Diary of a Madman

Noel Casler worked with Donald Trump on the Apprentice, so Noel knows Trump about as well as anyone. You can find this column on Substack at the link at the bottom.

Diary of a Madman

Noel Casler

Nov 27, 2023

Mainstream media hasn’t done much to protect us from creeping authoritarianism or to illuminate the darker corners of Trump’s criminal history of sexual assault, drug abuse, human trafficking through Trump Model Management and mob ties but damn if they haven’t succeeded at injecting the idea that ‘Biden is too old’ into the mainstream Democratic narrative. 

It’s the Hillary Clinton email story of the 2024 election cycle, even surpassing the spoon-fed Hunter Biden stories offered up to national newsrooms by MAGA.

A combination of cowardice, greed, the outsized influence of social media and the desire to go viral with articles has steadily replaced real journalism with podcast hosts and influencers opining for endless hours on cable TV news shows. 

It’s cheap and easy; Trump provides endless hours of relatively safe coverage of his myriad trials and the daily outrages and outbursts from the various conflicts he engages in within our judicial system.

Using the courts as a weapon has long been a Trump tactic, having been involved in nearly four thousand lawsuits BEFORE he even ran for POTUS.

Trump is a master of spectacle, training much of the tabloid-based media and its wealthier cousin, cable news talk shows, to pontificate on his every utterance. 

There’s no such thing as bad press in Trump’s world and he knows this better than anyone else. The fact that he has become once again the front runner not only of the GOP but is polling ahead of President Biden in several swing states and gaining traction with younger voters augers disbelief.

 

We are living in a surrealist nightmare vision where the foulest and most deformed human personalities command 24/7 coverage in our media ecosphere. 

Donald Trump and Elon Musk also command most of the online airspace - with would-be influencers and Democratic PACs breathlessly retweeting every new offense as ‘BREAKING’ while sharing a clip from one of the cable networks on the outrage du jour. 

Often these clips are from Fox News or concerning one of the MAGA henchmen in U.S. Congress - whose only role seems to be as chaos agents serving Trump’s planned takeover and dismantling of our republic. 

Many of these cretins have been turned into household names in the relatively short three years since Trump sent his followers to essentially and hopefully burn down the U.S. Capitol and hang his Vice President. 

They did not succeed the first time but many of the underlings who hatched that plot have become fixtures on the front pages of America’s newspapers.

Tommy Tuberville and MTG in particular have done lasting damage to functioning as a democracy and are placeholders for the coming autocracy. 

Tuberville apparently assigned the task of weakening our military and preventing leadership appointments until such time as Trump is reelected and can hand pick some generals willing to use our military against protesters via the ‘Insurrection Act’ should citizens protest his return to power. 

This is quite obviously based on the personal grievance Trump has against General Milley who, serving as Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, was unwilling to shoot protesters in Lafayette Park in 2020 at Donald’s behest. 

Trump famously lamented to John Kelly that he had wished his own military brass could be ‘more like Hitler’s generals’.

Kelly was granted the minor rhetorical victory of pointing out to the dumbest man to ever serve as POTUS that Hitler’s own generals hatched a plot to assassinate him late in the war. 

Madmen hopped-up on methamphetamine and twisted resentments should never be in charge of a country - whether they are raging in a bunker in Berlin or snorting Adderall in the bunker of the White House, fuming that the narrative on twitter is that you are hiding from protestors (the real reason Trump wanted to enact instant and violent retribution of the mostly young people protesting police violence). 

Just those few bullet points on Trump’s deviance should make it clear to all that there really is no choice between Trump and Biden in 2024 if you care about the future of democracy.

Not to mention Trump is only three years younger than President Biden and has the mental and physical health of someone who feeds his brain a steady diet of salt, fat & speed - and uses a golf cart to travel any distance more than twenty feet. 

Evil in the modern era comes from complicity; from seeking attention and career advancement over doing the right thing. 

It takes root as so many are plugged into the attention economy, desensitizing ourselves to suffering. 

It grows in the permissive silence that allows men to ignore their better angels.

 

It festers in the hearts of those who repurpose imagery for their own audience, to gain traction and a following in a climate where that seems to be the only metric that counts. 

One of the many problems with that approach is that whoever lies the loudest wins. 

This is not a new phenomena in the zeitgeist of course, as the oft attributed to Mark Twain quote proclaims, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. 

The difference now is the monetizing of misinformation and the encouragement of individual creators receiving financial rewards for spreading falsehoods and outright propaganda. 

We saw this in the immediate aftermath of October 7th when Elon Musk promoted two monetized X accounts as reliable sources for following ‘breaking news’ on that awful morning. 

When it was pointed out they were both known antisemitic accounts and had already shared video that wasn’t even from that day and was decidedly anti-Israeli, Musk removed his posts but the damage was done. 

