I think you have to look at where the funding comes from for Republican and conservative causes. Don't just look at candidate funding, even election advertising has a lot of funding that isn't straight to the candidate.

Although there might be no shortage of self-employed Republicans, they don't really call the shots for the party. It's the very deep pockets who do.

First you have to answer WHY they didn't spread across the galaxy. Second, why is there only one in the galaxy, and not many millions?

Finally, Fermi's Paradox doesn't care if they are long gone or not. Any evidence of existence of other life-forms resolves the question, and largely eliminates the paradox.

The easiest way to eliminate this threat is to lock down hardware sampling rates such that ultrasonic frequencies cannot be reliably reproduced

That's very short-sighted. The ultrasonics are only a matter of making the communications stealthier. Systems unable to produce ultrasonics could still communicate with each other, using audible ranges.

Doing so, undetected, just requires a little intelligence. It could wait until late at night, when all the systems have been idle for some time. The malware could even set a wake-up time in the BIOS to ensure they all start up some time after everyone has left, and communicate.

Or, you could modulate the data inside some sounds that wouldn't be out-of-place in an office. For computers, the obvious option is to play the sound of fan noises, with a little data modulated in with the audio.

For this to work, the computers must already be 'owned',

Computer viruses spread long before there was networking... One infected file on a CD, DVD, USB Flash drive, etc. Or it could be even more covert, like a USB mouse/keyboard modified with data storage.

the fact the computers can communicate 20 meters with another infected machine is the least of the worries if you ask me.

It's still significant. It may offer the only method of getting information in/out of an otherwise isolated network.

While fully autonomous malware can do some serious damage, it doesn't approach the level of damage possible by leaking sensitive information out to the world, or using some human intelligence to guide some very finely-grained data manipulation / corruption.

I wouldn't call it dogmatic at all.

Of course not... because you happen to believe it. You have absolutely no evidence for it, but it offers an easy explanation for a question that undermines many other dogmatic views you hold.

A new abiogenesis event would not produce a life-form as adapted to competing for resources as the existing biosphere.

OR it would produce a life-form that's better adapted, due to taking a completely different path.

And "better adapted" only really matters if you're assuming existing life-forms quickly consume all available resources, leaving none. That is not accurate.

It would almost certainly get snuffed out because of that.

Pure dogma, even if you continue to refuse to recognize it as such.

I'm not talking about similar features developing. That's irrelevant. I'm talking about the MAJOR steps in evolution.

A second abiogenesis would be at the top of the list, or another advanced technological animal any time in the millions of years of life on Earth before humans. Less significant (but not evidenced in the DNA or fossil evidence) would be multiple independent species making the transition from sea to land, multiple independent non-mammals developing into different branches of mammals. etc., etc. Instead, all the evidence indicates these major events happened only once, and not multiple times, independently.

You seem very confused about Fermi's Paradox. Perhaps you should actually read it. It has nothing to do with civilizations around our age.

There are an incredible number of worlds out there, which are several billions of years older than ours. If other civilizations haven't arisen until recently, an explanation for WHY is badly needed.

Well, you're missing an important dynamic here, which is groupthink.

When people decide whether something is true or false, right or wrong, the first thing they do is look around to see what other people think. And this is actually not a bad heuristic. Sometimes when you're in jail for civil disobedience it's because you are, in Thoreau's words, "a man more right than his neighbnors". But most of the time it's because you're a mule-headed crackpot. You should at least consider the possibility that if everyone else disagrees with you, it may be because you're wrong. But most people go further. They play it safe by only having opinions they see lots of other people having.

So shills actually do something far more significant than trick politicians and civil servants into believing there are armies of just plain folks out there who care so much about the natural rights of cable companies that they'll donate impressive amounts of time and money out sheer public spiritedness. Shills alter the public perception of what a normal opinion sounds like.

This isn't Civics 101. This is how politics works in the real world. It's a little bit like stage hypnosis. When diplomats are surprised or outraged in that particularly insincere way they have, everybody knows it's phony. But somehow they go along with it because -- well nobody seems to know why. Same when a politician cites the support of some group that everyone knows is paid to express support. People know it's fake, but they react as if it were real

I think this gets to yet another function of shills. I think they function as a signaler of fitness in the Social Darwinism game. It's a bit like buying an ad during the Superbowl; it doesn't really say anything about how your beer tastes. It signals that you're a successful, Serious Player in the beer game. Having flocks of flying PR monkeys at your beck and call doesn't mean that those monkeys spout anything but gibberish. It means you've got the resources to be a Serious Player; a kingmaker perhaps, and you've put skin in the game. And so we go along with the gibberish, because it's more important to be on the winning side than the right one.

^^^^ Now they have. Every level meta you go pushes the rock bottom that much lower...

1. Sounds a lot like "They choose not to interact with us".
2 & 3 Are the same as "Intelligent civilizations are too far apart in space or time", and also assumes "It is too expensive to spread physically throughout the galaxy" or similar.
4. Just why they "lose interest" could be any number of those theories.

And your alternates, 1, 2 &3 are all just the old "Aliens aren't monitoring Earth because Earth is not superhabitable", and again must assume "It is too expensive to spread physically throughout the galaxy" to explain why none of them ever came out here after possibly many billions of years of existence.

Birth rates rise and fall with many factors, attributing it all to education is ridiculous.

Fermi's Paradox does indeed predate effective birth control, so that's something. And yet, humans in areas with low birth rates, still have a deep desire to explore and colonize other worlds. So that factor does not seem to negate the possibility and perhaps likelihood of the basic assumption.

a full blown spread is highly unlikely or would take thousands upon thousands of years

No, not thousands... "tens of millions of years" per Fermi.

But other civilizations before us would have had those many, many millions of years, many times over, before we showed-up.

very few of us go where it's cold, or where there's lots of insects, etc - who knows what the tolerances of an alien species might be?

Humans are advanced enough to undertake minor teraforming. A few generations, and we should have the process down pat. It seems strange to think of any space-faring civilization not developing similar capabilities just about immediately.

However, those other lifeforms have to compete for the same resources as better adapted ones (per natural selection).

It's dogmatic to assume some new life-forms would be out-competed by the existing ones. It's certainly one possibility, but completely unproven. It's just as possible they'd be orthogonal to existing biology, having highly different requirements, or developing in an area with ample resources. We wouldn't have fossil fuels if natural selection was perfect at developing life-forms that would consume all available biological resources.

Stars had lived their entire lives before ours even formed.

Which is utterly irrelevant to GP's point that we don't have the foggiest idea what the odds are of life arising. Our single, solitary sample isn't statistically significant.

There are several steps from amino acids to space-faring civilizations, and even active attempts by our best scientists haven't been able to get past step 1 in a controlled lab.

And in our one sample of life on Earth, we don't have any evidence in all of Earths history, of any of the steps happening TWICE, independently. Instead, it's all a nice, neat, clean, singular and unbroken, tree.

I don't know how likely it is, and NEITHER DO YOU. We have no idea what values belong in that part of the Drake Equation, and they could each/all conceivably be astronomically large.