Over Fragmenten.blog

Posted on 30 januari 2022 by Jeppe Kleijngeld

Welkom op Fragmenten uit het Schemerland, mijn persoonlijke website en content-verzameling. Je vindt hier veel artikelen over films en series in de FilmDungeon. Ook vind je op deze site mijn achtergrondverhaal, een selectie van mijn professionele werk, en een groeiende collectie blogs – fragmenten genaamd – over uiteenlopende onderwerpen. Veel leesplezier en bedankt voor het bezoeken van mijn blog!

— Jeppe Kleijngeld

PS: Bezoek ook eens mijn andere website over bewustzijn en mijn visie op de ware aard van het universum:

Why Donald Trump is the Best Socialist Reviver Imaginable

Posted on 13 september 2026 by Jeppe Kleijngeld

In a wide-ranging conversation on the Econoclasts podcast, the Marxist economist Richard Wolff laid out a sweeping account of where American capitalism stands today, why he believes the United States is past its peak as a global power, and why he sees a genuine, if still inchoate, socialist revival taking shape among a new generation of Americans. What follows is a summary of his argument, segment by segment.

Who is Richard Wolff?

Richard Wolff is a professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor at the New School in New York City, where he now lives. Over a long career he has also taught at Yale, the City University of New York, and the Sorbonne in Paris.

Wolff describes himself as having spent most of his life working on the margins of acceptable American discourse – Marxist economics was, for decades, treated in the United States as barely tolerable even inside universities. He recalls that as a student he had to pursue his interest in Marxism largely on his own, in part by choosing to study at Stanford specifically so he could work with the radical economist Paul Baran in the final year of Baran’s life.

Today, Wolff says, the ideas he has spent a career developing have moved from the fringes toward the center of American political conversation, a shift he attributes in part, ironically, to Donald Trump. In his view, Trump’s presidency has done more to organize a socialist revival in America than any organizer on the left could have managed alone.

What is his view on this stage of capitalism?

Wolff argues that capitalism suffers from three structural flaws it has never managed to overcome. The first is its built-in tendency toward extreme inequality of wealth and income – a tendency so severe that, historically, it has periodically triggered uprisings from below before reasserting itself once those uprisings subside.

He points to the contrast between the celebration of Elon Musk’s path toward becoming the world’s first trillionaire and the fact that roughly two-thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Because capitalism enriches only a minority, he argues, that minority is perpetually anxious that democratic majorities might use the ballot to undo the inequality – which is why, in his account, the wealthy are compelled to corrupt politics to protect their position, something he says was made visible when billionaires sat arrayed on the dais at Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

The second flaw is instability: the recurring cycle of booms and busts that the National Bureau of Economic Research clocks at roughly every four to seven years, and which Wolff says has struck on schedule in 2000, 2008, and 2020, despite decades of Keynesian efforts to tame it. The third flaw is ecological – the way the profit motive drives capitalism to neglect or postpone the collective needs of both human beings and the natural environment.

Taken together, Wolff frames these as reasons to conclude, as humanity once concluded about slavery and feudalism, that a better system is both necessary and achievable.

What is happening to America that is quickly failing as a leading nation?

According to Wolff, the United States has passed its peak and entered a period of imperial decline, and he points to several converging signs. Militarily, he argues the U.S. failed to achieve its goals in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and is faring no better against Iran, while the outcome in Ukraine remains uncertain.

Diplomatically, he says Washington has squandered the ‘soft power’ that once made allies eager to align with it – citing, as a striking example, a petition drive in Canada, a longstanding ally, with more than 250,000 signatures calling for the expulsion of the American ambassador.

Domestically, he sees a historic collapse of trust in both major parties. As evidence, he points to New York City’s 2025 mayoral election, in which Zoran Mamdani – a democratic socialist and member of the Democratic Socialists of America – defeated the establishment-backed Cuomo family by a wide margin, despite carrying two labels (socialist, Muslim) that Wolff says have traditionally been politically fatal in America.

Wolff also connects this domestic decline to the country’s chronic government debt, which – echoing the interviewer’s framing – he treats not as a side effect but as part of the very mechanism that has funded American global dominance since the 1970s, as trading partners recycle dollars earned from U.S. imports back into American debt.

Is socialism on the rise?

Wolff believes it is, though he is careful to describe it as an awakening rather than a mature movement. He notes that support for both Trump and for left figures like Bernie Sanders and Mamdani spring from the same underlying source: a widespread recognition, across the political spectrum, that ordinary Americans’ economic security has been stripped away since the rollback of the New Deal began after 1945.

