On a Saturday afternoon in Nuuk, Greenland, last March, a thousand people walked down toward the harbor to a small red cabin that bore the Great Seal of the United States—an eagle grasping an olive branch in one foot and thirteen arrows in the other. The air was freezing, and the town was bathed in the crisp Artic light of a late winter sun. After almost seven decades with no diplomatic presence in Greenland the U.S. had opened a tiny consulate in 2020, during the pandemic; now, less than two months into Donald Trump’s second term as President, it was the site of the largest demonstration in Greenlandic history.

Elon Musk is less an aberration than the grotesque byproduct of a capitalist order that converts inequality into virtue, exploitation into spectacle, and mistakes its own deepest failures for its greatest successes. The media frenzy surrounding the prospect of Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is not a celebration of human progress or individual initiative. It is a symptom of a deeper social and political crisis, one that exposes the power of class privilege, the corrupting forces of gangster capitalism, and a culture increasingly incapable of distinguishing wealth from worth or exploitation from human flourishing.

En el primer Mundial de fútbol femenino, celebrado en México en 1971, las jugadoras de la Albiceleste golearon 4 a 1 a las británicas

This July 4, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document that throws off the yoke of a divinely appointed ruler. But President Donald Trump is exploiting this occasion to promote a revisionist history of America as “one nation under God.”

These words, importantly, appear nowhere in the declaration. It wasn’t until 1954, during the height of the Cold War, that the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance after heavy lobbying of Congress by religious groups and clergy. Similarly, “In God We Trust” was adopted as the nation’s motto in 1956.