Brooke Harrington
Appearances
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
No, this is really different. And in fact, I was reflecting on how different this is even from Russian oligarchy, because... Don't now.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Sorry. Well, you know, at least Putin had a very clear red line with his oligarchs. The grand bargain of the early 2000s was he was going to let them get rich on condition that they kept their noses out of his political business. At most, they would be his errand boys from some diplomatic missions in Europe, for example, on their super yachts. But that was it, and it ended there.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
And he made a huge example of Mikhail Khodorovsky, who was the Yukos oil chairman who dared to stand up for transparency and human rights in Russia. And that earned him almost a decade in Russian prison and seizure of all of his assets by Putin. He was lucky to escape with his life.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
No, but what Trump has done is so extraordinary because he doesn't have that bright line with the new oligarchs of America at all. He's basically said, okay, you bought it, do what you want.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Well, for me as an American, this is not good news because I like democracy.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
I want to hear about this.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Yeah. Well, the thing about the broligarchs, and this is even different from oligarchs. Stop. Stop.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
so we've had oligarchs in the past in america we've had carnegies and we've had rockefellers but aside from making sure they didn't get regulated or taxed too much they kind of stuck to their own business they just wanted to get rich but the broligarks really have an explicit political agenda and it is essentially anti-democratic and and almost monarchical
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Well, they're going for noblesse without the oblige. They want all the privileges and none of the obligations.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
philanthropy, any sense of social norms constraining them. I mean, what they're all about is nothing can constrain me. I mean, look what happened when the EU tried to impose its own laws on Elon Musk. J.D. Vance, not even the vice president yet, rolls up on the EU and says, you leave our boy alone or we're going to pull out of NATO.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Well, there is... J.D.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
With the eyeliner and everything.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
It sounds a lot, actually, like the divine right of kings, but with a pseudoscientific spin. So that's where you get all the Elon bros talking about being high T alpha males. That's that's just a 21st century way of saying God says I'm the king and you all need to bow down.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Well, I think it's different from the Gilded Age in two important ways. One is the sort of the release of the oblige part of noblesse oblige. These guys are totally released from the constraints of social norms that said it was stigmatizing to sit on your wealth like a dragon on a hoard of gold. You had to show that you were doing something for society.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Yeah, I mean, they didn't necessarily have to be fans of humanity, but they cared about their reputations. And in order to keep a decent reputation, you had to be seen to do something, you know, throwing the public a bone, as it were.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
I only know about the case of Mackenzie Bezos doing that.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Oh, she too, yes. She is doing her part. But it almost seems like a middle finger to the ex-husbands. Like, I'll show you the proper use of wealth, USOB.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
My understanding, I'm not a Russia expert, but my understanding from reading the work of people who are is it's sort of like a pyramid scheme or a mafia operation where the capo de tutti capi sits at the top and takes a percentage of what the lower-level henchmen are getting.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
So, you know, he takes a chunk of Yukos oil and he takes a chunk of Gazprom, and that way he stays the wealthiest man in the world. Yeah.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Well, I think you make a good point. It's better that we know and that it not be happening sub rosa and, you know, in whispers that we can't really define in any way. It's all cards on the table now, and it's almost like it's being rubbed in our faces.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Well, you went right from. Yeah, I'm not good. Well, it's obviously something very dangerous because what we're seeing here is the total release of all democratic constraint and all pretense to social norms that used to constrain these people. Right. They're totally unfettered in their access to power and in their sense of what is OK to do with that power.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
I would want to move away from individualistic explanations of like good billionaires and bad billionaires and talk about like, what do we as a society say? We're not going to let you get away with that because historically that's been the only thing that's constrained the really rich. If you go all the way back to the Medici in the 1400s,
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
They weren't necessarily good people, but they were the richest people in Europe. And the reason we have the Renaissance and all of its great works of art is because their society wouldn't let them get away with just sitting on their hordes of wealth and enjoying it for their own benefit. They had to do something for their society.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Yes, but you could say it's the hard way, so to speak. One of the wealth managers I spoke to in the course of studying offshore finance over 17 years, he was a historian. And I mean, he trained as a historian at one of the Oxbridge schools in the UK.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
And he was very candid about his role in making rich people richer at the expense of the rest of us. And he said, well, once that ball gets rolling, it becomes quite difficult to stop it short of revolutions or mass general strikes. And I think historically, that's what we've seen. We're at levels of wealth inequality unseen since the Gilded Age. And what happened then? Well, we had a world war.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
We had a pandemic. And then we had the rise of fascism. And in between then, we had a lot of labor action in the U.S. So if labor unions are able to muster enough power to stand up to some of these oligarchs, they could be a force for good.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
And you know what's really kind of surprising to me about this is that what's really needed here is a way for people to coalesce and organize themselves to stand up to these individual accumulations of power in the hands of the broligarchs.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
No.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Well, as you correctly point out, where does the wealth actually come from? It comes from labor. So if labor gets together and says, we're not going to stand for this anymore. Or if consumers get together and say, we're not going to stand for this anymore, there are way more of us than there are of them.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
The problem is that the weird twist in the wonderful world of the internet and social media is that rather than giving us a means to coalesce and come together, it's divided us into these little bubbles or camps that are at war with one another.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
Just last week, there was a scholarly journal article published by some political scientists in the Netherlands that looked at who generates the most misinformation on social media. And they found it was really asymmetric. It's almost all coming from right-wing populists. And it's not an accident. That's their strategy.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Inauguration and Elon Musk's Nazi Salute | Brooke Harrington
This process is what distinguishes the United States from a lot of other parts of the world.