways” to sway election results, even in Democratic-leaning districts like hers, where incumbent Democrat Joe Webster was first elected in 2018. Records show Webster has spent about $80,000 on his campaign, while Collins has spent just under $5,000.“I didn’t have enough money to send mail-in ballot applications to every low-propensity voter, but we’ll look after the election of what percent of those people voted,” she said.Asked whether there are aspects of Trump’s candidacy that trouble her – from his criminal convictions to being found liable for sexual assault – Collins said she is no more troubled by the Republican nominee’s record than that of Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee.“Nobody elects a president. You elect a team,” she said. “So many smart people I know are tapped into who his team is going to be.”She is most excited about billionaire Elon Musk’s high-profile involvement in the Trump campaign, and the Republican nominee’s promise that Musk would lead a cost cutting and “efficiency” drive in government spending. Musk has admitted it would lead to “temporary hardship” for Americans.Musk is reportedly a father of “at least” 11 children, according to a recent New York Times report that detailed the Tesla co-founder’s effort to fill a compound full of his own children and their mothers. Although he has been open about his pronatalist views, the New York Times reported that Musk likes to keep details about his own growing family a secret.It is the emergence of Silicon Valley as key partners in “the new right” that has the couple most excited about Republicans today. The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn (a father of five) donated just under half a million dollars to the Collinses’ pronatalist foundation in 2022.The issues“I’m very pro-gun. If you walk around this house you’ll find guns all over the place,” Simone Collins said, pointing to an old musket that is mounted on the wall. She said the guns are locked up and not loaded, and that ammunition is kept in proximity. While others might not like the constant sound of gunfire from a nearby gun club and shooting range, Collins said she loved the sound.Child protective services (CPS), the state agency people can call if they fear a child is being abused or neglected, has visited the Collinses at home on two occasions. Asked what prompted the first visit, Malcolm told the Guardian in a written statement that it “was supposedly because our kids were wearing used clothing, played outside in our fenced-in yard (with us watching from inside), and got sick frequently (this was before we took them out of preschool and during a time when sickness in preschools post-pandemic was brutal as kids returned from isolation)”.The second visit by CPS, Simone Collins said, followed the publication of the last Guardian article about the couple, published in May, which included a description of how Malcolm had slapped their then two-year-old on the face for nearly knocking over a table in a restaurant. Slapping a child is legal in Pennsylvania if it doesn’t cause serious pain or injury.View image in fullscreen“After the Guardian piece came out, CPS was here again. They walked through every room of this house because the internet decided that we were abusive, terrible people. They came again. I feel bad wasting their time. They’re like, ‘Please don’t beat your infants, or whatever. But no, you’re obviously fine,’” she said.Some voters in her district have called her directly to ask about her stance on issues, including abortion. Abortion is legal in Pennsylvania up until 24 weeks, though there are some restrictions in place. Simone Collins said she would support what in effect would amount to an abortion ban in the state after 12 to 15 weeks, with exceptions if a woman’s life was in danger or the fetus had an anomaly. Any abortion performed after 15 weeks, she said, would have to include giving the fetus pain medication.Collins is, however, an unabashed advocate for IVF, which is opposed by many conservative and anti-abortion Republicans. Simone and Malcolm have used IVF themselves and plan to continue having more children. They also are “huge early supporters” of embryo selection based on a “polygenic score” related to intelligence. In other words, selecting embryos based on IQ.Collins is planning for her next embryo transfer in January. More

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      JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the antidemocracy movement in America | Robert Reich

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      JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice-president, will almost certainly be the Republican presidential candidate in 2028, regardless of whether Donald Trump wins in November.But who is JD Vance, really? An opportunist chameleon who once viewed Donald Trump as “Hitler” and is now his pit bull?Or does Vance have an agenda over and above mere political ambition?In one of the most important exchanges of Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Vance refused to say that the former president lost the 2020 election, and he downplayed the violent events of January 6. Vance also declined to rule out challenging the outcome of the upcoming election even if votes were certified by every state leader as legitimate.Trump picked Vance as his running mate because Vance publicly stated he’d do what Mike Pence refused to do – overturn democracy and place the US under Maga control.In response to a question ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Vance last February – “Had you been vice-president on January 6th, would you have certified the election results?” – Vance said: “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”In 2020, Vance alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. In 2022, he suggested that Democrats were attempting to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”.Echoing the so-called “great replacement theory”, Vance told voters, “You’re talking about a shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we never win, meaning Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.”In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice-president.Why has Thiel been such a strong sponsor of Vance? Because Thiel sees in his protege a future leader of a political movement to turn the US away from democracy. “For Peter,” said one of the people familiar with his thinking, “Vance is a generational bet.”Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement. He has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding 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.How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”Vance has been anointed by Thiel and the rest of the anti-democracy movement as the post-Trump president, tasked with replacing the US establishment with an authoritarian regime.Make no mistake: the foundation for the US’s first anti-democracy president is being laid right now.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      ‘Dangerous and un-American’: new recording of JD Vance’s dark vision of women and immigration

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      Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.Vance also sideswiped the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a one-time Somali refugee, claiming she had shown “ingratitude” to America, and that she “would be living in a craphole” had she not moved to the US.In an emailed response to the Guardian, Omar slammed what she called the “ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance” as “dangerous and un-American”.Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.Last week his campaign was rocked by previous comments blasting a teachers union president for not having “some of her own” children. His previous characterizations of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” have also troubled the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to suburban women.Now this latest recording raises renewed questions about Vance’s contribution to the Republican ticket, which is trailing behind Kamala Harris and her bid to be America’s first woman of color president.In the 2021 interview Vance also claimed men and boys in the US were “suppressed” in their masculinity and made racially charged remarks about American cities and his political opponents.Of Afghans who assisted US troops during the occupation of that country who were now seeking to come to America, Vance asked whether “certain groups of people can successfully become American citizens”, and said those hostile to Minneapolis’s Somali American community “don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in [their] own community”.At the same time, Vance claimed that “the left uses racism as a cudgel”, and that he had been a “little too worried” in the past about such accusations because they can be “career-ending” and “destroy a person’s life”.Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on topics including US evangelicals and populist politics, said: “Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced hypermasculine conservatism.“He appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity. He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all.”“What they share is the view that women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be in the home and rearing children. But the public line isn’t ‘we hate women’, it’s ‘women will be happier if they stay at home’,” she added.The Guardian contacted the Vance campaign for comment but received no response.‘Racial and gender resentment’A video version of the podcast was published to YouTube on 20 September 2021, and events discussed in it suggest that it was recorded in the days immediately before. The liberal watchdog Media Matters had previously flagged the broadcast.At that time, Vance was a relatively new political candidate. He achieved national prominence as a writer in 2016, but on 1 July 2021 he announced his candidacy for the US Senate. That March, the far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel donated $10m to Protect Ohio Values, a Pac established to support a potential Vance candidacy.View image in fullscreenThe recording was initially published as an episode of the podcast of American Moment, a rightwing 501c3 non-profit whose website says its mission is to “identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all”. At the time of the recording, Vance sat on the non-profit’s advisory board; he’s now listed under “board members emeritus” on the organization’s website.Vance’s hosts were American Moment’s president and founder, Saurabh Sharma, and its COO Nick Solheim. Introducing the discussion, Solheim speculated that Vance “may end up with some angry texts after this one. It was a very spicy episode.”In the recording, Vance repeatedly offered a dark vision of the lives of women who prioritized their professional careers.At about 39 minutes into the recording, when asked what he saw inside elite institutions like Yale Law School that made him view them as corrupt, Vance answered: “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children.”Vance added: “What they don’t realize – and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God – is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do.“The corruption is it puts people on a career pipeline that causes them to chase things that will make them miserable and unhappy,” Vance said. “And so they get in positions of power and then they project that misery and happiness on the rest of society.”Minutes later, Vance adopted the perspective of a hypothetical professional woman to answer Sharma’s question about where “the racial and gender resentment comes from”.“OK, clearly, this value set has made me a miserable person who can’t have kids because I already passed the biological period when it was possible,” Vance began, “And I live in a 1,200 sq ft apartment in New York and I pay $5,000 a month for it.”He continued: “But I’m really better than these other people. What I’m going to do is project my, like, racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them … even though the way that I think has made me a miserable person, I just need to make more people think like that.”Last weekend, Vance tried to clean up previously reported comments about childless women by claiming it was “sarcasm”.