Tag Archives: trump

Autocracy in the digital space.

We were all raised on stories of obvious tyranny. We were taught to look for the book burnings and the public shamings. We were told to listen for the sound of the cage door slamming shut. But what happens when the cage has no bars? What happens when the prison isn’t a place, but a state of mind, meticulously constructed to feel like freedom?

This is the world of informational autocracy. It’s a far slicker, more sophisticated beast than the clumsy dictatorships of the last century. It doesn’t need to rule by fear when it can rule by manufactured consent. This new model of power doesn’t abolish elections; it mimics them, ensuring the outcome is a foregone conclusion while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy. It doesn’t ban the free press; it buys it, starves it of advertising, or floods the zone with so much state-sponsored noise that the truth is simply drowned out. Look at Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary, or Erdoğan’s Turkey. The playbook is the same: project an image of competence and stability, paint all opposition as chaotic or treacherous, and ensure the majority of the public never gets a clear enough signal to know the difference. The primary goal is not to terrorise the population, but to convince them. And the engine room of this entire operation is the device in your pocket.

Enter the social media platform: the greatest accelerator of informational autocracy ever invented. These systems are not neutral tools; they are battlegrounds designed for a very specific kind of warfare. Their algorithms, built not for truth but for traffic, are perfectly tuned to reward the divisive, the sensational, and the outrageous. It’s no accident that, on platforms like X, false political stories are proven to spread 70% faster than the truth. Outrage is profitable. Division drives engagement. In this environment, an autocrat’s propaganda isn’t just another post—it’s premium fuel for a machine designed to run on it. We are not just the audience; we are the unwitting foot soldiers, sharing and amplifying narratives that fracture our own societies. But this battle isn’t just for the hearts and minds of the masses. There’s a more specific, more strategic target in its sights.

Every society has an “informed elite”—that small but crucial group of journalists, academics, professionals, and artists who have the access and the training to see through the noise. In the old world, an autocrat had to arrest or exile them. In the new world, the strategy is far more subtle. Social media allows the regime to monitor them, identifying dissenters for a quiet campaign of shadow-banning, legal threats, or professional exclusion. Even more effectively, it allows them to be co-opted. A slice of the elite is turned into well-paid influencers, their credibility used to launder regime propaganda. The very tool that could expand the ranks of the informed by democratizing information also shatters their authority, turning public discourse into a chaotic free-for-all where a verified expert has the same algorithmic weight as a state-funded troll farm.

It leaves us in the crossfire of a silent, borderless war. The tactics perfected in Moscow and Beijing are now exported globally, seeping into the bedrock of democracies. This is the slow poison: the erosion of public trust, the exhaustion of civic life, and the creeping sense that objective truth no longer exists. This is the ultimate goal. The aim isn’t just to win an argument; it’s to create an environment where the very idea of a shared reality seems naive. It is to foster a deep, weary cynicism that leads to democratic fatigue, where we disengage not because we are forced to, but because we are too tired to continue.

So, what is the way out? It is not to find a mythical, uncompromised platform or to wait for a single heroic leader. The resistance begins with a conscious and deliberate act of what can only be called informational hygiene. It starts with us. We must become fierce curators of our own information, deliberately seeking out and paying for quality, independent journalism. We must take our conversations offline and into the real world, rebuilding the connective tissue of society in our own communities. And above all, we must build our own resilience as if it were armour. They are counting on our burnout. An exhausted, cynical public is their ideal political landscape.

This is the work. It is not glamorous. It is not easy. But it is real. The most radical act in an age of quiet persuasion is a loud and curious mind. Keep yours sharp. Keep it open. And never, ever let them convince you to close it.

The Playbook: What the Left Can Learn from the Right’s Online War Part 1

The alt-right’s online dominance stems from savvy, adaptive tactics that exploit platform algorithms, human psychology, and cultural voids, turning fringe ideas into mainstream forces through emotional resonance and community building. While the left should never mimic their toxic elements (e.g., hate, disinformation), there’s value in borrowing structural and strategic tools to counter far-right gains and rebuild progressive momentum.

Drawing from 2025 analyses, the key is ethical adaptation: Focus on hope, facts, and inclusivity to create “alt-left pipelines” that radicalise toward justice, highlight economic inequality not racial division.

