Your semi-regular reminder that Libertarianism is not about liberty. It’s about gaming the state to protect the rich and powerful from the just claims of the poor and powerless (in this case, the just claim of the poor and powerless to accurate information from a free press, and the just claim of the poor and powerless to a forum open to the exercise of their free speech rights). Bezos is turning WaPo into Pravda for the rich and powerful and calling it “freedom”.
Theologically, Libertarianism works by metastasizing the seventh commandment (“You shall not steal”) into a cancerous tumor on the body politic and privileging the property rights of the rich and powerful over all things–including the fifth commandment (“You shall not kill”). It subordinates both the love we owe God and the love we owe neighbor to the Libertarian’s right to Stuff. In this case, the Stuff Bezos has decided is his to regulate is Facts and Truth–and Lies.
Not for nothing does Jesus say you cannot worship God and Mammon.
And, as ever, the Cult of Lies where accusation is always confession calls this MAGA takeover of the free press a triumph over Fake News even as it becomes Fake News.
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This goes along with the “Prosperity Gospel” which is the Protestant Ethic on steroids. Thus the rich are God’s chosen people, and they got rich because God loves them more than the poor. The poor are poor because they are lazy, immoral, etc.
The modern Republican Party seems to have embraced this theology and their focus is not helping the average citizen, but rather tax cuts for the rich. They imply: Jesus wants the billionaires to have even more money. It’s in the Gospels, Matthew perhaps?
The amazing thing is how they have gotten so much of the White working class in MAGA to go along with this hogwash. Making Elon Musk even richer, somehow helps me. Yeah, right.
The parable of the rich fool comes to mind.
I have a little game I like to play with libertarians. It’s a lot of fun:
Ask them if they returned their covid “stimulus checks” uncashed. Of course not a single one of them did, but the hemming and hawing about how they justify that is hilarious. Libertarians are just people who believe that socialism should exist for them personally but nobody else.
What’s even more ironic is that the so-called libertarians, the ones who think that all government spending is waste, are right now clamoring to get the $5,000 checks that will supposedly be given to Americans as a result of the “DOGE” spending cuts. So government workers who put in a solid days work for a day’s pay don’t deserve their paychecks. The little African infants starving to death don’t deserve the USAID rations which were already paid for, but Real American Libertarians deserve a huge paycheck just for breathing.
Hypocrisy and sadism are a fundamental force of nature in this country.