CEO Murder & the Dark Enlightenment
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If you’re in NYC — I’m speaking at a few different events this week. Join me at 5pm on Saturday the 14th at Heart (442 Broadway) with Michael Connor, co-executive director of Rhizome and artist Aria Dean, to discuss “Info-Wars”, our influential research program that laid the foundation for much of today’s media theory discussions. Alright, that’s it for my updates. Lets talk about the crazy shit going on right now:
A handful of recent events have culminated into a decisive social and political shift. Our previous cultural divisions are now realigning along new and unexpected poles.
On December 4th, a masked man (who has yet to be confirmed as a listener of the podcast) assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City. To the legacy media’s great surprise, the internet, from both the left and right, has unanimously cheered this on. In a recent Substack piece, journalist
writes:Within seconds of the news breaking, people online began celebrating. A Facebook post by United Healthcare about the CEO's passing was met with over 23,000 laughing emojis before it was taken down. "Health insurance companies are parasites siphoning blood money from the sick, dying and injured,” one user posted. “I'm only surprised it hasn't happened sooner.”
The screenshot below shows the top comments on CNN’s official TikTok post:
Even Ben Shapiro is getting brutally ratio’d in the dislikes and comments from his own audience (lol):
The United Healthcare CEO execution represents a definitive break in the narrative of the professional media & consultant class. On the heels of Donald Trump’s victory in the popular vote, MSNBC viewership fell by 53%. There is now a rising tide of populism within American society that will be politically potent and difficult to control.
Aside from a deep-seated resentment towards the people who literally profit from the suffering and death of their loved ones, this cross-factional disregard for the ‘rule of law’ marks a significant development in the waning legitimacy of the American regime. But distrust in the law has already been systematically eroded by both Democrats and Republicans.
As far back as 2020, New York District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, promised (or at the least heavily implied) that, if elected, he would prosecute Donald Trump for his hush payments to Stormy Daniels. In the eyes of Trump’s base, this was understood as a politically motivated prosecution and an asymmetrical application of the law. The misuse of campaign finance funds could equally have been applied to the Hillary Clinton campaign’s expenditures on the Steele dossier. (In fact, the conspiracy-addled full-accelerationist take is that Trump willingly took the fall in order to set a legal precedent by which to prosecute Hillary after his victory in 2024. I always thought this was an elaborate cope but I guess we will find out soon.)
While Trump’s actions were indeed unlawful, his conviction was seen as politically motivated and it helped to delegitimize the rule of law among the Republican base.
In the wake of the Trump verdict, Democrats professed a moral high ground and heavily campaigned on his felony conviction. But as Joe Biden has now chosen to grant a “full and unconditional” pardon to Hunter Biden which spans “January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions)” this position has become impossible to maintain.
Earlier calls to abolish the police, during the 2020 summer uprisings, helped to whittle away at Democrats faith in the legitimacy of the existing order. But the Hunter Biden pardon has forced them to concede that ‘the law’ is merely another political tool. Today, law does not stand outside political affiliation as an impartial and objective framework. Its power resides in the hands of whoever wields it at that moment.
The inevitable teleology of the delegitimation of law is that you can just murder people in broad daylight. This is what we are seeing now.
As far back as John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, equality before the law has been a foundational tenet of the enlightenment and ingrained in liberal political philosophy. This revolutionary idea fundamentally transformed the sovereign power of absolute monarchs. It placed both the noble and the peasant on equal standing before a secular state. In this new political model, power was no longer bestowed by might but upheld through an objective framework of political rights.
Our on-going and multi-facted political crises have revealed liberalism’s current inability to resolve its own contradictions. The breakdown of this order is now pushing on the open door of a 21st century politics that is fully based within the framework of power and might.
Furthermore, this rapid demise of liberalism, has painfully revealed that the enlightenment frame of rationality, individual rights and equality, has always necessarily been underpinned by a hegemonic might. As our enlightenment institutions erode, there emerges a temptation to abandon this philosophical framework altogether.
Rather than dispense with enlightenment values, we should recognize its implicit contradictions and celebrate its historically brief existence as a victory of the left. As we return to a politics of war and might, we should remember that the purpose of these struggles is to attain power in order to rebuild a society in which to realize liberty, equality and fraternity.
Studying the 20th century and observing political shifts such as the Trotskyite to Neocon pipeline in Joseph Dorman’s Arguing the World (1997) and Fred Turner’s From Counter-culture to Cyber-culture (2006) we should consider how many of today’s left, within a similar 30 year arc, might be amenable to this anti-enlightenment framework? Once the necessary conditions for equality are achieved will they choose to return to it? What if they never believed in it at all?
One important reference for our current moment (which in full compliance with the Substack terms of service, I would never ever endorse and am merely citing as an historical reference) is Louis Adamic’s book Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America.
In our Neo Gilded Age of inequality, we will see the popular left realign along divisions of class. As wealth polarization soars, the old culture wars will start to feel increasingly unimportant. We are seeing some early indications of this now.
Let me know if you like these more casual Sunday editions of the newsletter. I have a window right now where I’ve got a bit more time to write and keep closer pace with the newsfeed. Production is revving up for Doomscroll but if people enjoy these I’ll try to keep it up in the future!
I think if the widespread approval of the killer across the political spectrum were indicative of some "cross factional disregard for the rule of law" you'd see that manifest in other, fairly obvious ways. Instead, as always, people seem quite fixated on the rule of law and elites' routine violations of it, on both the left and the right. Conservative outrage at Hunter Biden's pardon or the left pointing to the legal details of yet another reputable legacy institution (this time, Amnesty International) charging Israel with genocide are just recent examples.
It's true, of course, that Democrats and Republicans have been eroding the public's trust in the rule of law at an accelerated, hyper-mediatized clip. But this trend is recognizable in America as far back as the 1970s. Americans' approval of vigilante justice, be it real or fictionalized, stretches back even further. The "karma's a bitch" sentiment I see and hear being expressed re: UnitedHealthcare's CEO - not just on the internet but in public - is, I think, better understood as the latest installment of this admiration than some affirmative gesture towards a new political strategy, tactic, belief, or trend in thinking. No serious person thinks this guy getting clipped will change anything. It's just that, in an era where everyone is increasingly aware that nothing is going to get better, they're feeling pretty pleased that the right people's lives have gotten worse for a moment. This is about a libidinal desire for catharsis absent political change, not a change in itself.
>> The breakdown of this order is now pushing on the open door of a 21st century politics that is fully based
🙃