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’.

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Some thoughts on the campaign

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

This phrase is heard a lot in Silicon Valley but not in Westminster. (Cf. Ben Horowitz’s excellent book, The hard thing about hard things.) In the elections/campaigns I’ve been responsible for, and in government and management generally, I’ve kept this lesson close to my heart and tried to instil it in the wider team. One of the most amazing things about the world is that the most important lessons from history are really simple to understand, extraordinarily powerful, free, in classic books, and ~100% of those involved in politics ignore them so you can have enormous advantages — you just need a certain kind of curiosity, openness, and extreme determination.

It’s crucial in elections, campaigns, government and companies because usually a) success is determined largely by one or a small number of truly critical things you really need to keep manic focus on but b) the world is complex and the incentives of big institutions make it normal for individuals and organisations to be pulled away from focus on the main thing.

This is why after every campaign, it usually emerges that the losing effort struggled more than the winning effort to keep the main thing the main thing. Over and over, it emerges that either a) ‘there was no message’ or b) the campaign deluded itself about the crucial voters’ ‘main thing’ (or both).

For example, in the 2022 midterms Trump made the main thing the stolen 2020 election. It failed because the country, including MAGA, wanted to move on. But Trump learned.

If you look at my posts 2022-23 and publicly available data the three really big things were clear.

A. The cost of living crisis is the main issue and a disaster for the DEMs. ‘People can’t afford the American dream’ said voters over and over. This jumped out of every focus group in just the same way immigration did in the UK 2015-16. It was very clearly the main issue.

B. The DEMs are seen to have lost control of the border, even deliberately sabotaged border control because they don’t believe in it, and the chaos and crime is another disaster for the DEMs.

C. ‘Biden is too old / senile, he obviously should not run again, I can’t believe the Democrats are even thinking about it.’ NB. This was not just MAGA, not just GOP, not just swing voters — it was a big fraction of solid DEM voters outside the mental grip of the MSM. The DEM elites ignored their own voters.

Further, Newsom and Kamala were seen as very Left and could easily lose by more than Biden was on course to lose by (see my comment from 4/23). The DEMs have decided after the mid-terms that abortion and ‘Trump is Hitler’ is the winning message. Focus groups of swing voters in the crucial 6-7 states DO NOT AGREE.

My point here is that a) I do not think anybody who knows what they’re doing and was just trying to find the truth (rather than what people wanted to hear) post-midterms could honestly have come to a different analysis than I did, and b) this is not very hard to do.

• This is not about getting super-smart people.

• It is not about super-hi tech tools.

• All you needed was about $250k for some polls and focus groups. (The way we did our model that showed victory for Trump over Kamala was specialised and did involved super-smart people (not me) using advanced tools but you didn’t need to do this to get the main points above.)

What did it need? You just needed to be genuinely curious, prepared to listen honestly to voters, and follow Feynman’s advice to try not to fool yourself regardless of your own opinions.  

And this gets to the heart of the real issue with our politics and the ‘experts’ that I bang on about.

They will not listen with curiosity and honesty to voters, they will not try to understand their point of view even if they disagree with it. Instead they repeatedly convince themselves then try to explain publicly why the voters are wrong, stupid, evil or all three. And when their predictions don’t work out, their explanation is that the voters were idiots fooled by ’disinformation’, Nazis, or both. 

Another point. A, B, and C were obvious. But more of a judgement call is:

D. Biden’s campaigns have always been bad. He got nowhere as a Presidential candidate until 2020. In 2016, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, told him not to run because he would lose. This was masked in 2020 by the chaos of covid, Biden campaigning from his bunker, Trump’s mistakes, and the total commitment of the MSM to support him. But if you read the books on the campaign, mostly written by DEM journalists, a clear story emerges: he’s a bad candidate, his senior staff were not the A Team, his campaign was bad, he was rescued by others failing more.

And one of the big things was that he kept yapping on about ’the soul of America’ and it bombed in everyone’s research but he wouldn’t drop it.

And Kamala ended up closing the 2024 campaign similarly — on saving democracy and the soul of America from fascists, on ‘Dobbs and democracy’ as Insiders called it from 2022.

The main thing was the cost of living crisis. The DEMs spent two billion dollars and did not force themselves to face honestly their problems on the main thing.

(A question for the curious to pursue: somebody must have done a version of what I did, found the same things, and talked to Important People about it — but why did the Important People not listen, why did groupthink dominate? Please leave links to people who got these things right long before the result.)

So to keep in mind throughout this blog: the main thing was the cost of living crisis — ‘we can’t afford the American dream’ — not ‘Dobbs and democracy’.

The DEMs lost votes almost everywhere and especially in places they control

Trump improved his 2020 vote in over 90% of counties.

The DEMs lost the crucial swing states by less than the places they have tight control.

In places like San Francisco and NYC, DEM voters are angry about inflation, crime and the border chaos. In NYC, black DEMs have been vocal in saying the dumping of thousands of illegals in hotels has been a disaster for the city and for the Party.

The DEMs saw many of their biggest drops in places they’ve controlled longest.

Explanations for the loss must reflect the breadth of the DEM defeat. The main thing was the cost of living but many of the demographic/electoral trends pre-date the inflationary surge.

Results by county, largely complete, showing how reliant DEMs are on a few big cities

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

After Jan 6th and Trump leaving the White House, they thought Trump could never recover.

They thought he was an idiot in 2015 and underestimated him then got a huge shock when he won, a shock exacerbated by the polling miss in 2016. As soon as he left the White House they reverted to this mentality: he’s a clown, 2016-20 was a weird aberration, the system is reverting to the pre-Brexit/Trump normality. And they thought they could de-platform and begin a cycle of lawfare that would damage him without considering how it might generate counter-forces and blowback of different kinds.

Incumbent parties usually lose ground in the midterms after the Presidential election. In the 2022 midterms, the DEMs did surprisingly well — against historic base rates — after campaigning on abortion after the SCOTUS decision.

Insiders convinced themselves of a set of powerful memes and spread these memes through the NPC pundit world in US and UK:

1. Trump campaigning for the GOP in midterms was bad for the GOP, good for DEMs.

2. MAGA taking over the GOP was good for the DEMs election prospects in Congress and the White House 2024. Crazy MAGA candidates pushed moderates towards DEM candidates etc. (Also, based on this logic, some DEMs actively helped the most nutjob MAGA candidates in 2022 primaries despite publicly stating they were ‘fascist’.)

3. Biden is popular. He’s a very successful President. Pundits like Noah Smith compared him to FDR. He should be supported in running again.

4. Although we’ve talked about Trump’s return as ‘the end of democracy’, we will actually be pleased if he wins the nomination again because it means we are much more likely to win in 2024. (This was so powerful that immediately after the midterms while I was talking to pollsters about doing the work that went into the model above, a good DEM pollster called me back and fired me as a client because ‘we’re worried you might use this information to help DeSantis against Trump.’ Me: I haven’t told you how I’m using this information, I’m not working for DeSantis, but why would you care since you said a few months ago Trump means the end of democracy? Them: err, get back to us after the GOP nomination is decided we can’t work with you until then. Interesting data point!)

5. Abortion is the winning issue for us in 2024.

6. The economy is actually recovering, we have to explain to people ‘why they’re wrong on the cost of living’.

7. We don’t have to worry about Trump campaigning on the border, it’s racist/fascist/extreme.

These ideas spread, as they do, to SW1 pundit land, structurally downstream with a time lag from DEM mainstream. Here is SW1 NPC-Ambassador Sam Freedman expressing the widespread conventional wisdom post-midterms:

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

In Obama’s first term the White House staff pushed back against the Far Left campaign groups. In the second term this faded. E.g it was under Obama that one of the first directives was issued on trans rights forcing institutions like women’s shelters and university sports to accept self-identification etc. (To what extent was this because of Obama’s financial dependence on the Pritzker family and similar networks who are the most extreme on trans?) And DEM political elites quickly gave up pushing back and instead raced to appease them and gave them the power to set the agenda.

These groups are funded by billionaires, many of who have very far left social views, and staffed by activists who are young Ivy League graduates with very far left views. These views are very far from swing voters in swing states. But they were allowed to define ‘mainstream’ in DEM land. This proved a disaster.

Connected… Roughly all (all the top 10?) cities went DEM over twenty years. Then the Obama machine (cf. below) linked them up politically and to the NGO-donor-foundation complex. Then they figured out how to extract billions from federal and state funding. And this system with its multiple bosses and modern patronage network escaped local democratic control and became a money-moving system largely hidden from MSM scrutiny. It then peddled open air drug markets, trans insanity, and sanctuary for illegal immigrants. Cf. my. point about California below.

