Thread by @JYSexton

We need to talk about how our economy is intentionally programmed by the rich and powerful to help themselves and how they use conspiracy theories and racism to hide their tracks and attack their enemies.

Our literal future depends on defeating this.

1/

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/a-cataclysmi…

It's important to start with this: our moment, with all of its ludicrousness and radicalism, is a result of a long, long process.

Donald Trump and his allies are symptoms of a much larger disease. We have to understand that disease if we're going to cure it.

2/

Beyond the conspiracy theories and radicalizing rhetoric of Trump and MAGA and this authoritarian movement is a system of wealth and power that continues to enrich and empower itself.

Our economy has been rigged for their benefit and these movements hide that fact.

3/

Our current era feels cold, bloodless, and inhuman because it is. The wealthy and powerful have hooked our economy and culture up to advanced technology that plunders our resources, searching for new means of exploitation, and ensures we live in an increasingly hostile world.

4/

The white supremacy and brutality of past eras of enslavement and colonialism have been laundered into this new capitalist system, the cruelties hidden behind laws and numbers, but this is an explicitly racist and exploitative system that controls the world.

5/

Currently, the system as designed is faltering. The wealth extraction is still operating at peak performance, but we are starting to see behind the veneer of it all.

This moment of struggle is waking us to a fact that many vulnerable people have already known and experienced

6/

We can go back millennia, but for this moment we have to start with the 1980's, where an ideology of neoliberalism captured Britain, America, and then the world.

This system is pure-greed, anti-democratic, and what was loosed on us by its architects has been disastrous.

7/

Like Trump, Ronald Reagan was a buffoonish mascot for a larger cause. He sold neoliberalism to the American people as freedom while the wealthy and corporations went wild, taking over our society and then growing to the point they rivaled nation states in power.

8/

Neoliberals like Reagan and George H.W. Bush unleashed the ideology on the rest of the world, breaking down trade barriers, subjugating other countries and peoples into the system, and ensuring that corporations could skirt things like minimum wage, regulations, and oversight

9/

Meanwhile, in America, towns like my own started to die. Neoliberal globalism ensured their businesses would be destroyed, that production would move elsewhere to exploit other people for less money and more profit.

It was the beginning of something we're all feeling now.

10/

American industry dried up as politicians promised we would all enter the middle class and become managers of the new system.

Of course, greed made sure that wouldn't happen. There were still opportunities to exploit here and neoliberalism guaranteed that would happen.

11/

Slowly but surely, things started changing. There were seemingly inexplicable moments of upheaval. Businesses shutting that were successful, trends emerging that were unexplainable.

12/

One of the more insidious aspects of neoliberalism is how it lulls people into a sense of comfort before the tide changes.

The relative prosperity of the 1990's was only a precursor to the suffering we have today. It started with vulnerable populations and has spread.

13/

In 2008, the house of cards fell.

The economy melted down in an apocalyptic flourish. Greed was obviously at the center of the crisis, but what most people didn't know was that a system of artificial intelligence played a massive role.

14/

To optimize business and find opportunities for profit, investment firms and the wealthy had increasingly come to rely on artificial intelligence to handle their affairs.

A simple algorithm used by people who didn't care about the consequences wreaked havoc.

15/

Neoliberalism had an answer though. While governments were made completely incapable of helping regular citizens, they were very handy for marshaling those people's tax dollars and then bailing out firms in the midst of crisis.

Government became an emergency fund.

16/

All of this has a reason. It can be explained. But entities like Fox News, beholden to the wealthy people running the system, saw an opportunity to peddle a different story.

The consequences of neoliberalism were transformed into a massive conspiracy theory for profit.

17/

What Fox News sells is an alternate reality where neoliberalism and capitalism aren't to blame for the suffering, but where evil, satanic plots involving evil liberal traitors are responsible for our crises.

It's a product. A weapon. A diversion from the truth.

18/

Conspiracy theories like the New World Order take neoliberal globalism, strip away its economic components, and turn it into a Christian mythological narrative where Satan and evil forces are carrying out a plan

It also, conveniently, leaves white supremacy out of the story

19/

Sensing an opportunity to use the anger, billionaires created a fake movement called the Tea Party to traffic conspiracy theories and white supremacist paranoia, which Fox News then grew through its coverage.

It was a means of deflecting the blame to political enemies.

20/

In a society of suffering, where there was no reasonable or widely available explanation, many people wanted something, some answer.

The Republican Party, Fox News, and the billionaires responsible were only more than happy to give them one.

21/

Trumpism weaponizes racial prejudices and religious paranoid mythologies to redirect populist anger from the fallout of neoliberalism to vulnerable people, people of color, women, and "traitorous" liberals.

It's an intentional deflection that only furthers the grift.

22/

Donald Trump is merely a grifter who took that narrative and ran with it, all the while lacking any shame in saying the racist, sexist, authoritarian things necessary to keep the grift going.

It just so happens, that that process actually radicalizes people for violence.

23/

While Trump uses populist anger and white supremacist paranoia to further enrich the rich and empower the powerful, followers have come to believe they are *literally* in a war for their own survival.

That makes them willing to embrace violence and destroy democracy.

24/

It's no coincidence that antidemocratic moments like January 6 and Trump's attempted coup are funded BY THE SAME PEOPLE benefiting from this process.

They are inherently antidemocratic. Neoliberalism LOVES authoritarianism and hates democracy.

25/

Meanwhile, the systems are finding new ways to profit while democracy is being shredded. Artificial intelligence is now gobbling up homes so that corporations and firms can rent them for super-profits.

It's literally dismantling what we believed was the American Dream.

26/

As conditions get worse, as people are exploited more and more, as wages go down, regulations disappear, and life becomes more and more dire, radicalism will grow.

And unless we do something, the rich and powerful will only use that anger for their own purposes.

27/

What's happening only seems inexplicable and unchangeable. That's the condition neoliberalism thrives on. This is why they want to destroy education and democracy.

To make you feel alone and powerless. But you're not. And this can be changed.

28/

The answer is to expose the lie, eliminate these conspiracy theories which redirect anger, and spotlight what is happening and what has happened.

As long as we let this grow, radicalism and authoritarianism will grow with it. History shows us this.

29/

We are not doomed to live these exploited lives.

We can do better.

We have to do better.

Because crises like this authoritarianism and looming climate catastrophe will create a future that is brutal beyond our imaginations. We have to change this.

30/30