patrick.net

According to the analysis, “in 2018, ‘Trump’ was the fourth most used word in the paper. On average, Trump was directly mentioned two to three times in every article, and indirectly mentioned an additional once or twice. ...

The Trump obsession was so all-consuming that in order for a story to be published, it became almost mandatory for writers to include the Bad Orange Man w/Mean Tweets. The Columbia Journalism Review reported that even placing international stories in American outlets was getting harder unless they directly involved The Donald. Book publishing was much the same. In 2018, each book at the top of the New York Times best-seller list shared one commonality: Trump. ...

If there should be any question as to whether the Trump bump was merely correlation, one need only look at what happened when Trump left office. News engagement and viewership numbers plummeted. ...

It’s not that the MSM was wrong to exploit Trump for a bump in clicks and subscribers and what have you; it’s how they did it. Objectivity was replaced with shrill, self-righteous advocacy journalism.

In a post I wrote back in August, I detailed the lengths that the MSM went to push the it’s-always-Trump’s-fault narrative, often outright lying. But they also profited from an artificially induced “Trump scare.” Immediately following his election, shrewd media executives realized that the whole amusement-type carnival coverage based on the what-if fairy tale they treated Trump’s campaign as all the way up to November 8, 2016 would no longer suffice.5 Trump as existential danger allowed them to commodify the Bad Orange Man scare, a transition that amplified the Trump bump rewards even more. Thus, the politicization of the media business began, contributing to society’s surge in polarization. ...

To keep numbers up and the money coming in, and to lure converts past the pesky paywall, the MSM had to successfully use what’s referred to in the PR world as “a call to action.” They settled on rhetoric specifically meant to incite fear and angst. At every possible occasion, Trump was portrayed as a demonic figure Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy™, a madman who might well toy around with the nuclear codes for funsies on days that he got bored with Twitter, and whom no Good Person™ could possibly accept.

Notably, it wasn’t just Trump that they used for fear fodder, but the entire half of the electorate that supported him as well—the “MAGAts.” Ordinary Americans were vilified overnight, thereafter treated like some kind of mongol horde living amongst us in secret. Good People™ everywhere became paranoid: I just know Dave in accounting voted for that despicable man. I know it. I can just tell by the American flag sticker on the back of his car. That son of a bitch! ...

As polarizing agents within a new business model dependent on engagement and subscriptions, the MSM sells validation—of beliefs, not news. ...

The MSM’s new reliance on digital subscriptions means that the advertising-dictated necessity to appeal to the median American and practice objectivity is no more. The inherent liberal predisposition of the newsrooms is now unchecked by any financial imperative. This has led to the development of “post-journalism”—essentially, commentary commodified and sold as the modern-day version of news but which is funded through subscriptions, which are in turn solicited as donations. This new form of journalism sells not the news, not even the truth necessarily, but an ethos and an agenda to like-minded people; it identifies and exploits the ideological fears and values of a specific audience, then cultivates the content that audience will buy as part of a constructed worldview that can be altered to seduce.

... the best triggers are emotions, particularly fear and anger and outrage and angst, and as we all know well, the Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted are extremely sensitive to all things Bad Orange Man w/Mean Tweets.

Everything promoted by the left seems to lead to family breakdown and fewer children: atheism, militant feminism, promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, mRNA injections, and literal state-sponsored suicide as in Canada.

Edit: hooray, I've got my first ignore! I will wear it with pride.

Speech which offends no one ("Nice weather today") needs no protection.

December 23, 1913 - Federal Reserve created. Yes, I'm one of those "the central bankers are actually evil" people.

Edit: hooray, I've got my first ignore! I will wear it with pride.

Everything promoted by the left seems to lead to family breakdown and fewer children: atheism, militant feminism, promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, mRNA injections, and literal state-sponsored suicide as in Canada.

How the West Was Lost
BY DR JAMES ALEXANDER 4 MAY 2023 1:00 PM

Something is happening. We have several things we can do. The first thing is to observe it. The second is to criticise it. The third is characterise it. A fourth is to suggest causes.

By ‘it’, of course, I mean what has been clear since the emergence of COVID-19, and how this has altered our sense of the changes of the last 10 years (since the rise of political correctness 2.0), the last 50 years (since the cultural liberalisation of the 1960s), or even the last 200 years (since the religious and political liberalisation of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the British ‘National Apostasy’ associated with Catholic Emancipation, the Repeal of the Test Acts and the Reform Bill).