Also connected… After the financial crisis of 2008, there was an intellectual shift among DEM elites against the ‘neoliberal consensus’. The Party was pushed by left intellectuals and universities. Obama was to the left of Clinton on the economy. Bernie was on the rise — democratic socialism, free college, cancel loans etc. Hillary went to the left of Obama on the economy and to the left of Sanders on cultural issues like ‘systemic racism’ in 2016. Sanders then shifted left. The Squad emerged. Biden had supported a balanced budget amendment in the nineties — he shifted left too. In 2019 the DEM candidates made ‘Medicare for all’ the big issue. The stories Bill Clinton and Obama told about the value of WORK were lost post-2016. Welfare reform was attacked. (I think the dynamics of the groups yabbering at each other and politicians on Twitter also contributed to these shifts but that’s another story.)

Also connected… In the 2020 campaign there was a staff revolt that demanded Biden move from a more to less popular position on abortion. He folded. David Shor pointed out what a bad sign this was for the future. He was ignored. In 2024 the media reported post-election there was a similar revolt of staff objecting to Kamala doing Rogan. Even if false, the fact this story is widely believed by Insiders says a lot!

Some simple examples with big implications for 2024.

1/ In 2019 the ACLU developed a litmus test for DEM leaders: do you support taxpayer funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrant convicted criminals?!!!

Kamala said: Yes. Her answer was shoved down her throat in 2024.

The Trump campaign ran a simple ad during live sports games: Kamala is for THEY/THEM, Trump is for YOU.

This sort of message has routinely been denounced as ‘hate speech’, fascist, far right etc. But it chimes with the majority. Outside very radicalised education elites it is normal to think we should NOT destroy women’s sport or endanger women’s safety by putting them in contact sports against men. The fact that DEM elites could — and still do! — tell themselves that this is an ‘extreme’ position sums up a lot.

2/ In 2019 a coalition of groups demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalising border crossings and abolish ICE.

Kamala said: Agreed. Her answer was shoved down her throat in 2024.

Interestingly, Biden in 2019 repeated the language Obama had used on ‘illegal immigrants’ — NB. this phrase later disappeared from DEM communication. Biden said that illegals had to get to ‘the back of the queue’ for getting documentation. Even though he was just repeating what Obama said often, the vibe had shifted. Biden was attacked and had to do days of damage limitation.

Things that Bill Clinton and Obama had said about border security and illegal immigration were redefined from mainstream to ‘far right’.

3/ BLM and ‘defund the police’.

Kamala went along with it all in 2019-20. This was shoved down her throat in 2024.

These positions are all far from any mainstream. They are also NOT the view of poor blacks/Hispanics in poor areas — the people who bore the brunt of defund the police. But they became the ‘mainstream’ view for DEM Insiders and the old media.

Things that Bill Clinton and Obama had said about crime and police were redefined from mainstream to ‘far right’.

4/ DEM elites lost the ability to talk to working class Americans. They have been losing working class votes across ethnic lines since before inflation and the cost of living crisis. This is not just a recent thing. If you look at their attempted communication to blacks and Hispanics, it often seemed to imply that they thought young men want welfare checks and weed — they had no offer to those striving for the American dream.

5/ DEM elites presented Trump demands for voter ID as an extreme, authoritarian policy. It is supported by most Americans across party lines. Most Americans think something like: we have to show a driver license to do many things, it is common sense to demand this for voting and would improve trust in the system. The extreme position is the mainstream elite position. A DEM who wants to show they’ve changed should publicly: we were wrong on voter ID, the voters are right, I support it.

6/ DEM elites and the MSM started speaking out openly against the First Amendment. I noted in my pre-election blog a telling clip from John Kerry arguing that the First Amendment means disinformation therefore must be ‘changed’:

There’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities [social media] in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts etcetera. But look if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it [i.e ‘disinformation’] out of existence. So what you need, what we need, is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having, you know winning enough votes that you're free to be able to implement change [i.e to the First Amendment]. (Kerry)

The New York Times ran icebreaker-of-the-revolution pieces against the First Amendment. And parts of the DEM ecosystem tried to organise boycotts of shows like Rogan.

And this came after MSM organisations like the NYT ran stories saying that discussion of the lab leak hypothesis was RACIST disinformation!!!

To summarise:

• The DEM and old media elites shifted to an extreme position on many critical issues.

• They told themselves and the voters that their new view was ‘mainstream’ and opposing views are ‘far right/fascist’.

• This alienated much of the electorate including working class voters of all races.

• When questioned they doubled down.

• They talked as if Trump was obviously crazy but they made themselves seem more dangerously crazy.

Cf. ‘build a wall around California’ below.

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

Her 2019 campaign was terrible. She was a terrible candidate. In my April 2023 blog I wrote:

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.

Apart from her VERY extreme positions, she was very far from the sort of personality of Reagan, Bill Clinton, Obama. A lot of people said things like ‘she’s like one of those bad AI deepfakes but in real life, she talks but she doesn’t seem real’.

Again, this was obvious if you talked to normal voters.

But Insiders and NPCs everywhere tweeted at each other about her brilliant speeches and interviews. This was all delusional.

It is true that the Obama staff drafted in around her tried to stop her defending previous positions. Some of the campaign staff realised that the world had moved on and she couldn’t say in 2024 what she’d been saying for years. But the basic idea of the campaign was to try to ignore those previous things and be talking about Trump. They couldn’t escape the combination of the shift to extreme positions and her lack of ability.

Kamala massively lost the battle over CHANGE

Kamala presented the choice as ‘change by closing the book on the Trump era and steady-as-she goes in Washington’. She even did her last rally with the White House and DC as backdrop. In possibly her most significant public statement, Kamala replied to the question of what she would have done different to Biden with: Nothing really! 

Trump presented the choice as ‘change by closing the book on the Biden era and changing Washington’.

Connected: in focus groups people often say when asked ‘why do people vote for Trump?’ — ‘because he’s not a normal politician.’

There’s been huge focus from the MSM on Trump’s character: asshole, sexist, racist, fascist etc.

But perhaps the most important thing I found in focus groups was the phrase ‘not a normal politician’. And in an era when people are disgusted with normal politics/politicians, this was a huge advantage. When the entire system hated him so much they tried to put him in jail and people tried to kill him twice, maybe it’s because he’s on my side agains the system?!

Voters were angry and wanted change, not more of Biden. The right/wrong track numbers were appalling for the DEMs for two years. 

Trump won overwhelmingly with those who said they wanted change. 

This is an example of — the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. The Biden White House and the MSM campaigned on ‘Biden is a great President, the economy is great’. The Biden campaign was on the wrong side of change and perceptions of the economy. And Kamala couldn’t pivot.

‘Build a wall around California’

Much about the main thing was all summed up for me in focus groups I listened to when a swing voter said

You know, Trump was right about building a wall — we should build a wall around California!

And the whole group laughed and nodded. When I played that line back to others it got the same reaction.

The mainstream underrated the effect of endless videos of the dystopian scenes in San Francisco — zombie drug addicts, homeless encampments, open air drug markets, crazy people wandering around the city attacking people with Samurai swords in the middle of the day etc.

40 years ago, California was seen around the world as a) the future and b) strongly positive.

The California DEMs shift on crime, borders, drugs, shoplifting etc has been a disaster nationally.

And Kamala was a far left DEM from California. And most of America didn’t want this future. They wanted it contained and reversed. I think this was greatly underrated by elites.

This will be important for Newsom’s prospects. The 2028 ads write themselves.

(NB. The DEMs lost a lot of votes in California too and extremists lost a lot of races in SF.)

Experts fooled themselves on enthusiasm/turnout

Many DEMs and experts looked at normal signs of enthusiasm, which have proved accurate in midterms, and decided that the DEMs were doing well.

But part of the Trump coalition is low/no trust voters who do not participate in normal ways, do not show up to rallies, do not answer polls, and do not watch normal political news. This contributed to the polling miss in 16, 20 and 24. And fooled experts in other ways.

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

Trust in the old media has steadily declined since the post-Watergate high when Robert Redford played Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men (watch if you haven’t).

The old media has shifted since 2015 to be very overt cheerleaders not just for the DEMs but for the far left of the DEMs. And they’ve acted like political campaigns in putting out content that is false. And in the internet age, awareness of such tactics has spread. (There’s similar dynamics in the UK. E.g John Simpson said within a few days in 2022 that a) he would not call Hamas ‘terrorists’ as the BBC had to be ‘impartial’ and b) the BBC should campaign against Trump explicitly, forget the old impartiality, because Trump is so obviously extremist etc. And this sort of cognitive dissonance seems totally normal for a senior BBC guy these days.)

Perhaps the clearest example is Trump and the ‘very fine people’ comment. In America and Europe, across the old media they told the same story: Trump called Nazis ‘very fine people’. But when you watch the full clip, you see that Trump actually explicitly made clear he was NOT talking about the Nazis!

Almost everyone I know interested in politics in Britain swallowed the fake version of this story. When I tell them ‘Trump actually said the opposite, the media just edited it to lie’, they almost always say ‘no way that would be crazy’, and I show them the real version and they are shocked.

