Month: December 2024

Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment, by David Samuels in Tablet Magazine. Given the recent admissions by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that Joe Biden’s mental incapacity dates back a couple of years and everyone knew it, this piece is especially relevant. Excerpt:

The unspoken agreements that obscured the way this social messaging apparatus worked—including Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above—and how it came to supplant the normal relationships between public opinion and legislative process that generations of Americans had learned from their 20th-century poli-sci textbooks, made it easy to dismiss anyone who suggested that Joe Biden was visibly senile; that the American system of government, including its constitutional protections for individual liberties and its historical system of checks and balances, was going off the rails; that there was something visibly unhealthy about the merger of monopoly tech companies and national security agencies with the press that threatened the ability of Americans to speak and think freely; or that America’s large cultural systems, from education, to science and medicine, to the production of movies and books, were all visibly failing, as they fell under the control of this new apparatus. Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.

Until the fever broke. Today, Donald Trump is victorious, and Obama is the loser.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

THERE’S a neologism that ought to stick. From @CliftonDuncan on X:

The Bluegeoisie can never come back to the center.

Everyone is now fully aware of how contemptuous, how bereft of common sense, how dishonest and incompetent they are. It won’t work.

They can never build “their own Joe Rogan.” The notion is ridiculous–not just because it evinces their tendency toward top-down control, but because their cult renders intellectual, political and philosophical exploration outside of narrow ideological parameters impossible.

These people have psychotic meltdowns, blacklist peers, and cut off relatives over politics. They’re incapable of empathizing with anyone outside their congregation.

For all their fetishizing of credentials, their masturbatory exaltation of their educations, they’re violently allergic to intellectual curiosity–how on earth COULD they “build” their own Rogan, or a Lex Fridman, whose curiosity and openness are part of their brand?

How COULD they lower themselves to understand why they’re so despised?

Look at these people now, a month out from the election. They’re losers who are still lost, liars who keep lying. They’re throwing tantrums. Pointing fingers. Doubling and tripling down. The lack of reflection is astonishing.

They haven’t learned anything because they can’t learn anything. Learning would threaten their careers, reputations and relationships. Learning would require them to abandon the hubris that defines them.

They’ll never do that.

And even if they did, who would believe them, or be willing to listen, after they spent decades calling everyone racists and sexists, fascists and Nazis? Who’s going to forget such long-term abuse and slander?

We know power corrupts. The pendulum has now swung forcefully in a different direction. We need strong, sensible, rational opposition to check the excesses of those now assuming power.

Where the hell is it going to come from?

Excellent observation, and good question.

Joe Rogan recently had tech billionaire Marc Andreessen on his podcast. I strongly recommend you listen to the entire episode. Andreessen discusses at length what the government is doing to us by manipulating business and industry. Here’s a transcript of a short excerpt starting at 2:49:40.

Marc Andreessen: “There used to be this thing I called ‘The Deal’ – with a capital ‘D,’ and The Deal was, you could be – and this is what I was – you could be a tech founder, or you could start a private company, or you could create a tech product. Everybody loved you, it was great, glowing press coverage, the whole thing. You take the company public, it employs a lot of people, it creates a lot of jobs, you make a lot of money. At some point you cash out and you donate all the money to charity and everybody thinks you’re a hero. Right? And it’s just great.”

Joe Rogan: (Laughing) “Right!”

MA: “This is how it ran for a very long time. And this was The Deal and Clinton and Gore, 100% support of that, and they were 100% pro-Capitalism in this way and 100% pro-Tech. And they actually did a lot to foster this kind of enviroment. And basically what happened is the last fifteen years or so of Democrats, culminating in this administration broke every part of that deal for people in my world. Every single part of that was shattered, right? Where just like technology became presumptively evil, and if you were a business person you were presumptively a bad person, and technology had presumptively bad effects, and dot dot dot. And then they were going to regulate you and kill you and quash you, and then the kicker was, philanthropy became evil.

“And this is a real culture change in the last five years that I hope will reverse now, which is philanthropy now is a dirty word on the Left because it’s the private person choosing to give away the money as opposed to the government choosing the way to give the money.”