‘Soy boys who want to feed the monster’On the other hand, Vance depicted men and boys as “suppressed”, saying 52 minutes in that “one of the weird things about elite society is it’s deeply uncomfortable with masculinity”.Warming to the theme, Vance said: “This is one weird thing that conservatives don’t talk about enough … We don’t talk enough about the fact that traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood.”Assessing his young son’s habit of fighting imaginary monsters, Vance said: “There’s something deeply cultural and biological, spiritual about this desire to defend his home and his family.”He connected this with a hypothetical invasion: “If the Chinese invade us in 10 years, they’re going to be beaten back by boys like you who practice fighting the monsters who become proud men who defend their homes.”By contrast, for Vance, “They’re not going to be defended by the soy boys who want to feed the monsters.”“Soy boy” is a term, originating on the “alt-right”, which is used to impugn the masculinity of its targets.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion‘The left uses racism as a cudgel’Looming over the conversation was the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which had been completed on the orders of Joe Biden on 31 August, just weeks before the recording was published.These events led the trio to discussions of immigration and asylum, in which Vance expressed doubts about the suitability of Afghan and Somali people for immigration to the US, even those who had assisted the US military overseas.At about 22 minutes into the recording, Vance mocked the claims of Afghan refugees to have helped the US military in its occupation, saying: “Apparently, Afghanistan is a country of translators and interpreters because every single person that’s coming in, that’s what they say is this person is: a translator and interpreter.”He attributed the idea that the US should grant asylum to those who helped US forces to “the fraudulence of our elites”, saying: “You talk to people who served in Afghanistan. And one of the things they will tell you is, yeah, a lot of the translators and interpreters who helped us were great guys.”Vance added, however, that “a lot of the interpreters who said they were helping us were actively helping terrorists plant roadside bombs, knowing our routes”, without substantiating the claim.Vance continued: “The idea that every person in Afghanistan, even those who said they were helping us, are actually good people is a total joke.”Vance expressed similar skepticism about another immigrant group, while characterizing himself and others as victims of the left.At about 25 minutes into the recording, Solheim said: “There’s like a whole section of downtown Minneapolis that they call Little Mogadishu. Like that’s what they call it. There’s nothing in English. People are frequently hatcheted to death in the street.”Solheim added: “I was just down there a couple of weeks ago. It’s like a totally different country.”View image in fullscreenReplying, Vance said: “The thing that I hate about this is the left uses racism as a cudgel. And I myself was guilty of being a little worried about that. Like, I don’t want to be called a racist because I knew it can be career-ending and they can destroy a person’s life.”Vance then asked, rhetorically, “Why don’t you want, you know, people getting hatcheted in the street in downtown Minneapolis? Is it because you’re a racist or is it because you don’t like people getting hatcheted in the street in your own community?”“Like, obviously, the answer is the latter,” he concluded. “But the left uses racism as a cudgel to shut us up and to make it impossible to complain about obvious problems.”Last July, not long after being named as Trump’s VP pick, Vance suggested in a speech that Democrats would describe drinking Diet Mountain Dew as racist. The comment backfired and was widely mocked.‘You would be living in a craphole’Several times, the three steered assessments of migrant groups and their capacity for assimilation into negative personal commentary on the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar.View image in fullscreenAt about 28 minutes in, Sharma said: “You know, thinking about the Minnesota example, specifically, that’s how you get someone like Ilhan Omar, who despises the country.”Vance replied, “I mean, [the US] gave her an incredible amount of opportunity and she has a complete lack of gratitude,” later adding: “My family has been here as far as I can tell for nine, 10, like many generations. I’ve never heard a person in my family express the ingratitude towards this country that Ilhan Omar does towards this country.“And look, this is the way the laws work. This country belongs to Ilhan Omar in the same way that it belongs to me,” Vance allowed.“But my God, show a little appreciation for the fact that you would be living in a craphole if this country didn’t bring you to a place that has obviously its problems, but has a lot of prosperity, too,” he concluded.Congresswoman Omar’s full response to the Guardian took Vance to task over the comments.“The ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Mr Vance is not just troubling – it’s dangerous and un-American. I love America fiercely, that’s why I’ve dedicated my life to public service,” she wrote.Omar added: “America deserves better than Vance’s hateful, divisive politics. We are a nation of immigrants, and we will continue to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free – no matter how much it terrifies small-minded men like JD Vance.”Vance also talked about institutions like universities and the media as components of a “broken elite system”, and portrayed their inhabitants as enemies whom conservatives would need to reckon with.“There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.” More