Below are transferable lessons with deployment ideas tailored for a progressive agenda.

1. Build a Multi-Voice “Roster” for Narrative Dominance (The WWF Model)

  • Lesson from Alt-Right: They succeed via a diverse “ecosystem” of creators—intellectuals, meme-makers, podcasters—who cross-promote, feud playfully, and create social immersion, making ideas feel organic and inescapable (e.g., from Jordan Peterson to Nick Fuentes). This multiplicity normalises extremism, as one voice becomes a chorus.
  • Action Point: Create a “Red-Green roster” of 20-50 voices (e.g., eco-activists, union organisers, TikTok storytellers) focused on inequality/climate. Use X Spaces for collaborative “story arcs” (e.g., debates on wealth taxes) and Patreon-funded collabs to foster community. Aim for viral, relatable formats like short explainers on “why your rent doubled.” In 2025, leverage decentralised platforms to evade moderation while building loyalty.

2. Craft Gradual “Pipelines” for Positive Radicalisation

  • Lesson from Alt-Right: Their pipeline hooks users with benign frustrations (e.g., “woke overreach”) then escalates via algorithms to echo chambers, blending humour and validation to build commitment. This self-radicalises without overt pushes.
  • Action Point: Design an “alt-left pipeline” starting with empowering content (e.g., TikToks on “union wins” or “free college stories”) that funnels to deeper dives (e.g., podcasts on systemic racism). Use AI tools ethically for personalised recommendations, targeting disillusioned centrists with “hope hooks” like community success tales. Avoid outrage; emphasise “business offers” (e.g., “Join for better wages”). A 2025 survey shows this could sway working-class voters by addressing alienation head-on.

3. Weaponise Memes, Humour, and Emotional Storytelling

  • Lesson from Alt-Right: Irony, memes, and outrage farming (e.g., baiting replies for algorithmic boosts) create addictive engagement, polarising while evading bans. They tap anger over issues like immigration but dilute for broad appeal.
  • Action Point: Flood platforms with joyful, subversive memes (e.g., “Billionaires vs. Your Rent” cartoons) and emotional narratives (e.g., worker strike videos with uplifting arcs). Use X for “provocative but substantive” threads that provoke right-wing overreactions, then amplify the absurdity to highlight hypocrisy. Focus on “politics of substance” like cultural symbols of solidarity (e.g., union anthems remixed). In 2025, prioritise TikTok/Reels for Gen Z, where emotionally charged content drives 2x engagement.

4. Invest in Local Organising and Power-Building Networks

  • Lesson from Alt-Right: Online tactics feed offline infrastructure (e.g., rallies channelling frustration into loyalty), absorbing dissent via co-optation and purges. They build from the ground up, turning digital anger into real power.
  • Action Point: Mirror this by linking online campaigns to local “power rosters” (e.g., neighborhood groups for mutual aid). Use X/Discord for one-on-one recruitment: “What matters to you? Let’s organize.” Channel energy into sustained wins like tenant unions, not just viral moments. 2025 reports stress matching right-wing billionaire media with grassroots funding for community hubs. Avoid Alinsky-style baiting; instead, “grey rock” trolls with factual redirects.

5. Pursue Long-Term Institutional Capture and Patience

  • Lesson from Alt-Right: They play the “long game” (e.g., infiltrating education/media over decades), using feigned ignorance to waste opponents’ time and normalise via backlash. Short-term wins (e.g., elections) are secondary to cultural entrenchment.
  • Action Point: Shift from reactive “debates” to proactive institution-building (e.g., progressive media co-ops, school boards). Use “inb4” preemptive framing (e.g., “Before you ask about taxes, here’s how billionaires dodge them”) to control narratives. In 2025, amid platform toxicity, decentralise to Bluesky/Mastodon for safe scaling. Measure success by sustained engagement, not viral spikes.

Ethical Guardrails and Risks

Adaptations must prioritise anti-hate safeguards e.g., community guidelines against doxxing and fact-checking to avoid disinformation pitfalls. Risks include internal purges or echo-chamber toxicity, as seen in past left online spaces.

