According to the Political Dictionary: A stalking horse “refers to an individual or proposal that serves to mask the true purpose or interest of another individual or group.”
In the election of 2024, the individual and groups interested in electing the Republican party’s candidate are not masking their true purpose very well. The Heritage Foundation and the billionaires behind Project 2025 are clearly anxious to implement their democracy-crushing agenda if their candidate is able to wrangle his way in “by hook or by crook” and sit in the presidential chair—which he will then want to turn into a throne as soon as he can get away with it.
More dangerous even than the Evangelical Taliban of Project 2025 are the billionaire Tech Bros: Musk, Thiel, Allison Huynh, Nicholas Longo, investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and the Winklevoss twins, to name just a few who have surfaced. (You might remember the Winklevoss twins as the guys who claimed that Zuckerberg took their idea and turned it into Facebook.)
These power-hungry groups of people are really not at all interested in the GOP candidate as a person. They know he is unhinged and on the bullet train to dementia. In fact, they are counting on his early slide into dementia to solidify their hold on power, as long as he can get in there to get it for them. That’s why JD is riding shotgun in the campaign.
JD is the most obvious opportunist to arrive on the political scene since old “Tricky Dicky” Nixon was kicked out of the White House due to his criminal behavior. Of course since the Supreme Court has now given the Green Light to criminal behavior by a president, it will enable any democracy-hating candidate who arrives atop the heap to do “whatever” in order to maintain power. JD is the perfect puppet for the job.
The system in the USA is such that after an election, the declared winner has to have the win approved by the congress on January 6th of the new year (2025) and then, a couple of weeks later, on the 20th of January, the winner is inaugurated. Not until the 20th does that newly elected winner have any power to do anything at all. However, as the “dictator on day one” has promised to wield all the power at his command on that very day, democracy can be assured that the stranglehold on its existence will get tighter and tighter each day after that fateful “day one.”
The Project 2025 agenda is clear. Democracy will be dismantled all the way down to its most constituent parts, and any non-partisan federal or state or city employees will not only lose their jobs, but could end up as slave labor in some new gulag that the Evangelical Taliban will set up in the hells of Louisiana or Alabama.
Billionaire Tech Bros don’t care what the Evangelical Taliban get up to because they know that with their endless stream of money they can ride out any storm created by the religious few. Tech Bros are fundamentally non-religious, perhaps even anti-religious and can bide their time until democracy has been well and truly snuffed out before they go after the leaders of the New Inquisition—an easy task if you control the information space and can afford to hire condottieri to do your bidding.
The Stalking Horse Candidate actually has a very short lifespan in front of him if he is successful in his bid for the presidency. Probably, after his glorious “day one” as dictator, he will either die of something related to his poor diet, or he will become the victim of the 25th Amendment and be gently removed from office and confined to an institution.
Of course in my satirical black humor play Ladies MacDeath, I use his family members as principal characters instead of the Project 2025 people and the Tech Bros—the two ladies, Melanija and Ivanka, serve drama better than idiot men like Musk and the Winklevoss twins.
In any case, the result will be the same. A new breed of power-hungry people [men] will be allied at the top of the system, with JD as their willing CEO.
The alliance may even last a few years. Of course there will be no more elections, as the Stalking Horse said: “…you won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.” Project 2025 will take care of that. And the Tech Bros don’t give a damn if elections ever return.
Musk approves of theories that echo this point of view: “… a Republic of high-status males is best for decision making.” He regards himself to be a high-status male, smarter and tougher than others, charming, highly sexed, an Alpha who is allowed to dominate in a society that—according to him and other male rightwing actors—caters to the weak and to women and those people of color who are, according to this point of view, inferior because they are not of the white Aryan European racial family.
NB to the reader: Aryans don’t exist. White skin is not a characteristic of race. Skin color is due to the abundance or lack of melanin in the skin. And, most important: All humans on earth today are of one race, and that is Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
In today’s Nouvelle Stalinist Russia, the information space is rapidly coming under the command and control of Putin and his minions. The Tech Bros dream of this situation for the USA. The lyrics of New York, New York could be their anthem:
If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere …
I want to wake up in a city [world] that never sleeps
And find I’m “A” – number one, top of the list
King of the hill, top of the heap
The Stalking Horse Candidate will quietly, or maybe dramatically be eliminated after the 20th of January 2025—if he is able to claw his way into the presidency. The “dramatically” eliminated option is rather appetizing for those seeking to use power as a hammer. The model for that is the Nazi reaction after the Reichstag Fire in 1933: “The Chancellor stressed the fact that, in his opinion also, it was urgently necessary to hang van der Lubbe. The German public absolutely expected this. He could not recognize the doctrine of ‘the law must be observed,’ if the entire national life had to perish as a result.”
That is JD’s cue as to how to proceed after the dramatic assassination of the “dictator on day one” president. To the Nazi leadership it really didn’t matter to anyone whether there were doubts about who did it: “Reich Minister Göring stated that the Reichstag fire had been previously announced at four different places. Whether the person arrested at the Belgian border had any connection with the deed was still uncertain.”
So, if you have a need for democracy to exist in order for you to survive, you must see that the challenge to any form of democracy is what these Project 2025 and Tech Bros are aiming for, and that must be seen as “a clear and present danger.”
What can you do?
What can I do?
My job—as I see it—is to stick a needle under your [metaphorical] skin, hit a vein, and pump in as much knowledge of the truth as possible. My vain hope is that it will get you to understand the world as it really is so that you must act in a way that maintains the ability to have and practice the freedom to think about whatever you like to think about, to be whoever you feel the need to be, and to allow others the freedom to live the way you do, without constraint (unless of course they are criminally trying to take away your freedom—a subject for another article).
My message to the Evangelical Taliban of Project 2025 is that when the revolution comes, and it always comes, eventually, be prepared to flee or die. The wheel of fortune guarantees that no repressive regime lasts more than 40 years or so these days. And to the Tech Bros I say: the condottieri of old eventually turned on their masters and took over. You are as expendable as anyone else in this game.
Meanwhile, my message for you dear reader is: Stay healthy!
Danny Antonelli grew up in the USA, now lives in Hamburg, Germany and writes radio plays, stories and is a professional lyricist and librettist. His political writings, The Cassandra Files, can be found here: https://dannyantonelli.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/the-cassandra-files-1.pdf