The same loathsome South African billionaire toured one of the kibbutzim that were attacked by Hamas with Benjamin Netanyahu today, held a Q&A with the Israeli Prime Minister on X ‘Spaces’ and apparently struck a deal for Starlink coverage in the region. 

Netanyahu is obviously providing Musk some P.R. cover to staunch the exodus of advertisers on X since his latest antisemitic post and the firestorm it caused.

The fact that an insane tech bro is treated like a world leader is one of the most glaring examples of the rot and decadence of this moment where whoever can bully or buy themselves a seat at the table is somehow worthy of official visits. 

Especially so in a time of such fraught and complex geopolitical instability when Musk has already interfered in the military operations of Ukraine via shutting down Starlink service in Crimea per communications with the Kremlin to protect Russia’s naval Fleet. 

Leaving our own Pentagon leadership perplexed and aghast. 

Elon Musk is not a head of state and has no business at all visiting a war zone to have a photo-op and get his narcissistic need for attention filled: it’s an insult to all those suffering on both sides of this conflict and a grandiose distraction in a time that needs the sobriety and focus of serious men and women. 

I fear that Musk has figured out the Trumpian formula of being such a loathsome reprobate of a human being the media ecosphere becomes utterly transfixed by his every idiotic utterance. 

We need not all become digital Pavlovian dogs, salivating at every utterance from Elon Musk. 

We’ve been well trained from the Trump years and watching the fortunes rise of social media influencers who engage with his tweets to build their followings and expand their grifting operations. 

I don’t want the candidate who the billionaires want to put in office.

I want the guy that the single mom trusts to protect her children’s healthcare insurance.

I want the guy who is willing to look out for our senior citizens and working and middle class Americans.

I want the guy who can stand by our allies and lead from his heart even when political expediency an opportunism dominates our discourse. 

I don’t believe for one second that President Biden’s famous empathy is an act. 

He leads from his heart and what he believes to be in the best interest of the United States and our allies. 

I think it’s essential to who he is; empathy, like fine wine, only gets better with age. 

We can all do our part to fight back against the darkness that has taken over much of our world and political discourse. 

Real leadership always begins with acknowledgment of the work yet to be done but also a recognition that we have within us the means to change.

Original.

It worked, for them

I, and many others, were never taken in by Reagan's bullshit. But quite a few others, and a lot of media, were hornswoggled. And then we had the rise of conservative (e.g. lying) media pumping Americans full of bull for years. I think many Americans believed the bull, because wholesale lying was not something that people were used to. The massive wealth transfer, the erosion of the middle class and unions, the impoverishment of millions, shipping jobs and factories overseas....people thought that was a GOOD thing because they were told it was a good thing. Propaganda can be very effective, especially if it tends to confirm your existing prejudices and biases. I'm not quite as confident and optimistic as Thom is here. Looks like it may depend on the newer generations. We blew it.

Dear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work

by Thom Hartmann

Nov 21, 2023

The 1970s was a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS.  Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and nonprofit hospitals across the nation; nearly free college, trade school, and research support; healthy small and family businesses; unions protecting a third of America’s workers so two-thirds had a living wage and benefits; and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports that transformed the nation’s commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class.

The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It became a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then America.

They then moved on to infiltrate our universities, seize our media, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to add millions of votes, and turn upside down our tax, labor, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them “lazy” and “dependent”).

Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked:

Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over 40 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted wherever they wanted it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the 2nd Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill politicians. Five Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world.

Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus instead on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans that can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.”

Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a student’s tuition — so that students would have what they told us was “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by student’s tuition), our nation is groaning under a nearly $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families. 

While students are underwater, banksters who donate to Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable loans (thanks to George W. Bush’s 2005 “update” of our nation’s bankruptcy laws).

Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and more efficient. In 1983, Reagan ordered the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing our anti-trust laws.

Instead of improving America’s business landscape, we’ve seen every industry in the country become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s nearly impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.

Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier. From the 1930s until Reagan changed the rules, executive stock compensation and stock buybacks were considered stock manipulation and tax scam crimes.

Now, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives — while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss.

Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small group of often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as you can imagine, are generally absent.

Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve and which they’d reject. They said this will “lower costs and increase choice.”

In all of the entire developed world — all the OECD countries on 4 continents — there are only 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Every single one of them is here in America.

Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment.

Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were torn down or left vacant because their production was moved to China or elsewhere. Over 15 million good-paying jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their friends in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming — a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. They succeeded in delaying action on global warming by at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech.”

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of polite society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by five Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience.

And now that we know what it is, we’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused with their tax breaks at the illegal wars).

Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever they’re calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women and children to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.

We’re over it, Republicans. A new America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and you can’t stop it much longer.

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