[Overview: The key here is the video. Find 30 minutes to watch/listen. It puts lots of important things into place. The rest of the post includes thoughts I had about the video and the people described in it. Something about the narrator of the video. But the video is the important thing. It's not just someone's opinion - it's a well documented overview of the role of the billionaire tech bros in the Trump election and administration
This video came across my screen this morning. It offers much more depth to the previous post that said a coup was happening. While we all knew that the tech guys were involved - Musk, of course, and that Peter Thiel bought Vance's election to the Senate and the vice presidential nomination, etc. - my impression had been that Project 2025 had been something from the Heritage Foundation - (from the ACLU):
"Project 2025 is a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch authored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity."
The Heritage Foundation has been around a long time and among other things, created a whole conservative law society that groomed right wing attorneys with their ideology and got them onto the Supreme Court.
But this video outlines a different set of influences for Project 2025 - libertarian leaning, billionaire tech bros. And as we watch live - but not like we watched January 6 live - Elon Musk sucking up government data, this video makes much more sense of what's happening and why.
Here's an outline of the video from the YouTube channel:
"chapters
00:00-01:00 Introduction
01:01-04:25 The Dark Agenda of Tech VCs
04:26-07:10 Networks and Patchworks: Reinventing the State
07:11- 09:44 Praxis and Pronomos
09:45 –12:37 Making it a Reality
12:38 –18:03 Vance, Thiel, and Yarvin
18:04 –19:28 Tech and Project 2025
19:29-20:00 Butterfly Revolution Step 1: Campaign on Autocracy
20:01-21:42 Butterfly Revolution Step 2: Purge the Bureaucracy
21:43-23:00 Butterfly Revolution Step 3: Ignore the Courts
23:01-23:50 Butterfly Revolution Step 4: Co-Opt the Congress
23:51-25:06 Butterfly Revolution Step 5: Centralise Police and Powers
25:07-27:54 Butterfly Revolution Step 6: Shut Down Elite Media and Academic Institutions
27:55-28:35 Butterfly Revolution Step 7: Turn Out the People
28:36-29:40 Conclusion"
While this may make things seem worse, I'd argue that this guys had the right set of skills to get rich in the tech age in the US, but their smarts are limited. As Musk has shown with Twitter, there are important interpersonal skills he's lacking. When I read Atlas Shrugged in my late teens, it only took me about 150 pages to realize how repulsive the main characters were. But these guys think they know much more than they do, and want to create a libertarian world where they are free from government interference, where they are the government (and thus free to interfere with others.)
Now, I can understand how a bunch of rich techies with no serious background in the history of government, liberty, democracy, etc. can feel oppressed by government that seems to (and in many cases probably is) be a bit behind the changing technologies, but is trying to apply regulations to the industry and, even worse, tax their earnings. But that's only because they think their tech ability and the fact they got rich makes them smarter than everyone else. Sort of like doctors who think they have expertise in every other field beyond medicine.
So while I expect they're going to do a lot of damage to democracy, the world economy, and the planet* (by not fighting climate change particularly), I also think they're going to have a lot of failures and a lot of disagreements with each other and with the older legal far right architects of the US move to fascism.
But understanding what's happening is the first step to effective corrective steps.
* "doing damage to . . .the planet" - I'd like to clarify that 'damage to the planet' is a human-centric idea. The planet, it seems to me, follows the laws of nature. Does a volcano do damage to the planet? I'd say it changes the planet, but 'damage' is a word that judges the change negative. Climate change will make life more difficult for many plants and animals. Some will probably thrive. As I think about this, probably the only 'objective' use of 'damage the planet' would be to describe its total annihilation at which point pieces of the earth would, I guess, scatter in space, and still exist, but in a different way.
Who is the narrator, Blonde Politics/The Silly Serious?
Finally, I've never seen this YouTube presenter before, I was impressed with the presentation, but I did want to at least minimally vet her before sharing with my readers. So I did look her up. Here's what I found in a quick search. She's Australian Joanna Richards.
"Hey.
I am a writer, actor, and academic.
I love to create art, and feel fortunate to be able to blend my various interests to create meaningful work. Above all else, I love to laugh, and make others laugh! Using art to tackle important and controversial topics, I hope to create work that challenges people without making them feel defensive.
