"F**king Mondays: Putin's Playbook in America, DEI's Future, and JD Vance's Racist Logic

Putin style fascism has come to America.

Welcome to another edition of The Banter’s most popular column! In the roundup today:

It can happen here

The legendary Russian chess grandmaster and political activist Garry Kasparov grew up in the former Soviet Union. He watched the fall of communism and attempted to use his celebrity to help build a progressive society based on human rights and the rule of law. A profile piece in Reason described him as “leading critic of Russian leader Vladimir Putin” who was forced to abort a run for president in 2007 “only after authorities made it impossible for his followers to meet”. The article continues: “By the early 2010s, he [Kasparov] had been arrested for participating in unauthorized anti-government demonstrations and was widely believed to be the author of a popular petition demanding Putin's resignation.”

I’ve followed Kasparov for many years because I believe his life experience and ferocious chess instincts give him a far more realistic understanding of the power games played by totalitarian regimes. During the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 Kasparov became an invaluable resource when trying to understand Putin’s psychology and motivations.

Kasparov has always understood his former nemesis as a man obsessed with the accumulation, centralization, and exertion of power. There was no negotiating with Putin he argued, and no way to end the conflict in Ukraine without smashing his forces comprehensively. Kasparov begged the US government to give the Ukrainians all the weapons they need to drive Russian forces out of their country, and has maintained that if Putin isn’t violently confronted, he will continue expanding his borders. There can be no stalemates when dealing with tyrants like Putin, only checkmates that leave no room for doubt.

Kasparov, who now lives in the US, has also spent much of his time warning of the Trump threat. He has long viewed Trump as an autocrat in waiting and warned Americans that his assault on their institutions would bring “total mayhem and destruction to this country.”

“I never thought I would need to warn Americans about the dangers of dictatorship,” he wrote back on November 2nd of 2024. “Donald Trump has been breaking down the guardrails of American democracy for nearly a decade now. Generations to come will reap the consequences.”

Kasparov knows an authoritarian regime when he sees one, and he is now sounding the alarm as loudly as he can. He tweeted this in response to the Trump administration’s pronouncements that court orders blocking DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) from accessing the Treasury’s payment systems are “illegal”:

As Kasparov notes there is a strategy here, and it is to undermine Americans’ faith in government and the rule of law. When JD Vance says that “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal” and that “Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power," he is explicitly telling Americans that the courts are illegal and all authority lies with the executive.

This was the main reason why I spent so much time warning Americans that 2024 was the last chance they had to stop America descending into dictatorship. Trump’s coup was never going to be a lavish ceremony where he declared himself emperor of America — it would be a more subtle transition built on demonizing, then delegitimizing government and the courts.

Elon Musk’s DOGE may or may not have uncovered genuine instances of waste in government agencies (the evidence thus far is that he has grotesquely misrepresented them to the public), but it doesn’t make what he is doing legal. As an extensive report in the Washington Post outlines, almost everything Musk is doing is very much illegal:

Specific concerns include the terms of the “deferred resignation” Musk’s team is offering to purge the civil service — which experts say runs afoul of federal spending law — and whether Musk’s staffers will use Treasury’s payment system to reverse spending that has already been approved. (Two federal employee unions sued Monday to block DOGE from accessing that system. Late Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote to Congress that DOGE associates have only “read-only” access to it.) Several federal officials said they were worried about DOGE’s taking control of government systems that hold Americans’ personal information, including student loan data, and others have raised privacy concerns about the agency’s vow to use artificial intelligence on government databases. In other instances, officials have raised concerns that DOGE associates appeared to violate security protocols by using private email addresses or not disclosing their identities on government calls.

At a more fundamental level, several legal experts and government officials expressed alarm over how Musk’s team appears to operate as a strike team, outside typical agency rules and constitutional checks on executive power.

To assume that the world’s wealthiest man with extensive business contracts with the federal government has only benevolent intentions is an act of insanity. Musk, like oligarchs throughout history, is only interested in maximizing his own power. As historian Timothy Snyder writes, his war on government has one specific aim:

The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

When the government has been destroyed, Musk and the other tech titans will do what Russian oligarchs did when the Soviet Union collapsed. They will carve up the remains for themselves, deal lucrative contracts out to their friends, and wash their hands of any responsibility.

As Kasparov says it is an old model, and it can happen here. I’d go further than that and say it is happening here.

A reasonable DEI critique

Linguistic professor John McWhorter has a great essay out on where DEI went wrong in America, and why Trump’s destruction of it has gone too far.

McWhorter is extremely critical of the modern version of DEI that he says “took root especially in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, when a radical contingent calling for a racial reckoning enforced an allegiance to anti-whiteness on pain of social media humiliation, cancellation, and unemployment.”

He continues:

Between September 2019 and September 2020, DEI positions jumped by 56.3%. In 2023, Tabia Lee, a Black woman, was ousted from the directorship of the DEI program at De Anza Community College for, as she alleged in her lawsuit, being insufficiently opposed to whiteness (Jews included) and “not the right kind of Black person.” Lee has said, “The default here in America especially is [a type of DEI] that focuses on racial division and perpetual strife around racialized identity.”

McWhorter believes the inherent flaw in the “prevailing DEI” is that it is “based on a core assumption that battling the power of whiteness be not just one goal, but the central goal of our institutions.” He argues that DEI based on using “outreach strategies to identify applicants less likely to come to their attention via normal channels” is a far more reasonable approach and worries that Trump has now thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Because political discourse is dominated by the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum, it is almost impossible to have a sensible discussion on topics like DEI. We have swung from one extreme to the other with little hope of reaching a sensible compromise. Surely it can’t be that hard to see that diversity in the workforce is a strength, but being reflexively anti-white is bad?

Calling out racism is now worse than being racist

For many of the people in Trump’s inner circle, justifying his deranged behavior isn’t particularly difficult. True believers like Elon Musk and Stephen Miller are deeply dysfunctional sociopaths and have no issue with Trump’s bullying and authoritarianism. Others like Marco Rubio and JD Vance have to perform extreme acts of cognitive dissonance to justify their loyalty. Vance for example once called his boss a “cynical asshole” and “America's Hitler” when he took office in 2016, while Rubio called him a “con artist”.

In 2024, JD Vance is so used to lying to himself and inverting reality that he is now making the argument publicly that calling out racism is worse than actual racism. Here he was responding to Congressman Ro Khanna over the racist DOGE employer who called for normalizing “Indian hate”:

Vance’s wife is Indian and his children are half Indian, so you might think his ire would be directed at the government employee urging people to hate Indians. But just as laws and courts are now illegal, calling out racism is more destructive to our culture than racism.

Up is down, left is right, and Donald Trump is a very stable genius.

Have a great week!

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