The oligarch takeover is America's tall ships moment

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla’s Elon Musk at Donald Trump's second presidential inauguration.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Pool

For hundreds of years, a myth has persisted about the first time tall ships landed in the Americas. Native people, so the story goes, did not fear the looming ships at first because they couldn’t register what they were.

According to the theory, natives literally couldn’t “see” the ships, because they had no experiential familiarity with them. Quoting from What the Bleep do we know?, a paradigm-shifting take on human perception, native people ignored the huge ships because “their highly filtered perceptions couldn't register what was happening, and they literally failed to see them.”

When Captain Cook/Columbus/Magellan sent their men ashore in smaller longboats loaded with guns, the natives registered what they saw and began their futile resistance.

This is America’s tall ships moment

Experiencing Trump/Musk’s takeover, an oligarchs’ revolution mapped out in Project 2025 that was kept under wraps for decades, it seems we’re the natives now. The possibility that a malign force would infiltrate the government to destroy all we’ve built over the past 250 years, to upend laws defining the relationship between government and the governed, is so foreign, so alien, that many cannot see what is happening even as it dominates the nightly news.

To facilitate our blindness, Trump unleashes an attack against American interests so frequently there is no time to see the big picture. Trashing our national security by attacking our allies, comforting the enemy, threatening to invade our neighbors, shutting down science, national parks, and programs that keep tens of millions of Americans alive is so extreme, so bizarre, we can’t really register the macro. Surely an American president doesn’t want to harm or imprison half the population. Surely an American president is only causing temporary harm to benefit us in the long run. Surely Trump will reach a point of satisfaction, his deep thirst for power and money finally slaked, and we will all return to normal.

Day after day, Fox News and the rightwing media sphere praises what Trump is doing, as if they must protect their viewers—and themselves—from the truth. As Mark Jacob points out in his excellent newsletter, main stream news media sources aren’t much better. At first, I thought national media’s perfidy was a reflection of naivete, of the same sort German society experienced in the 1930s, despite Trump dropping clear Nazi-adjacent warnings— controlling the media, arresting critics, dispatching jackboots in the night. But German people then, like most Americans today, went along with it. Surely Hitler would only get so bad before his malign forces were stopped. Surely the oligarchs who funded him would rein him in before he started cooking people alive, if for no other reason than to protect their own financial interests.

Now I see it differently. Germany’s media knew what was happening in the beginning, but were conflicted because Hitler’s antics also made for saleable headlines. America’s main stream media is also governed by clicks, but with an added complication: their oligarch owners’ financial interests, which so far, have prevailed over any journalistic impulse to tell the truth.

Dictators have followed the same playbook throughout history

Due to early delusion, encouraged by a compromised and later state-controlled national media, more than eighty million people perished in WWII. Fast forward to today, and very little has changed. Intentionally dumbed down by the Republican party, Americans seem to have forgotten what WWII was about, or how apathy and obeying in advance leads to death.

When Hitler spread us vs. them culture wars to dehumanize “other,” as Trump and Vance are now doing, it was nothing new. It was the same playbook Julius Caesar followed, as have brutal dictators throughout history.

Successful dehumanization was most blatantly reprised by American slave owners in the South, with the same oligarchic motivations, and the effects linger still. As Manisha Sinha wrote in The Oligarchs’ Revenge, even though slavery and Jim Crow were eventually defeated, their “language of oligarchy,” promoted through an appeal to racism, has been wholly “adopted by the modern Republican Party.”

Corporate greed as governance is here

As the Tesla protests suggest, the extent of Trump/Musk’s privatization efforts are starting to appear; the ships are becoming visible on the horizon. If Trump/Musk succeed, all walks of life will be governed by for-profit corporations, from education to health to national parks to accelerated climate disaster. Never mind that government is meant to protect and serve without a profit motive, or that both Trump and Musk have run several private businesses into the ground. Once their corporate takeover is complete, the uber wealthy will own or control all of America’s resources even as Trump searches distant shores for more.

I have wondered all my adult life how the Germans let Hitler happen. And now, like the man who couldn’t live without knowing how his wife died until he met her same fate in The Vanishing, I know.

People didn’t react because most couldn’t see what was happening. Those who could see Hitler--Germany’s tall ships--didn’t believe what they saw. And those who both saw and believed their own eyes thought there would be a sane stopping point. There wasn’t then, and there won’t be now.

Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.