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      How JD Vance’s path to being Trump’s VP pick wound through Silicon Valley

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      When JD Vance was a student at Yale Law School in 2011, he attended a talk featuring Peter Thiel, the conservative tech billionaire. Although Vance didn’t know Thiel at the time, over the next decade he would become Thiel’s employee, friend and the recipient of his largesse. Thiel’s millions paved the way for Vance to become a senator.Thiel’s talk was “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School”, Vance would write in a 2020 essay for The Lamp, a Catholic magazine. In Vance’s telling, Thiel’s talk of the failures of elite institutions and belief in Christianity made him reconsider his own faith and immediately make plans for a career outside of law – one that wound through the worlds of tech and venture capital before politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Vance is best known for the hardscrabble origin story he laid out in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, in the years following his graduation from Yale he developed extensive ties with Silicon Valley’s investors and elites. His time as a venture capitalist, coupled with his status as a rags-to-riches media fixture, helped him make connections central to his political rise, as well as garner him influential supporters that pushed Trump to make him his vice presidential pick.Following a brief period of work in corporate law after he graduated Yale, Vance moved to San Francisco and got a job at Thiel’s Mithril Capital venture firm in 2015. After Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller in 2016 and brought him to national prominence, Vance joined the venture capital firm Revolution, founded by the former AOL CEO Steve Case.Vance remained a part of the tech VC world after returning to Ohio and leaving Revolution in early 2020. He received financial backing from Thiel to co-found the venture firm Narya Capital – which, like Thiel’s enterprises, was named after an object from The Lord of The Rings, this time a ring of power made for elves. Other prominent investors in Narya included Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO,and Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, who announced his own support for Trump this past week. The stated goal of Vance’s firm was to invest in early-stage startups in cities that Silicon Valley tended to overlook.Narya Capital in 2021 led a group of conservative investors, including Thiel, to put money into Rumble, the video streaming platform that positions itself as a less-moderated and more rightwing friendly version of YouTube. Vance’s co-founder at Narya, Colin Greenspon, touted the investment as a challenge to big tech’s hold on online services – a frequent conservative talking point during the backlash to content moderation around the pandemic and 2020 presidential election. It was also around this time that Thiel, who heavily backed Trump financially during the 2016 campaign, brought Vance to first talk with Trump during a secretive meeting at Mar-a-Lago in February of 2021, according to the New York Times.Vance’s long association with Thiel also proved lucrative during his run for senator in 2022. Thiel put a staggering $15m into Vance’s campaign and, according to the Washington Post, helped court Trump’s endorsement, leading to Vance winning a tightly contested Republican primary race and then the senate election.Although Thiel has pledged in recent years to stay out of donations to the 2024 election, Vance has since flexed his other Silicon Valley connections to ingratiate himself to Trump. The Ohio senator introduced David Sacks, a prominent venture capitalist, to Donald Trump Jr in March, the New York Times reported, and attended Sacks’ pro-Trump fundraiser in June, co-sponsored by Chamath Palihapitiya, Sacks’ co-host on the popular podcast All In. The event, which cost as much as $300,000 to attend, was held at Sacks’s San Francisco mansion and featured the investor thanking Vance for his help making the fundraiser happen. During an informal conversation at the dinner, Sacks and Palihapitiya told Trump to nominate Vance as his VP choice.Sacks spoke at the Republican national convention Monday. In the days prior, he had also called Trump to advocate for Vance as the VP pick, as had Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, the ex-Fox News host, according to Axios. Thiel also expressed his support for Vance in private calls with Trump, the New York Times reported. When Trump confirmed Vance would be his running mate, Sacks and Musk posted fawning celebrations on Twitter – with Musk saying the ticket “resounds with victory”.Many of Vance’s wealthy tech elite and venture capitalist supporters now appear to be preparing to offer even more tangible support. Investors including Musk, Andreessen and Thiel’s co-founder in Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, are all reportedly planning to donate huge sums of money to back the Trump and Vance campaign. More

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      Why is a group of billionaires working to re-elect Trump? | Robert Reich

