The Electoral College Has Confirmed 47!

Varoufakis on DiEM25...

L&R Populists on the Same Stage!

Whither comes the sorting of Populist from Elite Permission Structures?  Or Will the Educated Elites Always Dominate the Populist Permission Structure?  I suspect that the L/R Elite-Populism dichotomy merely reflects a natural L/R elite struggle for social status and control (described below) that will always be present as a result of Elite Overproduction, much as elites on both sides of the L/R Elite divide will always gravitate towards embracing "Luxury Values" whilst the Populist embrace the more 'common values' of "Pragmatism" sprinkled with a similar resentment?

Excerpt from Oliver Traldi's, "Who the Woke Are" on the book "We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite", by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton, 432 pp., $35)

Al-Gharbi gives a grand theory of awokenings—accounting for not only the recent Great Awokening but also social changes in the leadup to the Civil War, in the 1920s, and in the 1970s—and finds multiple threads of causation common to them.

One such thread is elite overproduction. When too many would-be elites are produced, they don’t get the standing they think they deserve, and sometimes seek to be revolutionaries instead (the '68 Student Revolt sound familiar?) In cases where elite overproduction occurs simultaneously with more widespread social unrest, would-be elites can co-opt and redirect political movements toward their own goals—which, according to al-Gharbi, is often correlated with plateaus when it comes to those movements’ successes on their own terms. The biggest victories of these redirected revolutions are often “social justice sinecures,” or carved-out positions for the elites among supposedly marginalized groups.

According to al-Gharbi, elite overproduction leads to resentment and reactive calls for revolution: “Frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants sought to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” But this isn’t completely clear. If wokeness is a legitimating ideology of a successful and powerful elite class, how can it also be a kind of formation aimed against that class by those who failed to join it? Some disentangling of this sort of tension could have helped highlight the book’s overall thesis amid the forest of fascinating detail.

In the recent Great Awokening, al-Gharbi notes with his characteristic eye, the new group of over-credentialed underachievers mostly consisted of women, and a significant majority of the jobs in the administrative bloat that was created in the wake of woke upheaval—the HR and DEI bureaucracies—went to women. Later on, he writes: “The feminization of the symbolic professions is significant in light of the robust and ever-expanding lines of research in moral and social psychology demonstrating that . . . men and women tend to engage in very different forms of conflict, competition, and status seeking.” This feminization is linked, for al-Gharbi, to the rise of a “victimhood culture” oriented in part around the concept of “trauma.” The psychology of victimhood fits the broader sense of superiority that al-Gharbi attributes to the woke symbolic capitalists: “Research has found that people who understand themselves as victims often demonstrate less concern for the hardships of others; they feel more entitled to selfish behavior; they grow more vicious against rivals . . . [T]hey also gain a sense of moral superiority relative to everyone else.”

Further, the risk-aversion and fear of ostracism that characterizes the psychology of most symbolic capitalists leads to reduced innovation in spheres as diverse as science, business, and pop culture. This section is more speculative than most, but I was happy to see al-Gharbi address the ubiquity of remakes, adaptations, and spinoffs in contemporary cultural output—just what one would expect if culture is dominated by those who have spent their lives getting better and better at following the rules. Progressive culture seems to resemble the political equivalent of bankers showing off their near-identical business cards to one another in American Psycho. Thus We Have Never Been Woke also improves on earlier accounts of wokeness by linking it to other contemporary phenomena that are obviously related but hard to associate as a matter of pure political belief.

Ron Paul on USIC Nostradumbasses

Cui Bono?

Trump and Musk and China G2, Oh My!

Spreading Holiday Cheer!

The most offensive Christmas song ever!

Tom MacDonald - Let It Snow (Screw The Woke)

SHARE THIS LIKE CRAZY! pic.twitter.com/X8y0bbdvM3

— Tom MacDonald (@IAMTOMMACDONALD) December 21, 2024

What's YOUR Budget CR Permission Structure?

