“Broligarchs” and Wimpy Kids
Academics continue to flail in the face of bullies, forgetting how easy it is to puncture their egos
“Move fast and break things” is in full effect. Thanks, Silicon Valley.
So is an effort to make American gangsters autocrats. Thanks, MAGA.
The linchpin in all this are our “broligarchs,” who are dressing more like gangsters while making obvious plays to solidify their wealth into more enduring power. Russia seems to be the inspiration.
As David Brooks said this past weekend, the current Administration seems devoted making America safe for gangsters.
One of the most ludicrous of these “broligarchs” is Marc Andreesen, whose 2023 “A Techo-Optimist Manifesto” contained a complaint about what he called “our enemy” in “the ivory tower.” However, in the days of DOGE, the complaint against academia seems to pertain more to Andreesen and his lot, who are, in his words:
. . . indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
This condemnation of higher education echoed a talk by Yale-educated JD Vance in 2021 where he urged far-right extremists to “attack the universities.”
- but why even attack the universities when they seem more than capable of forfeiting the game before even coming off the bench?
- More on that later, along with a reminder of how much trouble Russia has caused and is causing in the academic space.
Jeff Bezos is the latest “broligarch” to publicly go off the rails, first by spiking an editorial last year at the Washington Post supporting Kamala Harris, and last week by reorganizing the opinion section to have a new emphasis on “free markets and personal liberties.”
Nice words. Too bad they’re code for the kind of cyberlibertarianism that has brought America to the brink of technocratic fascism while destroying alliances and ruining any plans for trans-Atlantic tourism for many.
“Free” is a code word across which right-wing politicians and cyberlibertarians can kiss, concealing their real goal, which is to remove regulations and constraints on them using their money to exercise as much influence as possible while saying or censoring anything they want.
Hiding their intent with misleading language is key, as David Golumbia wrote: