Snippets 15: US election & Narrative Whiplash inside the Simulacrum

Why NPCs blew it again & don't learn... Why you should listen to Rick Rubin and not trust the 'mainstream' media

Kamala is already laughed at a lot in focus groups.

And there are so many videos of her waiting to be made into ads I think she would self-destruct and Trump would win easily against her.

Me, April 2023

Wrestling is real, the news is fake.

Rick Rubin, founder Def Jam

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Silicon Valley proverb

Our leading men think they have transcended the summit of human ambition, if the bearded mullet in their fishponds feed out of their hands and let all else go hang. Don’t you think I do service enough if I succeed in removing the desire to do harm from those who have the power?… The others you know. They are fools enough to expect to keep their fish ponds after losing their constitutional freedom.

Cicero

Bureaucracy is a bad European system of government, created by the use of permanent public officials, a system that does not, should not, and cannot exist in England.

Palmerston to Queen Victoria, 1837

Some thoughts on the US election, Insiders v Outsiders, elite fragmentation, the collapse of consensus reality and how our world in some ways will become more like 1800 than 1990, what comes next, implications for the UK.

The normal historical cycle of regime change is rolling: slow rot, elite blindness, sudden crisis, fast collapse, regime change, new elites...

Model posted here (4/2023) and a characteristic NPC response: they didn’t want to face fundamental dynamics and were still in ‘Trump will be easy to beat’ mode

Trump24 played out as with Vote Leave 2016, Trump 2016, Vote Leave in No10 2019, covid, ‘inflation/cost of living crisis is transitory’, Ukraine and many other episodes. It has demonstrated again the cycle of delusion and Narrative Whiplash inside the Simulacrum that politics in the West has become — a cycle that the Insider-NPC class demonstrates on all important issues and which has become so pathological it’s escalated the worst nuclear crisis since Cuba and is fragmenting elites and creating powerful counter-forces.

Marc Andreessen describes it as a form of denial-of-service attack that political-media elites have run against their own perceptions of reality. In Colonel Boyd’s terms, their OODA loop is broken and this provides constant opportunities. Marshal McLuhan warned us that the emergence of new media always generates dynamics that are effectively invisible to almost everybody as they’re playing out — apart from a few artists most of us can only see them clearly in retrospect. Perhaps this is why the old political-media elites now publicly perform this Narrative Whiplash via new electronic media but are almost totally unaware of their performance — they memory-hole everything including themselves and act as if everyone else has forgotten too…? How else to explain not just the whiplash but the absence of self-reflection?

In a world where the Insider class is not incentivised to try to minimise errors on fundamental issues — like the main thing in an election or ‘what’s our goal in escalating a war against the biggest nuclear power’ — there are trillion dollar bills lying on the pavement simply in the form of trying obsessively hard to follow some basic lessons from history and the history of high performance that are ~100% ignored in political circles. Sun Tzu and Thucydides remain edge-of-the-art!

I asked in 2022:

A new elite is very faintly visible, spectral networks forming over WhatsApp… How many live players will join Elon’s network?

Turned out quite a few decided to listen to Cicero and join with Elon.

The mainstream media, having failed to understand and report on this phenomenon, is now jabbering about Silicon Valley and the network around Elon. I strongly recommend watching the post-election Andreessen & Horowitz podcast where they describe in their own words how the DEM elite pushed them so hard they felt no alternative but to go all in with Elon.

And — remember! — Trump, Elon and Rogan are all … ex-Democrats! This hasn’t sunk in with a remarkably large number of NPCs but is a clue about what’s really been happening.

A challenge to Democrats and political science professors who self-describe as ‘serious’, like the Pod Save bros or Ben Ansell. State publicly the truth about the way almost the entire MSM edited ‘very fine people’ to make it look like Trump was referring to Nazis, and explain as Rogan did on his podcast how we can see these lies thanks to the internet, and explain that those who oppose Trump must face the collapse of trust in the MSM is because the MSM lies deeply and constantly, and explain why it’s important that so many ‘serious’ academics/hacks believe the fake news and don’t realise the truth. I am watching for the first person to accept this challenge. It will indicate some element of the Insider class wants to face what’s happened. I am not holding my breath! If you also believed the fake version, then scroll down, look at the real version, and describe in comments your reaction!

Below I explore:

• Some thoughts on the campaign

• Some thoughts on the media ecosystem — I wrote last year if you want to understand politics now, remember ‘wrestling is real, the news is fake’ (Rubin)

• What next

Some topics:

• ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing’

• After January 6th riots 2021, DEM elites and pundits reverted to ‘Trump is a clown who can’t win’ & this strengthened after the midterms

• DEM elites allowed the Party to orient itself around appeasing Far Left pressure groups with very extreme ideas

• DEM elites fooled themselves ‘Kamala is/was a great candidate’.

