{"text":[[{"start":6.4,"text":"The days of censoring Americans online are over, said US secretary of state Marco Rubio. “The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage,” vice-president JD Vance wrote on X. Europe is pursuing “civilizational suicide” through regulation and censorship, added Christopher Landau, Rubio’s deputy. And so on. All of this because the EU last week imposed a modest $140mn fine on Elon Musk’s X for transgressions unrelated to free speech. But forget the details. Musk is the EU’s sworn enemy. As is Donald Trump, who this week described Europe as “decaying” and its leaders “weak”."}],[{"start":50,"text":"Despite having bitterly fallen out earlier this year, Musk and Trump are fated to be close. As America’s chief broligarch, Musk is too shiny for Trump to ignore for long. Musk may flirt with a third party, denounce Trump’s fiscal recklessness and even claim that Trump has personal reasons to suppress the Epstein files, but the prodigal son can always find a way back. They have too many common enemies. The same is true of Trump and the rest of the broligarchy. When historians assess this age of American populism, Silicon Valley’s plutocrats will surely be judged its winners."}],[{"start":90.1,"text":"Trump’s blue-collar base seems to be cottoning on. Though he now says he plans to revive them, the US president has pretty much ceased to hold Maga rallies. Yet hardly a day goes by when he is not cloistered with one of his Silicon Valley allies. In addition to Musk, David Sacks, the White House AI tsar, and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, are rarely far from the Oval Office. They get what they want. Trump plans to issue an executive order banning America’s 50 states from regulating AI. There should be one national rule and nothing more, he says. Since there is no prospect of serious federal regulations, AI companies will continue to have carte blanche. "}],[{"start":138.69,"text":"The AI gold rush has sustained US growth, almost half of which this year has come from powering the LLMs. But it is not going over well with the average voter. Deep suspicion of AI is one of the few issues that unites Republican and Democratic voters. Some Americans correctly blame rising electricity bills on the impact of AI’s energy-guzzling data centres. Many fear AI will rob them of jobs and income. The more AI seeps into people’s lives, the harder it will be to blame immigrants for their woes. Distant Europe offers an even weaker scapegoat. The cost of Trump’s capture by Silicon Valley shows up in his declining approval ratings."}],[{"start":186.68,"text":"If Trump were following the market, he would be focused on the cost of living. That is what drove Democratic wins in last month’s off-year elections and could be key to next November’s midterms. Yet Trump continues to dismiss the affordability crisis as fake news. As he approaches his 80th birthday, his ability to read the public seems to be waning. A growing number of Republicans now feel able to stand up to him. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s retirement from Congress is one way of avoiding the electoral freight train that she sees coming. Her move was also a bid for the future of Maga, which will increasingly pit the base against the broligarchs."}],[{"start":230.93,"text":"The base has more people but it would still be smart to bet on the broligarchs. With fleeting Rooseveltian exceptions, America’s capitalist odyssey has been about the owners of capital finding ways of pitching labour’s have-nots against each other. The faultlines are racial and cultural. Given the power of the tech platforms to weaponise social divisions, the odds they will continue to succeed are high. The Maga base believed Trump when he promised to lower prices and deliver a new golden age. Who is to say they will not keep falling for the same trick? The effects of Trump’s tariff wars have hit their bottom lines but left Big Tech largely unscathed. "}],[{"start":276.96000000000004,"text":"Yet America’s 21st-century robber barons provide an irresistible political target. Having been Silicon Valley’s boosters since the days of Bill Clinton, Democrats are experiencing latent remorse. Instead of being a flash-in-the-pan, Zohran Mamdani, New York’s newly elected mayor, looks more like a possible trailblazer. Even centrists, such as James Carville, Clinton’s “it’s the economy, stupid” campaign manager, sound radical. “It is time for Democrats to embrace a sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and altogether unmistakable platform of pure economic rage,” Carville wrote in the New York Times. “This is our only way out of the abyss.”"}],[{"start":324.79,"text":"Europe, meanwhile, has been given every warning. In America, Trump has given the broligarchs an open field. Across the Atlantic, they see only obstacles to be cleared. "}],[{"start":346.02000000000004,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1765325940_4783.mp3"}