No Tao Time

I’m an infrequent follower of the Tao. I have the opening line to Chapter 56 of the Tao Te Ching tattooed on my back. It was my very first tattoo. In moments of self-awareness at the age of 18, I understood that I was (am) a blowhard with a superiority complex and an inveterate asshole. I decided to tattoo that fact and its solution on my body forever, to remind myself that I can go fuck myself. The Tao is a sacred collection of musings from an apocryphal cat named Lao Tse almost entirely about telling yourself to go fuck yourself. It’s brilliant.

It can also be wrong in a spectacular, confident fashion, but also it could be right at the same time. It’s a weird book; the other topic that it’s concerned with is good governance. Self-help meets Zbigniew Brzezinski.

29

If any one should wish to get the kingdom for himself, and to

effect this by what he does, I see that he will not succeed. The

kingdom is a spirit-like thing, and cannot be got by active doing. He

who would so win it destroys it; he who would hold it in his grasp

loses it.

Chapter 29 is right/wrong in this exact manner. Obviously, the first part is wrong, because all of history, and the second part is clearly right because duh, but also, because the second part is right if you look at the first part in that context the first part is probably right, too, because what the fuck?

In the context of the present, every president (the office that is becoming ever more reminiscent of kingship) has wished to get the kingdom, and has succeeded by doing. That’s kinda how it works. Unless you consider the kingdom a spirit-like thing, in which case he fucking nailed it. His point is, essentially, anyone who wants to president should be automatically disqualified on account of they’re going to fuck everything up. So, yea, he fucking nailed it.

43

The softest thing in the world dashes against and overcomes the

hardest; that which has no (substantial) existence enters where there

is no crevice. I know hereby what advantage belongs to doing nothing

(with a purpose).

Chapter 43 is right/wrong too. All of this is right in the long run, unlike Jesus’ “meek shall inherit the Earth” line, which by now we all know isn’t true. The meek is getting fucked, bro. Water erodes rock over time and you should totally be like water, as Bruce Lee told us two thousand years later (and then Spike from Cowboy Bebop only slightly more recently). To be deliberately flowing, rather than actively struggling, is to embody the principles of the Tao. Awesome. But we don’t have the luxury of becoming one with the universe and therefore ourselves, because we don’t have time.

In order to survive this time, we’re gonna have to be hard.

71

To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest

(attainment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a disease.

It is simply by being pained at (the thought of) having this

disease that we are preserved from it. The sage has not the disease.

He knows the pain that would be inseparable from it, and therefore he

does not have it.

Lao Tse got to the Dunning-Kruger effect a lot sooner than they did, which is pretty cool, and not only that, but he also solved it, which is super cool, but also no one ever paid attention and no one ever will, very less cool. Like he says, “My words are very easy to know, and very easy to practise; but there is no one in the world who is able to know and able to practise them” (which is just such a fucking cop out, if you ask me).

That is the reason we don’t have enough time to be Taoists. The diseased people Lao Tse describes are legion and they are in power. They’ve spread that disease to, if not a majority, a plurality and if that disease isn’t stopped we will all be destroyed by it.

Dan and I make sure to point out that we have no love for either party, we don’t give a fuck about Republicans or Democrats, we’re done with politics as a team sport. The problems we face are not the result, really, of the right or the left, they are the result of people who think they know what the fuck they are doing and stick to it regardless of the reality of the situation. The Iraq war is still going. We’re still putting shit tons of carbon in the atmosphere. We can’t fucking stop electing idiots.

We can no longer be patient. It’s time for the people who know what the fuck they’re talking about, but question everything, to publicly abandon that position - but privately prize it like precious metal - and start insisting loudly and forcefully we have simple, easy-to-understand solutions. Bernie Sanders knew well that taxing the rich isn’t a tax code, but it was a simple concept that penetrated the know-what-the-fuck-they’re-talking-about assholes. In America no longer can you discuss policy, reality, or much else. In order to defeat the Dunnings-Kruger, you have to appeal to them directly using their own language.

We need to take our good ideas and boil them down again and again until they’re at their simplest expression and repeat it loudly and confidently. They do it and that’s why they’re winning.  

Focus, Damn It

I check Google News every morning because it’s an exceptional news aggregator and because I am a sheep incapable of escaping from the foul grip of our shadowy technocratic overlords. I’m absolutely contributing to the death of investigative journalism (even though it’s been bleeding out from countless wounds for 40 years) and the ever greater consolidation of power within corporate media sources, but hey, fuck it.

