This late February article in The New Yorker briefly covers some of the same ground as the video above in terms of the Silicon Valley fascist influence in US politics, the close ties between the Trump regime and billionaire Yarvinites, and why rich tech nazis may see Trump's election as a vehicle to further their long-term efforts to establish private dictatorships by breaking the US administrative state and replacing it themselves. As such we can use it as supporting evidence for the Dark Gothic MAGA video, and to expand our starting point for discussions about the prominent role of billionaire fascists (of various types) in America and the larger Pig Empire's turn towards overt fascism and autocratic political forms. Furthermore, the author examines similar historical examples when technocrats with authoritarian political and organizational views merged with, and the case of Imperial Japan, subsumed fascist political orders.

https://archive.is/eZy6v

Techno-Fascism Comes to America

"For a time, digital platforms seemed to support democratic government as a kind of communal megaphone; but now, a decade later, technology seems to be supplanting the established authority of the government. “There is a crisis of the state,” McElroy said, and Silicon Valley may be “trying to corrode state power” in order to more quickly replace it.

Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”

Given Elon Musk's position at the head of DOGE and thus his role as the de facto exchequer of what Trump considers his personal empire, but most still call the American government, I have no qualms with the way this article focuses on Elon as a representation of the creepy tech elites behind Downmarket Mussolini. In fact, the author's note that Musk's use of so-called AI to carry out the purges all of these nazis desire (for various reasons) might represent an opportunity to refine automated systems of repression and control for billionaire tech fascists looking to run their own neo-monarchal states in the future, probably goes a long way towards explaining why Musk in particular is so keen to run point on this whole project for Trump. After all, it's not a secret in tech circles that Musk has been looking for a way to become the leading figure in the "AI" industry, and what better way to do that than pioneering the use case for the "fascism machine" I've been telling you these rich nazis always meant "AI" to be?

I would however, caution against reading as much into the split between the tech-fascists (as represented by Musk) and the faux-populist MAGA movement (as represented by Steve Bannon) as Chayka does here. On a long enough timeline, it's possible that the billionaire tech-fascists, the Christian Nationalist right, the Bannonite "populists," and other patchwork constituencies that form the larger Trump movement may be torn apart by divergent priorities and ideas about who really runs Bartertown; but given that they all agree on methods of operation, and they're all pushing towards some type of fascist order, I think we're a long way away from irresolvable differences tearing Trumpism apart. Besides, the fact that it's Elon Musk standing next to Trump and waving around a chainsaw, not Steve Bannon, tells you all you need to know about who won that particular power struggle in the short term.

Frankly, I think the easiest way to understand the network of relationships, methods, and objectives of the various fascist power blocs in the movement behind Trump, is to imagine a minivan full of cartoonishly-evil nazis who're used to getting their way, all trying to control the activities of the driver, who may or may not be paying attention at any given moment. In this scenario the various groups of fascists vying for control of the vehicle Trump is driving are all on the same road, they all broadly agree on how to progress on their journey, but each of them intend to end up in different places by the time the drive is finished and they don't need the car anymore.