RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/07/gavin-newsoms-american-dystopia/

President Gavin Newsom met today in Carmel, California with the representatives of the “Ten” – a consortium of giant tech and finance firms who control most of America’s business assets. Facing a challenge from front-running New York senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is pushing for a radical redistribution of wealth and property, Newsom has struck a deal with the oligarchs. He has imposed a universal basic income to head off a mounting populist revolt.

Some have called it a second Magna Carta – an accommodation between state and oligarchy. Others see the outlines of a new feudalism, or a technocratic fascism, rather than anything resembling liberal democracy.’

Implausible? Hardly. At a time when a handful of firms now dominate industries from tech to entertainment and media, and incomes for all but the wealthy are stagnating or falling, ever fewer see the system as working for them. According to Edelman, a strong majority in 22 countries now believe capitalism does more harm than good.

In the US, rising inequality and fear of downward mobility are fuelling support for state expansion and redistribution. Most under-40s favour socialism. Worse for the oligarchs, a majority of young people also favour limiting higher incomes. A new radical politics is incubating in cities like Oakland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles and, most obviously, New York – its likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a self-described ‘democratic socialist’.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) could accelerate this trend, cutting even white-collar and graduate employment while boosting the profits, as well as the market share, of a handful of giant firms. Like Mickey Mouse, as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, techies have unleashed forces that threaten many in their own class of educated professionals. Some 82 per cent of millennials believe AI will damage their careers. The displacement could soon reach 30 per cent of the workforce. Skilled professionals in finance, media and the arts could be undercut as AI trains itself on their past work. As one Marxist writer put it, no power on Earth is more fearsome than ‘the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vice of low-paying jobs’.

AI evangelists like McKinsey insist it will enrich society. But such elite enthusiasm for the future is not widely shared. A Wall Street Journal-NORC poll recently found that only 25 per cent of Americans believe they have a good chance of improving their living standards – the lowest proportion since 1987. Almost 70 per cent say the ‘American dream’ – that if you work hard, you can get ahead – no longer holds true. Among Democrats, pessimism is overwhelming, with 90 per cent holding a negative view of the future, almost twice as many as Republicans.

Having foreseen these trends, much of the Silicon Valley elite sees the mass of humanity, some of whom already eschew the value of hard work, as increasingly redundant. As they automate everything – even companionship – the oligarchical elites rarely mention mobility or opportunity. Researcher Gregory Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital founders, found little interest in expanding property ownership or entrepreneurship. The preference is for redistribution sufficient for the masses to subsist while the elites luxuriate. At the same time, unions are suppressed by ‘progressive’ firms like Apple and Amazon, and responsibility for workers’ incomes is shifted to the state.

This is all of the essence of oligarchic feudalism. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick (former head of Uber) and Sam Altman (founder of OpenAI) all favour a guaranteed annual income – not out of solidarity with the masses, but to stave off unrest. Unlike the ‘Penthouse Bolsheviks’ of the 1930s, they have no intention of paying for this themselves. The burden would fall instead on the squeezed middle class, who would likely foot much of the bill for guaranteed wages, healthcare, free college and housing assistance, alongside subsidising gig workers, who do not receive benefits from their employers.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/progressive-left-barbarism-charlie-kirk-murder

There often comes a moment in the pursuit of a noble but hopeless cause when the idealist discards both ideals and human bonds, embracing barbarism in the name of a higher purpose. The progressive Left has reached that moment in its moral decline. Once self-styled protectors of the marginalized, progressives now push their opponents beyond the margins—and beyond the pale. Their cause is the defense of victims, yet some have victimized their adversaries to death, while others have mocked and abused the dead afterward. Champions of compassion have mutated into purveyors of hatred. Whether these perverse reversals have penetrated the sect’s own consciousness, I cannot say.

Possibly, the Left’s belief system made its descent into barbarism inevitable. Progressives long ago cast aside God, religion, and other transcendental restraints. The moral order and conventional rules of a supposedly oppressive society mean less than nothing to them. What remains is hedonism and the will to power. In the Internet age, both find expression in rituals of demonization—destroying those whose opinions offend them, whether through harassment by a digital lynch mob, coerced confessions and firings, or, as in the cold-blooded killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, outright political assassination. It is the same principle aimed at the same end: hate the haters more brutally than they hate you.

Kirk’s murder can be blamed on an unstable individual. The reaction is harder to explain. Many progressives seemed blind to the horror of the crime; many more rushed to strip the victim of his humanity, cheering the extermination of a 31-year-old father of two as if it were a touchdown for the home team.