🚨CHAMATH: "People are underestimating what happened here (The Bill). This was a multi hundred billion dollar grift that was stopped on a dime over 12 hours of tweets. You would have never thought this was possible. To put a dagger in something that big that had so much broad… pic.twitter.com/xz7ULHk1P7

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) December 21, 2024

Clarice Feldman, "Trump and Musk Demolish the Obama Hallucinatory Permission Structure"

The big story this week is how X (formerly Twitter) worked to dramatically change the American legislative process. As Chamath Palihapitiya said, "People are underestimating what happened here [The Continuing Resolution]. This was a multi-hundred billion dollar grift that was stopped on a dime over 12 hours of tweets. You would have never thought this was possible. To put a dagger in something that big that had so much broad support just a few hours earlier is so consequential in how the United States can run going forward."

But if you grasp the background for this feat -- the story of how Axelrod and Obama, a struggling and complacent media, puppet NGOs, and a corrupt bureaucracy for years created a false preference cascade that fed absurd crazes like “defund the police,” ”structural racism,” “white privilege,” ”assigned gender,” ”genocide in Gaza” -- you can better understand the fast collapse. Obama’s was an autocratic regime that, using David Axelrod’s once benign psychological creation, sold large swaths of the public counterfactual, illogical nonsense like ObamaCare, the Iran deal, and Russiagate and used COVID hysteria to transfer billions of dollars from the rest of us to the top 1% and corrupt our electoral system, but it was utterly without foundation: In sum, sanity finally overcame politically manipulated hallucinatory thinking.

BACKGROUND STORY

To fully understand how the Continuing Resolution was defunded, how Trump won, and how Benjamin Netanyahu was able to properly defend Israel free of Obama’s delusionary views of reshaping the Middle East, read this lengthy, well-researched and argued essay by David Samuels.

I urge you to read it all. I have not space to do it justice, but I’ll try to summarize it. In 2000 the media landscape switched to online communications as 20th-century media collapsed. Early internet communications were on small platforms, often attracting the like-minded, but by 2000, “monopoly social media platforms” took off, and Obama used them to sell his policies. Captured NGOs, think tanks, and puppet outfits like ADL “credentialed each other on social media,” creating feedback loops and echo chambers. In other words, young aides in the White House were “creating ‘public opinion’ from their iPhones and laptops.” When Hillary lost to Trump, Obama stayed on as titular head of his party, controlling digital platforms, and he ramped this up when Trump lost in 2020 -- using it to bury the Hunter laptop story, promoting the fake Russia story generated by 51 former government officials, restricting and banning factual reports which challenged these narratives. Even worse, “the enforcement arms of the federal bureaucracy” were engaged and worked with the digital media to censor dissenting views on such things as COVID, DEI, police conduct, and the effects of transition treatments on youth. Nothing in these fads was “accidental, mystical, or organic.” “Formerly fringe positions” were promoted as something “all ‘decent people’ think.” The digital monopolies used algorithms to speed the momentum of these manufactured opinions. Thus, for example, we were led to dismiss suggestions that the obviously senile Biden was not. Eventually, the lack of logic and obvious deleterious results of these policies, which had been based on fake consensus, got to people, and “the fever broke.” It also broke Obama, who is visibly haggard and no longer of consequence. “The entire structure he had erected over more than a decade, and which was to have been his legacy… has collapsed entirely.”

Twitter was a significant part of Obama’s “permission structure machinery,” and Elon Musk’s purchase of it was recognized as dangerous to this scheme. Indeed, this explains the persistent lawfare against Musk and the party’s efforts to cut X’s advertising revenues until he followed other platforms like Facebook and Instagram and censored dissent.