My academic research focuses on the relationship between gender, political authority, and language philosophy. I frequently appear in print and on television to discuss issues relating to gender and representation. Sometimes I am on tv pretending to be someone else!
Please reach out if you want to chat.
Affliations
Institute for Governance Policy Analysis - Doctor of Philosophy (in progress) University of Canberra - Bachelor of Philosophy (First Class Honours) Moscow Art Theatre School - Fine Arts Conservatory (Stanislavski Intensive)
Australian National University - Bachelor of International Relations"
The reach out seems serious. At the bottom of the page it says:
"email: hello@joannarichards.com Currently in: New York City"
Solano, California - one of the cities tech bros are trying to create
On the video, Joanna talks about one the tech bros billionaires goals to build private tech, corporate owned cities. Which made me think of stories I read when I still had a subscription to the LA Times about tech billionaires buying up land in northern California to build such a city. Only the story didn't get into the more sinister underpinnings Joanna mentions. You can read an AP story about this here. They did qualify to put the proposal on the ballot, but later withdrew it. But they're planning to be back in 2026. And as I listened to the video again, Joanna does mention Solano. (about 11:40 in the video).
[Let me add one more note: I'm using Tech Bros as the technical term for white men who get rich through IT and generally think they know more than everyone else and that the rule of law doesn't apply to them. This definition is open for editing.]
This is just a tiny fraction of the acts he's taken.
Even if Congress stood up to Trump, he would simply ignore them and do what he wants. Who is to stop him? (I'll try to address this question in another post.)
What seems to drive his decisions? There seem to be four key factors, though readers can probably think of others:
Getting everyone to focus on Trump. He just can't deal with being ignored or criticized
Punish those who don't kowtow to his whims
Whip up the fear and anger of his supporters
Reward his wealthy supporters
No mainstream media mention coup yet
While the main media outlets might mention his actions, none that I've seen have put it all together and called it a coup. When I google Trump coup - everything that comes up is about January 6, 2021. Cyber coups are as easy to convey visually as military coups.
But on social media, people are starting to call this what it is. Here are just a couple of examples:
From Bluesky/ was bustling with coup references today.
"But the longer we fail to recognize the current situation for what it is—a slow-rolling coup attempt—the longer it will take for us to recover."
Even on Musk's own Twitter people are calling it a coup
We are in the middle of a fast moving putsch, a right wing authoritarian coup, a five alarm fire, and our media are treating it as if it were a little backyard bonfire.
If this isn’t a coup d’etat, I don’t know what is. Someone not elected to office is methodically taking full control of the United States government. pic.twitter.com/zxUMcsFv8G
At the moment, most people are living pretty much the way they were six months ago. Except for dark skinned immigrants, pregnant women with complications, LGBTQ folks, people are still going about their lives relatively normally.
They haven't grasped that soon they will be affected. Maybe when disaster funds are withheld, or people they work with disappear, or their health care or social security are sharply reduced or disappear.
But most authoritarian governments in world history end. Some faster than others. Find ways to resist in your community - whether it's joining a group, contacting your federal representatives on a regular basis, confronting disinformation when you hear it, and many other ways. Here's Robert Reich's list of ten things to do to resist.
I'd note Reich reminds people to find joy in their lives - get out and appreciate the beauty of nature, of art, music, a meal with family and friends, play with your pets.
I learned today that Jeremy Lansman, a very complex, intelligent man with many talents, and not a few loose ends untied, passed away on December 28, 2024 at his home in Grabouw, South Africa. He and I had very different skills. He knew as much about birds and plants as I knew about power lines. Yet we also had much in common and we had a wonderful and playful relationship in which we both learned from each other.
He's a legendary figure in the community radio world and he's the only person I know who thinks that electrical towers of any kind improve the landscape. To the point where I have photos of such things in my files, because of him.
There's so much more to say about him, but this will have to do for now.
There will be a celebration of his life in his garden in Gabrouw, South Africa on February 15, 2025.
Google doesn't tell us much about Jeremy, but here are a couple of links. Just search 'Jeremy Lansman' when you get to the pages.
