patrick.net

@jeffreyatucker
Like many others, including J.D. Vance, I’m very much on record in warning about Donald Trump from 2015 onward, including articles and an entire book (which is still valuable) on the rightest version of collectivism.

As we approach election day, my opinions have undergone a shift, particular in the last three years watching as Biden/Harris marshaled a massive ruling class propaganda and compulsion machine to push everything I oppose the most: state consolidation, corporatism, censorship, inflationism, central planning, and compulsory injections of experimental medical products.

It all seems surreal to me. I think back to what worried me the most about Trump: demagogic nationalism, nativistic protectionism, executive centralization, and the leadership cult. Features of his last term confirmed my worst fears, particularly his green lighting of lockdowns for Covid and disregard for religious and personal freedom in the period. He also has a terrible record on spending, mitigated in part by solid efforts toward deregulation and higher quality picks on the bench.

To my amazement, when Trump realized he was wrong on Covid controls and began to argue for opening up again, he was denounced by the whole of the political opposition! Then once he was out of office, everything became vastly worse, including mask mandates, forced closures, and finally the unconscionable forced shots that have no only killed and wounded many but demoralized and subjugated the population in ways that can only be compared with wartime conscription.

As regards Trump himself, what we’ve seen emerge since then is a changed man in many ways, or so it seems. He has new appreciation for the wicked power of the deep state and the toxicity of lawfare of which he is a main victim. The kinds of people he has gathered around him, including RFKJr and Elon, is also encouraging.

At the same time, I’ve changed too on many topics on which I thought I had settled opinions.

On nationalism, I had never imagined the conditions in which that impulse would favor rather than oppose liberty, and amount to a form of decentralization from what is called globalism. The Covid response was largely dictated (from Feb 26, 2020) by the World Health Organization, which is mostly funded privately as a corporatist racket pushing pharmaceutical products. This is why the Covid response was the same the worldover (but for three nations). Even the CDC claimed to defer.

And that’s just the start of it. It’s true for censorship and financial power too: both are global initiatives pushed by corporate elites, as we see in Europe. The treatment of Elon Musk for daring to permit speech is indicative: they really want to turn the Internet into a curated information machine controlled only by stakeholders. I’m not making this up. This is what they say!

Indeed, the problem is even deeper. There is a machine being built globally that necessarily disenfranchises voters the world over. Once they have power, democracy is at an effective end, which means that citizens no longer have any possibility of influencing the shape of the regime under which they live.

Nationalism in this case means taking back power from usurpers. (Generally speaking, as I’ve long written, whether nationalism is good or bad for liberty depends on circumstances of time and place.).

On the matter of immigration, I never imagined that I lived under a regime that would deploy the free movement of peoples as a weapon of vote manipulation and power consolidation. Voters in the UK saw it, and Murray Rothbard saw it as a possibility as early as 1993 but I couldn’t imagine it.

I was wrong. It became our reality. The liberal and broad-minded impulse to welcome strangers has been weaponized as a vote-getting scheme operated at taxpayer expense. This has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with the aspiration for a one-party state and premeditated demographic upheaval to break up opposition to state consolidation.

On matters of trade, I’m with Rand Paul in opposing tariffs as industrial protection. That said, the loss of domestic manufacturing is driven in part by a bad monetary system that broke all monetary settlement mechanisms that had smoothed trade in the 19th century and replaced it with a one-way industrial policy that came at the expense of the citizenry.

It has become clear, in addition, that the longing for a system of fiscal financing via tariffs rather than income taxes is on the table, as in the 19th century. That would certainly amount to an improvement over the current system. If that kind of nostalgia drives Trump’s tariff push, there is some basis for it and not automatically a form of what I feared the most.

The number one shift I’ve undergone in my thinking concerns the source of the real problem in the US. It is not the politicians elected by the voters as such but the permanent state structures that exist on three levels: shallow, middle, and deep. The consciousness of this is as new as it is ominous.

The deep state refers to the intelligence community which very obviously exercises massive power not only internationally but domestically as well. I’m not sure I was fully aware of that.

The middle state is the civilian bureaucracy, some 2 million strong plus 400 agencies that imagine that they are the real and permanent rulers of America.

The shallow state is the retail end of this machine: the media, the medical systems, the tech companies, and the corporate structure itself whether it controls advertising or philanthropy or banking or financial markets. The corruption is deep and wide.

There is only one way to break up this wicked cartel,: with executive, legislative, and judicial action. The Trump forces have a bead on this, in part because his last term was utterly foiled by this machinery.