The goal: Turn alt-right “tactics of scarcity” into left abundance—building power through solidarity, not division. As one 2025 analysis notes, the left’s edge is substance; deploy these tools to make it viral.

Flipping the Switch: The Digital Pound in the Wrong Hands

The Digital Pound: A Tyrant’s Dream Come True.

You’ve heard all the promises about the Digital Pound. That it’s safe. That your privacy is guaranteed. But you have to ask yourself one brutal question: what happens when the people making those promises are gone? Because in the hands of an authoritarian regime, the system they are building today becomes the perfect weapon for controlling you tomorrow. This isn’t an academic exercise; it’s a warning. The infrastructure of a digital cage is being assembled right now, and what matters isn’t the current design, but what it will become in the wrong hands.

This isn’t just an academic exercise. History is littered with democracies that faltered. To build this infrastructure without considering the worst-case scenario is not just naive; it is reckless. In the event of an authoritarian takeover, the digital pound, linked to a Digital ID, would not be a tool of convenience. It would be the most perfect instrument of state control ever conceived.

The first and most immediate change would be the weaponisation of surveillance. All the current safeguards—GDPR, promises of data privacy, the separation between the Bank and private wallet providers—would be swept away overnight. An authoritarian state would rewrite the laws, bypass regulations, or simply coerce private companies to hand over the data. The system is already designed for traceability; a new regime would just have to point it in the right direction. Every transaction, every donation, every purchase would become an open book to the state, revealing your networks, your beliefs, and your loyalties. Financial privacy would cease to exist.

This leads directly to the next implication: conditional access to your own life. Today, they promise it’s a choice. Under an authoritarian regime, that choice would vanish. The digital pound would become mandatory, and cash, the last bastion of anonymity, would be aggressively phased out. We’ve seen how quickly existing financial systems can be turned against citizens. During the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, the government froze the bank accounts of thousands of suspected dissidents. A digital pound would make this process frictionless and absolute.

Your access to money, and therefore your ability to buy food, pay rent, or travel, would be tied directly to your compliance. A centralised Digital ID would become the linchpin of a social credit system, where your right to participate in the economy is granted or denied based on your loyalty to the regime. Step out of line, and you could be switched off. Not arrested, not charged, just silently and efficiently excluded.

With this power, our fundamental civil liberties would be dismantled. The right to protest, to assemble, and to speak freely would be neutered. An authoritarian state could reprogramme the digital pound in an instant. It could block donations to opposition groups, restrict travel to protest locations, or even limit what you are allowed to purchase. The “silent denial of a transaction” would become the state’s most effective tool for suppressing dissent, creating a chilling effect that would silence opposition far more effectively than any police force.

And in a final, devastating step, such a regime could use the digital pound to manipulate the economy for its own ends. It could issue “helicopter money” directly into citizens’ wallets to shore up loyalty, but with strings attached—programmable funds that can only be spent on state-approved goods. It could even revalue the currency overnight, forcing everyone into the new system and wiping out the savings of those who resist.

The democratic checks and balances we rely on today are fragile. They can be eroded or dismantled. The infrastructure we build, however, is permanent. To create a centralised system that fuses identity and money is to build a cage. We may be promised that the door will remain unlocked, but in the hands of an authoritarian ruler, that door would be slammed shut and bolted. The Digital Pound would become the ultimate enforcer, turning every citizen into a subject, their freedom contingent on the flick of a switch.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/the-digital-pound

New Look Fascism: Hiding In Plain Sight

We all know the old footage. The stark, monochrome marches, the rigid salutes, the frenzied crowds. It’s the ghost that haunts our modern world, and we’ve convinced ourselves we’d spot its return a mile off. We tell ourselves, “Never again,” with a quiet confidence that comes from knowing the enemy’s uniform. But what if the uniform has changed? What if the new fascism isn’t wearing jackboots, but a tailored suit, a tech bro’s hoodie, or the ironic grin of a meme?

