Mitt Romney wasn’t a “good Republican.” He made millions of lives worse so the rich could get richer.

But his public performance allowed people to believe the GOP wasn’t authoritarian to its core and that Trumpism was the disease instead of a symptom.

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/the-best-the…
Romney was a relic of an age where authoritarian and oppressive policies could be hidden through decorum.

But at the heart of it all, it’s always been about bringing the boot down while enriching the powerful.

The narrative around Romney is a fiction. Period.

It never ceases to amaze me how much analysis of our politics and crises just completely neglects to mention wealth inequality and how the rich have used excess profits to create this status quo.

You simply cannot wrestle with any of this without that key understanding. But let’s also be clear: so many of the experts and pundits who should be connecting the dots between engineered inequality and our crises are also funded by and part of an ecosystem dependent on it.

So you get a sort of learned, motivated ignorance.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but let’s make it clear once again.

The GOP isn’t “pro-family.” Its only priority is control. Control through patriarchal institutions, control over women, children, behavior, and control through exploitative, cheap labor.

That’s it. Stop trying to make their behavior logical outside of this framework. Their “pro-life” stance isn’t about life. It’s about controlling women and exploiting people. That’s it. They’re not going to support programs or social safety nets. They’ll just dig the whole deeper and deeper

Always a good day for people to reframe their understanding of “foreign policy” to grasp fully what’s happening with the GOP.

Things like the Cold War were a convenient covers for using US military power to neutralize Leftists and organize the world to the liking of the wealthy. What a lot of you thought was “patriotism” or “national defense” was just mythology meant to launder oppressive actions domestically and around the world to benefit white, wealthy people and their corporations.

Republicans know climate change is real. They also know their political fortunes are chained to lying on behalf of the fossil fuel billionaires and corporations.

The entire point is to profit off the cause of the destruction and then pivot to profiting off the destruction itself We spend most of our time and energy treating GOP positions as if they’re real instead of cynical and strategic. There are no principles. They’re all cudgels.

The quicker people start to understand this the better.

Donald Trump was indicted for attempting to overthrow the 2020 Election, but this was a scheme involving Republicans at every level.

It’s time to face facts: the GOP has shown it can’t be trusted with power. It’s time for the party to go away.

https://t.co/sSDqefcCpnjaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/a-party-of-i…
Parties end.

The Federalists. The Whigs. And now it’s time for the GOP to exit the stage.

This was an organized attack on democracy at every level and the GOP’s actions should disqualify it from participating in government. It can be replaced, but it’s time is up.

For years now some of us have warned that neoliberalism and rising authoritarianism were both interconnected and that emerging crises were going to lead to a rollback of globalism but also hard-fought reforms and yet people are still just treating it all as unconnected phenomena. It drives me nuts, honestly. All of the signs have been there. It’s the entire thesis of my book The Midnight Kingdom and I’ve been telling people this stuff for years.

And yet, most of the journalists and politicians who should be talking about this are so in (willful) denial.

Believing Trump’s obvious mishandling of national security secrets will somehow “break the MAGA spell” is misguided.

The truth is their patriotism was never real. Like Trump, they only care about the country so much as it gives them what they want.

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/the-trump-in… It’s a horrific thing to realize, but the GOP’s “principles” have never been real. They are malleable cudgels in the pursuit of power. It’s not even hypocrisy, it’s weaponized ideology in the pursuit of power and wealth.

“Patriotism” is just a club for bludgeoning.

We’re six years into this.

People have to stop wondering “when will the MAGA base wake up and give up on Trump?”

It. Will. Not. Happen.

It’s now part of their fundamental identity. The question now isn’t waiting on them to snap out of it but mitigating the damage. Sitting around expecting photos making Trump’s crimes obvious to wake up the MAGA base only undermines the necessity to ensure they don’t commit violence.

The passivity of this era is built on a completely false belief that all of this will simply pass.

It won’t.

Licht isn’t out at CNN because employees bristled over his lame comments.

If his Trump Town Hall gambit had worked and the network hasn’t sunk behind NewsMax and possibly even the Soap Opera Network he’d still be gainfully employed

Simply put, his “anti-woke” garbage failed. What Licht was peddling was not only unpopular, it was damaging. This whole "the Left has gone too far" crowd is completely out of touch with what's actually happening in this country.

At his heart, he was an elitist who didn't care what happened to marginalized people.

