1) Trump is not the person in power. Musk is. the coup in the united states has already happened. Musk purchased control over the USA for over a quarter billion dollars, securing his unelected, unchecked meme position. he is moving on to germany and will not stop there

2) to contextualize the callous cruelty coming out of the new administration, understand: musk literally believes we are living in a simulation. that makes the rest of us mere NPCs, disposable lines of code

3) Musk demonstrates highly narcissistic behavior, benefits financially and legally from his takeover and shutdown of government agencies, and may believe he deserves to be god-emperor of this “simulation”. his silicon valley peers express concerns he has grown bored, struggles to stimulate himself after years of being able to do and buy anything he wants, and views life as a video game

4) Musk is not alone. Peter Thiel and his protege JD Vance were heavily involved in this coup, among others. the playbook they are running was written in large part by Curtis Yarvin and expanded by Balaji Srinivasan

5) Curtis Yarvin is a pseudo-philosopher who has spent decades convincing billionaires to destroy nation-states and replace them with venture-capitalist run “network states”. central to this philosophy is a fatalist assumption that democracy is doomed. in my opinion, Yarvin recycles a lot of material from Hobbes’ Leviathan. a cynic’s rantings disguised as deliverance

6) Yarvin’s philosophy is called, i kid you not: “dark enlightenment”. he coined a cute term, “patchwork”, for the process of dismantling democracies and divvying up former states among oligarchs. you can buy his book on amazon and watch these guys give presentations on their plans. they are not hiding, because they truly believe they’re right

7) red vs. blue is a distraction. black vs. white is a distraction. left vs. right is a distraction. the power gap is up vs. down. always has been. be kind and gentle to yourselves and each other. do not get sucked into lateral conflicts or debates. humanity has grown into an incredible global community, and we have each other… if we’ll have each other

exploited workers terrify their overlords, but only if and when they unite. in the 1500s, after successful revolts by unified black and indigenous people, spanish and french colonizers lived in fear of the people they enslaved. the slavers learned the importance of pitting exploited people against each other and began the work of constructing racism

“masters in a slave land would not sleep easily each night. europeans concluded it was absolutely necessary to remain armed, and use one race to fight the other. a french colonial dispatch later in the century put the matter simply: “the law is hard, but it is both wise and necessary in a land of 15 slaves to one white. between the races we cannot dig too deep a gulf.” [emphasis added]

Black Indians, William Loren Katz, page 34

8) be wary if a charismatic leader presents you with a seductively simple blueprint for society. blueprints are inherently violent. cookie cutters pressed onto our lives. life is organic and messy, while blueprints demand synthetic order. blueprints promising rapid change are carried out with bulldozers, guns, and paperwork. functional democracies and institutions develop slowly and can fall quickly. it is far easier to destroy than it is to create

9) listen. love. question everything

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