The Daily Reid: race purges and serfdom ... are we finally great again?

Jackie Robinson purged, the Iwo Jima memorial whitewashed, and Teslas literally burning. But Steve Bannon and Trump won't get a "live forever" neurochip, as far as we know...

Back in 2013, when I was managing editor of TheGrio, I got invited to a White House screening. President Obama had decided to throw a private screening in the residence of the movie 42, which tells the story of Jackie Robinson and how he grew from angry Army second lieutenant, serving in a segregated unit during World War II and constantly denied the advancement his excellence should have earned him, to the first Black Major League Baseball player to American legend. Here’s the trailer:

I was one of only two journalists at the screening (the other being my counterpart from The Root), that included a handful of Black elected officials and FOTOs (friends of the Obamas) and members of the Robinson family, including his beautiful wife, Rachel. I had never been in that part of the White House and I can tell you the screening room is really pretty, and surprisingly small and intimate. It was quite an intimidating experience, even as a former Obama campaign person who had met the president before on a couple of occasions before he was president. He was a gracious host, but I’ve gotta say, not thrilled to see the two of us journalists there. He literally stiffened when he realized we had been there, after dapping up members the gathering with that big Obama smile on his face. Still, despite the bit of discomfort, the event couldn’t have been more fun or amazing. I’ve since gotten the opportunity to interview Mr. Robinson’s son, at their beautiful New York museum (well worth a visit!) and to get to know even more about his legacy and contributions. In my humble opinion, everyone should know more about him. And that used to be a bipartisan belief.

Jackie Robinson has been purged from the U.S. military's official member on the orders of the Trump regime

Jackie Robinson not only defied the odds, to rise from the Negro Leagues to the MLB Hall of Fame, he had to fight through blistering racism every step of the way, including in the U.S. Army. So the idea of erasing him, literally, from the military’s official memory is as repulsive as it gets. And yet, this apartheid administration is doing just that, as part of its racist, ugly, scattershot, DEI purge. From The Guardian:

An article history detailing Jackie Robinson’s military career has seemingly been taken down on the Department of Defense’s website as a purge of articles considered to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) continues.

Robinson, who Donald Trump last month described as helping “drive our country forward to greatness”, is widely considered a national hero in the US. He broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947 when he suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers; he went on to be elected to his sport’s Hall of Fame. Robinson also served in the US Army during the second world war. However, on Tuesday night ESPN’S Jeff Passan noted a page detailing Robinson’s army career had been taken down and “dei” added to the URL.

The move is in step with similar decisions in recent weeks as the Pentagon works on the removal of any webpage it considers to be representative of DEI programs. The Trump administration has made its distaste for DEI clear and has rolled back many DEI programs across the federal government. One Trump executive order sought to end all “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government” related to “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility’ (DEIA) programs”.

And it’s not just him.

Other pages to have been removed include one focusing on Ira Hayes, a Native American who was one of the marines pictured raising the American flag at Iwo Jima during the second world war. Articles about the Native American code talkers also appear to have been removed from military websites.

So no more of this unity of purpose, then. Future generations are not allowed to know that one of these brave men was indigenous. Got it.

And the new Pentagon’s justification for this hideous purge will not make you feel good about America:

Defense department spokesperson Sean Parnell has defended the removals. “I think the president and the secretary have been very clear on this – that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, is frankly, incorrect,” Parnell said.

We see you, maga. And we need no further translation.

Bannonisms

Christian conservative New York Times columnist Russ Douthat did a rather breathless, I gotta say, interview with felonious former Trump White House adviser and 2016 campaign manager Steve Bannon. In a rather long conversation, Douthat didn’t even bother to ask about Bannon cuddling up to white nationalism by “making Breitbart the home of the alt right.” However, he did elicit some interesting thoughts from Bannon on the “technofeudalists” as he calls Musk, Sacks and the other Silicon Valley oligarchs whom he opposes as they enmesh themselves in Trumpworld, his desire to slash the Pentagon, and his opposition to the Trump tax cuts. Here are the most interesting bits. Let’s start with an area in which Bannon and I 100 percent agree, since I have been saying for more than a decade that the Tea Party Movement was the prequel to maga:

The Tea Party was the precedent of Trump. Every financial collapse or every financial crisis you’ve had worldwide has some sort of reaction to it. In the financial crisis and collapse of 2008, brought on by the established order and a little bit by the Bush regime, the Bush junta, I call it. By the way, the worst presidency in the history of our nation, except for James Buchanan’s.

Douthat: Franklin Pierce just breathed a deep sigh of relief. [Laughs.]

