Thread by @NafeezAhmed

🧵Donald Trump’s victory is an inflection point for the America, the West, and the planet. It has been enabled by a network of billionaires, think tanks and lobbying groups that believe, as does the Russian Government, that democracy must be destroyed /1 bylinetimes.com/2024/11/08/tru…

Social and economic dynamics driving rocketing rates of inflation, clearly played a key role. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was a trigger. Its inflationary impact was part of Vladimir Putin’s ‘hybrid warfare’ strategy to destabilise Western democracies /2 bylinetimes.com/2022/03/30/wea…

A long-term rise in inflation and declining rates of economic growth over the past half-century have been occurring for deeper structural reasons.

The massive decline in the energy returns from fossil fuels, relative to the rising energy required to extract those returns, appears to be one of the most significant (but largely overlooked) reasons for this long-term structural crisis in the global financial system.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats fully recognise the nature of this crisis /3 bylinetimes.com/2021/10/20/oil…

Democrats want to maintain the prevailing system with some tinkering here and there. The Alt Reich movement behind Trump wants to maintain the fundamental unequal resource ownership structures that underpin the neoliberal financial order, while tearing down and re-engineering the liberal political organising structures that currently regulate this system. It wants to replace these structures with new authoritarian regimes that can manage it in a way that can be more effectively dominated by a very particular faction of white supremacist elite interests across key extractive industries, automation, and information technologies. /4 bylinetimes.com/2024/11/08/tru…

The Trump campaign used disinformation to channel mounting American anger into a polarising ideology blaming migrants, minorities, and leftists for America’s problems. But who was really fighting this disinformation. In my book ALT REICH (register interest below), I identify several flanks /5 mailchi.mp/bylinetimes.co…

The political flank - a network of political lobby groups offering authoritarian blueprints like the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, Agenda 47, the America Policy First Plan. Some pundits think these are all competing. They are. But they're also overlapping, and coordinating, sharing staff and authorship. This nuance is often lost in conventional reporting - that they represent a shared consensus /6 bylinetimes.com/2024/11/08/tru…

Critical. These Project 2025 style agendas are not isolated to America. They are already being projected abroad and adapted locally. The Heritage Foundation has extensive ties with the Atlas Network of 500 free-market think tanks across more than 100 countries.

Sir Antony Fisher, the Heritage Foundation’s founder, had mobilised its infrastructure, personnel, and funding to seed the Atlas Network across the world, including the Tufton Street network of hard-Brexist groups including the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK. /7 bylinetimes.com/2024/11/08/tru…

The techno-utopian flank: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sacks – 3 South African-born billionaire oligarchs – aim to refashion world order in their own interests, which combine with extreme market ideologies demanding zero restrictions on capital /8 bylinetimes.com/2024/11/08/tru…

Curtis Yarvin, an inspiration to Thiel and his surrogate JD Vance, calls for national democracies to shattered to pave the way for a ‘patchwork’ of newly defined corporate-controlled sovereign territories that operate, not according to the democratic views of citizens, but according to the corporate sovereign. /9 bylinetimes.com/2024/11/08/tru…

Yarvin originated the idea of ‘RAGE’ – ‘Retire All Government Employees’ and replace them with Republican ideologues – in 2012, which was recently endorsed by Vance. It helped inspire Project 2025 and similar blueprints. Now he calls for an "elective monarchy" /10

Such techno-authoritarian thinking is often combined with revamped forms of eugenics, which advocate that virtually anything is justifiable to guarantee a future in which trillions of humans populate the solar system and merge with machines to experience the delights of virtual reality via planet-sized computers /11 bylinesupplement.com/p/the-far-righ…

Devaluing the US dollar and its reserve currency status – as well as the value of other Western currencies – while skyrocketing the value of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, is seen as a tool to weaken national governments and maximise the centralised wealth of this group of tech billionaires /12 washingtonspectator.org/peter-thiel-an…

Then there's the Russian flank: Trump is a victory for 'American putinism' according to Russian philosopher and Putin associate Aleksandr Dugin: “So we have won. That is decisive. The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy” /13

https://x.com/Agdchan/status/1854136340184490282

There are of course, other flanks. From all of them, a 'somewhat' coherent vision is now emerging for far-right thinkers tied to the Russian state: to essentially break down the established liberal democratic order and replace it with a global network of authoritarian regimes tied to Vladimir Putin.

While Putin and many of the ideologues around him appear to sympathise with the ideas and values of their Trumpist comrades in the US and elsewhere, the Russian President has his own agenda: the return of Russian imperial power /14 bylinetimes.com/2024/11/08/tru…

And so it begins. Trump’s triumph will empower an already existing network of authoritarian political parties, movements, and regimes – from Orbán to Putin, Le Pen and Geert Wilders. Not to mention Tory Leader Kemi Badenoch and Reform Leader Nigel Farage. They are all intimately connected to the networks that propelled Trump to his second term /15 bylinetimes.com/2024/11/08/tru…

To find out more about the network war that made a second Trump victory possible - and which now threatens our democracies - register your interest below for my forthcoming book via @BylineTimes /16 mailchi.mp/bylinetimes.co…

Ultimately, Trump's victory was also enabled by the increasing bankruptcy of prevailing liberal discourse, its failure to fully address the causes of global systemic crisis, from climate change, to energy, to widening inequalities. The failure to meaningfully transform our societies is creating a vortex that sucks democracies back into the rut of this ideology. Either the status quo is defended and we end up moving inexorably into that rut, which ends with collapse; or we move forward to rebuild and redesign our societies in line with economic, energy, and ecological reality. END