• Kamala massively lost the battle over CHANGE

• ‘Build a wall around California’

• Experts fooled themselves on enthusiasm/turnout

• Mainstream media, credibility, the new media ecosystem and the DEMs’ self-cancelling strategy

• ‘Hitler’ failed

• Trump didn’t win ‘because racism’, he significantly improved his position with ethnic minorities

• The Obama Machine failed.

• Deep state phantasms and lawfare: how the DEMs assault on parts of Silicon Valley combined with lawfare against Trump caused unexpected huge blowback

• DEMs as the war party

• RFK and food, diet, health

• How you close often says something

• Money is less important, message and OODA loop is MUCH more important than most think 

• ‘Education polarisation’

• Smug contempt: ‘never hate your enemies’

• What did Trump do wrong?

• Branching histories: assassination

• Russiagate hoax

And some Snippets at the bottom.

It’s a bit of a mess and I’ll edit when I’ve got time, please note errors and interesting links in comments.

After this blog, I’ll spend less time on the theme of NPC failure. I’ve hammered it for years. Finally realisation is spreading and elites are cracking up and re-forming. Ideas that were resisted for decades have suddenly gone mainstream in months. Even SW1, always the last to see anything, is shifting a little! I’ll move on more to what comes next.

Speaking of which, an interesting UK development…

Lawrence Newport, who ran the XL Bully campaign, has set up a new campaign: CRUSH CRIME.

He says the goal is to build mass support and pressure Parliament to:

1. Jail career criminals who generate most crime — 1 in ten commit over half all crimes but the system does not target them.

2. Toughen up the joke sentences.

3. Build more prison places and secure hospital places.

4. Huge growth in court capacity to crush the court backlogs (over three years for rape and growing).

5. Reverse the collapse of the entire justice system — prisons, courts, police etc.

The Tories inherited a dreadful system from Blair/Brown, broke it more, and Starmer is going in the same direction. It’s a classic systems problem.

Visit their website, give the campaign your name and postcode, they’ll email MPs on your behalf, and give them a small donation. Just 60 seconds and you can add to pressure — stop reading, do it now!

…

The public are desperate for change on this as on everything. The Tories will change their tune from government and suddenly rediscover that they want action (after 14 years of failure). Much of the media will pressure Starmer.

He’s a dud and Labour are in a terrible situation already so I can imagine CRUSH CRIME pressuring No10 into changing direction on crime to some extent as they realise continuing the Tory direction is SUPER unpopular, with Labour voters as with almost everyone. Maybe they’ll come to realise that copying Sunak-Treasury vandalism on the economy is also super unpopular?!

There’s also an anonymous group of data-obsessives (@UKCrimeWatcher) finding and analysing and publishing data on crime who are asking for help on research and say they have a Discord server for collaboration. They seem talented and their work has already featured in the national media so it looks like a good use of time for those of you wanting to do something.

And if interested in new political ventures, sign up to attend the 11/12 event HERE. The organisers say they’ll be doing other events around the country in 2025.

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Some things I said before the election

2022-3 I wrote some things. If you’re a subscriber you will not have been surprised by how things turned out.

Biden is Biden. He’s rubbish relative to the level of Bill Clinton or Obama… And he’s old, mentally frail (putting it kindly), clearly even less up to the job than in the 1980s, and getting older/frailer. Biden will be an even worse candidate in 2024 than he was in 2020…

Me, 2021

He isn’t going to change much for the better. People at his age only change a lot in a negative direction. And in 2024 it’s unlikely some covid-like situation will let him hide from the rigours of the campaign trail... DEM voters and swing voters already want him to stand down in favour of someone from a younger generation...

While he’s [Biden] benefiting now from confounding media expectations, such pundit-cycles never last. It’s easy to imagine that in the course of 2023 Biden comes to be seen as non-viable. He may die, be too ill, or be too obviously infirm to be viable even if the Party tries to rally behind him. Actuarial statistics are against him. And he may be challenged and quickly appear unable to cope and therefore doomed to lose against Trump, prompting panic…

His [Trump’s] strengths are still underrated by the media, as is the potential for Biden’s age to turn into a disaster. If tempted to think ‘Trump’s finished’, imagine how you’ll feel if Biden has a visible deterioration in 2023, says he will still stand, and the polls show him neck and neck, while Kamala is positioning for a run if Biden collapses.

The media underrates the desire of normal voters, including core DEM voters, for Biden to stand down and a new generation to step up.

Me, November 2022, post mid-terms

A new elite is very faintly visible, spectral networks forming over WhatsApp. Will it continue to form or will the pressure of 2024 scatter it? Will those with money and brains stick to their walled gardens and fish ponds or push chips forward? How many live players will join Elon’s network?