Polling, he says, shows that the younger the American, the more favorably they view socialism – even though, as he readily admits, most young people who hold this view know relatively little about socialism’s history or internal debates. What they are expressing, in his reading, is not yet a worked-out ideology but a rejection: a conviction that the current system is unbearable and cannot be reformed from within.

What would real socialism look like?

Wolff is emphatic that the socialism he has in mind bears little resemblance to the popular image of Soviet-style shortages and bureaucratic stagnation. For him, the USSR and similar systems represented state-run capitalism, in which the state simply replaced private owners as the boss while workers still had no say over their own workplaces – not genuine socialism at all.

The alternative he has spent much of his recent career developing is what he calls the Worker Self-Directed Enterprise, or WSDE. In a WSDE, there are no outside shareholders and no board of directors separate from the people who do the work; instead, the employees who work in an enterprise collectively and democratically decide what to produce, how to produce it, and – critically – what to do with the profits, or surplus, the business generates. Rather than that surplus flowing to distant owners, it stays with the people who created it, to be allocated toward wages, reinvestment, or community needs as the worker-members themselves decide. Wolff points to Spain’s Mondragon Corporation, a federation of more than 85,000 worker-members operating on a one-worker, one-vote basis, as the clearest real-world proof that the model can function at scale.

Wolff does not propose abolishing markets or nationalizing the economy overnight. Instead, he envisions a gradual, legally supported transition: laws that make it easier to convert existing firms into WSDEs or to start new ones, school curricula that teach the model alongside conventional corporate structures, and political movements that represent the interests of a growing WSDE sector the way today’s parties represent capital and labor.

The underlying principle, as he puts it, is that economic democracy inside the workplace is the necessary foundation for real political democracy, because a society cannot be genuinely self-governing at the ballot box while most people spend eight hours a day answerable to bosses they had no part in choosing.

SOURCE:
America is quietly losing the world – Yanis Varoufakis & Richard D. Wolff | The Econoclasts

The Nerd Reich: How Evil Tech Fascists Are Trying To Take Over the World

Posted on 5 september 2026 by Jeppe Kleijngeld

Silicon Valley has long had something of a hippie image, epitomized by legendary figures like Steve Jobs, as the crucible of global tech innovation. Historically, its political engagement, when it existed, leaned Democratic. In recent years, however, the region has taken a dark turn, though authoritarian undercurrents have always simmered beneath the surface.

In his new book, ‘The Nerd Reich’, journalist Gil Duran exposes a chilling reality: the world’s most powerful tech billionaires – Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Balaji Srinivasan, and their allies – are not just building companies: they are waging a deliberate, ideological war against democracy itself, replacing it with a vision of corporate authoritarianism where the rich rule unchallenged. And with J.D. Vance, Thiel’s handpicked protégé, now a heartbeat away from the presidency, their ideas are no longer fringe – they are policy.

Duran’s book is a meticulously sourced account of how Silicon Valley’s elite have radicalized against democracy, using their wealth, influence, and technological might to reshape government in their image.

The Ideology: What is Tech Fascism?

Duran defines tech fascism as a modern iteration of classic fascism: “It’s a cult of grievance and self-victimization that seeks to return to a mythical greatness by purging its demonized enemies – whether they be the poor, the left, or democratic institutions – to impose a permanent hierarchical structure on the world.”

This ideology didn’t emerge overnight. It has roots in libertarian thought from the 1980s and 1990s, but as Duran explains, these billionaires were never true libertarians.

Now that they are the government (or at least its most influential backers), their true colors show: they are extreme fascists and authoritarians.

The intellectual foundation for this movement is James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg’s 1997 book, ‘The Sovereign Individual’, which Peter Thiel has long championed. The book predicted that technology, especially cybercurrency (what we now call crypto), would overthrow democracy in the 21st century.

Thiel, a Stanford-educated lawyer who made his fortune in Silicon Valley’s late-1990s boom, has spent decades pushing this vision. Peter Thiel is the central character in Duran’s book, not just as a billionaire, but as the architect of a political movement. His influence extends far beyond PayPal and Palantir.

Significantly, he bankrolled J.D. Vance’s entire career, from his stint as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to his Senate run. “Vance is almost entirely a creation of Thiel”, Duran writes.

He shaped Vance’s worldview. In 2011, Thiel gave a speech at Yale Law School that Vance later called “one of the most significant moments of his life.” Thiel convinced Vance to abandon law and become a venture capitalist and at every step since, Thiel has molded him into a political force.