Where this analysis went wrong is the same place that the Obama team’s analysis of Trump went wrong: The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. Bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity by controlling the machinery of social approval may require both money and technique, but it is not art or thought. In fact, it is something like the opposite of thought. Lost in the hypercharged mirror world that they had created, they decided that having made themselves cool also made them right, and that evidence to the contrary could be safely dismissed as a “right-wing talking point.” Obama’s operatives shared the same character flaw as their master, a kind of brittle, Ivy League know-it-all-ness that demanded that they always be the smartest person in the room. Musk, meanwhile, was entirely and sincerely his own man -- a privilege that came in part from being the richest man in America, and in part from the nature of his businesses, which the Obama cadres appear to have misunderstood. Musk may have paid twice as much as the next-highest bidder for Twitter, if such a bidder actually ever existed. Except, it was also true that, as a business proposition, Twitter was worth more to Elon Musk than it was to anyone else with the money to pay for it. That’s because the value that Musk creates in his companies is a unique blend of high imagination and physical products which function as memes. [snip] It is clear by now that the Obama party were the suckers -- not Musk. In fact, the party’s belated war on Twitter’s new owner only served to convince other Silicon Valley oligarchs that whatever reputational risks they might incur by backing Donald Trump would be outweighed by the direct risks that party weaponization of federal regulatory structures, which gave it effective control of markets and banks, would pose to their businesses. [snip] With Musk’s X now open to all comers, the party’s censorship apparatus was effectively dead. A new counter-permission structure machine was now erected, licensing all kinds of views, some of which were novel and welcome, and others of which were noxious. Which is how opinion in a free society is supposed to operate.

DEMOCRATS LOSE THE BATTLE OF THE CONTINUING RESOLUTION

Just as Musk’s X platform created an open vehicle for Trump and his supporters, which certainly contributed to his victory, the platform undeniably played a historic and significant role in defeating a bloated Continuing Resolution by utilizing the forum to make it possible for everyone to read what was in it before the vote was taken. For years, Congress has avoided accountability for overspending by waiting until almost the end of the year, crafting a grift-heavy bill and demanding that it be immediately passed before the year-end recess under threat of a government shutdown (a shutdown sounds scarier than it actually is, in any event). Tucked into this monster is usually one or two more palatable appropriations, which the lackey media will highlight to persuade what readers they still have that the bill must be passed. This time, it was an appropriation for research into pediatric cancer. Unfortunately for the fools who bought this sob story, the House had passed a bill appropriating funds for this purpose nine months earlier, which Senator Chuck Schumer had left languish so that there could be a diamond in this manure heap to demagogue about. (Hours after the third attempt to craft a resolution that both houses would pass succeeded, the Senate finally got around to passing the House bill for this research.) When the first bill was introduced days before it was to be voted on, it was over 1500 pages long, another legislative trick, because no one could digest it in time. But Musk created an artificial intelligence program, Grok, that could and did, and the analysis was posted on X so everyone could see a summary of what was in the bill. Voters saw that Congress would fund a 35% raise for themselves, would continue the hated COVID biometric regime, would fund more government censorship, and would grant immunity from prosecution for the corrupt J6 committee, among other things. Outraged voters swamped congressional lines, and Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for it. The bill failed, as did a second one. A third bill,l now pared down to less than a tenth of the original, passed the House, then the Senate on Saturday morning, and Biden signed it into law.

Tomorrow, Senator Rand Paul is scheduled to release his Festivus Report detailing hundreds of billions of dollars in government waste -- things like a million dollars spent to study the effects of cocaine on Japanese quail. Look for it to be republished in full on X.

If “con” is the opposite of “pro,” what is the opposite of “Congress?”

Our Brave New Technofeudal World

Rajan Laad, "The Democrat Trump-Musk Feud Strategy"

It has been a triumphant phase for the MAGA movement. President Trump won a landslide electoral victory last month. The bogus cases against him, which were part of the establishment's attempts to outlaw political opposition, appear to be winding down. Trump had a triumphant return to the global stage during the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He effectively won a case against vicious slander by ABC News and George Stephanopoulos which compelled the outlet to initiate a settlement payment of $15 million. Gorgeous George himself had to pony up $1 million. Trump won Time magazine's Person of the Year, which meant a lot to him and his supporters. Trump secured a $100 billion investment from the Japan-based SoftBank Group Corp which will create 100,000 U.S. jobs, doubtlessly encouraging other investors.

Hamas has expressed intentions to end the conflict with Israel. Canada announced new border security rules to avoid a 25% tariff after Trump threatened them. Trump was in command during his recent presser which sent a signal globally that the U.S. is back.

Elon Musk was an important ally in Trump's massive victory last month. Musk joined the Trump campaign after being impressed by Trump's exemplary bravery and defiance following the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. Musk made X a free-speech platform, preventing the Democrats from manipulating the narrative on social media as they did in 2020. This time the public had access to all information and the lies were with 'community noted.'

