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?”