Who Is Pulling the Strings?

And Other Short Takes on the News

I’m working on a longer piece that I will post either tonight or over the weekend but there are some things to say.

The Onion reveals just how unfunny they’ve become with their really un-funny fake interview with JK Rowling:

That is just one example of the dumb “jokes” on this piece. They’ve hired someone who doesn’t know how to be funny but only knows how to be pathetic and whiny, aka “not funny.” The Onion used to be so great. They used to be funny. What happened? Well, you know what happened.

While taking a political side isn’t usually that funny, puncturing sanctimony is funny. Mocking Gavin Newsom’s California is funny:

And that’s why they can’t be funny on the Left anymore. They can’t make fun of themselves. If there ever was a group of people – uptight, puritanical, hypocritical — who were in desperate need of being made fun of, it’s them.

Who’s Pulling the Strings?

First, from the mail bag, a letter from reader Todd:

In your article you stated. ” The Democrats folded. The media pandered. Corporations surrendered.” I am looking for answers to why all this is happening in our society the same as you are. I more closely believe that the corporations are actually in control of everything. Follow the money. If you believe that your statement is true, then who do you believe is pulling the strings? If it is not the democrats, media or corporations, that only leaves Republican politicians or entities such as the WHO, or WEF types? I appreciate any thoughts you may have on this matter.

I think Vivek Ramaswamy has offered up the clearest explanation to the bigger picture of how things changed and why they changed, at least from the top down. He calls it the Great Reset vs. the Great Uprising. His book, Woke, Inc explains how corporations have evolved since the Wall Street bailout of 2008. The idea is that, in order to take the heat off of themselves they began pivoting toward the identity-focused politics of the Left. Now, all they have to do is virtue signal and that gives them unlimited power.

This streamlines nicely with Neil Howe’s generational theory that 2008 was the crisis that sparked the Fourth Turning. That was the moment the growing disconnect between monopolies and banks that were too big to fail was challenged by the people. Occupy Wall Street was a problem, especially since President Obama was in power at the time.

The shift away from a populist revolt toward “identity politics” was something I lived through. I was one of the Hillary Clinton/Blue Check Democrats trying to suppress and eliminate the threat from the populists on the Left (Bernie Sanders and his movement) and on the Right (Trump and MAGA).

Ramaswamy’s focus is more on “Woke Capitalism,” the massive monopolies are using the new religion of the Left to amass more power by appealing to Generation Z and, in effect, taking us to global totalitarianism.

I see the “why” of it slightly differently. I do think at its core there were good intentions by the Left to create a utopian vision for American life. The problem was that we had essentially cut ourselves off completely from the other half of America. As a culture, wealth, and institutional power began shifting left, the polarization became more extreme.

Most on the Left would say that the Right also became more extreme. But I have not found that to be the case. They’re doing what Conservatives have always done throughout our history – trying to hold fast to the founding principles and traditionalism – yes, this is true even of the Proud Boys. The Democrats want everyone to think that the Trump Right, the populists are mouth-frothing, chest-beating “white supremacists,” but that is a delusion that drives their hysteria and sends them deeper into their isolated fear bunker.

Things didn’t get really bad until Trump won in 2016. That wasn’t in the script for the utopian Left. They believed they had changed America and it was never “going back.” They saw Trump’s rise as a rejection of the first Black President and potentially, the first female President. (Although they now have to change that phrase to “first President who identifies as female.”)

They had expected to toss Trump around for a while like a cat playing with a mouse and then discard him in a humiliating fashion to “smash” the White Male Patriarchy at long last. But it didn’t work out that way. What we saw in the next four years was a slow-moving coup by extremely wealthy, powerful, privileged people who wanted this guy out of their country.

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