By Robert S. McElvaine
As it happened, I was about to hit “send” on what I think is an important essay to a WaPo opinion editor I have worked with in the past.
Then I saw that Jeff Bezos, sniveling coward and insecure male that he is, has joined the movement to kill democracy in darkness by dictating which types of opinion will appear in the Post’s opinion section. You know, freedom of speech and all that. What Musk and Trump were howling about. They said “Wokeness” was suppressing free speech, and there clearly was some truth to that.
Then Musk took over Twitter and turned it into a right-wing disinformation cesspool. While it may not, at least at the outset, be as horrible as the flood of lies Musk spreads daily on “X,” fellow broligarch Bezos is now dictating the party line at the once-proud Washington Post. Maybe he will change the name to Pravda, which is Russian for “truth” and the Soviet paper of that name was just as truthful as Trump’s Truth Social. “Truth Social” is a prime example of the way the Trumpians invert the meaning of terms. Its accurate name would be Lies Antisocial.
If we want to be accurate in names of media outlets, here is what the Post should henceforth be called:
Bezos says the post-opinion (yes, that’s intentional) section will focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” This "libertarian" claptrap is the 21st century version of John C. Calhoun's antebellum definition of "liberty" as the freedom of very rich men to control everyone else. Calhoun believed that the liberty of those with great wealth, including to enslave other human beings, must be protected from democracy. As I argued in an essay in June 2023, our current struggle is between democracy and a Zombie Calhoun. The broligarchs have now fully embraced the walking dead Calhoun.
Presumably the fascist broligarchs who have seized control of the United States government will not go as far as literally enslaving people, but they plainly see democracy and equal rights—the beautiful radical ideals on which the United States was founded—as incompatible with their race to accumulate ever-more of the world’s wealth for themselves. It is all about which one can claim to have the biggest peni- … uh, the tallest pile of money. Never forget that, less than two years ago, Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a literal dick measuring contest.
To everyone else, they yell, “Fuck … No." As I suggested in my last Substack essay, that word has become so overused that it has lost all its power and needs to be replaced by a truly obscene four-letter word. To everyone else, the broligarchs, like the old Slavocracy, say:
Musk you!
This lead story in the Washington Post-Truth yesterday is probably the last such analysis we will see in the paper that, among many other accomplishments, uncovered Nixon’s Watergate crimes.
(BTW, No, Jeff, Robert Redford isn’t going to play you in a movie.)
For a few years now, I have included in my identification on Broligarch Zuck’s platform:
Awake, not “Woke.”
What we all need to be striving for is to be neither the extreme version of “Woke” that some on the left fringes push nor sound Asleep, as the right—and not just its extreme fringes—wants us all to be.