In one of the recent chats between Rogan and Theo Von (can’t remember which), they discuss this and Rogan says something like — the old media doesn’t realise that we can see their tricks now, we can see the full version of Charlottesville and see how they’re lying to us, the internet changed the rules and the Democrats didn’t change their game. This very important fact has not sunk in among Insiders in America or Europe.

Full Charlottesville video here.

Trump didn’t do ONE interview with a traditional news outlet in the campaign's final few weeks — he pulled out of 60 Minutes and many others. Instead he focused on supportive new media and parts of the new media ecosystem NOT focused on politics, e.g crypto, gambling, health, fitness, food etc.

There’s a lot of talk now about Rogan but also many misconceptions. 8 years ago Rogan was for Bernie. But when Bernie went on Rogan many DEMs shrieked ‘don’t engage with fascists and transphobes, these people need to be marginalised’. (When Ezra Klein, high status in the NYT priestly caste, suggested engaging with Rogan, he was attacked by his fellow DEMs.) There were various attempts to cancel Rogan, have Spotify cancel him etc. As Elon said, ‘message received’! Rogan realised he’d been defined as an enemy even though it was puzzling WHY. So a lot of people say ‘who’s OUR Rogan?’ But the answer was ‘Rogan was with you but your extremism alienated him and millions like him.’

Many other online communities got the same treatment. Gamers. Crypto. Gambling. Health. Exercise. DEMs stopped engaging and attacked DEMs who did engage — it became a self-cancelling media strategy. (Crypto is an interesting example: it disproportionately attracts young black males — so two of the groups (young men, blacks) that Trump made big progress with against conventional wisdom.)

Meanwhile the GOP engaged. Trump did a huge amount of media with ‘enemies’. He was often mocked for this by elite hacks but I think it was the right strategy. In a fragmented ecosystem with a close election, you got to try everything.

And at the same time trust in mainstream news collapsed, see above. And younger people especially men stopped watching normal TV news ENTIRELY.

As usual with polls don’t look at the exact numbers — look at whether there is a big clear story that is true even if the pollster/methods are a bid iffy.

Yes there is. The story in this graphic is repeated over and over.

‘Hitler’ failed

Connected to the general collapse of trust in the MSM is the failure of a core message.

A few years ago there was an interview between David Shor (data scientist for Obama) and Noah Smith (DEM pundit). Shor said correctly that Trump in 2016 was seen as more moderate than the normal GOP nominee. And Smith’s eyes literally roll around in his head in amazement in a way that stuck in my head, a visual reminder of how hard it was for Insiders to absorb important ideas. This fact never sank in with DEM elites in 2016. They saw Trump as ‘extreme’ and couldn’t process how others didn’t.

In 2022, I pointed out that DEM elites discuss Trump as ‘extreme’ on abortion but his historic position was NOT the GOP default and voters know it (and NB. voters assume he’s paid for abortions himself) and he could go into 2024 with ‘a policy for the general election much closer to what he has said in the past’ and close to the median voter. The DEMs fooled themselves on this again. Trump did NOT back a national abortion ban, he said ‘leave it to the states’. The MSM united in saying ‘Trump wants a national abortion ban’, they wanted it to be his policy, but he repeatedly said it was not.

The Kamala campaign and MSM spent a huge amount of time on pushing ‘Trump is fascist/Hitler’. It did not work. We’re now starting to get reports from Democrats of feedback from focus groups saying ‘we ain’t buying the Hitler thing’ — reinforced for tens of millions who watched him on Rogan and similar podcasts (see below). Why did this feedback not permeate the Kamala campaign? Or did they think they had no better options?

Absolute blanket MSM coverage for 2-3 days on ‘Hitler’

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

A lot of the mainstream claims that Trump ‘fuelled racism’ to win etc.

A lot of data shows fewer and fewer Americans are racially prejudiced.

And Trump did much better than other Republicans with blacks, Hispanics, Asians.

And data is clear that the white graduate richer older ‘progressive’ DEMs are far to the left of blacks and Hispanics.

Blacks and Hispanics have been increasingly matching their party choice to cultural issues which has pushed them away from the far left dominated DEMs.

Again, this story was clearly visible in the polls for years. Trump did better than expected in 2016 with non-whites then did even better in 2020. The Insiders and MSM didn’t want to face this honestly. And many of their attacks on Trump made their problem worse and pushed more, especially younger ethnic minorities, to support him.

An example of how they couldn’t see these things clearly. The media portrayed the Maddison Square Garden event as a 1930s style fascist rally — the strangest fascist rally ever given how many Israel flags were on display and how many Jews posted their attendance (though of course for a subset of the DEM elite that actually proves the point ‘because Israel is the new Nazi Germany’!). Then there was the comedian’s Puerto Rico ‘garbage’ joke. The MSM went all in on this story: Trump calls Puerto Rico garbage! The Obama bros on Pod Save used it as an example of how dumb and mad Trump was and how it would hurt him among a crucial group. Trump’s vote went UP among Puerto Ricans. (This is another example of elites not learning. In 2016 Trump said things about ‘Mexican rapists’ etc which the MSM said would sink him with Hispanics. He went up with Hispanics. They didn’t learn.)

Another important thing: polls show ethic minorities support Supreme Court judgments against affirmative action of various forms. They also support voter ID — as do most Americans — and do not think it’s ‘racist’. Again this is strongly counter the official narrative in ways hard for the mainstream to admit publicly.

Many DEM elites thought that opposing Trump on immigration would, like civil rights, become a unifying force for the DEM coalition. But as Ruffini has argued there is no pan-non-white ‘identity’. Cuban Americans vote differently than Puerto Ricans and Columbians and also differently in different parts of the country.

The Obama Machine failed

I think this is underrated.

Obama had one of the top 5 social media profiles in the world.

He built two Presidential campaigns.

He built a separate NGO.

And his staff helped build the vast NGO complex mentioned above, sucking in money and buying patronage power.

And he engaged in the 2024 campaign. To his shame he pushed the Russiagate hoax favourites and the Hitler stuff.

And many of his staff joined the Kamala HQ.

And he had years and a huge fraction of billionaires eating our of his hand and eager to fund whatever he suggested.

But he didn’t build something that could beat Trump in the key states.

2024 was a big blow to the Obama machine which in many ways took over the DEM party.

I hope the GOP destroys the NGO complex via funding cuts and legal action because of its pathological effect on crime, drugs, homelessness etc across American cities.

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

Most obviously, the DEMs picked a series of fights with Elon.

Elon was a normal SV political player five years ago. He was a hero to environmentalists for Tesla. But as DEM elites moved Left on trans rights and free speech, they became quickly more hostile to Elon. The California government became hostile. There was the famous tweet from a California DEM politician which accelerated Elon moving manufacturing from California to Texas:

Then he bought Twitter and did two big things. First, he said he strongly supported the First Amendment and opposed the clandestine government censorship of platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Second, he opposed the overwhelming Insider consensus on Ukraine, warned of the dangers of nuclear escalation, urged diplomacy, and said that the West’s strategy would fail and wreck Ukraine in the process. He said he would not allow Starlink to be used for certain operations inside Russia to avoid possible escalation risks.

Insiders and NPCs had united in unprecedented fashion to support the Official Line on Ukraine. Dissent was not tolerated, nobody could be just someone who reasonably disagrees, everybody who said the sort of things Elon said was defined as ‘a Putin shill’. The conformity was such that I’m almost the only famous person in British politics who said clearly from the start the entire Western policy from the first neocon moves in 2007 on Ukraine joining NATO was a disaster, we should have ditched UKR joining NATO in 2021 as the crisis grew, the west’s policy from Q1 2022 was pure Idiocracy doomed to fail and possibly cause a Cuba 1963 type crisis, sanctions would obviously fail because they do not deter regimes from pursuing what they see as existential interests and China would supply them, and China will be the big winner from our stupidity. Despite the fact that I was seen pre-2016 as an extreme ANTI-Russian (!) because of my criticisms of SW1 on Russia/Putin, Russiagate then war meant I was redefined by the mainstream as PRO-Putin. (Cf. discussion of Russiagate below.)

So in 2022 the entire Insider-MSM complex redefined Elon as a fascist Putin shill national security threat who should have his companies taken away.

The Government made Elon sign a contract committing NOT to hire foreign citizens at SpaceX (normal because of all the classified programs they run) but they then sued him for sticking to this contract and NOT hiring foreign citizens! When this became public, the MSM buried the Kafka-esque truth and just used it as another stick to beat him with — more evidence of his fascism!

They hosted events at the White House for EVs and briefed against Tesla, the most important company in the world for technical advances in EVs.

The campaign grew and grew until the day before the election, Rachel Madow gloated on MSNBC how Kamala would shortly sink SpaceX. Obviously the same people who shrieked constantly about ‘the rule of law’ were totally cool with publicly stating the regime should destroy critical assets for humanity owned by political opponents.

There are many other such cases.