[Note: not to be confused with Baltimore's "Jeremy Landsman, the developer/pot-dealer/money-launderer chronicled in City Paper's coverage until his January 2013 sentencing, is out of prison and heading to Hawaii."]
Jeremy was in my life weekly, often daily, for maybe five or ten years before he went off to South Africa. He was a good friend and I already missed him when he left Anchorage. He left with bizarre blood issues that had him scouring the internet to figure out ways to lengthen the dire prognosis he got from his doctors. And he lived another life still during the years in South Africa.
I'm reading a book for my book club called Fuzz by Mary Roach. She shadows people who are dealing with animal/human conflicts around the world. It started with bears, then to elephants, and now I'm in a chapter on leopards.
The forestry official working with villagers in northern India has set up solar powered lights that intermittently go on and off during the night, which, they surmise, mimics people with flashlights, which keeps the leopards at bay. But the villagers wanted to leave the lights on all night, which, they say, is less effective. At that point, Roach tells us rangers had similar problems in Colorado trying to convince ranchers to use fladry.
So here's something very different - an explanation of how to use fladry.
fladry n.pl. a string of flags used to contain or exclude wild animals. ... Etymological Note: According to Polish Scientific Publishers (Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, SA), fladry is the plural of flader, which comes from German. It is not specified which German word, but it’s probably related to flattern ‘to flutter.’ It is probably not related to the Polish flÄ…dry, the plural of flÄ…dra, which according to the Oxford PWN Polish English Dictionary (2002, Oxford University Press) means “1. flounder, flatfish; 2. slattern, slut.”
I have found 'fladry' in English in the sense of "a string of flags etc." as early as 1993, in a technical paper titled "Status and Management of the Wolf in Poland" (Biological Conservation; see, for example, the abstract)."
We're back in Anchorage. As we went to the airport in the late afternoon Friday, there seemed to be a lot less smoke blowing from the Palisades fire toward the ocean. By the time we took off, it was dark out and while we sat on the wrong side of the plane, we could still see the flames through the window on the other side as we banked to the north. It was the first time we saw actual flames.
I grew up in LA and my mom lived in our house for 65 years. So I know the area fairly well. Especially the west side where the Palisades fire is. I've seen huge changes over time and I have some thoughts, having been in LA when the fire started.
We discovered KCAL on the radio while we were driving - which had the most up-to-the-minute and detailed coverage of the fires. You can watch the KCAL coverage here. I listened again this morning from here in Anchorage. I know the places they're talking about, but even if you don't it's pretty addicting and I don't recommend watching more than 15 minutes at a time.
History - Marquez, Will Rogers State Park, UCLA, Santa Monica Pier
Here's a recent map from the Los Angeles County Emergency site. These maps keep being updated. I've done a screenshot of an area of importance to me. The orange is mandatory evacuation areas. The yellow is a warning area - be ready to evacuate. I'd note I was still getting alerts on my phone as we were headed to the airport.
My mom's house is down at the bottom, just below the Santa Monica Airport which is the border between SM and Los Angeles. It's a long way off from the mandatory evacuation area. It probably doesn't look that far, but the fire is mostly in mountainous areas - large lots, hillsides covered with (now) dry brush. The land between mandatory evacuation and be ready to evacuate areas and my mom's house is much more urban. Directly above my mom's house is the concrete and asphalt runway of the Santa Monica Airport.
I went to school at UCLA. As you can see, the Evacuation Warning area touches the northwest corner of the campus.
My last two years at UCLA, I was a noon duty aide and afterschool playground director at Marquez Elementary School. It's one of two schools that burned down Thursday. Every day, about 11:30am I took off from UCLA and rode along Sunset to Marquez Elementary School. Sometimes I napped in the nurse's office between lunch and after school duty. Other times I rode the last mile or so of Sunset to the beach where I played volley ball and body surfed.
In more recent years, when I come down to LA, I bike down to Venice Beach and then north along the coast up to the where Pacific Palisades meets the ocean. In the previous post, I put up a picture from a recent ride, looking up at a couple of houses on the bluff above the ocean there.