Bannon: But Franklin — come on, man. Franklin Pierce did not do the damage that Bush did to the country, on so many different levels, in particular the financial crisis, which was not totally his fault but the fault of the established order. And the basic schmendrick underwrote all of that bailout and didn’t get a bailout themselves. In fact, they got blown out of their equity, and they blamed it on African Americans and Hispanics that didn’t have the income. But they blew them all out of the equity of their homes and, by the way, kept the title to those homes, I might add, so they could resell it later. It’s one of the greatest financial scandals in the history of this country. None of the crooks and the criminals that did this were ever held accountable.

And when I say crooks and criminals, I mean the top accounting firms, the law firms, the entire establishment. I know you’re an Ivy Leaguer also, and I went to the trade school at Harvard. None of the elites in this country were ever held accountable for it. And that lit a fuse that went off on Nov. 8 and the early morning of Nov. 9 in 2016 with President Trump. It was basically the forgotten man and woman’s vengeance.

Our platform at the time was fairly ill defined. I came in with the Breitbart philosophy of economic nationalism up in the blue wall and down in the South in the border states, and I started looking at demographics. People were mocking me, saying Bannon has never done a campaign. Why does he have Trump in Michigan? Why does he have him in Wisconsin? Why does he have him in Pennsylvania? He’s not going to win those states. To get it close, he’s got to focus on Southern states.

And then we won all three of them by a combination of, I think, 70,000 votes. But we won them.

Now, Bannon and I don’t mean this in the same way. What I mean by “prequel” is that the Tea Party was the dry run for a billionaire funded faux grassroots, quasi populist movement that pitted working class white people against both “the elites” as they understood it (college educated liberals) but also Black and other nonwhite people, as a way to explain their own economic malaise versus the (in my opinion) egregious political crime of bailing out the big Wall Street banks that crashed the economy during the George W. Bush administration. On that, Bannon and I roughly agree, although again … he is among the right wingers who were happy to hang Black homebuyers out to dry in 2008, because by his own admission, he is either part of the “alt right” or was courting it.

He also name checks Sean Trende, who I used to talk a lot about with my Reidout team. He is the pollster who came up with the “missing white voter” analysis, which stated that Republicans could win elections without having to court nonwhite voters, by finding ways to bring out the millions of white voters who stayed home during elections because bland, Republican neoliberal candidates didn’t appeal to them. (Someone ought to come up with a corollary “missing Black voter” analysis for the presidential elections in 2016 and 2024.) A clip from one of his initial pieces for RealClearPolitics back in 2012. Trende begins by talking about an election I know a bit about, having quit the news business as a deeply anti Iraq war person, to work as a press secretary for the 527 group America Coming Together (after taking the Wellstone Action training) in hopes of denying George W. Bush his bid for re-election:

…George W. Bush won by 2.4 percent of the popular vote, which is probably about what Obama’s victory margin will be once all the ballots are counted. Republicans in 2004 won some surprising Senate seats, and picked up a handful of House seats as well. The GOP was cheered, claiming a broad mandate as a result of voters’ decision to ratify clear, unified Republican control of Congress and the presidency for the first time since 1928. As Bush famously put it, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”

Democrats, like Republicans today, were despondent. Aside from having a president they loathed in the White House for four more years, they were terrified by what seemed to be an emerging Republican majority. John Kerry had, after all, hit all of his turnout targets, only to be swamped by the Republican re-election effort. “Values voters” was the catchphrase, and an inordinate number of keystrokes were expended trying to figure out how, as Howard Dean had memorably put it before the election, Democrats could reconnect with “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.”

He then gets to the heart of the matter:

For Republicans, that despair now comes from an electorate that seems to have undergone a sea change. In the 2008 final exit polls (unavailable online), the electorate was 75 percent white, 12.2 percent African-American, 8.4 percent Latino, with 4.5 percent distributed to other ethnicities. We’ll have to wait for this year’s absolute final exit polls to come in to know the exact estimate of the composition this time, but right now it appears to be pegged at about 72 percent white, 13 percent black, 10 percent Latino and 5 percent “other.”

Obviously, this surge in the non-white vote is troubling to Republicans, who are increasingly almost as reliant upon the white vote to win as Democrats are on the non-white vote. With the white vote decreasing as a share of the electorate over time, it becomes harder and harder for Republicans to prevail.