Over 2020-24 there was unprecedented lawfare against Trump. I won’t go into details. But the view of many very successful people who were not particularly pro-Trump was: it’s scary to see the system mobilised against a former President in ways that are unjustifiable and clearly political and if they’ll do it to a former President they’ll do it to anyone. E.g changing the statue of limitations specifically to allow a case against Trump while jabbering on CNN about ‘the rule of law’. Combined with the attack on Elon and other issues, many Live Players concluded: the Democrats are a bigger danger to democracy and the rule of law than Trump.

Broader than Elon, the administration pursued an aggressive campaign against other sectors and individuals that remains murky.

If you want to understand this in detail, watch 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.

A few points:

• White House went far outside the law to extreme harassment and threats — e.g Wells notices, debanking, threats of jail etc to coerce agreements, particularly vis crypto. (Korea has double crypto usage to US!)

• Meanwhile the regulators and White House wouldn’t even meet or explain what they were doing or why. Not even top VCs in the Valley could get a meeting to find out — what are you trying to do, what is happening here? Leaders in other sectors experienced the same — legal attacks combined with a blanket refusal to explain.

• While persecuting law-abiding companies, they did NOT pursue the shady memecoins and other scams (perhaps because they wanted the shady characters to undermine confidence in crypto?).

• The recent process — Operation Chokepoint 2.0 — morphed out of Chokepoint under Obama. Also cf. the operation against the Canadian truckers which escalated beyond debanking etc to threats to seize children.

• Lots of DEM governors couldn’t believe this was happening it seemed so bizarre.

Also watch Andreessen on Rogan yesterday.

Very few understand the censorship complex — the mix of overt government operations, government funding of NGOs and censorship/misinformation units inside universities like Stanford and Harvard, ex-intelligence agency employees embedded in companies, threats to the companies from the NGOs/universities which are understood as coming from the government and so on. The First Amendment constrains direct government action. But this complex process gave the DEMs power to control political information while dodging the First Amendment.

If you were very rich with great lawyers and time, you could start legal actions and think about a Supreme Court case some years in the future. But even powerful billionaires could not escape these dynamics. And people without their money and network were in deep trouble. You didn’t even know who to sue, or who to bring a judicial review against. There was no due process and no appeals.

And as DEM controlled cities collapsed in lawlessness, the DEMs’ raided … THE AMISH for using unpasteurised milk!

So far in the post-election analysis among DEM elites, I’ve seen no reflection on how they lost these arguments among critical elite audiences. The most anti-Trump faction — particularly the neocons — have instead argued that the White House was too soft and should have jailed Trump fast! I’ve seen zero serious coverage in the UK MSM about all this.

DEMs as the war party

The DEMs went all in on Ukraine. They ditched decades of bipartisan consensus that Taiwan will reunify with PRC but it should be peaceful. They seemed to be the party of more and more wars while also impotent and not taking them seriously. Far left DEMs even became publicly much more comfortable with the Cheneys than with Rogan and Theo Von and Kamala campaigned with Cheney in the last few weeks.

Meanwhile voters across the spectrum were telling focus groups:

We send billions to blow up Ukraine and lost in corruption but Washington says there’s no money for [insert priority].

And Biden was clearly clueless and couldn’t articulate a rationale for all these conflicts. He kept saying he would stop Israel doing X then X happened. He kept saying Russia was losing then Russia advanced. He kept saying international allies agreed with him and outside NATO the world moved clearly against supporting NATO in UKR.

Many young people in particular saw Trump as the anti-war voice of relative stability.

By definition the MSM, all in on Ukraine, could never face such a narrative violation.

Cf. Rogan post-election on the extreme weirdness of DEM excitement about Dick Cheney’s endorsement for Kamala.

RFK and food, diet, health

In the UK, RFK is seen mainly as a story about vaccines and bear memes.

But the big thing in the election was his stance on food, the food chain and health.

Over the past few years a widespread view has emerged that is not DEM or GOP/MAGA.

Roughly:

We are the fattest and sickest country in the world despite our wealth and vast expenditure on healthcare. Our food supply is poisoned. Plastics are everywhere, even in our ovaries and balls. We can’t trust the government which lies about it all. Regulation has been corrupted and failed. People who move to Europe keep reporting loss of weight. We need to figure out what the hell’s going on and fix it.

RFK was politically powerful because this is a huge topic outside political news. It connects to the podcast ecosystem discussed above.

Mainstream political world tends to trust exactly the established institutions like the FDA/CDC which blew up trust in covid.

So yet again the ‘serious mainstream’ didn’t grasp how opinion has been shifting. They attacked RFK as crazy. But he seems more sane on food than the mainstream to tens of millions in both parties and the very disengaged voters both were desperate to persuade.

Re vaccines…

There was a big push on ‘RFK is an anti-vaxer’. But again there is essentially no mainstream recognition of how they themselves destroyed trust in vaccines:

• The US government funded gain-of-function in Wuhan.

• There is a lot of evidence that covid was a leak from a Wuhan lab. This is not sure. But there is a LOT of evidence supporting it. (NB there are two distinct arguments: a) it leaked from a lab, b) it was an engineered virus. You can think (a) is likely without deciding (b) is true.)

• In the first half of 2020 there was a huge effort by Fauci and hundreds of officials and senior scientists to coordinate in LYING ABOUT THE G.O.F FUNDING AND THE POSSIBILITIES FOR A LAB LEAK. This is now well-established and beyond any reasonable argument. There are even emails between them discussing how to hide the coverup from Congress etc.

• The MSM ran many stories in 2020 that the lab leak hypothesis ‘is racist’. Then had to backtrack and cover the story 2021-4.

• As one of the handful who created the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce, I’ve been very sad and angry that post-2020 the government here and in US kept much covid vaccine data secret and allowed the big companies to do the same. This was the opposite of what I agreed with Vallance in spring 2020 — a quid pro quo of accelerating development was unprecedented transparency. Vallance agreed. It hasn’t happened.

• Many other aspects of covid zipped through a standard pattern of Narrative Whiplash. This often went with official institutions pressuring social media to define X as misinformation and suppress it, ban people etc. E.g look at the Guardian campaigning against rapid tests 2020 then flipping 2021.

This combination has had disastrous consequences. But there is practically no willingness in the ‘mainstream’ to accept errors, come clean, be honest. The opposite is standard: zero discussion of the Narrative Whiplash. On this as on everything, they just doubled down and blamed the voters for being fooled by ‘disinformation’. But the blame is on them.

A ‘Twitter files’ for covid, gain-of-function, lab leak, vaccine data etc — i.e everything put on the internet — would be incredibly good and is necessary to restore trust in vaccines. Just bleating ‘restore trust!’ will obviously fail.

If RFK does this, which many are urging him to, it will be a huge gain for a truly scientific debate on these important issues.

How you close often says something

Per above, DEM elites convinced themselves of a very comforting story post-midterm: ‘democracy and Dobbs’ was the winning message to repeat the 2020 victory.

Polling evidence showed this was not the main thing.

But the theory remained intact. Although Kamala started her campaign on other things, she ended in the same place as Biden — giving speeches in hated Washington on democracy and Dobbs while the voters focused on the cost of living.

Candidates are less rational than the media describes them. As I’ve said many times, a Golden Rule is politicians are not rational optimisers for the goal defined as ‘win election’. If they were their behaviour would be radically different. Their real incentives are a mix of a) immediate attention from the old media and b) signals to the in-group that affect their immediate career prospects — both of which run on cycles 10x to 1,000X faster than election cycles (years).

Because of this candidates often do things that after defeat people say ‘they make no sense’. But they do them because they have learned habits and under pressure politicians default to simple heuristics like ‘say what I’m most comfortable with’ which is often a NPC script that doesn’t fit strategically with their actual goals.

It ‘made no sense’ at all for Boris to leave Hancock in place wrecking the NHS. It ‘made no sense’ for the Tories to a) say we must have GROWTH and b) cheer Boris closing all the pro-growth efforts in 2021. It ‘made no sense’ to replace Boris with perhaps the only MP more fixated on media-reality over actual-reality. It ‘made no sense’ for Sunak to watch the NHS implode for two years when it was the voters’ No1 priority and thousands were dying unnecessarily. It ‘made no sense’ for MPs to say a) UKR must win while b) Whitehall continued vandalising critical national capabilities including the industrial capacity to help UKR win. Politicians ‘make no sense’ all the time.

And at the end of campaigns they often revert to their comfort zone. Hillary was the same in 2016. Her close reminded me a lot of the Remain campaign — a message of (to me) smug, nauseating contempt for the working classes and embrace of ruinous identity politics, Better Together, United Against Hate, all good people vote the same way blah blah.

Ruffini says the most noticed event of the last month was the photos of Trump serving people in McDonald’s. The cost of living was the main thing. Trump closed on it visually, Kamala closed with word salad on Dobbs and democracy.