I see a lot of interesting suggestions, but no general statements, so offer this as an attempt to bring together as many lines of thought as possible.

The decline of the church
Until the separation of church and state in the centuries after the Reformation every state was also a church. The decline of the church and the rise of the secular state had consequences:
• the loss of an anchor or aspiration or standard ‘not of this world’
• a shift from concerning ourselves with salvation to betterment in this world
• the emergence of a need to find a new anchoring belief system for the state
• a tendency to build such a belief system out of policies claiming to better the world.
Overall, we sought justification in terms of what could be achieved in this world.

The rise of the cash nexus, trade and debt
In the 17th and 18th centuries the Dutch, English and French experimented with remarkable new institutions of banks, bonds, stock exchanges and national debt. This had consequences:
• for the first time in history ‘growth’ could be achieved without conquest
• we increasingly came to see everything in the world as marketable
• there was much more commercial activity and travel (and, ironically, conquest)
• markets enabled remarkable corporate monopolies to emerge (monopolies which attempted to tie up those markets)
• debt enabled us to postpone responsibility, since our current activities could be funded by mortgaging the future.

The rise of bureaucracy
States increasingly concerned with this world and with a more complicated commercial world to preside over, and exploit, turned to bureaucracies to manage the situation. For the first time in the West a class of bureaucrats emerged, loyal not to a lord or a locality but the state. They were to be funded out of the public purse: taxes but also debt. Debt enabled not only great standing armies to be maintained, but also standing teachers and standing doctors. This had consequences:
• a shift from the old view that government should maintain law and order to a new view that government should manage and even educate the state
• an increasing use of statistics
• the emergence of a language of bureaucratic imperatives which for the last two centuries has existed alongside the similarly novel language of commercial imperatives.
Now these two, or three, languages exist alongside each other, and have drowned out the old languages of state law and order, and church. The new three languages, which exist alongside each other, and infect each other, are the language of bureaucracy (of the state or public monopoly) the language of corporations (of wealthy lobbying private monopolies), and the language of markets (of freely active private individuals). Together these three languages provide most of our current political language.

The rise of meritocracy
Education had for centuries been dominated by the church and state. Commerce had almost no effect on education. But bureaucratic imperatives led, in the nineteenth century, to the formation of new universities, and the adjustment of historic universities, which abandoned religious tests and developed academic subjects designed (at first indirectly; later directly, if spuriously) to serve the interests of the state. This had consequences:
• the emergence of a class educated in bureaucratic and corporate languages, as well as academic languages
• the emergence of a divide, evident only clearly with the expansion of the universities in the late 20th Century, between this educated class and the uneducated classes
• the demoralisation of the poor, who, without the church, had only their relative failure in commercial and corporate activity to give them a negative identity and otherwise had to build a positive identity out of the modern bread and circuses supplied by doles and media.
Populism is the politics of those excluded in the modern class divide.

The rise of specialisation
Until a certain point in history everyone was a generalist, from the farmer to the Renaissance gentleman. But commercial imperatives – Smith’s division of labour – as well as bureaucratic and corporate imperatives encouraged everyone in an increasingly complicated society to specialise. This had consequences:
• as the educated class became less generally educated and more specially educated there was an undermining of the old secular ‘republic of letters’ which constituted our culture between 1700 and 1950
• the rise of a difficulty about making general and wise assessments of the political worth of any policy under consideration
• the increased likelihood that a policy would only seem attractive if it was sanctioned by specialists: and only if the specialists could associate their policy with some sort of crisis
• the increased likelihood that the shared opinions or values of our society would be fatuous, since they were side effects of a media circus trying to generate excitement in the new boring languages.

The rise of political correctness
The decline of the church meant that the state, especially now with its phalanx of bureaucrats, required a belief system. Commercial, corporate and bureaucratic imperatives supplied the language: but could not supply anything more powerful. State ideologies appeared in dictatorships, but also in liberal societies. This had consequences:
• the state had to find a surrogate for religious belief
• this belief had to be confected out of educated opinion and the new public languages
• the belief had to be something sufficiently contorted that it would appeal to the educated class but appear to be beneficial to the uneducated class
• the result was ‘political correctness’, or a set of received values which could be used to distinguish those willing to swear allegiance to what were, in real terms, contradictory and self-defeating policies from those who wouldn’t or couldn’t.
The world of political correctness is a world in which the elite avow a ‘public’ belief which ostentatiously contradicts their ‘private’ interests: but enables them to flourish commercially, corporately or bureaucratically nonetheless. It offers nothing to the demoralised poor and uneducated.

