Edit: Full Text -
@ChrisLynnHedges
My thoughts on Biden dropping out:
Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career. Barely able to stumble his way through the words on a Teleprompter and not always cognizant of what is happening around him, his billionaire supporters pulled the plug. He was their creature – he has been in federal office for 47 years - from start to finish. He was used as a foil to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and was anointed as the candidate in 2024 in a Soviet-style primary campaign. The billionaire class will now anoint someone else. Democratic Party voters are stage props in this political farce. Donald Trump, unlike Kamala Harris or any other apparatchik the billionaire class selects as a presidential candidate, has a genuine and committed base, however fascistic.
In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Vogelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.
Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist. They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States, ensuring that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs. As I write in America, The Farewell Tour, this assault on the working class created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to devise a new political paradigm. Trumpeted by a compliant media, this paradigm shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime and law and order. Biden was at the epicenter of this paradigm shift. Those undergoing profound economic and political change were told that their suffering stemmed not from rampant militarism and corporate greed but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that buttressed New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked as enabling criminal Black youth, “welfare queens” and other alleged social parasites. This opened the door to a faux populism, begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly championed family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the Christian faith and the return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans. The Democratic Party, especially under Bill Clinton and Biden, became largely indistinguishable from the establishment Republican Party to which it is now allied.
The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the capture of democratic institutions by a rapacious oligarchy, the grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations and an unchecked militarism. The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties. The Democrats, tools of Wall Street, gave us Trump, and the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020. They look set to give us Trump again. God help us.@JoeBidenMy fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.
Source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1815425971643986009
I'm not reading that; I'll wait for the movie
it's "buy my book" as a 4 paragraph twitter post that otherwise offers nothing new to the discourse.
keep an eye out for this it makes up much of the non-Marxist antiwar news outlets. they just do flourishing criticism of the main imperialist press and repost each other
Adapting that wall of text is gonna require a whole trilogy.
I say turn it into a full wall of text thread. In fact, padding is a critical component of a lot of compatible left writing. After doing a lot of once in a lifetime research into the Phoenix Program and how the CIA conducted a mass torture and blackmail operation by using connections from writing a book about his vet father to play CIA officers off of South Vietnamese police officers (which is impossible to do today, you have to make do with typing in the comment section of news articles, you will rarely make contact with any investigative journalism or real front line footage), Doug Valentine complained that writers like Chris Hedges, Jeremy Scahill, and Seymour Hersh were bowlderizing research like his into long winded descriptions of a single massacre & worked together with the intelligence agencies they are supposedly running exposes on and receiving whistleblowing communiques from to secure the very notoriety that gets them reposted here on this forum.
The more you pad out the writing the harder it is to notice all of the sources loop back to the Guardian and the NYT and other AP and AFP sources. Don't get me wrong, it's helpful to use internal logic and inconsistencies of the press against itself like that, but for these non-Marxist antiwar leftists it's just a way to earn favor with a more erudite audience. It's like the people who use their understanding of imperialist economics to invest better. I don't like them if you didn't pick up on it.
The irony of so many comments in this thread being ridiculously long to get to the point
Ridiculously? An ounce of bullshit requires a pound of explanation
I'm being deliberately long-winded but that's true, especially when you get into explaining the context of how the lefty antiwar press makes money. You have to start talking about Project Mockingbird and stuff.