That’s the unsettling truth we have to face. The aesthetics of authoritarianism have undergone a quiet but total redesign for the 21st century. It’s a friendlier, more insidious form that creeps in not with the bang of a dictator’s fist on a podium, but with the soft, persuasive glow of a smartphone screen. It’s less about stormtroopers and more about Silicon Valley’s vision of a tech-utopia, less about blood-and-soil rallies and more about the curated nostalgia of a “lost” masculinity. To my own mind, the most dangerous trick it’s pulled is making the whole thing feel like one big, bad taste joke.

Take a look around. The Italian Futurist Artists glorified war and speed; today’s tech oligarchs preach a gospel of progress, selling us a shiny, minimalist future where their corporations, not nations, are in charge. It’s a vision of power wrapped in the cool, unobjectionable aesthetics of a corporate keynote. And when that feels too cold, it offers Solar Punk—a beautiful, green-washed dream of harmony that can so easily be twisted to justify eco-fascist ideas of population control and exclusion. It’s utopia as a sales pitch, and it’s dangerously persuasive.

But the real shift, the one that leaves many of us feeling like we’re shouting into a void, is the weaponisation of irony. The symbols of hate have been replaced by cartoon frogs and anime girls. The dehumanising rhetoric is hidden behind layers of “just banter, mate.” It’s a shield of plausible deniability that allows cruel ideologies to spread through gaming chats and podcast bro culture, targeting young men who feel adrift. When you try to point out the nastiness lurking beneath the surface, you’re instantly labelled a humourless “snowflake.” It’s a brilliant, frustrating tactic: they make the world meaningless, so that caring about anything at all becomes a sign of weakness.

And now, we have AI. This, to me, feels like the final stage of this aesthetic hollowing-out. We’re being flooded with AI-generated slop—politicised art created without a shred of human conviction or creativity. It’s the ultimate tool for aestheticising politics, turning historical atrocities and genocidal fantasies into just another piece of content, stripped of all weight and horror. When everything can be faked and every image is just empty aesthetics, how do we hold on to truth?

So, how do we push back against something that’s designed to be slippery, ironic, and everywhere? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I believe it starts with a kind of stubborn, clear-eyed authenticity.

First, we have to get better at reading the aesthetics. We need a new kind of literacy that looks past the what and questions the how. Why does that political ad look like a video game trailer? Why is that leader communicating entirely in memes? We have to name the tactics when we see them, pulling back the curtain on the irony and the aesthetic whitewashing.

More importantly, we have to offer a better, truer story. You can’t fight a sense of belonging built on hatred with a list of policy points. We need to build real, tangible communities—through unions, local projects, mutual aid—that give people a genuine stake and a connection that no online cult can match. And we need to champion art and narratives that are unafraid of complexity and rich with empathy, that offer a vision of a future worth fighting for, one that includes everyone.

Ultimately, it comes down to a simple, profound choice: we have to insist on meaning. In a world that’s being deliberately drained of it, we must value truth over fiction, complexity over simplistic lies, and the inherent dignity of every person over the fascist’s cruel hierarchy of worth.

It’s not about winning an online argument or a single election. It’s a long, persistent effort to build a world where people feel secure and respected enough to see the new fascism for what it is: a seductive, well-designed package with nothing but emptiness inside. And that requires us to be, above all else, true to ourselves.

The Keep Sane in Troubled Times Playbook
1. Develop Critical Aesthetic Literacy
The first step is to recognise the weaponisation of aesthetics. This means moving beyond analysing what is said to how it is presented.

  • Teach Media Literacy 2.0: Go beyond identifying fake news. Teach people to deconstruct visual rhetoric: Why does a political ad use a specific type of animation? Why does a leader’s social media feed look like a meme page? What emotions is a corporate “utopian” video trying to evoke, and what material realities does it hide?
  • Name the Tactics: Publicly label the strategies when you see them. Point out the irony-poisoning, the co-option of subcultures, the use of AI slop to flood the zone. By making the mechanics visible, you rob them of their power.

2. Rebuild Trust through Material Politics and Local Organising
Fascism feeds on alienation, despair, and the collapse of trust in institutions. The most powerful antidote is to demonstrate that collective, democratic action can improve people’s lives.