At least 70% of the headlines feature the word “Trump”. This is a massive problem. The trend inescapable is maddening because every article is redundant. We already fucking know. Everyone who’s going to get it, gets it. Everyone who doesn’t get it, will never. There’s no story of his psychopathy that can surprise, there’s no bottom to his madness, there’s nothing more to say about him. He’s not news. He’s not even fucking fake news at this point. He’s the presidential equivalent of Dog Bites Man.

When he called the widow of a dead soldier and was a dick, were you at all surprised? When he tweets out some threat to North Korea or some defense of some racist or some racist shit himself, are you surprised? More pressing, does it change your thinking regarding him? Of fucking course not. Because we already know enough about him to judge accurately what needs to happen to him and that’s some sort of ironic, Twilight-Zone-y type of punishment. Like maybe he’s put in a small, padded room with a permanent gag in his mouth and his hands tied behind his back while civil rights leaders tweet W.E.B. DuBois quotes from his account. Maybe not that, but something along those lines.

I’m not giving some kind of “If you ignore him he’ll go away” take, quite the opposite, I think every story should be about him. He is the largest immediate threat to the entire world. The entire GOP is butt and should be removed with the use of a time machine set to 1979, but none of them are so obsessed with a combined paranoia and pathetic need for instant and total approval. Those two qualities are the perfect Nixonian mix of getting us all killed. The damage Pence and the rest of the GOP fucks will do once he’s gone will be catastrophic, but it will be reversible so long as we can come together and defeat them, but the reality of Trump is not necessarily nuclear war, but definitely the destruction of any kind of global cooperation with the US.

It’s time to let go of the shit that Trump does being the story, “Trump makes false claim” is not news, he’s a liar. “Trump lies and needs to be impeached” is the news. “Trump tweets…” should be changed to “Fuck Trump, he needs to be impeached, and also why the fuck is tweeting a news thing? Like, for real, what world do we live in where the President is even allowed to tweet?” “Trump says…” needs to be changed to “The oligarchs are murdering us all because all they fucking care about, and are using the stupidity of their easily lied to racists to gain, are Tax Cuts”.

Most importantly, every front page, blog, and tweet should be about the cowardice, worthlessness, idiocy, and actual, real-life evil of the GOP house members who refuse to do the only fucking job they have. If enough of them can be successfully bullied into doing something valuable for once in their lives, move on to the Senate.

So I suppose the great question of the internet generation is simply, “Can we focus if our lives depend on it?” Cause they goddam do.

Third Party

For a third party to have any success it must be divorced from any presidential candidate or “independent” label in congress. In fact, it must be free of any cult of personality or charismatic leader. It must emerge wholecloth from a collective and candidates from it must run for election across the entire spectrum of elected offices.

Money has utterly corrupted our political system (WHO COULD’VE GUESSED EXCEPT EVERY FUCKING SMART PERSON SINCE ALWAYS! FOR REAL, WE ALL KNEW THAT!) and all of the solutions put forward are somewhat workable, but there is an exceptionally effective one that we never talk about. A District Attorney can prosecute financial crimes on the state level, whereas the DOJ attorneys are appointed, state DA’s are elected. Because of the money poured into election campaigns and the apathy with which most people view these elections (and also Law and Order has convinced us they only deal with murder and bullshit like that), most of these attorneys are corrupt in the same way as every other elected official; they’re beholden to the oligarchs. Why would you prosecute a rich person when you rely on their money? Multiple times this has been reported on and forgotten. The Trump University case was settled by, relatively speaking, stingy donations. Pam Bondi took $25k in donations in order to nix a case that would’ve been worth millions. Now, of course, those millions would’ve gone to the people hurt by Trump University, rather than her personally, but still, our government is so cheap to buy. Imagine if we had a DA there who would’ve actually taken the case to court? Would we have the president we have now if he’d lost a shit ton of money?

You absolutely do not become as rich as these fuckers without committing crimes. How many crimes were committed during the housing collapse? So many. How many of those responsible went to jail? None.

Run for DA, prosecute those crimes, the rich will tremble.