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      Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns.According to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about the president at least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on issues ranging from Biden’s age to his policies on health and immigration, calling Biden “a tragic front for a far left political machine”.The Times analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases the former president now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias.This is no small matter. Musk has 184 million followers on X, and because he owns the platform he’s able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize the number of people who see his posts.No other leader of a social media firm has gone as far as Musk in supporting authoritarian leaders around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used his platform in support of India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.Some of this aligns with Musk’s business interests. In India, he secured lower import tariffs for Tesla vehicles. In Brazil, he opened a major new market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. In Argentina, he solidified access to lithium, the mineral most crucial to Tesla’s batteries.But something deeper is going on. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch and their cronies are leading a movement against democracy.Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier, once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”If freedom is not compatible with democracy, what is it compatible with?Thiel donated $15m to the successful Republican senatorial campaign of JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. (Vance is now high on the list of Trump vice-presidential possibilities.)Thiel also donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claimed Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.Billionaire money is now gushing into the 2024 election. Just 50 families have already injected more than $600m into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of this is going to the Trump Republican party.In 2021, Stephen A Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, called the January 6 attack on the US Capitol an “insurrection” and “an affront to the democratic values we hold dear”. Now he’s backing Trump because, Schwarzman says, “our economic, immigration and foreign policies are taking the country in the wrong direction.”Trump recently solicited a group of top oil executives to raise $1bn for his campaign, reportedly promising that if elected he would immediately reverse dozens of environmental rules and green energy policies adopted by Biden. Trump said this would be a “deal” for the oil executives that would avoid taxation and regulation on their industry.Speaking from the World Economic Forum’s confab last January in Davos, Switzerland, Jamie Dimon – chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest and most profitable bank in the United States, and one of the most influential CEOs in the world – heaped praise on Trump’s policies while president. “Take a step back, be honest,” Dimon said. Trump “grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked”.Rubbish. Under Trump the economy lost 2.9m jobs. Even before the pandemic, job growth under Trump was slower than it’s been under Biden.Most of the benefits of Trump’s tax cut went to big corporations like JPMorgan Chase and wealthy individuals like Dimon, while the costs blew a giant hole in the budget deficit. If not for those Trump tax cuts, along with the Bush tax cuts and their extensions, the ratio of the federal debt to the national economy would now be declining.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut don’t assume that the increasing flow of billionaire money to Trump and his Republican party is motivated solely by tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. The goal of these US oligarchs is to roll back democracy.When asked if he was becoming more political, Musk admitted (in a podcast in November): “If you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a civilizational threat, to be political, then yes … Woke mind virus is communism rebranded.”Communism rebranded? Hello?A former generation of wealthy US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater because they wanted to conserve American institutions. Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman, Murdoch and their fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.As Thiel wrote: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy by supporting Trump and the neo-fascists surrounding him.Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the US had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power – as Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman, Murdoch and other billionaires are now putting on full display – which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.Under fascist strongmen, no one is safe – not even oligarchs.If we want to guard what’s left of our freedom, we must meet the anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government from oligarchs like Musk and Thiel and neo-fascists like Trump.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Peter Thiel won’t fund any 2024 races after backing Trump in 2016: ‘It was crazier than I thought’

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      Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who supported Donald Trump in 2016 and sunk millions more into underperforming Maga candidates in subsequent election cycles, has confirmed rumors that he is stepping away from 2024 political funding.In an interview with the Atlantic, Thiel said voting for Trump “was like a not very articulate scream for help” and that things had not turned out the way he had hoped when he donated $1.25m to Trump and Trump-affiliated political funds eight years ago.“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was – I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”Thiel told the magazine that Trump had called him earlier this year to solicit $10m – the same amount that he had donated to Blake Masters, a former protege who campaigned and lost a Senate bid in Arizona last year, and JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy who won an Ohio Senate seat.When Thiel turned down Trump’s request, he said the former president told him that “he was very sad, very sad to hear that”. He later heard that Trump had insulted him to Masters, calling him a “fucking scumbag”.Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and the big-data analytics firm Palantir whose fortune is estimated at between $4bn and $9bn, said that while he was not planning to donate in this cycle, “there’s always a chance I might change my mind”. He added that his husband “doesn’t want me to give them any more money, and he’s right”.He also said that he knew political candidates are “going to be pestering me like crazy”.The Atlantic profile sheds light on why Thiel, sometimes described as a techno-libertarian, had become a political donor at all.He explained that in early 2016, when a jury sided with Terry Gene Bollea, AKA Hulk Hogan, in an invasionof privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media – an action Thiel had funded – he read it as a sign that Trump could win.Ten days before Trump’s political coronation at the Republican national convention that year, Trump’s son Don Jr called to ask if Thiel wanted to speak from the platform. He agreed, he told the magazine, in part because he favored candidates with pessimistic slogans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“If you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch,” he said. “‘Make America great again’ was the most pessimistic slogan of any candidate in 100 years, because you were saying that we are no longer a great country. And that was a shocking slogan for a major presidential candidate.”Thiel also sounded off on diversity initiatives – calling them “very evil and it’s very silly” – and his interest in life-extension, a common theme among tech billionaires. “I should be investing way more money into this stuff,” he said. More

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      A social network for bigots? No wonder Kanye West wants to buy Parler | Arwa Mahdawi

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      A social network for bigots? No wonder Kanye West wants to buy ParlerArwa MahdawiThe rapper’s antisemitic remarks have got him banned from Twitter and Instagram. But here’s a safe space where he’ll be able to say just what he likes Kanye West, a man who can’t seem to stop saying bigoted things, is buying Parler, a social network designed especially for people who like to say bigoted things. I was a little surprised when this news broke on Monday because I thought Parler was basically a Nazified version of Myspace that nobody used any more. There are a bunch of fringe rightwing social networks out there – Gettr, Gab, Truth Social – and Parler might be the least successful of a very unsuccessful bunch. The Twitter clone was launched in 2018 with the stated aim of countering the “ever-increasing tyranny … of our tech overlords”; it had a brief moment of popularity then that fizzled out. No doubt because of the tyranny of our tech overlords.Despite the fact it’s not a household name, I’m sure I don’t need to explain why West, who has changed his name to Ye, is interested in Parler, which, one imagines, may soon change its name to Er. The musician, who has been moving dramatically to the right in recent years, had his Twitter and Instagram accounts locked this month because of antisemitic comments. Or that’s what us lefties have been saying anyway – West seems to think he was being censored and free speech is dead and liberals are trying to cancel him yada yada yada. Instead of engaging in any sort of introspection following his Twitter suspension, Ye apparently decided to fight for his right to be a bigot. Parler’s parent company, Parlement Technologies, put that in rather more sanitised terms. In a statement, it said West is making “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again”.If you think you’ve heard this story before, it’s because you have. Rich conservatives are obsessed with creating safe spaces where they can never be criticised or contradicted; where nobody cares about facts and everyone cares about their feelings. Donald Trump launched Truth Social at the beginning of this year after he was banned by Twitter. Elon Musk said he was buying Twitter then said he wasn’t buying Twitter and now seems to be buying Twitter again. Trump-supporting Peter Thiel has put money into Rumble, a more rightwing version of YouTube.While it may look suspiciously like they’re too fragile to deal with other people’s opinions, conservatives always couch their obsession with building echo chambers in terms of “free speech”. George Farmer, the CEO of Parler’s parent company, for example, said he thinks West will “change the way the world thinks about free speech”. I don’t know about that. I do know, however, that the acquisition (which is for an undisclosed sum) is likely to change Farmer’s bank balance.Farmer, it’s important to note, happens to be married to Candace Owens, a rightwing pundit who once suggested the US military invade Australia in order to free its people “suffering under a totalitarian regime”. When she’s not dreaming about liberating Australia, Owens is busy palling around with West; the pair recently wore “White Lives Matter” shirts at Paris fashion week. Owens also defended West after he tweeted that he was going “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE … You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.” This is obviously indefensible, but Owens did her best, saying on her podcast: “If you’re an honest person, when you read this tweet, you had no idea what the hell he was talking about … if you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic.” (If I’m honest, I think it was.) The Farmer-Owens-West connection has led a number of people to suspect that the Parler acquisition was a brilliant manoeuvre on Owens’ part to get West to redistribute some of his wealth to her family. Candace was cashing in on Kanye, in other words.While West’s descent into extremism is disturbing, his acquisition of Parler (assuming it goes through) is not keeping me up at night. If Truth Social is anything to go by, I highly doubt that Parler is going to be influential anytime soon. What is keeping me up at night, however, is the rightward drift of more mainstream platforms such as CNN. What’s keeping me up at night is the rightward drift of politics. West is a very prominent symbol of a much bigger problem. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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