Me, 12/2022

Biden is a weak candidate. He answers questions about Ukraine saying ‘Fallujah’. His own voters are not enthusiastic about him running again. Given his age and mental impairment he could easily suddenly deteriorate… But if the DEMs replace him, perhaps in panic after a sudden deterioration, someone could win the primaries who is easier for Trump to beat…

Many players around the world regard Biden as senile, the Democrats as insane, and the DC system — together with European capitals — spinning out of control towards more war. The Insider-Twitter network has been effective in policing views inside western elites but its very success is generating counter-forces outside the West…

[P]oorer people who don’t watch much news are generally much more open-minded about politics than graduates living in big cities who consume a lot of news, who are much more ‘trapped in narrow information bubbles’ than the average GOP rural voter who pays little attention to politics. And pundits and academics are the most closed-minded of all while thinking of themselves as the opposite. They herd to a few acceptable opinions but think they’re the few able to step outside herding and observe objectively. Another golden rule of politics is that it’s the intelligentsia who are easiest to fool with simple moral propaganda tales…

One core problem with the 2016 Facebook story was that almost nobody in politics, media or academia understood communication, digital marketing, how Facebook actually worked and how ‘AI/data science’ could be connected to these subjects…

But a deeper problem was and is: most of the old political media and Left-academia aren’t actually interested in the truth, they just repeat whatever crazy nonsense they see on Twitter and if their social network believes it so do they! A small but telling recent example: look at how they swallowed the ‘Andrew Tate arrested because of his twitter spat with Greta’ story, classic fake news reported as fact across old media and swallowed whole by the Insider twitter network that generates Official Truth because it was simple and striking propaganda with a moral twist that the audience wanted to believe. Everywhere you looked, Harvard and Oxbridge graduates, so keen to write op-eds and tweets about how non-graduates are suckered by Putin-Trump ‘misinformation’, tweeted their delight at the story. This is normal.

Having watched Washington and New York since 2016 the most reasonable prediction is that most Insiders will continue to tell themselves fairy tales and peddle misinformation to each other while thinking it’s the MAGA plebs who are the victims of misinformation. There will be incredible dislocations between Insider debates over 2024 election and what’s really happening, what normal voters actually hear and prioritise. If you pour the petrol of the war and ‘AI/KGB/PRC/MBS’ stories onto the fire, it could easily be even crazier than 2020.

Kamala is already laughed at a lot in focus groups. And there are so many videos of her waiting to be made into ads I think she would self-destruct and Trump would win easily against her.

Me, April 2023

Biden is seen by critical voters — not just swing voters but most DEMs — as ‘too old for the job’. The old media has tried to portray the State of the Union speech as kiboshing this meme. Everybody honestly reporting focus groups knows this is deluded. (Some of the comments are like this — ‘he was shouting in the speech, I guess because he’s so old, you know old people lose track of whether they’re shouting’.) A faction of the most Left is attacking the NYT for discussing this problem and printing polls that show the problem. This is a classic example of how political networks can reinforce delusional behaviour by encouraging displays of ‘loyalty’ based on spreading nonsense. (This is much-discussed by academics so ironic that academics are the most prone to this sort of thing.)

Similarly DEM Insiders keep saying on the media that ‘those who work with Biden know he’s super-sharp’ etc. This is also deluded. Voters can see an old man shuffling around the stage, often tumbling over, clearly confused, often getting critical names wrong — calling Ukraine ‘Iraq’ etc. He’s now got those special extra-wide shoes designed to make old people less likely to tumble. Voters will not be persuaded to disbelieve their own eyes by tales of ‘how sharp Biden is in private’… Term limits is even more popular than in the 1990s because the age of DC has grown and Biden is so visibly old…

Me, Feb 2024

In September 2024 I wrote about the delusions of NPC intelligentsia and false consciousness.

We are experiencing a historic event in which consensus reality among educated elites has cracked up... Now the NPCs see Elon as ‘mad/delusional’ — so much so they even tweet without irony about how Elon doesn’t understand rockets, is technically an idiot etc.

Just before the election I wrote about the polls and Trump:

There are interesting ideas about what to do… But I don’t see evidence of normal polling companies doing clever things. It seems reasonable to assume, in the absence of counter-evidence which I can’t see (please post if you think I’m wrong) that the problems of 16/20 have not been solved by an industry a) not well-incentivised to solve this hard, complex and expensive problem which has also b) allowed the quality of panel data to fall…

All the conditions are in place for another significant polling miss. 

If the polls are off on Trump vote by the level in 16 or 20 then Trump is (now) winning the electoral college. Even if they’re off by less, he could be winning the EC. And perhaps they’re off by more… 

The results are in and with some good luck the model I published in spring 2023 ended up being almost exactly right.

My point in posting this is not ‘I predicted this’. It was not a prediction. It was a model based on data gathered March 2023 based on how would you vote tomorrow and focus groups exploring views conducted Jan-March 2023. Different decisions could have generated very different results and Trump was an inch from death!

My point has been that what’s just happened a) seemed to ‘the experts’ / ‘mainstream’ / Insiders in Q1 2023 a laughably improbable result but b) the core dynamics, the main thing, were clear then if you know how to look and listen — all you had to do was talk to swing voters in the key states while thinking ‘I’ll learn from them’ rather than thinking ‘idiot low information voters’.