The rise of a corporate-commercial-bureaucratic monopoly in politics
Politicians are trained in corporations, can expect to work for them after retiring, and are lobbied by them when in office. This has consequences:
• it is very hard to use any sort of available political language against the ruling elites or, what is the same thing, the educated class
• we have a ruling culture which is extremely fragile and fickle, since solidarity and unanimity can only be achieved by following fashions of unreal and hypocritical avowals of extreme sentimental allegiance to certain policies, usually supported by specialists and justified by crisis or spurious emotional identification
• the ‘public’ culture which exists now has almost no reality: it is a confection out of whatever successes private interests have had in using the available political language to create a pseudo-ideology of rationalist solutions and policy deliverance.

The emergence of a world of fractured crisis
Political correctness is partly a moral matter, where it is dominated by a concept of equality which has existed since the French Revolution; but it has also, in the last 50 years, become a matter of technology. Whereas before technology was positive, serving progress, now (in the prevailing ideology) it is associated with crisis, for better and worse. This has consequences:
• we are told that capitalist technological society has damaged the world by draining it of its resources leading to ‘climate crisis’ and ‘overpopulation’
• this justifies policies which damage the world, including the human world, far more than the problems they are designed to solve
• Covid-19 was a vivid instance of a crisis which was magnified by corporate and bureaucratic imperatives and the media circus until it dominated every other possible political concern and became the unlikely contender for the cause of the greatest solidarity ever seen by man.

The demoralisation of the educated
The demoralisation of the educated classes by climate politics, pandemic protocols and political correctness has so far been justified by the solidarity it has achieved in the service of the interests of bureaucrats and corporations: but it has alienated the uneducated classes and is in the course of alienating the educated classes to the point where they will have no ability to make adequate sense of any problem of genuine political concern. This has consequences:
• the instincts of the educated classes will be to generate solidarity negatively by undermining the continuity of their own civilisation and the capacity of their own state to deal with genuine problems in a realistic manner
• a culture is emerging in which unity is only affirmed by admitting to historical transgressions and signalling virtue by admitting guilt
• we are coming to believe that there is nothing of the value in the past, there is only bread and circuses in the present, and there is only repayment of debt in the future
• education is increasingly becoming an education in limited specialisations, in which incentives serve specialisation and in which unity is only found in what is encouraged by bureaucratic-corporate state propaganda (since everything else is to be discouraged as misinformation, disinformation—or atavism—and censored)
• the educated classes will continue to turn to specialists for answers, to indulge in hypocritical or fatuous politics of display, and to do so in such a way that they destroy their societies while claiming to save them.
One consequence of this is that the bureaucracy, which has one task, to serve the state and hence society, cannot see what the state as a whole requires, and out of specialisation and hypocritical moralisation and frank opportunism comes to serve corporate interests.

The end of identity
In an era in which nothing can be affirmed except whatever is required by the fashions of crisis, a premium is put on identity. The problem is that indeterminacy in our politics also threatens confidence in identity. Identities become political, some more admirable than others, and as much cultural appropriation and cultural disburdening takes place, so identity becomes malleable. This has consequences:
• no positivity is found in old identities associated with church and state (religious, imperial or national)
• everything must be globalised, abstracted and emptied out: especially our own civilisation
• women have been ‘emancipated’, and this has led to the overturning of the old sexual division of labour, causing much confusion of sexual activity and sexual identity (for both men and women): with the new political correctness positively valorising sexual confusion
• the freedom to do anything has developed into the freedom to be anything as long as there is the consent of others and the consent of the self
• we have become separated from nature, cushioned by technology and increasingly alienated even from our immediate selves
• we remain unformed and immature, confections of neurosis and narcissism.
All this is the consequence of living in a state which claims, fatuously and hypocritically, to do everything for us. Fatuous and hypocritical, because it is not true. But it is harder to say that it is not true: because our language has been corrupted by bureaucratic and corporate imperatives, creating noise and chaos like the final orchestral rising glissandos of Sgt. Pepper, above which we can increasingly only hear the dissonant siren falsettos of globalism, slave-morality and crisis.

@DavidSacks
George Soros has been so uniquely destructive to law & order in American cities that there’s a name for the carnage he’s wrought: “Soros DAs.” His organization described its strategy to Politico in a 2016 article: it would change the law, not by going through legislatures, but rather by buying under-funded DA elections. His DAs would then change the law through the abuse of prosecutorial discretion.