This supposed surge in minority voting has sparked discussions about the GOP’s renewed need to draw in minority voters, especially Latinos, usually by agreeing to comprehensive immigration reform. Continuing the “Bizarro 2004” theme, Democrats are encouraging the GOP to move leftward, just as the 2004 GOP insisted that Democrats needed to abandon their opposition to the Iraq War, adopt less liberal economics, and shift more to the right on social issues in order to win.

Setting aside completely the sometimes-considerable merits of various immigration reform measures, I think these analyses are off base. First, there are real questions about the degree to which immigration policies -- rather than deeper issues such as income and ideology -- drive the rift between the GOP and Latinos. Remember, passage of Simpson-Mazzoli in 1986 was actually followed two years later by one of the worst GOP showings among Latinos in recent history.

Moreover, the simple fact is that the Democrats aren’t going to readily let Republicans get to their left on the issue in an attempt to poach an increasing portion of the Democratic base. If the GOP embraces things such as the DREAM Act, the Democrats can always up the ante. There are plenty of other issues on which Latinos agree with the GOP, but at a bare minimum the party will have to learn to sharply change its rhetoric on immigration before it can credibly make the case for these policies.

But most importantly, the 2012 elections actually weren’t about a demographic explosion with non-white voters. Instead, they were about a large group of white voters not showing up.

Which brings us back to Bannon’s fascination with Trende’s analysis. More from the Times:

Let’s go back to Sean Trende. I would actually say that was an inflection point in American history because it got me excited about what the possibilities were and what the math was.

What really proved our chops was right after I saw Trump on May 1, 2014. Six weeks later, Zuckerberg, that criminal, was coming here to get the amnesty deal done in this huge announcement the night before on Tuesday, I think, June 7 in 2014. An economics professor named Dave Brat from Randolph Macon actually defeated Eric Cantor, the first time a sitting majority leader had ever been defeated in a primary. And he ran on a 100 percent anti-immigration platform.

That was really the beginning of feeling the power. We really had something here that could win elections and win votes.

So how to harness that “power” to motivate white voters?

In the Times interview, Bannon talks about how he tried to recruit Sarah Palin and Alabama’s vehemently anti-nonwhite immigrant Senator Jeff Sessions to run for president on his populist nationalist banner, and how Michelle Bachman, who weirdly enough, Stephen Miller used to work for (in addition to Sessions), actually was the first to run on his style of right wing Christian*-fueled “populist nationalism.” And how when Trump stepped in, he knew he’d found his muse.

All of that sets up an interesting pivot to a conversation on “technofeudalism,” a term coined by a former finance minister for Greece named Yanis Varoufakis in an eponymous book that argues that the tech giants have actually overthrown capitalism and replaced it with a rebooted form of the old European feudal system of lords and serfs. That apparently is where old school white nationalism-curious populists like Bannon get off the ship with the Silicon Valley crowd who he says desire not just to subjugated the working stiff masses, but also to “enhance” themselves and other wealthy humans by implanting chips in their brains for a healthy fee so they can live forever:

Douthat: This phrase is sitting here in my notes because you’ve used it a bunch: technofeudalism. We’ve talked about immigration. You’ve talked about the idea that Silicon Valley is basically trying to bring in as much foreign labor as possible to presumably keep its own costs down.

That’s obviously part of what you mean by technofeudalism — but I don’t think that’s all of it. This is not just about H-1B visas.

Bannon: No, no, no —

Douthat: Suppose Elon Musk came in tomorrow and said: It’s fine — I’m reforming the H-1B program. You would still disagree with him. So give me a broader view of what you think is wrong with the Silicon Valley view.

Bannon: Let me just give you a quick bunch of history. Obama and the progressive administration — him and Biden — are the most reactionary in American history.

No. 1, he made a Faustian bargain with the sociopathic overlords on Wall Street to bail us out of the 2008 crisis, which still hasn’t been resolved. At the same time, Obama and the established order went to Silicon Valley and made a deal with them.

And the deal was the following: We will allow you to become the wealthiest people in the history of the world. We will let you create an apartheid state. We will let you become monopolies. We will get no anti-trade. In fact, that’s why you got Google and Search. You got Facebook and what they do. You got Twitter and what they do. You’ve got Amazon destroying small businesses for the C.C.P. Every one of these guys is a monopoly. And the Justice Department for 10 or 12 years would just look the other way.

So we’ll let you become monopolies, we’ll let you become the wealthiest people on Earth. But here’s the bargain — here’s what you have to do: You have to make the hegemon, the United States, and the postwar international rules-based order and the ruling class of this country — you have to make us a dominant technological power of which we can have the commanding heights that can never be questioned.