It’s something when you realize the Far Right that embraces authoritarianism is actually on the same side as the elites they spend all day and night criticizing and that their main differences are aesthetics and manners

And that most of the rest of us are without representation. The great majority of what we call “politics” is theater hiding a general economic agreement between most parties and the people who lack a real seat at the table are the ones who bear the brunt of the resulting consensus and oppression.

One side is arguing that systemic inequality and long observable cycles of oppression have created quantifiable suffering and that real, lasting, necessary change requires actual examination of those facts.

The other is upset over who’s playing The Little Mermaid. One side is worried about its friends and family and neighbors who have endured lifetimes of abuse and intimidation and are currently watching the state conspire to carry out genocidal violence.

The other is scared because someone they don’t like drank their beer water online.

The point of bothsidesing the Debt Limit hostage crisis is that moderates and “sensible liberals” in the media actually want programs and the safety net to be cut in order to shore up the status quo that serves them.

And that’s the outcome they’re going to pressure into being. We’ve seen this garbage before. And there’s always a granting of legitimacy to the GOP because deep down, in places these people might not even recognize, their loyalty belongs to the system they enjoy rather than changes that might benefit others while risking what they have

The emphasis on AI-generated entertainment is a side-effect of a culture so unwell and so unhappy that its only recourse is to consume mindlessly in hopes of not having to address the core reasons for the unhappiness.

In other words. Addiction. Books, movies, TV, art in general, are best when they reveal as a medium a basic human connectedness and spark that reminds us of our interdependence.

The AI art boom is antithetical to that. It’s production of a synthetic drug that distracts from what art is supposed to be.

Musk promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories on Twitter was shocking, but unsurprising.

Following in the footsteps of Henry Ford, who mainstreamed the same conspiracy theories, he's just another industrialist relying on these lies for power.

1/

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/the-useful-p… Watching Musk grow more openly radicalized has been instructive in that it's given us a realtime example of how the wealthy and powerful embrace Right Wing conspiracy theories in their battles against democracy.

We need to recognize and learn from these patterns.

2/

The problem with Elon Musk and his platform of “free speech” isn’t just that he has ties to authoritarian regimes.

It’s that the wealthiest people have a natural aversion to free speech and democracy and are dedicated, as a matter of existence, to stamping it out. Of course Musk has ties to authoritarians. All the wealthy and corporations do. Ours is an interlocking system of liberal democratic veneers and places of oppression that keep labor cheap and resources available.

That’s the WHOLE thing.

A fun thing about our current state is that even Right Wing oligarchs and figures have endless ties to organizations and people mired in conspiracy theories because it turns out, stories aside, there are the wealthy and powerful and everybody else. What we witness in our politics and economics are squabbles between the powerful over leverage, wealth, and occasionally personal feuds.

But make no mistake. Their petty wars are far from anything resembling a concern over the lives of regular people.

The Donald Trump Town Hall on CNN was an indictment of Trump, his supporters, CNN, the GOP, and our politics and media.

And it was a warning that things could get much, much worse unless we prepare to fight back.

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/stop-the-rid… The Trump Town Hall was disgusting. A coterie of repulsive ideas and gleeful cruelty mined for ratings and profit.

It was nauseating, but pundits are wrong thinking this somehow hurts Trump’s chances of either winning the nomination or the presidency.

We are in the middle of a self-destruction spiral.

It's caused by an exploitative system, white patriarchal supremacist delusion fueled by Right Wing fearmongering for power and profit, and a worsening, weaponized sense of precarity.

We cannot keep living like this. This is a mental health crisis as much as it is a socioeconomic or political or authoritarian crisis.

It is all things at once because they are all connected.

And until we realize this and demand change, it is only going to get worse. Much, much worse.

America is a nation of tragedies, full of mass shootings and worsening vigilantism fueled by white supremacy and conspiracy theories.

It doesn’t have to be like this. And it begins by recognizing how this state benefits from this tragedy.

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/a-nation-of-… The reason things feel worse now is because the powerful rely on terror and division to stave off democracy and to fuel a system of ever-increasing profits.

We have to live in constant terror of one another in order for this state to rumble on and worsen with every day.

People keep asking how it is that Elon Musk, Bill Maher, and any number of personalities or institutions and media have "changed" so much.

But the truth is they haven't changed. Circumstances did. And their "principles" were revealed as performative.

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/a-long-overd… What we are coming to realize is that so many of these people and businesses have expressed "principles" that were never real in the first place. It was just advantageous and easy to say them.

Now, when it matters, we're finding out who really holds these principles.