Machismo fascismo

The unholy alliance of broligarchs and right wing nuts never ceases to amaze

A quote generally attributed to Benito Mussolini (although it is very likely apocryphal) states : “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” No matter who the actual author is, this quote rings especially true every time you read about the total surrendering of any semblance of self-respect by both billionaires and Republican elected officials in front of their Dear Orange Leader. And boy do we get to read a lot about this kind of things lately.

Reading the chapters about Mark Zuckerberg in Kara Swisher’s excellent Burn Book while the same Mark was making the news with his spineless decision to remove all fact-checkers and his rewriting of what is considered acceptable speech on his platforms, was quite an experience. The clueless slimeball that Swisher describes in her book, who turned into a poodle of sweat every time a hard question was asked of him, the guy who famously said that Holocaust deniers did not mean to lie, was in our headlines and in our feeds for all of us to see. To add insult to injury, this appalling specimen of the human genus took not one but two pages out of Elon Musk’s playbook, first by replacing fact-checking (human or AI) with “community notes” and second by forcing himself on our feeds with a video explanation that was both disingenuous and pathetic.

Much has been written about Mark “Mini-Musk” Zuckerberg and his broligarch colleagues falling over themselves to try and curry favour with the leader of the Grand Orange Party in the run-up to his second inauguration. I will suggest these two articles from The Guardian, who rightfully paint Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos as cringe losers sprinting to kiss Trump’s ring.

FACT CHECK : This photo is fake, obviously created using an AI who got the colour of the floor at Mar-A-Lago’s grand dining room completely wrong.

A worrying commonality between Musk, Zuckerberg and the elected and nominated officials of the upcoming Trump regime that has been on full display lately is their incessant bullying. Between Meta’s insane new policy on hate speech, Trump’s inane rants about annexing Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, and Elon’s pledge to fund primary challenges to any Senate Republican who does not vote to confirm a drunk rapey white supremacist to run the Pentagon, the bullying is flourishing. Mini-Musk (Mark Z. renounced to his right to have a cool nickname of his own when he started to shamelessly copycat Elon M.) even went to Joe Rogan’s podcast to complain that our society (and especially the corporate world) has been “neutered or emasculated” and to say that the corporate world needs more “masculine energy”. Seeing how Meta now condones speech that equates homosexuality and transgenderism to mental illnesses and classify women as property, I would surmise that by “masculine energy” he actually meant “toxic masculinity”. Or, as Jimmy Kimmel put it, “looking like a molly dealer from Chechnya (…) clearly transitioning into one of the Golden Girls”.

It all looks like the right, drunk on their electoral success, and the corporate broligarchs, drunk on their insane amounts of money, have mostly let down any pretence of working for the greater good, and are now threatening everyone who gets in their way or even dares disagreeing with them. In the process they have reached peak hypocrisy, singing the praises of democracy and freedom while walking all over the checks and balances established by the US Constitution, silencing their critics on the social media platforms they control and trying to subvert elections at home and interfere in foreign countries. Their embrace of Capitalism is also a façade, the only objective of their anti-regulatory agenda being to cement their monopolies and shackle the markets to their advantage. And their idea of progress is the promotion of sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and white supremacy, all served with a disdain for expertise, facts and science, since these have the annoying tendency to prove those ideologies wrong.

Whether they’re wearing brown shirts, black shirts, oversized t-shirts or black MAGA hats, fascists stay the same : bullies hiding their crippling insecurities behind a hyper-aggressive way of wielding power while fleeing accountability. And power without accountability is, well, nothing. History will not be kind to those guys, who obviously don’t remember (or, more likely, never studied) how a surprising majority of despots and dictators have died violent and ignominious deaths, when everyone around them realized that the emperor had no clothes and that, as Indiana Jone taught us relentlessly, the proper way to engage with Nazis and bullies is punching them in the face.