And over the last 72 hours, what we’ve seen is two things: No. 1 is social media. The Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army created TikTok, which is far more powerful than all the social media platforms of these guys put together.

Forget that they use the information and the ownership. I’m just talking about the addictive nature and how evil can be put in it. And we now know that all the really — let’s say hundreds of billions of dollars, not tens of billions — that we put into the theory of the case of blunt-force computing power that say that the Green New Deal is forgotten. Climate change is forgotten. You’ve got to build power generators everywhere. You got to give over federal land for data centers everywhere. We got to burn more coal, more oil for these data centers because of our method of artificial intelligence. We understand that if this is not a PSYOP — which I don’t think it totally is, we’ve had our Sputnik moment — and guess what? The oligarchs that we created, who were all progressive Democrats, absolutely [expletive] face planted.

Now here’s the point. In technofeudalism, you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit — they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them.

They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? Transhumanist is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity.

And that’s why they’re all rushing — whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it — to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life.

You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction “Dungeons & Dragons” guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every [expletive] step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that.

And the progressive left made a deal with these guys. They’re all lefties. Elon had the first awakening because as an engineer, he could kind of see the math. He fully supported our plan of a base plus election, to go get the low information voters and the Moms for America who had flipped during the pandemic.

He backed that strategy, and the dude wrote a $250 million check over five months, unprecedented, to back our play. He’s the first, but the rest of them, even Andreessen, they’re all superprogressive liberals, they’re all technofeudalists, they don’t give a flying [expletive] about the human being. And I don’t care if you’re Black, White, Hispanic, Chinese — they don’t care.

And they have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world. And you see this in artificial intelligence. We have no controls over this. We’ve allowed these monopolies to exist. And now we know they’re getting their ass handed to them, I think, by the Chinese Communist Party.

We’re in deep [expletive] right now. We’re in a crisis.

Asked whether Trump himself would take the brain chip, Bannon says nah, cause Donald’s a germophobe… But this is where it gets interesting, right? Bannon represents a very old school populism that prioritizes the American demographic majority: white working class people who base their humanity on traditional religious conviction, like the people he comes from — old time Kennedy Democrat working stiffs (despite he himself winding up in the U.S. Navy and then at Goldman Sachs.) Bannon, honestly like Joe Biden, wants to preserve an America where people like the folks he grew up with can still make it. And he views H1B visa immigrant “indentured servant” labor (he refers to Silicon Valley as an apartheid state) as well as all immigrant labor, as unfair competition. To be fair, there are Black Americans who look at things the same way, which is why despite his embrace of the racist “alt right,” there is a real convergence between Bannonism and a kind of self-sufficient Black American ethos. And he knows that, and has literally courted Black conservatives and business types on that basis in the past, even while allegedly working to suppress Black votes.

Still, Bannon views this technofeudalist, transhumanist regime of white South Africans and tech billionaires as existential threat, because in his view, they want to cast all non-enhanced humans into the mosh pit of serfdom while they chip their own brains and live forever like Gods on earth. And he is in a battle, in his mind, for the attention, heart and soul of the man he thinks can and will take America in one direction or the other — Donald Trump, whom he fully expects to still be president in 2029 (and hell, maybe for the rest of his life…)

Bannon has therefore made the technofeudalists his sworn enemy, to the point where he reminded Douthat that he opposed the 2017 tax cut, and would prefer that the Trump administration strategically demand huge cuts in defense spending in exchange for making it permanent, or essentially put a gun to the billionaires’ proverbial heads and say it’s that, or we soak the rich for real.

Strange times.

And before you ask, yeah I would interview Bannon. But know that unlike Douthat, I would be asking him about the “alt right.”

The Tesla doom loop

A sign of Elon Musk's Nazi salute and AFD leader Alice Weidel is seen as thousands of people take part in a protest against the AFD party at Heumarkt Square in Cologne, Germany, on January 25, 2025, ahead of the German election (Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via AP).

Bannon may get his way in one sense: Elon Musk’s eager cultivation of maga and far right political parties in Germany and throughout Europe, plus that peculiar arm gesture, has cost Tesla dearly.

The company’s stock is down.

Tesla owners are selling their cars to cut ties with Elon.

The cars (and the ugly trucks) are being vandalized … including with swastikas and dog poop.

And they’re being set on fire.

Tesla has been kicked out of the Vancouver Automotive Show because Canadians hate them:

The decision was announced Tuesday afternoon, March 18, by Eric Nicholl, executive director of the 2025 event taking place this week at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

In a statement, Nicholl explained the American-based automaker was given multiple chances to voluntarily withdraw from the show.