The Freedom Caucus in the House (jesus christ they could not be more misleading with the name. In Australia the Liberal Party is a hard right political party and even they scoff at that bullshit) has demonstrated how much power a small amount of assholes can wield. When it’s those assholes, we’re the ones getting fucked, we need it to be us assholes. Unfortunately, right now we’re relying on individuals to break in. Randy Bryce, i.e. Ironstache, is running against Paul Ryan, he’s an unapologetically pro-union, anti-everysinglefuckingassholeGOPmotherfucker and hopefully, he’ll be able to leverage the anti-Trump sentiment into an effective campaign and unseat one of the worst human beings on the planet. But he’s one guy. Across the country, countless GOP lunatics are running unopposed in their districts. The Democrats have essentially conceded all of these races because the districts have been so gerrymandered it’s nearly impossible for a Democrat to win there. Their theory is that they can’t win because of their policies and they think that because they are very, very stupid. Progressive policies are insanely popular, Democrats are not. Nationally, it’s hard to convince people that a third party is effective because they believe that it will siphon votes away from one party and thus hand the election to the other. But in a local election, one where there’s only one national political party running, and there’s no possible way to siphon votes away from the other; Fuck it, run. Avoid the national unpopularity of the Democrats, run against the national unpopularity of the GOP.

These smaller elections can have an outsized impact. Our system is set up in favor of the rich, but it’s also set up in favor of the people who are paying attention. In American history we’ve had multiple small parties emerge and fuck shit up. The Know-Nothing party fucked shit up in the 1850s not because it had a centralized leadership, exactly the opposite. It was effective because it was an ever expanding network of affiliated groups of assholes. They were anti-immigrant monsters, of course, because nothing motivates people more than anger and helplessness, but they put together a blueprint. They never won a national election, but goddam it if they didn’t win the small ones. The secret is to emerge collectively across the board. The third parties we’ve seen in the states in the past 40 years have been universally about one candidate running for one office. They’ll get national attention and then they’ll be blown off as disruptive at best, but more likely worthless and awful.

All of this is to outline the basis for my plan: I believe the most effective strategy to change our current political system as quickly as possible is to organize as many candidates as possible for as many elections as possible. Doesn’t matter for what, doesn’t matter where, but we all need to run underneath the same banner. One candidate won’t receive the attention necessary, nor will they receive the money necessary, to actually win an election, no matter how small. But if a third party emerges nationally, hundreds of candidates running simultaneously, it will demand attention. With small elections, attention is the most valuable currency.

In elections decided by 1000 votes or less, a third party can absolutely win. And as talked about above, some of these small elections can wield outsize power when coupled with determination and the will necessary to remain uncorrupted by the wealthy. That power can then be parlayed into more and more popular politics and so on and so on. There’s a reason the most popular politician in the country right now isn’t a Democrat or a Republican and we need to capitalize on that as soon as we can. The two parties we have now have spent the last 40 years killing us all. They need to be stopped. Short of riots, this is the way we gotta go.

Fixed It

Anybody got any solutions?

How about this, what if we give North Korea everything they want? I mean, fuck it, right? We’re the richest nation, they’re fucking crazy, let’s just give them all that shit. Let’s do a full Star Trek, let’s give them so much shit every North Korean becomes rich and we fill them with so much wealth they explode. You think North Koreans are going to put up with a God King if they’re all rich? Why not try it? The shit we’re doing is dumb and doesn’t work. Anybody ever think of that?

Immigration? No restrictions. Everyone can immigrate to America if they want. We’ve got enough space. You can move to any city that has less than 1 million in population. We did it before. When we went all Manifest Destiny everyone could go claim some land if they felt like it. Do it again. The shit we’re doing is dumb and doesn’t work. Think about all the jobs. If people move to somewhere remote, we’ll have to build roads to get there, power plants, water filtration, everything. Everyone will need everything it takes to be a part of modern society. Done, no problem. Everything we’re doing right now is stupid, fuck it, why not?

Nuclear weapons? We get rid of them first. If America dismantles every single one of its nuclear weapons immediately, with no restrictions and no promises and no deals with any other country, do you think that all of a sudden they’d start pushing us around and threatening to bomb us? If anyone uses a nuke, the entire Earth is destroyed. Mutually assured destruction as a foreign policy is, and has always been, in effect simply by the existence of nuclear weapons. A nuclear weapon is not a weapon, it’s suicide. The Japanese didn’t surrender because we dropped nuclear bombs on them, the death toll between Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined was less than the firebombing of Tokyo. The only difference was that you can rebuild after a fire, you can’t rebuild after radiating the Earth. The threat of dropping nuclear weapons is effective(?), but actually using them, at their current strength, is stupid. Fuck it, everything we’re doing now is stupid, why not?

