CROSSPOST: JOSH MARSHALL: Thinking Clearly About the Global Authoritarian Movement

Billionaires, Bots, and a Bloid for Smart People: In Praise of Josh Marshall’s TPM “Talking Points Memo”. Today we have Josh’s analysis of today’s “global authoritarian movement” of Trump, Musk, MBS, petro‑states, and a right‑curious billionaire class whoh together form an Authoritarian International whose natural habitat is our current, parasocial, rage‑bait internet, which is a tool they hope to use to castrate democracy as we have known it, and transform liberal democratic capitalism into a very strange authoritarian oligarchical collectivism powered by its use of the information-warfare brain-hacking tools that are part of our Attention Info-Bio Tech mode of production…

I hope first-generation internet stalwart Josh Marshall and his TPM “Talking Points Memo” team <http://talkingpointsmemo.com> won’t be too mad at me for crossposting this, and thus pulling it out from behind his paywall of TPM members. Here it is at its original location in the form of a gift link, I think: <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thinking-clearly-about-the-global-authoritarian-movement>. Do join TPM and get their “The Backchannel” member newsletter (“one must-read delivered daily to your inbox”), along with unlimited access to all TPM articles and member features: <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/memberships>.

This weblog has never been in the “call to action” business. But today I want to make an ask: In our current situation, the same wetware that evolved for a roving band of 150 East African Plains Ape souls on the veldt is now thrown into a billion‑person feed curated by authoritarian‑curious plutocrat-oligarchs. So please to something to slightly unkew our mediasphere of public reason. That is my simple, bossy ask: support one of the outfits—Josh Marshall’s TPM—that is stubbornly on the side of civic democracy.

Josh Marshall: Thinking Clearly About the Global Authoritarian Movement <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thinking-clearly-about-the-global-authoritarian-movement>>: ‘Day after day we’re seeing more signs of Donald Trump’s slipping grip not only on public opinion, but at the margins of the GOP itself. But I thought it was a good time to remind ourselves that Donald Trump isn’t the only problem. Yes, there’s the GOP, which could easily dispatch him at any point if he didn’t have an iron hold over the party. There’s the 30%-40% of voters who are solidly in the MAGA camp. Without them, Trump’s nothing. I don’t mean either of those. I’m talking about the global authoritarian movement, which includes and is even perhaps led by Trump. But it exists quite apart from him and has roots in some