Soros’ strategy worked because few were paying attention to hyper-local DA elections. No one expected out-of-town money to come in and seek to radically change their quality of life. Now that the results are clear, many more people are paying attention. This has caused some in the mainstream media and leftwing political groups to attempt to portray any criticism of Soros as anti-semitism. This is absurd.

Soros sought to have an outsized impact on public policy. He should not be immune from criticism. In any other context, the influence of money in politics would be a legitimate topic of conversation. Indeed, it is highly appropriate in a democracy to recognize when a special interest has subverted the public interest.

https://politico.com/story/2016/08/george-soros-criminal-justice-reform-227519
7:35 PM · May 16, 2023

Academics get frustrated that there have been no mass conversions to Marxism as they were certain would happen if universities were "liberated" from pro-Western "bias". They turn against free speech and meritocracy, and refuse to hire faculty members suspected of thoughtcrime. (Perfect for 1984!)

The bait & switch that destroyed American manufacturing and led to a massive increase in human suffering

In the early 1990s, Democrats who supported free trade claimed that those who lost out on these international agreements (American factory workers) would be retrained for higher paying jobs as symbolic analysts (computer programmers, graphic designers, global production managers).

That’s not what happened. There was a bit of retraining money but it ran out pretty quickly. For the most part, factory workers with only a high school education did not become computer programmers. Instead, they became unemployed, depressed, riddled with pain, and disabled.

As midwestern and Appalachian towns were getting destroyed by NAFTA and later, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, Democrats expanded federal spending for “healthcare”. Pharma took advantage by flooding depressed factory towns with opioids... that now kill 100,000 Americans a year. Suicide kills another 50,000.

Instead of retraining, former factory workers got slow genocide. THAT’S why these towns vote overwhelming for Trump. They remember the broken promises and Trump is the only president in the last 50 years who opposed free trade (and actually imposed tariffs on foreign products).

Trump is the only president in the last 50 years who opposed free trade

Another good graph of the death of newspaper advertising revenue at the hands of Google and Facebook:

https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/how-the-mainstream-media-commodified

the radicals (for diversity of thought) they had hired in the 1970s began being more and more powerful on tenure boards and began only selecting fellow travellers.

Yet even in red states like TX social justice warrior types abound among faculty. Either there is no caring or the politicians/regents are insanely incompetent.

As U.S. relations with China have fractured over the years, Mexico has emerged as the new manufacturing base for America.

Doing business overseas has become increasingly more expensive.

Due to the rising costs, experts believe that Mexico has now overtaken China to become the top manufacturer for American companies.

At the beginning of 2023, Mexico became the top U.S. trading partner with bilateral trade between the two countries totaling $263 billion during the first four months of this year, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

“Mexico’s emergence followed fractious U.S. relations with China, which had moved past Canada to claim the top trading spot in 2014,” said the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

“Mexico’s emergence followed fractious U.S. relations with China, which had moved past Canada to claim the top trading spot in 2014,”

In the dystopian novel 1984, the protagonist realizes that a senior English Socialist Party member can turn the telescreens off.

They have that power.

So too in the dystopian reality of 2024. Today, we’re realizing that a senior American Democrat Party member can turn the homeless encampments off.

They too have that power.

In fiction, the Party member was O’Brien. But in our reality, the Party member is Newsom. That’s Gavin Newsom: former mayor of San Francisco, current governor of California, and possible future President of the United States of America if Biden is firmly escorted off the stage.

As we’ll detail, Newsom recently pulled off an under-reported diplomatic coup by not only getting a rare in-person meeting with Xi Jinping, not only getting Chinese state-run media to sing his praises, but apparently getting Xi to come out in person to the Nov 11-17 APEC Summit in his home city of San Francisco, California.

In advance of Xi’s visit, Newsom just held up a hand and rolled up SF’s seemingly permanent homeless encampments. He spent the political capital to do this, overriding all the Democrats paid by the city to feed drugs to addicts. Of course, Newsom could have done this at any time to the homeless industrial complex, but why now? Because their local business model is temporarily less important than his global power model: the question of how to hold onto power for his Party when his country is in decline. ...

Why do we see Xi meeting with Newsom and then flying out to San Francisco for an in-person meeting at an eminently skippable summit in the middle of the chilliest period for American/Chinese relations in decades? Toyota has something called the Five Why’s, which we can use here.

Why are SF’s streets suddenly clean? Because Xi is coming.

