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If by American democracy we mean a pluralistic, multiracial society of political and social equals, then American democracy as we know it began with the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 60 years ago today.

“There is no middle ground in this question,” Ross continued. “We must concede the right of suffrage to everyone who stands as our equal in the scale of creation, or we must deny it to all. It is universal suffrage or autocracy.”

The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing. The most glaring example is End Citizens United. In 2015, just one year after founding their consulting firm, Mothership principals Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes also co-founded this PAC. It quickly became one of their largest and most reliable clients, a perfect circle of revenue generation that blurs the line between vendor and client.

This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.

What we are left with is something characteristically Trumpian: memetic alligators eating memetic undesirables, leading to a fascist policy where real humans will be placed into a concentration camp in sight of real alligators.

Netscape’s task was relatively easy. People simply had to download it—on computers built by someone else, running an operating system developed by someone else, connecting to a network built by many others.

After reaping the benefits of that public infrastructure and investment, Andreessen went to the private sector, where he developed Netscape Navigator, eventually selling his company to AOL for billions of dollars.

The tech oligarchs want government cash but not obligations, wealth without duty or any of the basic burdens of citizenship. The rewards of success without the risks of failure, and indeed, they want to be rewarded even when they fail.

“ProPublica continues to degrade their already terrible reputation by suggesting we should turn a blind eye to criminal illegal aliens present in the United States for the sake of trying to collect tax payments from them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement after receiving questions about the blueprint from ProPublica.

“For years, the IRS has told immigrants that it only cares that they pay their taxes,” said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which is seeking to block the data-sharing agreement in federal court. “By agreeing to share taxpayer data with ICE on a mass basis, the IRS has gone back on its word.”

The weather is mighty and monstrous and incapable of clemency. The Trump administration may be the same. In the light of day, all we are left with is the misery of tragedy, the shocking reminder that we all survive only upon the whims of the Earth and men, and the dreadful fear that mercy is in shorter supply every day.