By Roger L Simon
Ever wonder where the political ads we get that endlessly litter our text and email inboxes like the “Sorcorer’s Apprentice,” rendering them close to useless, come from?
These missives are almost impossible to stop, treat us as if we have a collective IQ of 86, and are an ecologically monstrous waste.
One I received just as I was typing this goes:
“(Read Immediately) – Secret Intel briefing attached from House GOP HQ. Please, view in private.
30 minutes remaining: gop-report.com/V8VlNm
Stop2END”
Thirty minutes remaining? In private? I’d better go to my secure room—only I don’t have one. Or is this a Babylon Bee parody?
Unfortunately, not.
Moreover, “Stop2END” never seems to work. Occasionally, you get something back to the effect of “you have been removed from this list,” but are you? Good luck. Another similar list magically appears within minutes, or is it seconds?
And then there are the equally endless importunings for money from our politicians that clutter our snail mailboxes, some of them as lavish as the most elaborate wedding invitations.
Being a politician means spending most of one’s life (and attention) raising money—and it’s getting worse.
No wonder this Florida congresswoman, whom few had heard of (I hadn’t), was accused of dipping her hand in the financial cookie jar 25 times. She probably thought this behavior was SOP—and on some level, it probably is. Almost everybody seems to do it to some extent.
The old phrase “Money is the mother’s milk of politics” has become outdated. Money is now the enriched uranium of politics. Or the rare earth.
And since the advent of the internet, with its ease of constant communication, not to mention with AI feedback (think how that’s used) on top of it, we are more rats in the proverbial maze than ever, perpetually being fed a new mix to tempt us.
I don’t know about you, but this has had a reverse effect on me. I give less and less to politicians. And on the now rare occasions when I do give, I try to do so without solicitation.
Still, I remain fascinated by how this has happened, both as a writer/novelist and in the admittedly vain hope that we can do something about it.
One thing I learned during my years in Tennessee, where I was closer to the political process than I had been before, was that those who have most to gain from our system are the powerful consultants who literally run the show. One of the major players in this realm in TN is the go-to guy in the state if you want to get elected, and for a surprising number of big names across the country as well. He has been cleaning up for yhears.
It’s a lucrative profession, to say the least, if you can break into it and have the stomach for it—not quite as lucrative as being a major politician yourself like Nancy Pelosi, but way beyond what might be considered a reasonable norm.
When you see how it works—how, for example, the consultant and the advertising executive work in tandem also for years, building their mutual fees into the stratosphere, often receiving kickbacks, to enrich themselves— it can make you more than slightly depressed about the nature of our republic.
Further, you, hoi polloi, are a victim of “chumming” because these internet and mailing breadcrumbs—constant though they are—sent to tantalize you (Is that really Don Jr. writing me exclusively? How did James Carville get my phone number?) are just being thrown at you virtually at random, knowing the most you could give is a very minor contribution. Unless you have many thousands—or more—to donate, you are very low on the totem pole and essentially irrelevant—chum. Your contribution yields nothing for you but more solicitations.
Speaking of which, I was reminded this morning, via the indispensable Don Surber, of how potent and actually dangerous our opposites, those political “whales,” can be. He quotes Fox News:
A network of about 500 groups with an estimated $3 billion in combined annual revenues is behind the coordinated nationwide No Kings protest Saturday, including communist groups who are using the day to call for a revolution, according to a Fox Digital News investigation.
According to a copy of the permit for the flagship march in St. Paul, Minn., Indivisible, a national well-heeled Democratic political advocacy organization funded by billionaire George Soros, is the lead coordinator for the protest.
But Fox News Digital has also identified key participation by a network of radical socialist and communist organizations funded by Neville Roy Singham, an American tech tycoon and avowed communist living in China.
Over nearly a decade, Singham has financed a constellation of activist institutions that promote revolutionary socialist politics and frequently collaborate in protest campaigns, including the People’s Forum in New York, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the ANSWER Coalition and CodePink, whose co-founder Jodie Evans is married to Singham. These groups work closely with the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
How could Neville Singham, an American tech tycoon, actually live in China and declare himself a communist?
I am not privy to the inner workings of Mr. Singham’s mind, but it corroborates something I have been thinking for a while.
Communism, as dreamed up by Marx in a museum library and carried out to a frightening extent in the real world by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, has not existed for a long time. Forget the working class. It has been replaced by a one-party state oligarchy in which you can become as rich as anyone on the planet (save, perhaps, Elon Musk) through capitalist enterprise, as long as you remain faithful to that one party, still known as “communist” but far from that, and absolutely obey their rules.
What better place to migrate to for a successful capitalist like Singham, who was originally born in Sri Lanka? All he has to do is mouth the pieties of Xi’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” donate a modicum of his copious cash to nefarious international enterprises, and he’s a happy guy, safe from business competitors and, needless to say, the IRS.
Not surprisingly, I could not find images online of his Shanghai home shared with his spouse, Code Pink founder Jodie Evans. But you can be sure it’s not the local equivalent of a South Bronx walkup.
Don Surber was witty when he wrote, “It must be nice to be rich enough to afford communism,” but I beg to differ. If you’re totalitarian enough, like Mr. Singham, communism, in its current dubious form, can make you even richer. (Whatever happened to Marx’s “withering away of the state”?)
Despite all this—plus so many of our own politicians being on the take in some manner— aren’t we still glad we are Americans? I am. It’s not even close.
LASTLY
As I wrapped up this article, I received the following in Messages:
“Roger, be honest.
Is there a reason you won’t verify your GOP profile?
Did we do something wrong?
Let us know: gop-poll.com/yjVAvD
Stop2END”
Needless to say, the link led to a solicitation, not a profile. If I were “honest” as this missive demanded, I would say one of the reasons I “won’t verify my GOP Profile” is dimwitted texts like this.
Years ago, Paul Mazursky and I wrote a screenplay (never made, probably deservedly) called “Freddy Faust” about a screenwriter who made a pact with the Devil, a Bill Gates-type, to revive his waning career. At the beginning, the screenwriter was so down on his luck that, to make a living, he was reduced to writing fortune cookies for a Chinese restaurant. In a modern version, he’d be writing text messages for politicians.
First published in American Refugees