And why is Xi coming? Because Newsom likely got him to come, as the trip wasn’t confirmed before Newsom’s meeting.

And how did Newsom do that, when so many others failed? He may have promised him something.

And how could he promise anything, given that he’s only a governor? Xi must think Newsom could be the next president.5

And what could Newsom promise? Probably detente between Democrats and Communists, as explicitly discussed in all these Chinese articles. ...

So, the Democrats need to make peace with some rival tribe to retain power. Would that mean reaching out to their domestic Republican rivals, their “fellow Americans”? Hell no! Democrats won’t hire Republicans and 95% of Democrats won’t marry them either. So they certainly won’t ally with Republicans in any except the most cynical of ways — to get them to pay the bills and die for empire.

After all, in 2023, the entire point of being a Democrat is the holy war against the Republicans — the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobes responsible for every form of oppression, the straight white males (and white-adjacents) who need to be politically dispossessed to defend democracy. This has been the constant message from media and academia for decades now, and the result is BLM/Hamas. ...

After all, US manufacturing and the US military ain’t what it used to be. China is #1 in steel, #1 in trade, #1 in high speed rail, and #1 in shipbuilding. Meanwhile, the US is struggling to produce enough weapons for both Ukraine and Israel, let alone a war with China. And it estimates that it’d lose more troops in one week fighting China than in one decade in the war on terror.

By contrast, a Democrat/Communist pact may mean China resumes buying Treasuries, ships goods to lower inflation, filters Democrat-designated “misinformation” on TikTok, and intercedes with Iran and Russia — all of which could produce domestic and foreign policy gains that help keep Democrats in power. It’d be a Chinese bailout of American Democrats, when their numbers otherwise look extremely grim. ...

If Republicans want to be part of the most powerful nation, Democrats want to be part of the most powerful state.

That is: Democrats are wired differently from Republicans. While Republicans want to be part of a tight-knit community that organically scales from baseball and hot dogs to aircraft carriers and world domination, Democrats are fine with simply becoming senior administrators of a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and even multi-national global empire.

For example, Republicans complain that the US is focusing more on the Russo-Ukrainian border than the Texas-Mexico border. But that’s because Republicans naively think of the US as a country populated by people with shared culture. Democrats by contrast think of the US as an empire, governed by enlightened bureaucrats, and recognize that the actual border of democracy is indeed in Ukraine. For a Democrat, the internal migration from Mexico to Texas is of no more moral concern than the internal migration from New Mexico to Texas. All of these are just provinces of the American Empire. And if you expand the borders of the empire, sure, you may dilute the founding nation, which would anger Republicans — but you expand the reach of the state, which would favor Democrats.

So, while Republicans would find the idea alien, it’s not that big a deal for Democrats to work out a power-sharing deal with Communists to manage a global empire. Again, that’s been part of the playbook since FDR and Ted Kennedy.

Also, if the Republican base leans Russia, the Democrat base likes China more.

Some Republicans have a soft spot for Russia, which they see as surviving communism to rebuild the Russian Orthodox Church. Democrats by contrast hate Russians, because (a) they’re mostly white Orthodox Christians, (b) they blame them for Russiagate, and (c) they refuse to submit to the American state.

These sympathies are reversed when it comes to China.7 Republicans now see the Chinese as the most threatening outgroup; while not acknowledged, China is what unenlightened generations would have called the “Yellow Peril.” But the TikTok Democrat has much more sympathy for China. After all, the CCP is non-white, non-Western, and calls themselves communists…so can they really be that bad? Or so the logic goes.

Some Republicans have a soft spot for Russia, which they see as surviving communism to rebuild the Russian Orthodox Church.

Patrick says

Trump was the one who said the weapons first. And Trump was the one who sent USMC Ospreys to fly over Kyiv back in 2017 or 18 when Pukin went probing around Avdiivka. Obama never sent a single bullet. Looks like you liked that Mooslim cuck's so-called "foreign policy" more than Trump's.

And not USMC - USAF.

‘Democrats see ordinary Americans as the great unwashed’

Ruy Teixeira on how the Democratic Party abandoned the working class.

Who would vote for the Democrats now? Certainly not working-class Americans. Once the voice of the union man, the Democratic Party is now more interested in acting as a mouthpiece for the college-educated elites. These supposed progressives care more about imposing woke ideology and Net Zero penury on ordinary people, than they do about improving their lives. And yet Democrats remain baffled as to why working-class voters are turning to Donald Trump.