Bohemian Grove? That is SO yesterday.

 

Very interesting Atlantic article, excerpted.

...In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach…

Each morning, we gathered in a lecture hall to hear presentations. If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk, you understand the format. The year I went, a sitting Supreme Court justice was interviewed, and a neurologist talked about technological advances in prosthetics. In the afternoons and evenings, we were encouraged to exchange ideas over drinks and four-course meals, with no set purpose—to network, in other words, with some of the most rarefied talent on Earth. The most common question I heard was “Why am I here?”

“Why am I here?” asked the 1980s hair-metal singer. “Why am I here?” asked the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, the famous anthropologist, the presidential historian. Only the movie stars and the billionaires didn’t ask: They had done this kind of thing before. It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history...

At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.

Sitting in the lecture hall, pencils out, listening to a famous chef explain his humanitarian work, it was easy to feel like the solution to the world’s problems lay within our grasp. And yet, looking around at faces I had only ever seen in a magazine or on-screen, I had an unsettling revelation: This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything…

Here we were, 80 individuals with a combined net worth that was greater than a small city’s yet infinitesimal compared with the wealth and dominion of our host. How did he view this exercise—as a first step toward changing the world, or as a performative display of his reach and influence?

Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of this impossible wealth...

Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.

The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything…

This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life…

Great piece. Read all of it.

 

My dear Las Vegas friend Jerry Lopez (below leading his killer band) once got to do a hang and performance at The Bohemian Grove in the SF Bay Area.

 

 

Similar kind of juiced-up heavy hitters thing at the Bohemian, but these current-day techbiz cats like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman et al are order(s) of magnitude wealthier and aggressive. This stuff struck me when I read the Atlantic article, given its publication concurrent with the airing of Kara Swisher's awesome new CNN docuseries.

 

SPEAKING OF CNN

    

I'm  not yet sure what to make of this. Really like Jake Ward.

 

More shortly... 

Trump convenes his first second-term cabinet "meeting."

After an hour of random self-aggrandizing Acting Celebrity Apprentice POTUS babble, CNN cut away.

   

Somenone, please buy Elon Musk a dress shirt and tie. And, please, dude take that MAGA hat off.

 

 

Seriously?

 

Back to some real world. Katherine Stewart's timely new book is out.

 

 

 

A quick cite from the Preface, then onto some relevant current events.

PREFACE
…The big story of our time is the rise of an antidemocratic political movement in the United States. Like any such movement, this one is diverse and complicated. It brings together a collection of people and ideas that in ordinary circumstances would not dream of sharing a bed. It is united in its profound rejection of the Enlightenment ideals on which the American republic was founded, and it represents the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War…

Abraham Lincoln had it right when he said that the United States is dedicated to a proposition. The American idea, as he saw it, is the familiar one articulated in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It says that all people are created equal; that a free people in a pluralistic society may govern themselves; that they do so through laws deliberated in public, grounded in appeals to reason, and applied equally to all; and that they establish these laws through democratic representation in government. In the centuries after 1776, in its better moments, the United States exported this revolutionary creed and inspired people around the world to embrace their freedom.

But in recent years a political movement has emerged that fundamentally does not believe in the American idea. It claims that America is dedicated not to a proposition but to a particular religion and culture. It asserts that an insidious and alien elite has betrayed and abandoned the nation’s sacred heritage. It proposes to “redeem” America, and it acts on the extreme conviction that any means are justified in such a momentous project. It takes for granted that certain kinds of Americans have a right to rule, and that the rest have a duty to obey. No longer casting the United States as a beacon of freedom, it exports this counterrevolutionary creed through alliances with leaders and activists who are themselves hostile to democracy. This movement has captured one of the nation’s two major political parties, and some of its leading thinkers explicitly model their ambitions on corrupt and illiberal regimes abroad that render education, the media, and the corporate sector subservient to a one-party authoritarian state.

Stewart, Katherine. Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (pp. 2-3). Kindle Edition.

Ch 11: Exporting the Counterrevolution
In the decades immediately following the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the new American republic became the modern world’s first great exporter of democratic revolution. As America’s founders watched the strategic alliances between priests and kings tumble before the advance of ideas of human equality, individual rights, and representative government in France, Haiti, Greece, the Spanish colonies, and eventually much of Europe, they were exultant. “From that bright spark which first illumed these lands / See Europe kindling, as the blaze expands,” wrote Philip Freneau, the so-called poet of the American Revolution. His friend Thomas Jefferson was equally pleased. “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for light and liberty go together,” he wrote. “It is our glory that we first put it into motion.”

Today, however, sectors of the American right have become exporters of the antidemocratic counterrevolution. Not satisfied with their efforts to roll back individual rights in the United States and replace democratic pluralism with sectarianism and authoritarian forms of governance, America’s Christian nationalists have pushed their ideas and agendas out to other countries around the world. Joining them in the effort are a host of “antiwoke” culture warriors from the New Right along with the white supremacists, men’s rights activists, New Traditionalists, and others they inspire. Some groups in those other countries have proved receptive to the new ideologies. A global antidemocratic reaction has emerged that in turn contributes to the counterrevolutionary process in America.

The axis around which a sector of the global antidemocratic reaction now turns is an extraordinary alliance between a dominant wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Only twenty years ago, the same Republican Party was willing to go to war to overthrow a dictatorship in Iraq and (supposedly) promote democracy. Yet the faction of the Republican Party that has mortgaged itself to Donald Trump balked at providing relatively small-scale aid to Ukraine as that country attempted to fend off a brutal and unprovoked Russian invasion. And even while Vladimir Putin continues to crush democracy in his home country and abroad, with assassinations of journalists and political opponents, widespread imprisonment, and kleptocratic arrangements, to say nothing of the suspiciously convenient “suicides” and “accidents” of Russian business, political, and military leaders, the right wing of the Republican Party hails him as a hero and a strong leader. To be sure, after months of pressure from the White House, House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to squeak out approval for aid to Ukraine in April 2024, bypassing opposition of a number of Republicans. And yet out on the far right, among the kind of people who contribute to Claremont Institute publications and who now form the “brain trust” for Donald Trump and other Republican leaders, one can hear Ukraine’s resistance to Russia described as a “woke war.” It is important to note that Russia and other hostile foreign powers have avidly targeted sectors of the American left in order to intensify and exploit divisions in U.S. society. This activity and its consequences are grossly underappreciated… (pp. 213-214). 

Just for starters.

 

See some prior posts of mine apropos of "Christian Nationalism."

 

Also, the word "Evangelical." And, Matthew D. Taylor's fine book on the topic. Hmmm... one more for now: "Claremont College," anyone?

 

"A Republic. If we can keep it?"

 

More shortly...

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