We’ve never had an incoming administration so finely focused on the real problems and floating real solutions to actually save freedom in this generation from utter destruction.

Of course it might not go well: usually politics betrays us. But this much I know: we cannot endure four more years of whether things are headed now. Everything we love is being lost.

Most Americans have a simple demand: we want our lives back. It’s that simple. We don’t even need to take recourse to far-flung ideological precepts to understand it. We need only draw on moral intuition and what we remember (if we can) of what normal life should be like.

I felt well-informed, and completely morally righteous when ranting about the Orange Man and what a threat he was, while also treating him as a joke.

After all Trump, according to all of the Professional Experts, was dangerously unprecedented. The things he said, the words he used, the mere fact that someone who had never stepped foot in DC dared throw his hat in the ring - It was preposterous, and surely no serious person could take Trump seriously.

I was well and truly inside the bubble. It didn’t matter what arguments were made to the contrary - I listened to the Experts™. By the time Election Day rolled around in 2016, I was phone banking for Hillary. I was ready to stay up all night here in Israel while the vote came in, watch the first female be elected President of the United States, and celebrate. ...

Over the next few days, we absorbed the shock of the political earthquake we had all experienced. My husband patiently listened to me cry that the world was going to fall apart and then he told me to snap out of it. He said the media bubble I was trapped in was full of actual garbage and they lie nonstop. He’d said it before, but I couldn’t hear it. Now that Trump was President-Elect, my mind slowly opened to the possibility that the legacy media wasn’t all I thought it was. After all, everything they had said about Trump’s odds of winning was dead wrong.

It didn’t happen overnight, it was a slow process. I began to cut back on watching the bobbleheads at MSNBC and CNN and replaced them with people like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin, who was going through his own political awakening at the time. A Trump hater would say I fell down the conspiracy theory, right-wing YouTube rabbit hole. By the time Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, I approached his upcoming term with cautious optimism.

Shortly after his inauguration, Trump gave a 90-minute press conference in a room in the White House in front of gold curtains. For 90 minutes Trump went to battle with the press. They were nasty to him. They twisted his words, assumed his intentions, and phrased questions in an inappropriately biased manner. I watched Trump handle the media with logical answers, good humor, and patience. I watched him speak without CNN injecting a dark filter and evil intent over small clips taken out of context.

I remember sitting glued to the TV, ignoring the kids’ bedtime, unable to turn it off. When it was finally over, I turned to my husband, full of newfound optimism and a different kind of naivete. I said that Trump was so good at that press conference, that surely now CNN will have to admit they had been wrong this entire time. Once again my husband laughed at my naivete and we turned on CNN, where sure enough they had full panels of Experts furiously discussing Trump’s tie.

That was pretty much the last straw, and as anyone here who has gone through the “redpill” process knows - once you break out of the media bubble and you can see who they truly are- you can NEVER unsee it.

Once I was free from MSM tentacles, Trump was president and everything felt bright. I learned the values and tenets of conservatism and libertarianism through books, podcasts, shows and debates. It felt like things finally made sense, once my mind was open enough to consider the arguments.

Liberal Hollywood Star Michael Douglas Admits That Trump’s Republicans Are the ‘Party of the People’ While Dems Are ‘Elitists’

There’s a long ongoing saga of liberals trying to come to term with reality.

Besides mad leftists shaving their heads and freaking out on camera, there are also those who try to understand America’s moment using whatever mental faculties the TDS did not destroy.

It’s the case of Academy Award winner Michael Douglas.

The Hollywood star has allowed himself to admit – even if it was notably painful for him – that the GOP under President-elect Donald Trump is now the ‘party of the people’, while Douglas’ beloved Democrats are now seen as ‘elitist’.

The actor appeared Friday on Bill Maher’s Real Time , and the episode dealt primarily with Trump’s historic victory over Kamala Harris. ...

Douglas told Maher that the Democrats lost the election over the economy.

“’In 40 years, the stock market has increased 5,000 percent and real earning wages have increased 14 percent’, Douglas said, later adding that ordinary Americans ‘are going week to week with the inflation, it is killing them’.

‘And I think we really underestimated it, and the very fact now that we could talk about Republicans as being the people, the party for the people, and that we have this elitist party on the left, Democrats, is wild’.”

Social media has been buzzing for days about Joe Rogan’s interview of Marc Andreesen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and influential ‘thought leader’ in tech and venture capital. He co-founded Netscape, predicted the rise of the Internet, and has been an early investor in some of the biggest startups in the Valley.