He funded a network of extremists. At least 16 Thiel-connected figures served in the Trump administration, embedding his ideology into policy.

But Thiel’s most chilling contribution is Palantir, the surveillance giant he co-founded. Named after the all-seeing stone from The Lord of the Rings, Palantir is not just a tech company – it’s a cornerstone of the emerging authoritarian state. Embedded in U.S. military, intelligence, and ICE operations, it enables mass surveillance. Created with CIA investment, yet its leaders openly push anti-democratic ideas.

“It boggles my mind that you can say the most anti-American, anti-democratic things and still be a billionaire off government contracts”, said Duran in a recent interview.

Peter Thiel in South Park

Curtis Yarvin: The Philosopher of Corporate Dictatorship

If Thiel is the puppet master, Curtis Yarvin is the theorist. His writings – once dismissed as fringe – are now shaping policy.

Yarvin’s most infamous idea is ‘Patchwork’. He argues that nation-states are obsolete and should be replaced by corporate fiefdoms – autocratic ‘network states’ where billionaires rule as dictators over their own citizens.

His proposals are shockingly extreme:

● Purge the federal government of anyone who resists the dictator’s orders (Yarvin called this ‘RAGE’ Retire All Government Employees. That’s pretty close to DOGE – the Elon Musk led hatchet job to the American government).

● Eliminate international aid programs (The Trump administration did exactly this, with USAID cuts that Duran calls “a targeted hit delivered against the poorest people in the world by the richest man in the world”).

● Adopt ‘pretorian diplomacy’ – a military-first foreign policy.

● Deal with the poor by turning them into biodiesel to fuel city buses (Yarvin later claimed this was a joke, but added that what the poor really need is “a humane alternative to genocide”).

Yarvin’s influence is not theoretical. In 2021, J.D. Vance openly cited him on a conservative podcast, arguing that the left’s institutions should be “seized and turned against the left” as part of a “deep deinstitutionification program.”

The Central Role of Crypto

Balaji Srinivasan, a former Coinbase CTO, is the evangelist of the ‘network state’: a vision where tech billionaires create their own countries, free from democratic oversight.

His ideas are gaining traction: Kazakhstan is now building a ‘crypto megacity’ based on these principles. Trump himself tried to establish ‘freedom zones’ in the EU – autonomous territories where billionaires could make their own rules. Media coverage of these efforts, Duran notes, never explained what ‘freedom zones’ actually were, because they stem from this radical Silicon Valley ideology.

The network state cult envisions a world where billionaires can flee to their own private nations when democracy becomes too inconvenient. As Duran warns: “They’re investing in escape routes for when their prophesied apocalyptic collapse of democratic states happens.”

Originally, crypto was seen by cypherpunks as a way to escape democracy, rules, and law. Today, it’s a tool of mass corruption. The crypto industry is now the biggest spender in U.S. politics, holding politicians hostage by threatening to spend millions against anyone who opposes them.

Trump’s family is cashing in. From bitcoin mining to coin scams (including Melania Trump’s own crypto scheme), the Trumps have fully embraced the industry – despite Trump once calling crypto a “scam against the dollar.”

Duran calls this a “crypto banana republic” – where oligarchs use fake digital currency to undermine government authority. Crypto used to be a useful tool for drug dealing, human trafficking, gambling, and crime. Now it’s being used to break the country in half.

And the corruption is staggering. A Trump-appointed bank regulator recently granted conditional approval for a Trump family crypto business to establish a bank charter – a move Duran describes as “a bank of mass corruption.”

Elon Musk: The Crypto Fascist

Musk, once a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”, has fully embraced the authoritarian turn. He bought Twitter (now X) and banned critics, including Duran himself, who was suspended for calling Palantir’s manifesto “fascist”.

He stood behind the presidential seal at a Trump event and threw a Hitler salute. He pivoted from calling crypto a “scam” to becoming a “crypto bro-in-chief.” The Trump family, Duran reports, made 5 billion dollars from crypto schemes, though volatile markets have since reduced that to about 1.2 billion dollars.

Musk’s realignment with Trump is no accident. As Duran puts it: “These guys – Musk, Thiel, David Sacks – are immigrants who came to America, became wildly successful, and now feel it’s not enough. They’re full of anger. And with Trump, they see an opportunity to remake the country in their own image.”