"The Vancouver Auto Show’s primary concern is the safety of attendees, exhibitors, and staff," Nicholl added.

"This decision will ensure all attendees can be solely focused on enjoying the many positive elements of the event."

Canadians in several cities have joined a wave of "Tesla Takedown" protests to denounce CEO Elon Musk and his role advising U.S. President Donald Trump.

And tech Substacker Will Lockett says the industry is “exorcising Musk.”

Musk is killing Tesla. His lack of integrity, lack of internal consistency, and deeply fascistic leanings are now on full display for the world to see. And the world has responded by violently throwing up in their mouths. Tesla sales in the EU are down 45%, despite the EV market growing 37%. Tesla’s share price has plummeted by 41%, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars from its value. There are no signs that this will end, and JP Morgan is predicting that Tesla’s shares will lose 66% of their value by the end of the year. In fact, Tesla is selling so few vehicles that they are risking their lucrative regulatory emissions credit business, responsible for 30% of their total income! But if Musk is killing Tesla, Polestar wants to deliver the final blow. They are offering Tesla drivers a $20,000 discount for a new Polestar if they trade in their “swasticars.”

Yep, Polestar is offering anyone who owns or leases a Tesla $5,000 off a lease on a brand new Polestar 3. Combined with their latest $15,000 Polestar Clean Vehicle Incentive, any Tesla driver can buy a Polestar 3 for a whopping $20,000 off.

Locket took it even further in a subsequent post, declaring; this is how Tesla will die.

It’s fair to say that Tesla isn’t doing so well. Thanks to an ageing lineup and a ket-fuelled, government-destroying, Nazi-saluting CEO, Tesla sales are plummeting across the entire globe. Their revolutionary 4680 battery has failed to materialise and is now obsolete. Their Cybertruck is such a sales flop that they are already pulling its manufacturing capacity. Thanks to Musk’s dogmatic “vision only” approach to self-driving, Tesla FSD is far from being an industry leader and miles away from being functionally safe. As a result, Tesla’s Cybercab and self-driving revolution is now all but confirmed as vapourware. Everything that once made Tesla one of the highest-valued companies is falling apart. It looks like Tesla is spiralling towards death. But can such a giant really die? Oh yes, and this is how.

In 2024, Tesla’s annual net income was only $12.6 billion (though some sources put it as low as $7 billion). The vast majority of this was from their car sales. However, as of the time of writing, Tesla is valued at $852.43 billion! That means its P/E ratio (a ratio of company value to its net income, used to determine if the company is over or undervalued) is a staggering 67.65!

Let’s compare that to Toyota. They are far larger than Tesla and have far more impactful upcoming EV and self-driving technology than Tesla. Last financial year, their net income was a massive $29 billion! However, they have a much more realistic value of $243.56 billion, giving them a P/E ratio of 8.40, which is close to the average for the automotive world. …

…Currently, its sales are down 45% in the EU and 49% in China, and these numbers are predicted to fall even further. So, let’s be generous and say that over the course of this year, Tesla’s sales and net income will fall by 45%. Let’s also be generous and say that it is valued at the same P/E ratio as Toyota, even though Toyota is larger, has a bigger cash surplus, better upcoming technology, a stronger market share, etc.

And the company secretly wrote to the White House complaining that tariffs will hurt them.

Apartheid may still be around, but it’s not any cooler now than it was in Elon’s old home country.

Oh, and South Africa is telling Elon? Things don’t work the way they did when your family lived here:

Part of a U.S. administration that has dismantled diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, Musk appears irked by similar policies in South Africa. The world's richest man last month accused his birth nation of having "racist ownership laws" over recent land reform legislation.

He claimed on Friday his satellite internet service Starlink is not able to operate there because he is "not black."

Many South Africans believe President Donald Trump's decision to cut funding to South Africa is influenced by Musk's views.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said his country "will not be bullied" soon after Trump's decree to halt aid. Will he be steadfast when it comes to granting Starlink a license? …

And things are so rocky, Tesla is no longer Elon’s most lucrative asset.

SpaceX is now Elon Musk’s most valuable asset as Tesla’s stock continues to tumble, marking the first time in five years the rocket company has meant more to Musk’s pockets than his automotive company.

Forbes estimates that the Department of Government Efficiency chief’s 42 percent slice of SpaceX is worth $147 billion—almost $20 billion more than his Tesla shares, a 12% stake worth $97.8 billion. …

…And Musk looked close to tears during an interview Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow earlier this month when discussing his “difficulty” in juggling his businesses.

Sucks to be you, billionaire.