Andreesen is a pretty big deal, a former Democrat, and very persuasive in the tech sector. If you picked a single theme for his interview, it would be “weaponization of government.”

Based on Andreesen’s claims, in a sane, non-circus world, the interview would produce Congressional investigations and public hearings, forcing agency heads to either admit serial constitutional violations or else prove they haven’t happened.

If you have time or need a good travel listen, listen to the whole thing. Among many other astonishing tales, Marc testified from personal experience having been told by Biden Administration officials not to invest in AI, since the government planned to capture and control two or three “competitors” and tightly manage the entire industry. He also described a secret war against digital currency developers including widespread de-banking and nebulous, never-ending quasi-criminal prosecutions in the cryptocurrency sector.

On Christmas Eve, Fox News ran a prophetic story headlined, “DNC powerhouse fundraiser announces exit from Democratic Party following attacks: 'It's like leaving a cult’.” The sub-headline added, “Lindy Li said she was 'ostracized' from the party and labeled a 'wh—e’ after criticizing Kamala Harris.”

Lindy Li is a (now former) Democrat strategist, media talking head, and fundraiser to the progressive super-wealthy. She sat on the DNC’s national fundraising committee. Recently, after the election, Lindy grew frustrated at how bad the loss was. She made her first mistake by going on Fox News. She sealed her fate when she said, “Democrats have a stench of loser hanging over them.”

That’s when the fireworks really started. Li told Fox, "People have called me a wh—e, the ‘C-word.’ People are calling me a communist spy. They asked for me to be deported.”

By people Lindy meant Democrats. Her former friends.

Ms. Li was mostly frustrated at how the badly money she’d raised was misspent. “My initial disillusionment became clear,” Lindy explained “when I realized (the Harris campaign) essentially set $2.5 billion on fire. There’s been no accountability. We still haven’t gotten any answer as to why Oprah —a billionaire!— got $2.5 million dollars through her production company. Why couldn’t she pay for it? She’s an oligarch! Not to mention they spent $450,000 putting Kamala’s face on The Sphere. Now tell me how that would help her win? Obviously it was utter failure.”

Amidst Lindy’s laundry list of complaints about the money appeared one completely separate objection that stood out since it wasn’t like the others: “I want to be a part of the team that says men are men and women are women and men shouldn't play in women's sports.” It’s a good team. Lindy added, “I don't want to be a part of this craziness anymore. They're (democrats are) accelerating my rightward shift."

Well. I’m not sure Lindy is shifting rightwards, even though it might feel that way to her. We’ve returned to that cartoon Elon Musk made famous: the Democrats are sprinting leftwards, which leaves people like Lindy in the dust. When the dust clears, they discover they’re actually closer to conservatives than to the woke progressives.

Lindy’s journey reminded me of a clip making the rounds yesterday. It was from a recent “Genius Life” interview of Harvard professor Arthur Brooks, who studies happiness. Over ten years ago, Brooks published a controversial op-ed in the New York Times disclosing his research finding that conservative women were one of the happiest groups he studied.

In his recent podcast interview, Brooks reported that conservative women under 30 remain the group who self-reports being the happiest; if anything, their satisfaction is even more pronounced, with up to 40% describing feeling very happy or even “blissful.” But the most unhappy group is now white liberal women under 30, with an astounding sixty percent being clinically diagnosed with a mental illness.

My own theory is that progressivism (as distinct from classic liberalism) requires unhappiness as a signal of virtue. If you aren’t always mad and depressed at the woeful state of the world and all the hatred and injustice toward cross-dressers, how can you possibly call yourself a sensitive progressive? The torturous mental gymnastics needed to accept that being a good person also requires being unhappy produces mental illness. That’s my theory, anyway. What do you think explains all the unhappiness and lunacy among white liberal women?

Returning to Lindy Li, whose departure from the Democrat party could be better seen as a form of self-survival. After all, nobody who’s not in a cult wants to live that way.

Lindy’s leaving is twice as expensive as it looks. Every million she doesn’t raise for Democrats is a million she’ll be raising for someone else, summing to a net shift away from Democrats of two million dollars.

Lindy said she’d already been approached by Trump’s team. She’s thinking about it.

The question that should be dogging Democrat leadership (if there is any Democrat leadership) and keeping them awake at night, is the question of whether Lindy Li’s defection is an exception, or is she the Asian canary in the progressive coal mine?