The Santa Monica Pier, which is just about where the SA of Santa Monica are on the map, has also been a favorite spot in the LA area. We took the grandkids to the pier on New Year's Eve before going to see Cirque Du Soleil which was in a tent in the pier parking lot. And the pier is still there and likely not in danger, despite earlier reports that it was, and what almost certainly was a fake photo of the pier with the sky full of flames behind it. Though the Cirque Du Soleil tents are gone.
On Wednesday, the second day of the fire, I biked (with a good mask on) to the pier and a little beyond it. Here's a video I took from the pier. Downtown Santa Monica is where the tall buildings are to the right.
Today's map has the evacuation line right up to the ocean for a good part of it. But at downtown Santa Monica, the air was relatively clear and was still reasonably so a couple of miles north of the pier. I rode beyond the pier until I could see that up ahead the smoke was down on the highway and bike trail. I didn't need to get that close to thick smoke. But you can see, in the picture below, a runner, without a mask, heading for it. I'd note that as a Jr. High and High School student, LA air frequently looked like that and on the worst days, we'd get a pain in our chest when we breathed deep.
"In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism."
If you don't know these names (and I acknowledge that most people probably don't, despite their being important cultural figures), and others mentioned in the linked book announcement, I'd urge you to google them. They're pretty remarkable people. My mother had connections to Schoenberg family through her work, and through the owner of the dress shop who was featured in the film Woman In Gold. who hired Schoenberg's grandson to represent her in her fight against the Austrian government to recover pictures stolen from her family by the Nazis. My mom shopped at her store and sent me clippings from the newspaper of the lawsuit while it was happening.
Another member of the group was Leon Feuchtwanger. When I was a high school or college student, my father took me to visit an older German woman in West Los Angeles or possibly Santa Monica. Close to the yellow evacuation warning area today. I could be wrong, but I believe this was Leon Feuchtwanger's widow, Marta. (My father also fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.)
The End, But Not The End
I wanted this to be one integrated post, tying a number of different ideas together. But while I think some of my readers could read on beyond this, I've got several more topics and there is already a lot in the links to explore. So I'll save the others for tomorrow and maybe the next day.
Coming:
1. Development in the hills - Why have people built way up in this area known for fires?
2. Pacific Palisades and Malibu, and now Brentwood ( especially Mandeville Canyon), Encino on the valley side are some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, probably the US. Would we be paying such close attention if this were a poorer neighborhood? Would a poorer neighborhood be getting all the resources coming in to help like this?
3. The idea of ownership and loss - humans are short term inhabitants on earth. We don't 'own' the earth, or anything else really. We are the temporary guardians until the 'properties' are lost, sold,, destroyed, stolen, or by the death of the people who believe they own them.
4. Phone Alerts - I kept getting loud alerts on my phone with warnings to evacuate immediately
5. How television news (in particular) distort reality by showing the most sensational snippets and ignoring the fact that most people are going on with their lives normally.
6. Warning to Anchorage hillside residents, and people everywhere who live in wooded hillsides. Or any area that is threatened by nature's reaction to Climate Change.
It was very foggy several days ago, from what I could tell, mostly within three or four miles of the coast.
So, this afternoon, as we were driving home from errands that got us as far east as Beverly Hills, and we saw a wall of clouds off to the west, I assumed it was a fog bank. Though it looked a bit odd, and it seemed to be more north and to the south was still clear.
When we got home, I walked around the block to take some pictures.
We were listening to KJZZ, and didn't hear any news of the Palisades fire. It was pretty windy, and I thought the off shore wind was keeping the fog to the coast.
It was much later that we heard about the fire. And then, as I was reading about the fire, almost midnight - an alarm went off on my phone.
We're about six or seven miles, as the crow flies from the Palisades. Malibu is even further. When I bike to the beach and then north through Santa Monica and to Will Rogers State Beach (back in Los Angeles), Pacific Palisades is above the ocean. Those areas are up in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains. We're down in more city area.
Here's a picture of a couple of houses up on the bluff at Pacific Palisades from my bike ride along the ocean the other day.
But I did just go outside and while the moon is bright, the air is starting to get smoky.
And we've had three more alarms go off on my phone. The last one is for folks in Topanga Canyon to be ready to get out.