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

Combined the Biden and Kamal campaigns spent about 2B. She spent 1.5B in her 15 week campaign. But from October ad spending was roughly equal with Trump who raised only about 1.2B.

Credible reports say she wasted lots paying for events with celebs like Beyonce and Oprah with the campaign paying for large celeb staff travel and work etc.

Interesting they paid about $50 million for paid door-to-door canvassers.

According to leaks to the NYT a PAC identified a ‘100th percentile effective ad’ but it got almost no play. (The ad in question is a) on the right theme (cost of living), b) much worse than classic ads of the past! If this is their 100th percentile no wonder they lost.)

Spending gets overrated but message is underrated.

More important than the volume of spending was that the Trump campaign focused ads on the cost of living and effective contrasts with Kamala.

Education polarisation

An important transnational phenomenon affecting Brexit and Trump is a) the shift of working class voters against Left parties and towards right parties and b) the shift of richer educated people towards Left parties. The biggest shifts to Biden and Kamala came in the richest areas.

This is changing electoral coalitions across the West relevant to the electoral coalition we built with Vote Leave in 2016 and 2020.

It’s also entangled with the racial issues above.

One of the few pollsters I’ve seen who has understood this is Ruffini who wrote a 2023 book on it, see below.

This is very badly understood in SW1. The Tory Establishment never understood the electoral coalition we built in 2016 and 2019. The conventional wisdom now is that they should not try to rebuild it but instead try to rebuild Cameron’s which was much less effective. Partly this is because SW1 Insiders do not want to think about working class voters’ priorities, they are sick of being told to do this since 2016, so will look for rationalisations for why it’s ‘clever’ to ignore them. E.g ‘you’ll get puled towards mad policies on immigration and crime’ — i.e popular policies despised by Insiders.

Smug contempt: ‘never hate your enemies’

The Pod Save bros are not the usual pundits, they are former Obama staffers who worked in the White House for years. They understand winning campaigns and how DC really works. They’re as able as it gets in the DEM political world.

I listened to their podcast a lot over the past year or so. A lot was interesting and perceptive.

But there was a constant tone that was exactly the same as NPC pundits: smug contempt. MAGA world is inherently absurd. Trump is always ‘saying crazy self-defeating shit’. It’s wearying to have to deal with these morons. Many jokes per episode about what a bunch of clowns the people around Trump are. And never, ever serious reflection on how normal Americans might conclude that someone like Kamala is MORE extreme and dangerous than Trump. Never reflection on the process of Narrative Whiplash and how this has undermined confidence in people like Obama.

I think this has been a terrible error for the Establishment generally and the DEMs particularly. Week after week they dismiss opposition as ‘batshit’, moronic, evil. They label everyone else as hateful but their tone is constantly hateful. They participate in the Narrative Whiplash rollercoaster and don’t try to explain it.

And they don’t get that millions of people watch people like this and think: I’m sick of your smug contempt and I’ll vote for anything to kick people like you in the teeth!

An important example. After the Maddison Square Garden event, the Pod Save bros were all over the garbage joke. Trump was an idiot for doing the MSG event. It reminded everyone of the 1930s fascist rally. Obviously it hurt him. But he did it because he can’t avoid being self-destructive. And obviously a joke like this will really harm him with Hispanics. And Hispanics shifted further to Trump again — bigly! 

The hate is bad for their souls and bad for their analysis.

I always tried in politics to remember: never hate your enemies, it affects your judgement. I said publicly, maybe Remain is right, nobody can be sure about such questions in history — which ironically would generate deranged extra hate! Another way the dynamics of Remain/DEMs were similar to Brexit/Trump is the way Remain elites have never shaken the smug contempt either. You could see it this summer with the riots. People who’ve spent their adult lives arguing ‘prison doesn’t work’ were suddenly screaming on Twitter ‘lock em up and throw away the key!’.

Why? Because the media pictures of the rioters looked like the media pictures of working class areas that voted Brexit and it triggered them.

The smug contempt doesn’t alter after each kick in the teeth. Many have fled to BlueSky to rant with smug contempt about the moron voters and the need for censorship.

What did Trump do wrong?

The Trump campaign did a lot right and some things very well.

But in my opinion Trump himself should have had much greater focus on the cost of living and his economic plans. This was the biggest issue for swing voters and his biggest strength.

Trump preferred to discuss other things while the campaign staff hammered inflation in ads.

I think he would have won by more with more focus on the main thing and fewer distractions.

Branching histories: assassination

I wrote in my review of the referendum how it’s hard for people to think about counterfactuals and how very small things can change huge things because of nonlinear effects. It’s quite conceivable that if someone’s phone had broken in a 90 minute period in January 2016, Brexit never happened.

Trump was an inch or so from death. Institutions have collapsed so far it’s often very hard to guess ‘incompetence or conspiracy’. Clearly the Secret Service had enough systemic problems it could have been pure rot. It’s interesting how fast even such an event disappeared from the news, how little followup there was, how little was made public about the assassin.

As I wrote in my blog about the history of the CIA, it’s extraordinary to discover that the CTO-equivalent of the CIA’s most classified photo lab was given the Zapruder film to work on over the weekend after JFK’s assassination and he concluded that JFK was shot from the front — and decades later he said the film we see has been edited to make this less clear. This was all kept secret until after the Oliver Stone movie pushed Congress into publishing documents. And documents surfaced tracing the film’s journey to NPIC. If you’d put it in a movie, few would have believed it. (Follow the link for an interview with Dino Brugioni.)

Trump has said he’d declassify the last CIA and other files on all this. I hope he does. As well as declassify records around the two attempts on him.

---

The Pathological Simulacrum and Narrative Whiplash

In great empires the people who live in the capital… feel many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies… They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace which puts an end to their amusement and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

Adam Smith

The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis (imitation) on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Toynbee

I’ll try and summarise some thoughts on the really weird new media ecosystem and how it affects politics.

The ‘mainstream politics/media’ world, driven haywire by powerful mimetic dynamics and technologies they don’t understand, has generated a sort of Simulacrum, a fake version of politics that Andreessen describes as a denial-of-service (DOS) attack on Insiders’ own perceptions of reality and capacity to act, or in Boyd’s terms, they’ve destroyed their own OODA loops.

1. There’s been a profound talent collapse in politics, government and public service. Much of the A Team used to go into these things. This has gradually changed over decades. Almost none of the A Team has gone into government recently. Much of the A Team now is in some combination of maths, money, tech, private research, startups, hedge funds/PE — what Steve Hsu calls ‘hard elite’ jobs (versus ‘soft elite’ jobs).

2. There’s been a powerful process of pathological bureaucratisation. Everywhere, real individual responsibility has been largely replaced by permanent civil service castes controlling institutions mainly to maintain the power and money of the caste. Meritocracy and responsibility shifted from real to fake.

3. There’s been a powerful process of intellectual elite capture by Communist/Socialist adjacent ideas and the mutant viruses that flow from German and French philosophical dynamics — Nietzsche to Heidegger to the French existentialists and deconstructionists to Anglo-American humanities departments etc (cf. Leo Strauss’s lectures on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, maybe the most influential philosophical work since Kant?). Few of the academics today yabbering ‘trans rights activists stand with Gaza’ realise the origins of the memes they dance to, or the efforts the Soviets made for decades to infiltrate American culture.

4. These powerful forces have merged with the conformism/careerism inherent in pathological bureaucratisation and the mimesis inherent in elite ideas.. Mainstream elites self-select for people with a very narrow range of acceptable opinions. They repeatedly herd/swarm via social media and WhatsApp to super-confidence in an Official Line that’s often laughably, obviously fake. E.g ‘Biden is super-sharp in private’.

5. There’s strong social reinforcement via strict policing and ostracism for non-believers. Insiders denounce those outside their tight social network who stray from the Official Line as ‘fooled by disinformation’, ‘populist’, ‘fascist’ — as idiots/Nazis. Moral courage is rare in academia and media so the vast majority kowtow without complaint.

6. The Official Line then gets exposed by events as fake. E.g the first Biden-Trump debate shreds the Official Line.

7. After 48 hours or so of disorientation, they generate more very confident nonsense ‘explanations’ of why what they very confidently said would not happen just happened — trust the experts! E.g ‘The debate was SHOCKING, who knew he was this bad?!’ And they double down on Narrative Whiplash and delusions and memory-holing. ‘Closing the borders is racist. Only racist idiots oppose closing the borders… Rapid tests are dangerous. Only racist idiots oppose rapid tests… The covid vaccines are dangerous [pre-11/2020]. You’re dangerous if you don’t accept the covid vaccines [post-11/2020].’ [You probably don’t remember Biden and Kamala as anti-vaxxers!]… Putin blew up the pipeline, BOOOO. Ukraine blew up the pipeline, HURRAH!… Trump is Hitler and the end of elections…. On to the 2026 midterms comrades!’

