CULT OF THE BILLIONAIRE: My Latest ‘Hot Type’ Column in Byline
My weekly Hot Type column in Byline Supplement suggests instead of glorifying hoarders of vast un-spendable wealth, the world must finally wake up to the huge damage they are doing.
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Today’s Hot Type column just dropped in Byline Supplement, and it focuses on my recent interview with Dr. Nancy MacLean, where she notes instead of deifying billionaires we actually need to be protected from them.
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Below is an excerpt from today’s Hot Type:
Hot Type: The Cult of the Billionaire
Instead of glorifying hoarders of vast un-spendable wealth, the world must finally wake up to the huge damage they are doing, writes Heidi Siegmund Cuda
MAGA didn’t know they were voting for billionaires to deliver them austerity. They just wanted to own the libs.
But as I wrote in my recent Hot Typecolumn, dozens of billionaires paid for Trump’s 2024 campaign, and among them, were men who got their wealth from buying distressed homes during the Great Recession. All that pain that tore through the United States during the mortgage crisis, resulting in millions of displaced and devastated families, was good for the business of making more billionaires.
MAGA didn’t know that Donald Trump never planned to make good on his promise to deliver cheaper eggs, but he is promising to deport millions of people while taking away safety nets that grew out of the New Deal of the 1930s, when Americans were literally dying on the streets.
Currently, repeated weather events caused by global warming are displacing Americans, but ongoing tribal agitation keeps the population distracted while Trump stacks his upcoming administration with anti-science robber barons.
So how did we get to a place where the rich who profit from the misery of the poor became the heroes?
According to US historian Dr Nancy MacLean it began with disinformation.
In Democracy in Chains, she reveals that libertarian billionaire Charles Koch and the Koch brothers network knew about global warming mid last century.
“These guys knew going back to 1959, when they were getting their first reports of how destructive climate change would be, and rather than shifting to safer energy models, no, they invested more, and they disinformed people,” she said.
She also said that the Koch cadre of think tanks cynically plotted the use of reactionary populist leaders as frontmen to obfuscate unpopular policies.
“Back in the 1970s, there was a very smart, very interesting libertarian thinker named Murray Rothbard that Charles Koch was patronizing. And Murray Rothbard wrote back at the time he was friends with [Trump mentor] Roy Cohn and supported [Red Scare tactician Senator Joe] McCarthy, not because he believed some of the crazy things they believed, but because he thought they could be a battering ram against federal power.
“So while Murray Rothbard was working with Charles Koch, he wrote how libertarianism could benefit from an alliance with a populist leader. The reasoning was straightforward. Libertarian ideas would never on their own win over the support of the majority of Americans but by riding on the coattails of a figure who could ‘appeal directly to the masses, emotionally, even demagogically, over the heads of the establishment, they could get to places they could never get on their own’.
“Such a person could best, in Rothbard’s words, ‘the Ivy League, the mass media, the liberal intellectuals and the Republican, Democratic political party structure’. But not just any populist would do to achieve its goals. The cause needed, and again, here I'm channeling Murray Rothbard, ‘the cause needed someone with audacity, with a genuine talent for the whipping up of populist emotions, because that is what it would take to smash through established norms.’ So here is where we are. This is not a new idea for these guys.”
She added: “And yes, Donald Trump did win one of the narrowest victories in modern American political history to get into the White House… so much of that was based on disinformation, on radically lying to people and telling them things that weren't true and promising things that they won't deliver.”
Tribal Agitation
MacLean said while the country continues to be constantly poked around by Elon Musk tweets and Trump’s Truth Social posts, they are counting “on those mechanisms to keep the base inflamed, to keep the kind of tribal agitation up that happens with Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting and Clear Channel and all of those things, while they're actually moving this deep political economic agenda that will, if it continues, lead to ecological collapse, let alone all kinds of other destruction.”
Instead of lurching from distraction to distraction, she advised to already plot out a prebuttal dialogue for MAGA, who are about to find out that they actually voted for a new kind of feudalism, as attacks on public education, public health, employment, Social Security and Medicare, are all coming.
“It's going to be incumbent on us not to spend all our time letting them bait us into outrage about tweets, which only helps Donald Trump solidify that base, but instead try to open wedges that bring light between him and his followers, to say ‘you didn't vote for this. You don't want that agenda. You know that's not what you wanted, that's not what you need,’ and so, try to have those conversations,” MacLean told Byline Supplement.
MacLean, who is a board member of the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute, said we need to change the language we use to be more direct to help end the deification of billionaires.
“They are not figures to be emulated,” she declared. “They are figures to be controlled for the survival and the well being of the rest of us. I also like the phrase ‘our capitalist overlords’. These people are riding us. They've got a saddle on. They've got the spurs and the reins. And the question is, are we going to overthrow them, or are we going to let them ride us into perdition?”
As the report continues, she offers suggestions on being ready when these extremists abuse their power and are revealed for their vast corruption to a wider audience.
Whether the Right succeeds will depend on what the American people do, according to MacLean.
Dr. Nancy MacLean will be a featured guest at our first Sunday Speakeasy of the New Year.
The above is just an excerpt from my Hot Type column. As always, I ask those who can afford to support a small global team of investigative reporters to please take out a subscription to Byline Supplement.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