And another alarm just went off but I didn't get a screen shot. The alarms really screech. It's 1:15am. I really don't think we're in any danger. When I was growing up, we would see the red glow up in the hills, but it never got out of the hills.
But these are different times. I probably should leave my phone on, just in case. But I don't think I'll get much sleep if I do.
Our tickets back to Anchorage are for Friday night.
Here's the LA County Emergency map for right now. We're about where the black star is. That looks much closer than I realized. But that orange blotch along the ocean is the evacuation area, NOT the fire area. There is all of Santa Monica between the evacuation area and us. As you can see there is another fire to the east. But I'll leave my phone on. It's 1:30 am as I post this.
1. Happy New Year seems inappropriate as we enter 2025. Yes, enter, like we are going into a different space. Where the traditional rules of engagement are ignored by the incoming president of the united states. The rest of us can no longer depend on the rules to protect us. And by taking the high road and simply following the rules, we will be buried.
We're still in this place where people are going about their lives almost normally, when in 20 days we get a broken human as our new president and he's surrounded by similarly afflicted people. That normality is going to change. Rapidly for some, more slowly for others. The unhoused have been living in that world already. LGBTQ+ and immigrants and people of color have also been feeling it, and it will quickly get worse.
The rest of us have to help protect them, because it's the right thing to do. But for those who need a more personal reason, well, eventually it will be you with a target on your back.
There are times when following the rules can get you killed. Like packing your suitcase and quietly following the directions of the Nazis to get on the train. Times where acts of resistance and sabotage are the morally correct actions. It's time to reread Saul Alinsky.
"In his theory of means and ends, Alinsky puts across a question, which states whether the ends justify the means. According to the theory, the ends entail what individuals want, or goal, while means entail the activities of how to get what they want or to achieve the goal. In his discussion, Alinsky thought that the morality of actions did not require to be judged in itself, but rather be weighed against the morality of inaction. In the chapter on the means and ends, Alinsky stated that the issue of means and ends is usually viewed in a strategic and pragmatic manner by the man of action. In his arguments, he pointed out that the man of action only gets to ask of ends when they can be achieved and of means whether they will work for his plans."
Morally balancing ends and means is not a simple task and many have and will do it poorly. Start with actions whose ends are not major violations to practice before taking more consequential actions. Remember, many of our incoming President's supporters are rabid supporters of their interpretation of the Second Amendment, and they have and intend to use their guns.
Examine your values. List them. Prioritize them. Know which ones are most important. Then use your values to actively guide your actions.
A small but vocal group is driving the current flood of book bans in school and public libraries across the country.
Every resistance group, almost by definition, comes from a very small group that is dedicated to their cause. We don't all have to fight every battle. We each need to focus on one or two issues (while also supporting people fighting other battles as we can). Here's United Against Book Bans tools:
"It's important to counter those voices by uniting in support of the freedom to read in your local community. How can you and your community unite against book bans? We've put together this action toolkit to help you get started.
Are you part of an organization? You can find additional resources to amplify and support the Unite Against Book Bans campaign in the UABB Toolkit PDF.
We took the grandkids to Cirque du Soleil yesterday. (An example of how we are still living what seems like a normal life.) All the performers break the rules of what normal people can do. This woman, wrapped in a long red cloth found ways to seemingly defy gravity. They are able to do these amazing feats by focusing on their skills, building the appropriate body and mind muscles, and then, during their acts, focusing on perfection.
I challenge my readers to keep this image in mind as you focus on keeping our democracy alive.
4. My New Years Resolution
My resolution is to perform at least one act of resistance every day of 2025. I realize 'resistance' seems to be 'against' and I want to also include acts of affirmation, of strengthening democracy, but haven't figured out the right word yet.
This can be as basic as speaking up to racists, misogynists, homophobes. You don't have to save the world each day. Just plugging a hole in the dyke is resistance. in Reading Alinsky's books and other books that give you tools for your spirit and for action. Reading the United Against Book Banning group's Tool Kit to take action and applying them to your most cherished causes is a first step. Go to all the links in this post and read. Those are acts of resistance and building your resources. Find other good resources and prescriptions for action and leave them in the comments.
