Donald Trump is just the Setup Guy. Elon Musk will be the Closer

If our future is some form of dictatorship, it’s Musk and his ilk who will make it so

Don’t think for a minute that this coming election is primarily about Donald Trump, his get-out-of-jail-free cards, and his increasingly incoherent performative grievances and ramblings. And neither is this election about the cowards, sycophants, “suckers,” sheeple, and creeps who now occupy and lead the Republican Party and imagine themselves to be in charge of making America great again.

This election is not about a depraved egomaniac and his sycophants.

The biggest threat to our future is not MAGA populism. It is the plutocratic class of the super-wealthy: It’s about a whole class of depraved, power-hungry plutocrats who now have the wherewithal to come out of the shadows and claim their places as “the powers that be.”

Case in point: Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is a man of unquenchable ambition for wealth and power. He has just exercised that power to get himself a grotesque $54 billion payday. He has ridden Reagan/Republicanism and its privatization-of-public-goods wave into significant personal control over a vast array of our nation’s civilian and military technological development. He is completely obsessed and consumed with controlling public policy to such an extent that he has ventured to turn our most influential and open social media platform into a personal propaganda platform.

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Musk is a “Longtermism” evangelist and he has made this very public and explicit: his ambition is nothing less than to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to launch humanity to Mars and onwards through the universe.  He sees himself as the ultimate savior of an elite slice of humanity to be preserved and protected as the rest of us self-destruct here on earth.

Crazy? Yes. Delusional? Absolutely? Scary as shit? You bet your measly, irrelevant life.

Musk is a world-historical autocrat of the most potent and dangerous sort.

And he is not alone. There is a whole strata of such megalomaniacal Elon Musks who hold themselves above us, including Clarence Thomas’s sugar-daddy Harlan Crow, Peter Thiel, a large number of Texas oil billionaires, and too many others who have enjoyed the same trajectory of accumulating supermoney and superpower.

Trump, in comparison, is a weak, petty, and pathetic wannabe. He’s nothing more than a clueless but helpful tool of plutocrats who have higher aspirations than being President or grifter-in-chief. Trump has taught these plutocrats how a munch more competent sand ruthless ruler of America could shunt aside or “play” democracy and The People to achieve real power.

And, of course, our captured SCOTUS majority of plutocratic puppets is hastily, if somewhat sloppily, laying the Constitutional groundwork for eviscerating all traces and instruments of popular power.

Our plutocrats, these Masters of Monetization now believe they can and must become Masters of our Universe. They will be fighting this out among themselves for the immediate future, of course. But then they will be forced into some sort of accommodation to the most ambitious and vicious among them. My money is on Elon Musk.

This election is not about Biden versus Trump. It’s not even about Democracy versus Autocracy.

This election is about The People versus The Plutocrats. It’s what, once upon a time, was known as The Class Struggle.