Climate Change? Check this out. We fucking move now. We don’t even bother trying to solve it, that’s dumb, it’s too late. Let’s just figure out where it’s going to really damage shit, and then move. Florida? Nope. Move out. Food? Crops? Animals? Start moving them, too. Soil isn’t fertile? Start working on it now. Shit has been terraformed in the past and we’ve survived it. We didn’t have modern tech back then, all we had was a fucking hoe and a dream and an infant mortality rate that was crazy high. We’ve got all kinds of shit right now. Imprison every executive at Monsanto (because they’ve absolutely committed crimes, like, ridiculous numbers of crimes, like, they’ve committed all of the crimes, I bet you wouldn’t even have to do that much investigating, I bet I could just google Monsanto and the first google search result would be “Monsanto totally committed some crimes, damn, lots of crimes”) and put the people at Monsanto on the job. If you can genetically engineer corn to be infertile after one generation, I guarantee you can figure out dry soil.

Income inequality? Here’s a plan, killing all rich people doesn’t work (as much as I’d like to, as satisfying as it would be (ok, maybe we kill one or two) but we tried it in France and it did not go well, I wouldn’t expect it to go differently now - we can pretend that we’re better than our counterparts in the 1700s, but I don’t actually believe it), so we let them keep their money, but, rather than hoard it, they must spend 40% of their yearly income on stuff. Let’s Brewster’s Millions income inequality. All the wealthy do is try to become more wealthy, they hoard money like dragons. Make them spend it. We’ve had massive stimulus packages in the past, instead of having the government tax the wealthy, they’ll just try to get out of that bullshit, why not pass a law making them spend the money? It’s just like a stimulus package, but it’s private. What is the fucking point of having money if you aren’t spending it? This way all of the Ayn Rand-loving piles of human waste get to satisfy their libertarian LARP fantasy and pretend that the bullshit they say makes a goddam bit of sense. At the same time, they put enough money in the economy to actually benefit human beings, like we are, instead of satisfying cruel, psychopathic monsters, like they are.

Are these all reasonable, workable solutions? No. Maybe. Who the fuck knows? But the solutions that have been discussed, the limitations that have been falsely ascribed to the situation we find ourselves in, and the people who absolutely refuse to entertain any creative notion all need to fucking go. Get these fucks out of here. America has been run by the dumbest, worst, most horrendous people for the past all-of-its-existence and it’s time to get rid of them. Now.

SCOTUS

Until we change the Supreme Court in one way or the other, we will be the victims of mass shootings.

In 1936 FDR added justices to the Supreme Court (imagine how that would go down now, Democrats were so incompetent and Republicans so intractable that we spent more than a fucking year without a justice) in order to pack it with his people, people that would rubber stamp pretty much everything he tried to pass. Do not misunderstand, this is a shaky situation. In that particular instance, FDR was using these justices to get America out of the Great Depression and he was doing so in a way that would benefit the large majority of people as opposed to the richest. In fact, no president has ever had a more aggressively progressive agenda (shocker, during this period the lives of the poor began to improve at a faster rate as well as a more consistent increase shown over the next 40 years until the great fuckface Reagan fucked everything up for us). However, any use of power, especially this type of ‘partisan’ power, can be misused by the other side, as evidenced by Obama’s use of executive orders. By giving the president more power, which, by abdicating their own, Congress did, you give both presidents more power. The president that used that power to commit some war crimes, versus the president that is currently committing all the war crimes. So if we’re going to pack the Supreme Court in order to actually fix this dumb fuck government, we’re also going to have to close the door behind us. Otherwise we’ll just get into an ever more insane SCOTUS arms race.

If we can successfully add at least two more justices to the court, we’ll be able to pass through a large amount of progressive bills that would otherwise be challenged for a billion years in court. We’d be able to revisit cases that have fucked over the lower classes for hundreds of years. Did you know there are precedents from hundreds of years ago that are still used today? Fun Fact: that’s fucking stupid. Imagine reversing the damage done to women seeking an abortion, the damage done by fucking Citizens United, and the upcoming damage done to the working class by their utter gutting of worker’s rights. Unions will be decimated by the upcoming ruling that will allow non-union workers to opt out of paying dues.