8. Recently they’ve added the flourish: [episode X] shows why we need MORE CENSORSHIP. I said before the election that the NPC response to a Trump victory would be another double down and more demands for censorship — no learning, no humility. After two years of blathering ‘Trump is a moron, Elon is a moron’, and after years of denouncing ‘echo chambers’ and ‘lack of diversity’, many NPCs particularly white male graduates (!) flounced to BlueSky. And there they demand MORE CENSORSHIP and ‘just BAN X!’ to ‘counter disinformation’ with those pesky ‘low information’ voters who don’t trust CNN goddammit and keep voting for Nazis! One of the remarkable aspects of DEM elites is how senior people and institutions have gone so far down the censorship path that they openly stated in the election campaign that the First Amendment was a historic mistake that will be ‘fixed’ after Kamala’s victory (see above).

9. While the Official Line gets quickly rewritten in constant mimetic Narrative Whiplash, the whiplash is effectively invisible inside the Simulacrum. Insiders act like they forget that they were saying the opposite of what they suddenly say today for weeks-months-years then denounce people for saying what they said recently themselves. Sometimes they do remember and they’re lying, but most of the time now they actually have their minds re-programmed by their social network and actually forget they believed something else recently, i.e they are mostly true NPCs for who it becomes less and less relevant to ask ‘what to they really believe’. The best way to understand this is to read about the intelligentsia and the Soviet Union, Orwell, former believers who wrote memoirs etc.

Marshal McLuhan said that a new medium becomes invisible during the period of its innovation, that only artists can see today and sense that the future is already here while everyone else lives in the past.

In the Utah desert earlier this year I ran into the legendary founder of Def Jam recordings and the most influential music producer in the world, Rick Rubin.

His artist’s view on politics and news gets to the core of the madness of recent politics and the way those inside the Simulacrum can’t see it or themselves:

Pro wrestling is real, the news is fake — if you watch the news like you watch wrestling, [as if] you never know what’s true, it would be more accurate, you’d have a better sense of the world if you took it all in like it was pro wrestling... [I highly recommend Rick’s book, podcasts, and he is an inspiration to what we will build!]

Insiders tell us ‘trust the news, trust our institutions, trust us!’ Outsiders increasingly watch the ‘news’ a la Rick Rubin. Insiders tell us ‘Twitter is collapsing, Twitter is evil, everybody should leave, I’m leaving’ — on Twitter, for years. Is this fake or real? Do all these MPs, journalists and minor academics really believe they understand managing technology companies better than the guy who built SpaceX? It seems too fake to be true yet it is true and they cannot see the absurdity — as if they stumbled onto a WWE set where everybody knows they are the ‘heel’ act, except them.

They are the biggest sources of ‘disinformation’ but they think ‘the real problem is voters fooled by disinformation and collapsing trust in us’. The more they fail, the more voters hate them, and the more they blame the voters for being the ‘real problem’. There’s a repeated intensification of the D.O.S against itself.

But unlike in WWE, few of the players realise it’s fake — in politics most players follow fake scripts but think they’re real…

The fake has spread across all politics:

• Fake experts (public health 2020). E.g look at how the Guardian covered rapid testing. In Q3-Q4 2020 rapid tests were ‘dangerous’, ‘more Tory corruption’. Then the script flipped 180 degrees. Suddenly the Tories were evil for not being aggressive enough in pushing rapid tests. Much of the media followed the same narrative arc. And there was no discussion of this Narrative Whiplash: it was invisible inside the Simulacrum. The few thousand MPs, hacks, broadcast producers et al who determine ‘news’ just switched what they said without any reflection. If you ask Guardian hacks themselves about it none of them now remember it and are baffled when you say ‘get out your phone and google rapid tests from November 2020 / January 2021’.

• Fake news. See below.

• Fake policies. E.g Rwanda was designed by Boris as an alternative to an actual plan in the accurate belief Tory MPs would be dumb enough to fall for for it because for 20 years they’ve always fallen for every attempt to divert them from the ECHR. His ploy worked as planned. MPs and the media, including media purportedly in favour of actually solving the problem, spent two years discussing the farce as if it was a serious idea. The madness was so intense that it even seems to have shifted PM Sunak himself, who originally realised it was fake, into treating it as real.

• Fake inquiries. The Iraq inquiry did nothing to change the Cabinet Office pathologies. Ironically, the DHSC Permanent Secretary told the covid Inquiry that he’d tried to stop an actual expert attend SAGE during covid because he was trying to ‘learn lessons’ from the Iraq Inquiry! In the covid Inquiry, scientists say under oath ‘I thought X on date Y in 2020’ when there is a YouTube video of them saying the exact opposite of X on date Y. The Inquiry lawyers never say ‘I’m not accusing you of lying but you gave an interview on Y in which you said the opposite of what you now say under oath you thought on Y, how do you explain this?’ Nobody inside the Simulacrum cares. (I asked the Inquiry lawyers why they ignore this. They refused to answer.) The Official Line is the Inquiry must give the judge all information relevant to the PM’s state of mind in spring 2020 but the Cabinet Office censored my official evidence to remove important information and even stopped the judge seeing it. The real official policy has been over-written with fake versions, spread mimetically via the MSM and Inquiry, and will probably become the Official Truth in the Official Inquiry. The fake becomes ‘real’, the ‘serious’ people herd to the fake story, the real story becomes a ‘conspiracy theory’ for ‘cranks’ and ‘fascists’.

• Fake intelligence. E.g WMD in Iraq, Ukraine.

• Fake budgets. E.g the massive secret nuclear weapons budget black hole eating the MoD like PacMan.

• Fake responsibility. Every scandal: ‘never again’. Response to every scandal: more regulation and bureaucracy making everything worse. Ministerial responsibility was real in 1795. It’s now fake. Cabinet government was real in 1795 and 1895. It’s now fake.

• Fake democracy. Whoever wins >99% of the same people stay in charge. Increasingly parts of the deep state are shifted to entities with zero political oversight and this is defended as ‘preserving an independent civil service’, e.g the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office which refused to allow any political observation of its functioning in 2019-20 and the PM sadly allowed this to continue.

• Fake wars where the real causal structure is almost totally invisible. E.g Ukraine.

  • Ukraine had such a big Nazi problem that Congress passed legislation making it illegal to fund neo-Nazi groups (2021). Those Nazi groups were redefined as ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘heroes’ (2022). We now supply them with weapons which they carry into battle while wearing famous symbols of Nazi death squads.

  • The outbreak of war had ‘nothing to do with Ukraine joining NATO’ (2/2022). Then in September 2023, Stoltenberg suddenly blurted out that Russia said in 2021 that Russia would not invade if NATO abandoned Ukraine joining NATO and NATO refused. Then the official line became: UKR must join NATO. But when Putin said this was the goal in 2/2022, NPCs screamed LIAR and if someone said this seemed true NPCs screamed ‘Putin shill’. Such Narrative Whiplash is invisible inside the Simulacrum.

  • We must continue the war because it’s weakening Russia (2022). The war has strengthened Russia so must continue until it weakens Russia (2024).

  • Putin blew up the gas pipeline (2022). Ukraine special forces blew up the pipeline (briefed by CIA to NYT, 2023, and now widely accepted as true).

The ‘senile Biden’ story is a great recent case study of the Simulacrum’s invisible Narrative Whiplash. I described it above. The ‘mainstream’ world — from the New York Times to CNN and the Guardian and BBC — either ignored the issue or when forced to confront it defined it as ‘disinformation’. The dumb voters had been conned by those pesky Ruskis again. After the decision was published not to prosecute Biden over his classified documents case, partly on the grounds that a jury would regard him as gaga, the MSM went crazy attacking the guy as spreading disinformation and clearly partisan — weeks later Biden blew up. [Added 29/11. When videos of Biden freezing and appearing unable to speak started circulating, the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told the assembled media that were ‘cheap fake videos’ and disinformation, which was faithfully reported by CNN, NYT etc.]

The censorship-disinformation complex including academics in ‘political science’ and psychology reinforced ‘disinformation’ to the ‘mainstream’ media. This Professor of Psychology (Cambridge) specialises in ‘misinformation’. His book was blurbed to the max by FT pundits. This is the sort of analysis they think is ground truth. He got a Nature paper in 2023 in which he defined the ‘Biden is gaga’ story as ‘misinformation’. But that’s not the most revealing thing.

After Biden’s debate collapse when the entire mainstream media did their Narrative Whiplash and had to face the humiliating realty, this Cambridge Professor of misinformation took to Twitter to double down. He attacked Nate Silver and claimed that he’d been totally right all along because ‘THE EXPERTS’ had said so — and before making any further comments post-debate, citizens must wait for ‘THE EXPERTS’ to inform them about Biden’s medical situation!! Unsurprisingly, this charlatan is part of the swarm to ban Twitter and advocated ‘restricting access to the site or getting it banned from the app store’. Can’t have anybody spreading the idea that Biden is gaga before the ‘experts’ weigh in!