Trump announced that Musk and Ramaswamy will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a watchdog focused on cutting wasteful government spending and reducing bureaucratic impediments.

To sum it up, President Trump has had a triumphant start even before being sworn in. He seems on track to be delivering key campaign promises. DOGE is already on the job, both Musk and Ramaswamy have been vocal about the scandalous recent 1500-page spending bill.

The D.C. swamp could render DOGE irrelevant by preemptively mending its ways, but will not, because its existence is based on corruption and government excesses.

The swamp dwellers are now in a quandary. They know that they cannot misuse agencies to target Trump as they did before. Their media proxies aren't going to engage in blatant lies, after the ABC settlement. They desperately need to derail this Trump train.

So what do they do?

They resort to petty ploys. Following Trump's victory there were memes by some Democrat proxies that Musk was the new first lady. In time they attempted to suggest Musk was the equivalent of Vice President and that Vance was sidelined.

But neither of these had any impact.

Now they are pushing another hoax -- that Musk is the President and Trump is the Vice President. This is similar to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax where they attempted to credit Putin for Trump's amazing victory in 2016 and suggested that Putin was in charge. This time around, Putin has been replaced with Musk.

The usual hoaxers Kinzinger, Sanders, the Lincoln Project, Democrat representatives, etc. are pushing this falsehood.

Democrats allies are posting memes depicting Trump as subservient to Musk. USA Today, the WaPo, MSNBC, and CNN are also pushing this hoax.

This divide-and-rule tactic has been used throughout history to overcome seemingly invincible enemies. It may appear petty but it can be effective and it doesn't cost anything. All one has to do is sow seeds of division.

This is depicted in Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Yojimbo and its remake A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood. They are hoping that the constant bombardment of this narrative will enrage Trump. They are also hoping it will color his judgment about Musk, if he finds a comment or a Tweet that appears to be a difference of opinion, Trump will interpret it as an act of defiance. They are also hoping that Musk will succumb to the flattery and think of himself as a puppet master and make a display of it on X.

The main goal is to cause a massive feud which will lead to Musk's sacking and the dismantling of DOGE. Many Democrat proxies are openly declaring this on X. They are hoping that the rift will make Musk one of Trump's worst adversaries and that they will engage in a vicious war of words on social media.

In subsequent days, expect mainstream news outlets to use unnamed sources to declare a battle royale between Musk and Trump.

We will learn of 'sources' claiming that Musk ridiculed Trump among friends. 'Sources' will claim Trump is furious with the President Musk hoax and told allies he will 'kick Musk the f---k out of Mar-a-Lago and banish his a—forever.' In the coming weeks, months, and years both Musk and Trump have to be careful.

Musk must understand that Trump is the founder and will always be the leader of the MAGA movement. He was a great support and an ally. But it was Trump who won.

During the early 80s, rock superstar Sting's manager Miles Copeland revealed that his primary job was to keep the egos of his Police bandmates in check. He said bandmates would complain they had better ideas than Sting and he had to remind them that if Sting dropped out, the concert would be canceled. But if any bandmate quit, he would be replaced and nobody would notice.

Musk is a guitarist in the MAGA band, but Trump is the lead. Musk is a valuable bandmate, as is Lara Trump, Dan Scavino, Susie Wiles, Dana White, Vivek Ramaswamy, etc.

While exercising his opinions Musk must be clear that he reports to Trump in DOGE. Musk must not be seen to defy Trump in any way. Musk is accustomed to being the boss and doing as he pleases, and he will have to exercise restraint given this new role.

To be clear, Musk hasn't shown any disloyalty or defiance toward President Trump. There is also no indication that Musk is behind this hoax. Musk even praised Trump in a recent tweet.

Trump too must exercise caution while reacting to this hoax. During future pressers, he will likely be bombarded with questions about 'President Musk.' It would be a good idea to ridicule this premise without an answer while expressing support for Musk.

Trump, Musk, and the rest must remember that they thoroughly vanquished the Democrats last month.

The Democrats have nothing to offer but lies, petty ploys, and hoaxes.

Hopefully, everyone will remember a lesson that history frequently teaches us -- to be victorious, total unity is essential.