They’re doing this because unions have been a reliable source of support for the Democratic party and also because they are owned by oligarchs who want to make every possible fucking cent they can. Unions benefit not just the people within the union, not just the people who do the same job and refuse to join the union, but every single member of the working class. The stronger unions are, the higher the wages of every single one of us. The argument used currently to compel non-union members to pay dues is that if you’re a public school teacher, union or non-union, the collective bargaining power will benefit you. If it benefits union and non-union equally, then both should pay their fair share. This argument is unimpeachable and yet, somehow, the SCOTUS will almost certainly rule it unconstitutional or however they may put it. They will do this because the GOP has packed the court and will use that power to ruin our lives until we do something about it, or the requisite judges die at the same time as a non-idiot, non-monster, non-oligarch supporting, piece-of-shit moron with malignant narcissistic personality disorder president is in office.

If we don’t successfully alter the process by which SCOTUS fucks us, whether by packing it, or perhaps, not a bad idea, abolishing it entirely, we will be in the thrall of the GOP long after they’ve been removed from Congress.

Unhealthy Taxes

You’re going to be told that the GOP is moving on from destroying healthcare to tax reform. Don’t buy it, they are the same thing.

It’s easy to talk shit about ‘my tax dollars are going to this?’ but don’t forget, every positive thing the government does is funded by taxes, too. The government’s budget is almost entirely eaten by Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Endless War (or at least that’s how it should be named on those pie graphs instead of bullshit like ‘military spending’), combined they’re more than 2/3rds of the whole thing. Of those three, if money were scarce, which do you think the oligarchs are going to come for first?

Even our dumb allies like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker voted to increase the military budget this year by almost all of the college loan money. America is out of control with the whole military thing. Hindsight is 20/20, but I don’t think we should’ve fought all those wars and then kept fighting those wars and then never stopped fighting those wars. Could be me, though.

Obamacare, comparatively, doesn’t even cost much to the government. In a lot of ways, it’s really the epitome of what Republicans used to be in the 90s, privatised and still in the racist closet instead of the ‘17 ‘out and proud we’re nazis’ model we have. And you can already see they’re trying to kill it with a thousand cuts. They’re pretending to do weekly maintenance on the enrolling website in order to impede a few more people from signing up. Weekly. On a website. The fewer people that sign up and participate, the higher the premiums other people pay. Every time the premiums rise, more people will cancel their coverage, raising premiums for everyone else. It takes effort, but you can sabotage anything from healthcare websites to voting machines to free and fair elections to one big election that may have accelerated the end of the world to a breakneck speed.

All of this is about taxes on the oligarchy. All of it. It’s really insane. It’s so mind-bogglingly insane it forces you to realize that they are psychopaths. Why did the GOP want to get rid of the ACA and literally, not figuratively, literally, sentence more people to death and bankruptcy? Tax cuts for the wealthy. A tax on the oligarchs helps pay for Obamacare. Every bill the GOP tried got rid of that tax. They just wanted to give the oligarchs a tax cut. Now that we’ve stopped their efforts to repeal Obamacare, and literally, not figuratively, literally, saved lives, now the GOP is moving on from that to...giving the oligarchs a tax cut.

You saw Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder, two psychopaths who should be put in a time machine and beheaded during the French Revolution, kneel alongside their employees, coopting a symbolic protest directed entirely at them and their other, decrepit, monstrous, billionaire, kleptocratic cockbag peers by way of a police force that has become a militarized pauper’s prison; a self-perpetuating murder machine that penalizes the helpless, the homeless, and the person of color for existing in a public space; a police-force cum street-gang that chants and cheers while it beats back any attempt to curtail their brutality. Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones didn’t kneel to protest them. They knelt because they needed to make sure you didn’t put them on the guillotine first. Those same two assholes have donated more money than you or I will ever see to GOP cockbags for the express purpose of lowering their taxes. They don’t care about anything but money.

The oligarchs buy politicians who, rather than run on the clearly unpopular position of ‘we will make the poor die’, have their white supremacy stoked and erect, jingling keys that the destitute white idiots look at in order to vote for their own shallow grave. They’re almost certainly white supremacists themselves, but that’s gravy on top for them, all they care about is keeping just a little more money. And the more money they keep, the less money there is for programs that actually help people.

Apparently, regardless of party, they’ll never touch that military budget, they’ll never lower that fucking military budget. They’ll cut Social Security and watch old folks die before they take a penny away from a fucking plane that can’t fucking fly. They’ll cut Medicaid and watch poor people die before they stop building fucking tanks for a ground war that will never fucking be fought. They’ll raise the fucking military budget to 700 fucking billion and then tell us that single-payer healthcare isn’t fucking feasible. (Jesus Christ, Kamala fucking Harris, I was rooting for you.)