  • Focus on Material Conditions: Shift the conversation from the abstract culture war to concrete, material issues: affordable housing, healthcare, wages, unionisation, climate resilience. Fascism offers scapegoats; a real alternative must offer solutions that address the root causes of anxiety.
  • Strengthen Local Community: Support and participate in local unions, tenants’ associations, mutual aid networks, and community gardens. These organisations build real-world solidarity, trust, and collective power that is immune to online manipulation. They provide a sense of belonging that is not based on hatred of an “other”.

3. Create Competing, Hopeful Narratives and Aesthetics
You cannot defeat a powerful aesthetic with a dry policy paper. The left and centre must relearn the art of storytelling and vision-building.

  • Articulate a Positive, Inclusive Future: Solar Punk, as mentioned, has positive potential. We need compelling, artistically rendered visions of a future that is both technologically advanced and socially just, ecologically sustainable, and inclusive. This vision must be attractive enough to compete with the nostalgic fantasies of the far right.
  • Support Art and Culture that Builds Empathy: Fund, celebrate, and amplify art, films, music, and games that celebrate complexity, diversity, and human dignity. Counter the dehumanising caricatures with rich, humanising stories.

4. Strategic, Unified Opposition and Deplatforming
While open debate is ideal, the video correctly shows that these movements often argue in bad faith, using debate as a platform to spread conspiracies.

  • Do Not Normalise: Avoid treating fascist ideology as a legitimate point of view in political discourse. The goal is not to “debate” whether some people are inferior, but to isolate and discredit those ideas. Media outlets have a responsibility not to platform figures who traffic in replacement theory or Holocaust denial for “balance”.
  • Strengthen Institutional Guardrails: Defend and strengthen independent journalism, an independent judiciary, free and fair elections, and the rule of law. Support projects that document hate speech and extremist networks. This is the unsexy, bureaucratic work that is essential for democracy’s survival.

5. Personal Responsibility and Courage

  • Interrupt Casual Bigotry: Do not let racist, homophobic, or antisemitic “jokes” slide in personal conversations. A calm, firm response like, “I don’t find that funny,” or “Why do you say that?” can disrupt the normalisation process.
  • Support Victims: Stand in solidarity with those targeted by hate. If you see someone being harassed, be a proactive bystander. This demonstrates that the community will not tolerate intimidation.
  • Protect Your Mental Space: The constant barrage of corrosive content is designed to exhaust and demoralise. It is essential to log off, engage in real-world communities, and protect your capacity for empathy and hope. You cannot fight a long-term battle while burned out.

The Core Challenge: Rejecting Meaninglessness
The video concludes that the ultimate goal of this aestheticisation is to make everything meaningless. Therefore, the most profound act of resistance is to insist on meaning.

This means:

  • Valuing Truth: Upholding the distinction between fact and fiction.
  • Valuing Complexity: Rejecting simplistic, us-vs-them narratives in favour of nuanced understanding.
  • Valuing Human Dignity: Constantly affirming the inherent and equal worth of every person, against the hierarchy of worth that fascism promotes.

Countering this new fascism is not about winning a single election or a viral online battle. It is a long-term, cultural, and political project to rebuild a society where people feel secure, respected, and hopeful enough to reject the seductive but deadly lies of fascism in any aesthetic guise.

How To Beat Reform

Core Strategic Principle: Diagnosis Before Prescription

Think of the 1970s and you think of flared trousers and Abba. You probably don’t think of Nazi salutes on British streets.

But for a time, the far-right National Front (NF) was a terrifying force in UK politics. Its skinhead gangs terrorised immigrant communities. Its leaders were open Hitler admirers. And in the 1977 elections, over 200,000 people voted for them.

Then, they were crushed. Not in a war, but by a brilliant, gritty campaign that united punk rockers, grandparents, trade unions and communities. Today, as a new wave of populism gains traction, the lessons from that victory are not just history – they’re a handbook.

Here’s how it was done, and how it applies now.

Lesson 1: Stop Debating, Start Disrupting

The anti-fascists of the ’70s knew a crucial truth: you can’t reason someone out of a position they weren’t reasoned into. So they didn’t try. Instead, their strategy was simple: make it impossible for the NF to function.

They physically blocked their marches. They packed their meetings and shouted them down. The goal wasn’t to win an argument; it was to create such a logistical nightmare that the authorities were forced to ban events and the Nazis were too ashamed to show their faces.