JR: “Oooh.”

MA: “So I’ll give you the ultimate case. Here’s where I radicalized on this topic. So you’ll recall some years back Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla, they have a ton of money in Facebook stock, they created a non-profit entity called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative which the original mission was to literally cure all disease. And this could be like $200 billion to cure all disease, right? Big deal. They committed to donate 99% of their assets to this new foundation.

“They got brutally attacked from the Left, and the attack was ‘They’re only doing it to save on taxes.’

“Now, basic mathematics (laughing) you don’t give away 99% of your money…”

JR and MA: “…to save money on taxes.”

MA: “Right? But it was a vicious attack. A very, very aggressive attack. And the fundamental reason for the attack was, ‘How dare they treat that money like its their own? How dare they decide where it goes?’ Instead tax rates for billionaires should go to 90-something percent, the government should take the money, the government should allocate it, and that would be the morally proper and correct thing to do.”

JR: “What do you think is the root of that kind of thinking?”

MA: “Utopian… This is utopian collectivism. You know, it’s…”

JR: “Socialism that works.”

MA: “Socialism, yeah. The core idea is socialism. The core idea is this sort of radical egalitarianism. ‘Everybody should be exactly the same, all outcomes should be exactly the same, everything should be completely fair at all times.'”

JR: “At some root of it has to be in envy.”

MA: “Yeah, of course. Envy, resentment. Neitzche had this great term he called ‘ressentiment.’ It’s like turbocharged resentment, and so the way he described it was ressentiment is envy, resentment and bitterness that is so intense that it causes an inversion of values.”

JR: “Ooooh.”

MA: “And the things that used to be good become bad, and the things that used to be bad become good.”

JR: “Philanthropy becomes bad.”

MA: “Philanthropy becomes bad because it should be the State operating on behalf of the people as a whole who are handing out the money, not the individual.”

JR: “I was not aware of that blowback. I would have loved to read some of those comments. (Laughing) I would like to go to their page and see what else the commented on.”

MA: “I’ll give you another example. Here’s another radicalizing moment. So my friend Sheryl Sandberg who I worked with very closely for a long time at Facebook, and by the way, Democrat, Liberal, by the way endorsed Kamala, like very much not on the same page as me on these things – she actually worked in the Clinton administration, dyed in the wool Democrat – she wrote this book called ‘Lean In’ about twelve years ago. It’s this sort of Feminist Manifesto. And the thesis of ‘Lean In’ was that women in their lives and careers could ‘lean in’ – she said that what she observed in a lot of meetings was that men were leaning in to the table and sitting at the front while women were like leaning back and waiting to be called on. She said that women should lean in. It became a metaphor for her for women should like lean in on their careers, they should aggressively advocate for themselves to get raises and promotions…”

JR: “Like men do.”

MA: “Like men do. They should basically, women should basically become more aggressive in the workplace and then, therefore, perform better. It was a manifesto to women saying ‘Be more confident, be more assertive, be more aggressive, be more successful.’

“I read the draft of the book when she was writing it and I said ‘You realize you’ve written a right-wing manifesto?’ She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, because she’s a life-long Lefty, and she says ‘What do you mean?’ I’m like, you, this book is a statement that women have agency. This book is a statement that the things that women choose to do will lead to better results. But that’s what people believe on the Right. On the Left the people believe that women are only, always and ever victims, and if a woman doesn’t succeed in a career it’s because she’s being discriminated against. So I predicted that when this book comes out Right-wingers are going to think it’s great, and you’re going to get a t-, like the Left is going to come at you, ’cause you’re violating the fundamental principle of the Left which is ‘Anybody who does less well is a victim.’

“In that case that’s exactly what happened. By the way, the reviews were all by women, and they tore into her. In every major publication they completely ripped her. They were like ‘How dare this rich, entitled woman be telling us, telling women that they’re not victims and that they have all this agency. This is denial of sexism, denial of oppression.”

Watch the whole interview.