You will not be surprised after reading his tweets below to know that he also waged a war to label discussion of the lab leak ‘misinformation’ and even this year said a) ‘the lab leak was never plausible from a scientific standpoint’, which is clearly nonsense given the number of world class experts who think it is plausible-to-likely, and b) the lab leak theory was ‘instrumentalized by racist xenophobes’ (many hacks including NYT closed down argument in 2020 by calling it racist). As Nate Silver has said, this professor’s claims are a great example of ‘where misinformation experts engage in misinformation themselves’.

So top hacks paid to be the best informed and professors were stunned by Biden’s debate debacle in a way that swing voters in rural Wisconsin who watch little political news were not.

Are they all lying? Or are they delusional? On any given story it’s hard to know how much is lies and how much is delusions. I think generally it’s something like <5% lying and >95% are simply mimetic NPC nodes in the network. Clearly Mehdi Hasan actually believed his constant claims that Biden was fine and the gaga story was disinformation. People don’t usually leave themselves open to such embarrassment.

The Russiagate hoax

A big part of the reason for the elite madness since 2016 is that Insiders created the Russia hoax in 2016 then it spread mimetically through elites then they persuaded themselves the voters were stupid for not understanding it. This broke their brains on Brexit and Trump then it metastised

You can’t understand the Ukraine herding or the recent campaign without understanding how the Russiagate hoax morphed the war on Trump into the war on Putin back into the war on Trump.

If you look carefully you’ll see an extremely strong overlap between those with the most extreme views on:

• escalating in Ukraine,

• open hatred for Russia to an extent that would be condemned as ‘racist’ if applied to any other group, including open support for burning of Russian books in Ukraine with no self-reflection of the Nazi overtones (!!)

• Trump derangement

• supporting censorship

• supporting DEI etc.

At its leading edge, Russiagate has morphed to the following claim: the legal investigations into Trump’s collusion with Putin failed to find evidence because Putin with Trump’s help penetrated the FBI and covertly scuppered the investigation. Checkmate! (Cf. Professor Snyder for this gem.)

Cadwalladr and others got the story going in Britain then it took off after Trump’s win, helped by people like Jake Sullivan (now NSA). The domestic enemy, Trump, was in league with the foreign enemy, Putin — the move made historically by totalitarians to justify repression — then both were labelled ‘fascists’.

Anybody who understands digital marketing and Facebook understood from the start that the 2016-17 hoax about Facebook/Cambridge Analytica/me/Bannon/AIQ etc was laughable. The obviousness is partly why Facebook and the Trump administration handled it so badly at the start — neither could believe people would take it seriously. Silicon Valley obviously has many of the world’s experts on this. So many SV players saw the White House and MSM repeatedly make bogus/dishonest arguments and keep doubling down on it. 

This hoax morphed into a long, complex and often illegal scandal involving incompetence and worse in the CIA, NSA, DNI, FBI etc. It’s now a matter of public record that there was repeated illegal access to FISA data. And this unlawfully obtained information was used to justify FBI surveillance of the Trump 2016 campaign then was unlawfully leaked to the media to undermine Trump and spread the Russiagate hoax. And they mobilised dozens of senior officials from the CIA, DNI, FBI etc to lie on TV about all this.

If you want to understand details, Steve Hsu’s blog has the receipts including the declassified documents. NB. the NSA director Rogers under oath explained he came to a different conclusion on Russian election interference to the CIA. In 2016 Rogers shut down unlawful FBI and contractor access to the FISA Search System after which DNI director Clapper — who went on TV pushing the Hunter Biden laptop as ‘Russian disinformation’ — asked Obama to remove him from NSA.

Two years ago I was hanging around waiting to meet someone in a private jet hanger in the American desert and started chatting to another guy waiting for someone to show up. I introduced myself. He laughed and told me his job. He was one of the most senior career CIA officials of the past 20 years who has briefed Presidents many many times. We had a somewhat surreal chat about Russiagate. I asked him an obvious question: Why did John Brennan push the Russia election interference so hard to Obama in 2016? He stared into the distance for some seconds and replied, ‘John just really fucked up, he connected dots he shouldn’t have connected, we told him he was wrong.’ I also stared into the distance and pondered on how much of ‘history’ is actually weird spectral phantasms like the Russiagate hoax. We now know that Brennan admitted under oath (Congressional testimony, secret then declassified) that he had no evidence of Russia collusion, while saying the opposite in public as part of the disinformation campaign.

As far as I’m aware no senior person has been punished for their lies or crimes in this scandal — a scandal much worse than Watergate. Not even 0.1% of UK journalists who covered the story have a clue about all this.

The real victims were leading politicians, journalists, academics and hyper-online graduate news junkies, not ‘low information voters’. When the senior political adviser to Reid Hoffman, a rich, very well-connected super-Insider anti-Trumper, heard about the attempted Trump assassination, he sent a ranting email to the media that they should be investigating how the assassination attempt had been staged because it’s ‘classic Putin’ and, well, obviously, as we all know from the Ukraine war, Putin = Trump!

With the UK riots you can also see those who helped push the Russia-gate hoax into the mainstream media pushing similarly deranged disinformation into the mainstream while claiming they are fighting Russian disinformation. And those who swallowed the hoax turn everything into a ‘it’s secretly Putin’ story.

Collapse of consensus reality

These problems are, I think, part of a deeper long-term shift.

In 1815, French soldiers picked up and tossed across Europe had no clue what was going on. Consensus reality did not exist in the way we think of it. The telegraph, mass newspapers, radio, cinema, TV etc then created extremely centralised institutions where individual decisions from Stalin or the BBC or NBC could create consensus reality for hundreds of millions. This world is collapsing fast. We increasingly resemble 1815 more than 1950.

I think this is very hard for graduates to grasp, partly because it’s really hard to understand one’s own position in a big historical shift and partly because understanding of technology and the internet is so appalling among political/media elites. And as the amount of content generated by AI models heads towards ~99% of all content, including video, short-term our old ideas on consensus reality will collapse. Perhaps live events and cryptographically identified as ‘true’ content will become more important? Cf. excellent essays by Jon Askonas linked below.

Here I’ll summarise a few Top of the Pops since the 1990s.

• The euro will be a triumph, Britain will have to join. 

• Putin is a ‘reformer’, we can do business with him, Russia will get closer to the EU (maybe even join).

• ‘Mission accomplished’ in Iraq. 

• We will build democracy and women’s/gay rights in Iraq.

• We will build democracy and women’s/gay rights in Afghanistan.

• Devolution will kill Scottish nationalism.

• The financial system is sound, derivatives like CDOs and CDSs lower systemic risk, Buffett and Munger are out of date, ‘this time it’s different’. 

• We will build democracy and women’s/gay rights in Libya.

• David Cameron is a serious PM. 

• We should make nuclear power almost impossible to build (even though we want Net Zero).

• Diesel is environmentally friendly.

• ‘The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights will have the same legal force as the Beano.’ [For foreign readers: the Beano is a famous old comic, the Charter is now enforced by the European Court of Justice]

• Social media is wonderful, Zuckerberg is a hero, it helped Obama win and the Arab Spring spread!

• Vote Leave are idiots and can’t win. 

• Brexit means Scotland will soon leave the UK.

• Trump is a joke and can’t win. 

• Leave and Trump won because Putin deployed magic Facebook/Cambridge Analytica/Jedi-mind-bending tech.

• Brexit will empower the Far Right in UK.

• The tech bros are panicking on covid. 

• It’s racist to shut the borders. 

• Surgical masks won’t stop covid. 

• Covid transmits by touch, don’t worry about air.

• It’s impossible to speed up vaccine research.

• The idea of a lab leak is racist and/or a conspiracy theory, trust Fauci. 

• Rapid tests are dangerous.

• The new vaccines are dangerous. [It’s forgotten now but this was the line from Democrats like Biden before November 2020 when it was ‘Trump’s vaccine’, then they flipped 360 degrees on vaccines after the 2020 election then the DEMs defined what they’d said themselves as ‘misinformation’ and censored it.]

• Trump called Nazis ‘good people’. [Watch the whole speech and you’ll see you got psyopd again and the entire mainstream media lied about this for years by tricky editing.]

• Elon’s plans for Tesla are mad and will fail.

• Elon’s plans for SpaceX are mad and will fail.

• Elon’s plans for Starlink are mad and will fail.

• Cummings pushing No10 to buy a LEO satellite network is mad.

• Cummings pushing MOD on drones and AI is mad.

• Cummings setting up a data science/AI team in the PM’s office is mad.

• Cummings getting Boris to push BUILD BUILD BUILD is mad, MPs want stability not ‘disruption’ [i.e growth and productivity improvement].

• Boris will govern for a decade, Cummings has no chance of pushing him out.

• Inflation is transitory. 

• EU dependence on Russian gas is a good trade, shutting German nuclear down is reasonable [remember how the ‘serious’ people laughed at Trump when he warned of the leverage it gave Putin?]

