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November 29, 2022
Image by Amy Z from Pixabay
WN: It seems like stark warnings. But does it ring authentic?
excerpts:
Whether they believe their God sent them or that their DNA is superior to the rest of us, the new supremacists who own the GOP represent a threat to American democracy. They’ve tried to conquer America three times in the past: will they do it this time?
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who describes herself as a Christian Nationalist, is lying to the families of imprisoned January 6th traitors that Trump couldn’t possibly have pardoned any of them. She’s quite concerned that they’re upset with him.
Many, perhaps most, of the people who attacked our Capitol on January 6th believed they were doing work endorsed by their white male all-supreme god. Just like the men who flew planes into the Twin Towers believed they were doing work endorsed by their brown male all-supreme god.
There is no negotiating with people who believe they were sent by a god. Even in America. Or, perhaps, especially in America in 2022.
The events, podcasts, programs, and politicians whipping up the traitors who attacked us on January 6th were funded, at various levels and in various ways, by morbidly rich men and women who believe in their own version of a personal divinity.
They see themselves as standing apart from the rest of humanity, as genetically superior to the rest of us.
Will they succeed this time? Will they end the American experiment and take us down the road that others, so certain of the blessing of their god and their DNA, briefly took most of Europe eighty years ago?
Or will this cycle — like the last three — turn toward the rabble instead of the aristocracy? Will “We, the People” prevail?
It will end one of two ways.
Either the ones acting on behalf of their god and their superior genes will conquer our nation, or our nation will conquer them.
In the 1930s they thought they could conquer America by assassinating President Roosevelt and leading a half-million veterans against the White House and Congress. An American patriot, General Smedley Butler, blew the whistle.
Still, they found common cause with the rising fascist movements in Germany and Italy, as Rachel Maddow has so brilliantly documented in her podcast Ultra. But President Roosevelt saw them coming.
“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the Fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
“There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”
He would later say, “They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred.”
In that era, they tried to conquer America, but instead America conquered them.
FDR hit them with a 91% top income tax rate that held above 70% until the Reagan Revolution. Congress regulated their businesses and legalized unions. Chastened, they retreated to their executive suites and mansions to play their games of finance, philanthropy, and monopoly, leaving politics largely untouched for two generations.
But now they’ve risen again, seizing over $50 trillion in wealth from working class people just over the past 40 years. They’ve taken over the Supreme Court and gerrymandered their way into control of the House of Representatives.
They’ve tried it three times before, and failed each time.
They were the roughly one-third of Americans who aligned with the British in 1776 and fought against the small-business American revolutionaries like tavern-owner Paul Revere. In 1861, they ended democracy in the South and raised arms against the United States. In the 1930s, they tried to kill Roosevelt and, when that failed, to destroy his New Deal.
Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are “pronatalists,” part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. It’s a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times‘ opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen bantered about on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” It’s also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “You will not replace us” to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.”
…
Genomic Prediction is one of the first companies to offer PGT-P, a controversial new type of genetic testing that allows parents who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to select the “best” available embryos based on a variety of polygenic risk factors.
The Collinses became the public face of the technology after being featured in a May Bloomberg article, “The Pandora’s Box of Embryo Testing Is Officially Open.” After the piece went live, Malcolm said, they began hearing from wealthy pronatalists around the country.
“We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca‘ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids,” Malcolm told me. [↩]