In the 1950s the top marginal tax rate was 90% on income above 300k. Marginal in this sense means people didn’t really pay 90% on every dollar over 300k, but rich fuckers making more than 2.5 million did. I’m sure back then there were loopholes and investment dodges and all that, but they still paid a whole hell of a lot more. Coincidentally, income inequality was nowhere near the staggering level of near-serfdom we live in now.

When they tell you we’ve saved Obamacare, we haven’t. We fought and won the first battle for a small part of the healthcare system. Now they’re starting the battle on the entire healthcare system. We need to fight just as hard, otherwise we’ll see just as many, if not more, people die.

Alternatively, we could seize every billionaire’s assets over 2.5 million and, this is true, fix every problem that poor Americans have. Just sayin’. And if they complain, I mean, time machine, French Revolution, fixed another problem poor Americans have.

Propaganda

Stop caring about what they say. Stop caring about what they think. Stop caring about what they write or publish or shout into the void. They stopped caring about you a long, long time ago.

The people who want your healthcare taken away are going to have their healthcare taken away, too. They will cheer for this. They are stupid. More importantly, and more to the point, they will be incapable of reconciling this fact. As the elderly, who voted for Trump overwhelmingly, die miserable and in pain, unable to afford a nursing home or assisted living facility or a house or an apartment, not just bankrupting themselves, but bankrupting their families who will do their best to treat them with compassion and throw money at their problems; they will applaud the very people who sentenced them to this fate.

Why will these morons, these utter fools, too stupid and entrenched in their own idiocy to stop for one moment and consider how they’ve destroyed themselves, still live in denial? Because they won and we lost. That is all they care about.

Trump voters do not care about themselves at all. They do not function within rational self-interest. All they care about is what liberals want, ironically. They care about it so much. They think liberals are the source of evil. They have been thoroughly indoctrinated with a belief in nothing but the destruction of liberal thought. So long as liberals lose, they will be happy.

The GOP does not have any ideas or policies or ideology beyond ‘dismantle everything that liberals have made’. What have they built? Their healthcare policy is ‘no healthcare’. Their tax policy is ‘no taxes (for the rich)’. Their military policy is ‘more war’ (doesn’t get more destructive than that). Their only goal is death on a massive scale.

There is no logical argument that can sway them, they are irrational. Pointing out the benefits of a socialist structure, and how many there are, and how much they would improve everyone’s lives will not give them pause, it will not change their minds. They are lost and to imagine otherwise is naive in the extreme.

Furthermore, the people whose interests the GOP is ostensibly acting for are just as stupid. The oligarchs will get more money in the short term from the massive tax cut they’re angling for, and then they will get less money because their businesses only function if people buy things. Siphoning money away from the middle class (which they’ve been doing but are now accelerating) will keep people from having enough money to buy things. This is a true thing that they cannot admit to themselves. This is what we learned during the 20s when the crash hit. The only way out was to redistribute income from the rich to the poor and it fucking worked. It worked so well that lives improved uniformly (though definitely not equally) for 40 years. When the GOP began dismantling the New Deal, overseen by the third dumbest president in American history, lives worsened uniformly (though even more unequally). These are true statements, borne out by history.

And not just American history. The events unfolding today have been the fundamental failing of humanity since always. When you consolidate power among a small few to the detriment of the many, everyone gets fucked. Sooner or later a rebellion happens. Sooner or later the oligarchs fall (hopefully in as violent a manner as possible). Or, even worse, when they realize there is nothing left for them to suck out of the many, like the miserable parasites they are, they eat themselves.

Monarchs and oligarchs last a few generations at best and then they suffer the same fate as the ones that came before and the ones that will come after (for as long as there is an ‘after’).

Humanity has a history problem.

So few are left who lived through the Great Depression, who saw firsthand the effects of a "Rich Folk First!" world, it is no longer a real thing to us. It is something in a history book. History books can be written by anyone, but they can only be distributed by those with the money and power to do so. So they'll teach the history that benefits their agenda, regardless of reality.

In Texas history books, slaves were “workers”.

Christians believe the Earth is 6 to 10,000 years old, depending on flavor of stupid.

So long as history has no ties to reality, you can justify whatever it is you want to do in the present. Propaganda is the destruction of reality, so it fits right in with every other GOP policy.