The Modern Application: Today, the town hall meeting has been replaced by the social media algorithm. The tactic of disruption isn’t just about physical blocking—which can backfire against a legal party—but about a more sophisticated, multi-pronged assault. This means flooding the digital space with compelling counter-content, using ‘pre-bunking’ techniques to inoculate the public against predictable manipulation, and actively ‘de-branding’ their language by refusing to parrot loaded terms. Instead of “stop the boats,” the debate becomes about “fixing the asylum system.” The goal remains the same: to deny their narrative the clean air it needs to breathe.

Lesson 2: Expose the Core, Not Just the Policies

The NF tried to hide its Nazi core behind a veneer of ‘respectable’ racism. Anti-fascists ripped this mask off. They circulated photos of leader John Tyndall in his not-at-all-a-Nazi-uniform and highlighted his speeches praising Hitler. The result? The more moderate followers fled, and the party splintered. The label ‘Nazi’ stuck because the evidence was overwhelming.

The Modern Application: This isn’t about slapping the ‘fascist’ label on every opponent. It’s about rigorous exposure. Who endorses this party? What do their policies logically lead to? When a candidate is found to have made extremist statements, the question to the leadership is simple: “Do you condone this? If not, what are you doing about it?” Force them to either repudiate their fringe or be defined by it. The battle is to expose the underlying narrative of national humiliation and purging, no matter how sanitised the language.

Lesson 3: Apply Institutional and Economic Friction

Beyond the battle of ideas lies the less visible but equally critical war of institutional accountability. The 1970s activists understood that pressure had to be applied at every level. When the Hackney Gazette ran an NF advert, its staff went on strike.

The Modern Application: The contemporary equivalent is wielding strategic economic and legal pressure. This means holding corporate donors publicly accountable, supporting rigorous challenges to potential campaign spending breaches, and demanding that media platforms couple any coverage with immediate, contextual fact-checking. The objective is to create friction—to make supporting or enabling populism a professionally and reputationally costly endeavour. This isn’t about silencing opposition, but about enforcing the rules and standards that populists seek to erode, ensuring demagoguery carries a tangible price.

Lesson 4: Out-Create Them. Make Hope Go Viral.

This was the masterstroke. While some groups fought in the streets, the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism (RAR) fought for the culture. They realised that to win over a generation, you couldn’t just be against something; you had to be for something better.

RAR staged legendary gigs that paired white punk bands like The Clash with Black reggae acts. Their 1978 carnival in London attracted 100,000 people—a joyful, defiant celebration that made the NF look like the miserable, hate-fuelled sect they were.

“This ain’t no fucking Woodstock. This is the Carnival against the Nazis!” – Red Saunders, RAR co-founder

The Modern Application: This is the most critical lesson. Populism feeds on pessimism and cultural despair. The antidote is to build a more compelling, positive, and inclusive vision. Where is the modern equivalent of RAR? It’s about supporting creators, artists, and community initiatives that showcase a confident, modern Britain. It’s about telling stories of successful integration and shared future, making ‘hope’ more viral than ‘fear’.

Lesson 5: Protect Your Own. Community is Armour.

When the state failed to protect them, targeted communities organised their own defence. The Southall Youth Movement and others made their neighbourhoods ‘no-go zones’ for racists, patrolling streets and confronting threats directly. This wasn’t just about physical safety; it was about building unbreakable social and political resilience.

“What did we  share with the white left? We learned from them   as well. We shared the vision of a new world,  our world, a world in which we were all equal,   a fairer world.” – Tariq Mahmood, activist

The Modern Application: The threats today are often more digital and psychological than physical, but the principle is the same. This means strengthening local community bonds, supporting organisations that monitor and combat hate crime, and building robust support networks. Critically, this work must be underpinned by a ‘marathon, not a sprint’ mentality. The defeat of the National Front was not the work of a single election cycle but a sustained, multi-year effort. The modern challenge is to build resilient, long-term infrastructure—’the bakery’—that can withstand populist waves by addressing the underlying grievances of isolation and economic despair they exploit.

