I wrote this comment in response to the latest essay By Audrey Watters (21st Feb 2025): https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/automated-contempt
Hi Audrey, Have read your stuff for some years now. It always stirs me, leads me, and makes me think.
These are indeed amazing times. I am surely not the only one who has fallen foul of Godwin’s Law if I note that the TV film “M – Son of the Century’ is surely relevant to understanding the current cultural and political darkness that is swallowing America (I’m in the UK, where it’s typically very dull politically and where we have not left the years of Tory disdain behind but now suffer its replacement, a Tory-Lite form of politics … but that is another story … ).
Anyway, the film is stunningly well made – and, paradoxically, brings cinematic beauty to one of the darkest topics. The non-fiction novel on which it is based is also good (though a challenging read). Key point, to me, is that Trumpist politics is much, much closer to Mussolini’s fascism than to the more obvious Nazi parallel. Vanity and ego, self-delusion and self-aggrandisement, and above all violence, violence, violence all perpetrated for the good of the nation, the rebirth of the Italian soul … just as today for example Steve Bannon, that vile creature Alex Karp, and others, talk brazenly about murdering people in large numbers. Yet no-one blinks.
(Karp is the relevant case here – encouraging shareholders to invest in AI that he openly says he uses to instil fear and to commit murder, as he does against Palestinians …)
In the film the last word is spokne at the very end of Episode 8 when in 1924, faced with the loss of power resulting from the latest savage murder of a political opponent, Mussolini demands of the elected assembly that all it takes under the terms of the Italian constitution is for one member to call for an impeachment.
“Come on, speak, just one of you …”. No-one does of course.
He turns to us, the fourth wall, and with a subtle smirk to camera says simply “silencio”.
END.
Saying nothing says it all!
Must stop. Love your writing. We share your despair – hope this comment does not add to it! 
Incidentally I have got hold of a copy of Karp’s book ‘The Technological Republic’ which glows radioactively inside my Kindle (if you can bear to look at it, it is grist to the mill-stones of anger that burn us up). The TechnoRepublic must return to it roots he says, which lie with the military machine, the machine that kick-started everything worthwhile techn0logically (AI) but which has become mired in trivia … (so says the billionaire technologist!).
Same old shit!