Now, with Vance as Trump’s Vice President, Silicon Valley has one of their own in the White House – a man who has openly embraced Yarvin’s extremist ideas and who, as Duran warns, holds “personally anti-American” views.

The Resistance: Is Anyone Fighting Back?

The good news is that there is resistance. Communities across America are opposing data centers – the physical infrastructure of the surveillance state.

Some politicians are speaking out, though Duran argues not enough. Journalists like Duran himself are exposing the movement, despite censorship and harassment.

But the bad news? The resistance is fragmented. Democrats are afraid to directly challenge tech billionaires, instead repeating “innovation” talking points.

Republicans are fully aligned with the Nerd Reich’s agenda. The media often fails to connect the dots, treating these ideas as eccentric rather than dangerous. “Silicon Valley is no longer about innovation. Silicon Valley is about fascism and a race to control the future.”

After years of studying these figures, what keeps Duran up at night? “That you can be as anti-American and anti-democratic as Peter Thiel and still be a government contractor with CIA investment. That you can smoke the most anti-democratic dope in the world and still profit from the intelligence infrastructure of the United States.”

Duran’s book is not just a warning – it’s a call to action. We don’t have to accept a future where billionaires rule as dictators. We can reject the dystopian vision being imposed on us.

The tech fascists are now fully entrenched in authoritarianism, they are prepared to go all the way and they are moving at breakneck speed to destroy democracy once and for all.

Reading Duran’s book makes it clear: these tech demons have to be completely destroyed if we are ever to be fully free again.

SOURCE:
“The Nerd Reich”: Author Gil Durán on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, JD Vance & the War on Democracy

Double Bill #19: It Chapter One and It Chapter Two

Posted on 28 augustus 2026 by Jeppe Kleijngeld

2017 and 2019 brought a fresh interpretation of Stephen King’s horror masterpiece ‘It’ (1986) – one of the scariest concepts ever conceived – with Bill Skarsgård starring as the demonic entity It, aka Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The first film follows the Losers Club, seven kids from Derry terrorized by It, an entity dwelling in the sewers that feeds on fear. The second, a three-hour monsterpiece, sees them return as adults to face Pennywise again. The timeline shifts from the book’s 1950s and 1980s to the 1980s and modern day. The script invents many new terrifying encounters with the clown, and the excellent special effects mark a major upgrade from the 1990 TV movie. Add to that Skarsgård’s fantastic performance – he truly makes the role his own – and strong turns from many of the child and adult cast (including James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, and Bill Hader), and you have one of the scariest film series of recent times. It’s the ultimate story about fear: how it takes hold, and how breaking free can seem impossible. It also tells a great psychological story of how we get trapped in childhood roles – Eddie married his mother, Richie wants to steal the show, Bev has an abusive boyfriend like her father, and so on. The film pays great homage to the 1990 miniseries, with Richie getting trapped in a room full of clown dolls, including the original Pennywise portrayed by Tim Curry. Stephen King even makes a cameo in Part 2. A must-see for horror fans: your heart will definitely be beating a lot faster during much of its runtime.

Dungeon Classics #47: IT

Posted on 22 augustus 2026 by Jeppe Kleijngeld

FilmDungeon’s Chief Editor JK sorts through the Dungeon’s DVD-collection to look for old cult favorites….

IT (1990, USA)

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Cast: Richard Thomas, Tim Reid, Annette O’Toole, Tim Curry
Running Time: 192 mins.

Before the cinematic It movies from 2017 and 2019, there was this beloved TV mini-series adapted from Stephen King’s horror masterpiece ‘It’. IT revolves around an evil entity living in the sewers of Derry, Maine, which feeds on the fears of people – children especially – and usually appears as the terrifying clown Pennywise. The structure of this TV production is very well done. The story is told as the adult members of the Losers Club are called back to Derry by their old friend Mike Hanlon when Pennywise returns after 30 years (“It’s back!”) and begins killing children again. They have all forgotten their horrific childhood encounters with Pennywise and must relive them before returning to Derry to finish him off for good. It’s a very intelligent metaphor for traumatic childhood experiences and how the past – and its many fears – remains very much alive in adults. The youth cast is very impressive, drawing you in and making their experiences believable. Tim Curry is absolutely great as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Bill Skarsgård definitely had huge clown shoes to fill when he took on the role in the reboot. The effects are dated nowadays, but IT still retains that eerie atmosphere that makes it so effective as a horror experience. The only flaw is that ending with the fake spider doesn’t cut it anymore (it never really did). Still, there are some genuine scares, and it still has some of that Losers Club magic going for it.