• Ukraine will lose immediately. 

• Russia is collapsing, Ukraine will win fast. 

• China and the Global South will support the West on Ukraine.

• Sanctions will work.

• Putin was mad to invade… Putin won’t use nukes he’s not mad.

• Putin’s invasion was nothing to do with NATO (2/2022)… Putin invaded because of NATO expansion (NATO Secretary General, 2023).

• Russia blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, proving how mad/dangerous they are. [The NYT was briefed months later it was actually Ukraine that blew it up.]

• Truss is underestimated as a politician, she’ll lead Tories into next election.

• Starmer is a serious PM, the civil service will be fine once he’s PM and serious characters like Sue Gray are in No10.

• The Southport stabbings had nothing to do with Islam, the real danger here is an Islamophobic backlash. [NB. We now know No10 and the PM knew through August, when they were pushing this line through the media, that the Southport murderer had Al Qaeda manuals and ricin.]

• Trump is a joke and can’t win (redux). 

• AI is a fad/bubble.

• Elon doesn’t understand managing tech companies, he’s broken Twitter, it’s about to collapse, see you on [Threads/Mastodon/Bluesky].

• Biden is not senile, this is Russian disinformation, he’s doing a great job.

• Elon doesn’t understand politics, he’s embarrassing himself in the 2024 campaign.

• Kamala is an incredibly strong candidate.

• The Selzer poll is huge!

• ‘The election is the final straw, I’m leaving Twitter, I’m off to Bluesky, and actually echo chambers are GOOD!’ [echo chambers were bad after 2016]

• Mainstream news is unbiased! Disinformation is the real problem, we need more government censorship!! If you disagree you’re Far Right!!!

On and on and on…

Here’s an example you can see play out today. Smart mostly young people are deploying LLM/generative AI tools as assistants in very creative ways and this is replacing knowledge work by humans. This trend is already clearly visible in various published stats. But if you look at the top 50 SW1 pundits and that surrounding network, you will see them all retweeting joke articles from websites that exist to trash Silicon Valley, laughing about AI is ‘just a fad/bubble’, laughing that tech companies are Ponzi schemes etc. This has become the socially approved thing to do among political Insiders, despite a) the huge weight of scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs having the opposite view and b) the economic foundations of NPC lives are being demolished as they tweet.

And here’s an example of how elite delusions directly affect government. Such clear admissions are rare. Here, the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office describes how SW1 was caught up in a delusion in the last week of the Brexit referendum. NB. Anybody doing focus groups at this time knew that the SW1 reaction was totally opposite to outside the M25 reaction. Such delusions meant the civil service did not prepare for our victory, contributing to the chaos.

Every new important thing I’ve ever observed is seen last in SW1 — you don’t have to be quick or insightful to be ahead of political Insiders, second slowest is enough! In Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin infamously said, Always Be Closing. SW1 is programmed: Always Be Last.

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A few thoughts on the future

[COMING!]

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READING

Listen to pollster Ruffini. He seems one of the few who had a good grasp of what was happening.

Plouffe and other Kamala campaign give first reactions. A few interesting points.

a/ The campaign director claims that their data was better calibrated in 24 than in 20 and 16 but she also says they had the battleground states basically dead even so implicitly she’s admitting it was off in similar ways to the polls.

b/ The debate got huge media play as a ‘disaster for Trump’ but their internal data showed maybe a point improvement [i.e noise / non-response bias].

c/ Listening to some of her staff (not Plouffe) I think many could conclude ‘we lost because the fundamentals were terrible, but we did better where we campaigned, so we’re confident she was a good candidate’. Wrong.

d/ Their internal data showed the best Trump ad was ‘Bidenomics’.

e/ They tested a lot of responses to the they/them ad but nothing worked well so they decided to focus on their own story. As Plouffe says (paraphrase), the trans medical spending was her position, Trump wasn’t lying, rebutting it was tricky!

f/ The campaign director says (1:17:40), ‘It is never going to be we have to make choices about one type of voter versus another.’ Wrong, you do, that’s what campaigns are!

g/ They do not discuss the big issue of Biden staying in so long though they keep saying ‘we had no time’. They confirm they were trying to keep Biden in the race to the end, they did not work preparing for Kamala until Biden dropped out.

g/ They sort of talk about the problem with how campaign groups push the DEMs in damaging ways while the GOP supports Trump. But they swerve serious discussion.

h/ They sort of admit ‘we’re losing the culture war’. They hint at the trans/commie madness but don’t really discuss it.

The discussion is overall depressing. There is almost no direct engagement with a core fact of the election: moderate voters, committed to neither GOP nor DEM, concluded the DEMs have become more crazy than Trump despite a UNITED MSM fully campaigning for Kamala. There is absolutely no facing that voters have seen through the massive constant lies of the old media.

The Obama Machine, Michael Lind.

Listen to the a16 podcast and @pmarca/Rogan podcast linked above to understand Valley dynamics.

Look at Professor Hsu’s blog for many posts on Russiagate and the declassified documents showing massive lies and crimes from the DEM regime. And for the latest on AI, drones, PRC etc.

Listen to Ezra Klein talk to Anne Applebaum post-election if you want to get a sense of how the Russiagate brainworm took over so much of the intelligentsia. On one hand she talks like ‘democracy is dead’ while also talking about future elections — one of many signs of amazing cognitive dissonance.

To get a feel for the new media ecosystem. Watch Theo Von interview Dana White. Best bit is Dana on ripping out Peloton. Watch Theo Von talk to Joe Rogan — two top comedians, if your conclusion is ‘unfunny retard nazis’ you must try harder! Watch Theo Von interview Trump. Watch Rogan interview Trump.

Jon Askonas on modern media, on consensus reality, and on conservatism and technology.

I’ve mentioned before a deranged economic professor, Simon Wren Lewis. He thinks voting for Brexit is the same as supporting QAnon. I explained how people like this believe a form of the Communist ‘false consciousness’ theory — voters don’t really think ‘we want less immigration’, they say this to pollsters because of false consciousness. Here he is, as predicted, saying that Trump’s victory proves why we need more censorship to stop voters disagreeing with Oxbridge professors. He says that the Democrats lost because Trump has ‘a megaphone’ — TRUMP! Anybody who thinks that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT etc are a ‘megaphone’ for Trump is, obviously, living in a parallel world. What would SWL say if forced to look at the Hitler graphic of the MSM megaphone above? SWL speaks for many UK academics.

I’ll drop other things in here as they pop up…

Some other things by me relevant:

Dostoyevsky, the modern intelligentsia, the spiritual crisis of the West, regime change

Oakeshott on rationalism and politics, 2022, which touched on Elon and elite fragmentation

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Other Snippets

Dwarkesh interviews Gwern - you probably haven’t heard of Gwern but his blog is one of the wonders of the internet and is super-influential in Silicon Valley. He’s an anonymous blogger who understood the importance of scaling years before many tenured professors of AI at elite universities.

A piece on the disgraceful persecution by Labour and Tories of UK special forces. I tried to do something about this in No10. It’s another example of the catastrophic effect of politicians handing political responsibility to lawyers combined with the collapse of leadership in the MOD and Cabinet Office plus the ECHR/HRA.

German industrial production

Talk 1 by me in Oxford recently

Talk 2 by me in Oxford recently

UPDATE Napoleon / Pitt etc blog.

More self-sabotage from the EU Commission on tech, reclassifying software as a product thereby significantly

Consider the following facts:

• 80% of space cargo is launched by a single company, SpaceX

• Up to 95% of AI computing chips are designed by one firm

• 100% of approved mRNA vaccines have been developed by two firms

• The three frontier labs driving progress in AI have around 8000 employees combined — no more than 0.2% of the tech sector

• Five firms (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft) collectively account for almost twice as much R&D as the entire EU public sector.

• The ≈7.5 million people in the Bay Area have created more tech value than the ≈750 million people in all of Europe.

Other things that undermine the EU:

• The EU AI Act and other digital regulations compress the distribution rather than encourage experimentation and risk-taking.

• Solvency II's high risk classification of VC investments constrain insurers' venture funding capabilities.¹⁰

• National regulations for pension funds restrict their exposure to VC, and AIFMD rules that govern funds larger than $500 million restrict VC participation to accredited ‘professional investors’ ¹¹

• Bankruptcy rules in Europe mean people remain hindered by failure far longer than in the US.

The big point here is the one Vote Leave made 2015-16: the Commission is in charge of these policies and they do not prioritise or understand these issues, many officials are driven by hate for US companies’ success (hence their ludicrous predictions on the effects of GDPR).

It’s good that understanding of the Commission’s pathologies is spreading but I am pessimistic that European politicians will act. Only when things are much worse in the next financial/economic crash will politicians, under pressure, think seriously about a new path.

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I finally got around to finishing the Ghost blog on the CIA — final section summarising the very long blog here.

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