Photos: YouTube Screenshots
Greetings, Lowdowners! As you know, our crew here loves political cartoons, and we try to highlight some of our favorites whenever we can. This week, we wanted to bring back one of our longtime friends for a guest post—Jen Sorensen. Jen is a cartoonist for Daily Kos, The Nation, In These Times, Politico and other publications throughout the US. She received the 2023 Berryman Award for Editorial Cartooning from the National Press Foundation, and is a recipient of the 2014 Herblock Prize and a 2013 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. She is also a Pulitzer Finalist.
Not only is Jen a great cartoonist, but the posts that she writes to go with each cartoon always add extra nuance and info to the work she shares each week. If you enjoy her work, please consider subscribing to her newsletter here!
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Playing the Wealth Card
The sheer chutzpah of these billionaire technofascists who assume it’s their right to take over the country, destroy our government, and financially terrorize millions is simply beyond me. I find it a little strange, though not surprising, that we rarely heard the words “radical libertarianism” in the mainstream media before the election, and as far as I know, we still aren’t hearing much about the extremist ideology behind the current chaos (admittedly, I haven’t been paying close attention to these outlets lately). Not that there hasn’t been excellent reporting elsewhere. I highly recommend reading Wired magazine these days — in particular, this article about plans for corporate-controlled cities operating outside the scope of pesky federal regulations like environmental protection and worker rights.
I have to admit that I find the worldview of these people endlessly (if darkly) fascinating. As someone with a bit of a utopian streak myself, the idea of building new cities designed for healthier and happier living holds a certain appeal. But these guys belong to a pseudoscientific cult that conveniently places them at the top and devalues the lives of everyone else. Unfortunately, they also have nearly infinite financial resources. A “libertarian revolution” simply means rule by the richest and most powerful; it’s the opposite of liberty. The people most enthused by this nonsense tend to be those who haven’t experienced marginalization in the first place.
Another interesting article I read this week was this AP report on Javier Milei’s first year as president of Argentina. Milei is another extremist libertarian who posed with a chainsaw well before Musk’s asinine photo op. He’s cut funds for universities, pensions, public works, etc. Unlike the US, Argentina had catastrophic inflation that was used to justify some of these measures — but as the article points out, Trump and Musk are following the same playbook without even a pretext of hyperinflation. We need to be talking about this reality, and move beyond the tired old paradigms and normalizing horse race coverage that seems laughably stuck in the past.
For this week’s classic, here’s a comic from 2019 that may have seemed a little dark at the time, but has unfortunately aged well.
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