The Uncomfortable Truth for Today

The crucial difference is that Reform UK is not the National Front. It is a populist party, not a fascist paramilitary one. Applying the 1970s playbook isn’t about mindlessly copying tactics; it’s about intelligently adapting the principles.

The battle against the NF was won by a coalition that understood this was a war fought on multiple fronts simultaneously. It required the raw energy of street-level disruption, the sharp wit of cultural creation, the shrewdness of political exposure, and the patient, grinding work of institutional and legal challenge.

To effectively challenge modern populism demands the same holistic courage. It is not enough to out-create them online if their economic enablers face no consequences. It is not enough to win a legal battle if the cultural narrative of grievance remains unchallenged. The lesson of the 1970s is that victory comes not from a single masterstroke, but from the relentless, coordinated application of pressure everywhere it counts. The question is whether we can build a movement with the strategic depth to fight on all those fronts at once.

Trump And Musk A Modern Punch And Judy Show Engineered To Distract

It is Punch and Judy on the world stage, a performance designed to distract, confuse, and entertain. We get so caught up in the political drama that we miss what is happening behind the curtain. The political theorist Noam Chomsky has warned of this for decades, calling it the “illusion of debate”, an enchanting spectacle where we are encouraged to argue, heckle, and voice an outraged opinion, but only about things that don’t truly matter.

Chomsky put it bluntly: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow lively debate within that spectrum.” We are led into a room and told we can rearrange the furniture as much as we like, but we must never think to knock down the walls. This keeps us feeling engaged while the fundamental systems that shape our lives remain unchallenged.

The high-profile feud between Donald Trump and Elon Musk is a perfect modern case study. The rolling news coverage presents a spectacular public blow-up, with Trump threatening to cut Musk’s multi-billion-dollar government contracts and Musk firing back with personal insults. It feels dramatic and significant.

But while we are glued to our screens, watching the meme wars unfold on social media, we miss the real story: both men are beneficiaries and proponents of the same system. Their public theatre distracts from their shared interest in maintaining corporate power. Trump’s landmark 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Meanwhile, Musk’s companies, such as SpaceX and Tesla, have raked billions from government contracts and subsidies, benefiting from policies that were advanced during the Trump administration and beyond. Despite the public spats, their economic interests align in opposing higher taxes on the wealthy and promoting deregulation.

This is the illusion of debate in action. While the media profits from the drama, critical policy decisions are made in the shadows. Investigations into corporate malpractice are quietly halted, labour laws are weakened, and environmental regulations are rolled back. The spectacle keeps the public divided and misinformed, undermining democratic accountability and preventing any unified challenge to a status quo that overwhelmingly favours elite interests.

This tactic is not new. From the Reagan-era tax cuts sold as “trickle-down economics” to the Clinton-era financial deregulation that paved the way for the 2008 crash, political theatre has long been used to divert public attention while corporate agendas advance.

So, what can we do? The first step is to recognise the performance for what it is. We must learn to ask better questions: not “Whose side are you on?” but “Who benefits from this entire system?“

Secondly, we must actively seek out diverse sources of information, particularly independent journalism that is not beholden to corporate advertisers or political factions. This allows us to see the whole picture, not just the carefully framed sliver presented to us.

Finally, we need to engage with politics more meaningfully. This means focusing on policy, not personality. It means getting involved locally, where our voices have a tangible impact. History shows that it is possible when people come together to demand systemic change. Breaking the spell of the illusion is not just an act of intellectual curiosity but a vital act of democratic self-defence.

Additional Information and Resources:

Table: Summary of Hidden Agendas and Mechanisms:

Hidden AgendaDescriptionMechanism
Maintaining Corporate ControlEnsure corporate-friendly policies are implemented without opposition.Divert attention from lobbying and policy changes.
Protecting Elite InterestsProtect wealth and power of elites, including billionaires.Keep public divided and entertained, preventing unified action.
Manipulating Public PerceptionShape opinion in favor of status quo or corporate agendas.Frame issues as personal conflicts, influencing priorities.
Undermining Democratic AccountabilityReduce accountability of officials and corporate leaders.Distract from transparency demands, focusing on spectacle.
Generating Media ProfitsIncrease viewership and revenue for media companies.Amplify sensational stories for higher ratings and engagement.

Key Citations