Thursday, September 5, 2024

Who's Minding the Store Now?

Excerpt from the above video:
CW- When we spoke at the start of the year I said it was way too close to November to switch anybody out. Turns out that I was wrong.

EW- Beginner's luck.

CW- You said, "What are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November, including death, so he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that I don't think you know whether he's even going to make it to November." Debilitating event could have been a debilitating public event.

EW- I purposefully left it vague and I didn't say the other part of it, which I now feel comfortable saying which is, I don't whether Donald Trump will be allowed to become president.

CW- What do you mean by that?

EW- I think that there's an remarkable story, and we're in a a funny game which is: Are we allowed to say what that story is? Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it, is to bring it into view. I think we don't understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don't understand why it's in the shadows. We don't understand why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. Ao let's just set the stage given that that was in February. There is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the rules-based international order. It's an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings, about how the most important structures that keep the world free of war, and keep markets open. And there has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes, or implicitly. It says that the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a Faceoff, are both acceptable to that world order. So what you're trying to do from the point of view, let's take it from the point of view of let's say the State Department, the Intelligence Community, the Defense Department and major corporations that are, have to do with, international issues from arms trade to oh, I don't know, food, they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn't agree with them. And the mood of the country was, why do we pay taxes into these structures? Why are we hamstrung? Why aren't we a free people?

So what the two parties would do is that they would run primaries. You have populist candidates, and you'd pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place, and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order, that is that they aren't going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you, we called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what's called magician's choice, where the choice is not actually you know, "pick a card any card", but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows. In that situation you have magician's choice in the primaries, and then you'd have the duopoly field two candidates, either of which was acceptable, and you could actually afford to hold an election, and the populace would vote. And that way, the international order wasn't put at risk every four years, because you can't have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebecites.

So under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, and then the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military, nor position in government, in the history of the Republic to enter the Oval Office, Donald Trump, broke through the primary structure. So then, there was a full court press, okay? We only have one candidate that's acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure; that he's a loser, he's a wild man, he's an idiot, and he's under control of the Russians. And then he was going to be you a 20:1 Underdog. And then he wins. And there was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson, you cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem. So, I don't have a particular dog in this fight. I for one believe in democracy. I also believe in international agreements. And it is the job of the State Department, the Intelligence Community, and the Defense Department to bring this problem in front of the American people and say, "We have a problem, you don't know everything that's going on, and if you start voting in populist candidates, you're going to end up knocking out loadbearing walls that you don't understand."

But, Trump was in office for four years. Did he turn the entire table upside down? He risked doing that same. All you remember that there was this uncomfortable uh accomodation given to the Central Intelligence Agency at the beginning of his actual term. There was a question about, was he going to question the, I have a very different point of view than most of my friends who are also, you know, at least nominally Democrats, which is: it was a very immoral thing that was done to him. He was asked the question, "Will you pre-commit that you will accept the results of an election? Now, if you were going to rig an election, you would ask somebody that to begin with, and that's part of the game. And he says, "Well you know, we'll see."

So you have this very strange thing going on where democracy is the greatest threat to democracy. Now how can that be, it's two different concepts of democracy? One concept of democracy is the will of the people, you hold plebecites, and even if you do it with an electoral college or political parties, the idea is that the people are, you know, by and of and for the people. The other idea of democracy is that democracy is about institutions that sprang from democracy Once Upon a Time, and that those institutions have to be kept strong. Those are two completely different concepts that are overloaded to the same word. Under that circumstance we have a paradox which is, how do we keep the electorate from overturning the, you know, the type A democracy from overturning the type B democracy? And that's the unsolved problem that they will not bring in front of the people. So what you have is a situation in which, I believe, that there are many people in Washington DC who think that Donald Trump cannot become president because he can now go For Broke. He's also not going to try to run for reelection. He's relatively unconstrained. He's wealthy. He's learned how to play a lot of these games, and maybe got a little bit of an axe to grind as well after the last six years. No kidding, and he's a wild card you know?

There are three people who are doing amazing versions of the drunken body boxing game, Kanye, who's probably the first one to really fail, Elon, and Donald Trump. And all three of them tried to do something where you couldn't pin them down, you couldn't figure out like, what they were going to do next. And that's what the order is, keeps trying to do. Like, "Will you commit to this? Will you say this? Will you mouth these words"? And none of these people would play the game. And I find this all; you ever see Emanuel Augustus or this boxer who actually, I think Floyd Mayweather said was his his toughest opponent because he just he wouldn't fight in the style that anyone could recognize? Probably most unpredictable and the most entertaining boxer I've ever seen in my life. I mean, just check out any highlight reel and you won't even believe this is real, it doesn't seem possible. So that's what Donald Trump is. He's a guy who's got formulas that confuse people, like Sam Harris. You know, Sam and I have been debating this for years. I think that Trump is an incredibly intelligent man and that there's incredible method in his tweets of old. You can just, you could put them into a data set, and you say that there are five or six different types of tweets, and that the Left falls for every one of them every time.

So in the situation you have a question, how is it that Donald Trump and RFK Jr cannot possibly reach the Oval Office, and we have to have a candidate who is pre-subscribed to perpetuating these institutions, these agreements, and these orders. And there's only one out of the three who has that character. And that person did not win a primary, right? Now, we have no idea who's running the United States of America. I just came here in at Tesla, and I did not steer once, and I would say America is in full self-driving mode, and we don't know what the AI is that's running the Oval Office. And that's really bizarre given that we have something like six minutes to make a decision about nuke launches. We have no idea what the United States government in the Executive branch actually is, but it can't be Joe Biden.

Every time, it seems, that an election has happened over the last decade or so, it's always been "This one is different. This is the most important. This is the most important." Is there something different about the one that we're about to go into? How should we think about this election, as World War II unraveling, the order that has produced the illusion of Peace for this length of time? Imagine that you were, let's say, in the 2000s, that you had this thing called the Great Moderation. There was a story that we had finally banished volatility from the markets. None of that was true. What you were doing was, you were going farther and farther into a regime without understanding that, sooner or later, the D'Jenga tower has to collapse, the order that was put in place at the end of World War II. None of its' architects are still alive, very few pieces of information were passed down about what it actually is or how it functions because it's secret, and I think what you can say is, that we are now living on the fumes built from that Victory that is, what is, unraveling. You're about to head towards a multi-polar world where the game theory in an idiotic game of two players doesn't look remotely like the game theory in a five or 10 player game.

So Kamala is essentially the youngest Boomer possible, and she's tied to the last silent generation president we will ever have. Which was a bizarre thing to begin with, and she's pre-committed to trying to continue that order in the guise of a alternatively woke Wall Street friendly, Indian black folksy, I don't even know what she is. To quote the great Chris Williamson, she's a meme of a meme of meme, that was from our last talk. And I would say this is probably the most insane election we've ever seen by a comfortable margin. I would say that there's no one in second place. I can't think of another election that is even close to this bizarre, including the attempted assassination on Donald Trump. Yeah, there's so many things all coalescing at the same time, from MSNBC’s Editing of Joe Rogan to Support Kamala, what's happening with the media, to AI, to discontent, to fake news and cheap fakes, and construed, constructed did.

Sorry, fake news was a fake story, if you look at the Google Trends, fake news was a tiny story during the 2016 cycle that blew up immediately afterwards. It was the placeholder, as the Intelligence Community, or the blob, figured out what it was going to do next to try to take control of the international order. You have to realize that that's the first real surprise in presidential history, where they lost control of the process....12:50