The truth is that much of the leadership and policy groups in the Global North have come to the implicit decision to see the “bright side” of climate change. Going from the US to Canada to the UK to Russia, there’s been numerous environmental studies published in those countries on how they would “benefit” from climate change. This is why there’s a fixation on Greenland and the Arctic. They’ve come to understand the unspoken truth about climate change, which is that the same Global North which has contributed the most historical emissions is also the same region estimated to be set to suffer the least through the coincidence of their geography. They’re more excited about the potential Italian vineyard country climates that the Midlands and Minnesota are estimated to develop towards as climate change is more and more exacerbated than the apocalyptic scenarios slated for elsewhere, like the submerging of Jakarta or the wet-bulb temperatures of South Asia.

SE Asia, Africa, Latin America are likely to suffer severe climate-induced hardships, but the most that the West needs to worry about (apart from the submerging of places like the US Eastern Seaboard, Florida, and the European Low Countries, which they believe they’ll always retain the national wealth to spam dikes and levees and sea walls) is “climate refugees,” which is telling in of itself. The arrogant conceit displayed here is also potentially backed by the current climate estimates, which is the danger of it all. You can see the falsehood that “everyone will suffer equally together so we must all work together, we’re in the same boat” that climate scientists have tried to defend starting to be pierced with climate change-enthusiast leadership like Trump coming to power. From a relativistic sense, so long as your enemies suffer more than you, this is acceptable for them. They don’t need to be better off than themselves in the past (and the Global North is absolutely not completely unscathed from climate-induced catastrophes like they want to believe) but they must be better off than the rest, which is enough for them.

So the real takeaway here is that the US military is basically that player in a video game who hoards all their health potions for the final boss, but keeps getting wrecked by the “mid-tier” opponents along the way because they’re “saving it” for the big showdown. Newsflash: there are no save points in real life. And that’s why smaller powers, like Yemen, can inflict serious pain on the US military, as the latter is trying to win a game it looks down on with one hand tied behind its back.

This also highlights why having a balance of power, like a bipolar system, is crucial for keeping Western dominance in check. After the USSR fell, that balance went out the window, but it’s slowly coming back now thanks to China. The key message being expressed here by these “worried US commanders” is going to show how important the role of China is in the world order.

There’s definitely an internal contradiction within America’s elite classes that has ballooned with the monumental capital accumulation from, especially, the past decade through the seismic technological gains. The paradigm of America’s upper class composition was indeed one of finance for most of modern American history, but I do suspect that the rise of Silicon Valley has suddenly created a new power base that has the capacity to come into friction with the traditional institutional elite.

The fact that many of these tech oligarchs like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg eclipse the traditional financial elite in wealth means that they have no interest in falling in line at the bottom of the pecking order as “New Money.” The recent TrueAnon episode about them really highlights the sense of “persecution” these narcissistic freaks obtained during the Biden government.

To be frank, they do have a compelling case to sell in that the state apparatus firmly believes technology is the primary means to secure American hegemony and sees their much fantasized ultimate showdown with China as one defined primarily by technological capabilities. So this is a contradiction in which they believe in their own self-importance as the lead actors of modern America and much of the state apparatus also believes the same thing. If that is true, all those avenues you highlighted of the further “technologification” of American society would be inherently to their interest and would cyclically entrench their explosive influence in modern America.

To add onto this, though this is clearly just the early stages, I think what we’re seeing with the consolidation of the Silicon Valley elites and Big Tech giants under the Trump faction is, in many ways, a coup by America’s “New Money” Tech oligarchs against the traditional 20th century financial/industrial institutional elite that the MAGA Republicans had moved away from and therefore had visibly coalesced under the Democrats. I was listening to TrueAnon’s take on the Republican “shift” of Big Tech and they highlighted the persecution complex that Silicon Valley had under Biden, where people like Zuckerberg were dragged into Congress and made to endure a televised grilling. This was something that would have never happened to the likes of Dimon, Soros or Buffett.

Given that explosive stock market capitalization had made these Tech oligarchs far wealthier than the “Old Money” ever had been, it must have been humiliating for narcissistic freaks like Zuckerberg who have megalomaniacal messiah complexes from usually being just in their Silicon Valley yes-men echochambers to experience being treated this way when they’re also the new overwhelming power in America’s elite. These deeply resentful individuals then saw in Trump’s admin a way to finally have the Big Tech power base institutionally reconstituted at the top of the hierarchy, above the “Old Money.”

Rather than LARPing as a character in some British drama about “New Money” losers spending the entire series trying to ingratiate their way into the “Old Money” elite nobility, they’re deciding to simply flip the table and pull down the entire superstructure to rebuild from the rubble something that can acknowledge the powerbrokers. The destruction of all these old levers of American institutional power and the government careerists that have decades of networks with the “Old Money” elite (including in places like USAID, RFE and VOA - though it shows a bottom line of US imperial consensus still exists as RFA is untouched and unmentioned in all this) is to pauperize the latter’s connections within the US state and to reset the playing field in a way favorable to the recognition of the overwhelming wealth of the new Big Tech oligarchy. The intent is to demonstrate an overwhelming show of force that demonstrates their political power through what Trump is able to do with their sponsorship, rendering it impossible for the Big Tech elites to be alienated and treated the way those like Zuckerberg were under Biden.