Lew Rockwell Institute

Many of my fellow Substack authors are expressing dismay this morning about President Trump’s announcement of his Stargate deal with Oracle’s Larry Ellison, SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Especially alarming are Larry Ellison’s Start Trek geek comments about fusing A.I. and mRNA technologies. Like a lot of tech dorks, Ellison grossly overestimates our understanding of biology, which I believe is vastly more complex than electronics and algorithmic learning.

However, I agree with Jeff Childers that it’s better for President Trump to try to capture the Billionaire Nerds instead of shunning them.

Though I see grounds for extreme vigilance, I’m also inclined to adopt the optimistic view that it’s far better for Trump to have these potentially dangerous men on his side than to shun them. I have read Larry Ellison’s biography, and I believe he is one of the most formidable guys who has ever lived.

If I were president, I would far rather have him very close to me than shun him, leaving him completely untethered to direct A.I. schemes from his island lair on Lanai. Snubbing him would be the equivalent of the Roman Senate telling Julius Caesar to relinquish command of his army and return to Rome, which didn’t work out for the Senate.

These guys are going to run with A.I.—as are the Chinese—whether the U.S. government wants them to or not. Though I reiterate that his development is indeed cause for concern and vigilance, I intuitively sense that President Trump is making the right moves with them.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Capturing the Billionaire Nerds & Their A.I. appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Dread Pirate Roberts is a free man.

Like so many who have called for Ross Ulbricht’s freedom for the past eleven years, I never fully believed I would see this day. And, like many of us, I have heard all kinds of (ignorant) reasons why I should not be supporting him.

“He’s a drug dealer!”

“He ordered a hit on a father of three!”

Neither of these are true. If you want to know what he actually did, and why he was caged for eleven years, here is a place to start.

There is a much bigger issue at stake though, than the particulars of Ross’s case.

Sarah Thompson puts it well:

“Ross Ulbricht embodies the most important issues and ideals of our time. He is just a man, human and fallible, and also an icon: the quiet hero, an innovator so threatening to the established order that they had to bury him. To a small group of people, they made him a martyr instead. And, beyond hope, he is free, having faced the darkness.

“Our choices are Ross or Klaus Schwab. We can’t have both; any drift towards Schwab washes us over the precipice. We still stand on a knife’s edge. But, for this moment, the sun has broken through the murk low on the horizon. Let us not forget our hearts when it sets. The world is still in spin.”

The government did not put Ross Ulbricht in prison because he was a criminal. Ross committed no crime against anyone. But he, and the platform he helped to build, did threaten the government’s monopoly on crime. And that is why they had to lock him up: To send an unmistakably clear message to anyone else who might think about doing anything similar.

When Barack Obama ordered a hit on a US citizen and his sixteen-year-old son, along with other innocent people, nobody threw him in a cage. And I’d be very surprised to find that any of those who were cheering for Ross’s incarceration have likewise called for Obama to be incarcerated for his many crimes.

Too many people are in love with criminals in positions of power. So in love that they can’t even recognize what is going on. So let me explain:

Every time you make an exchange with someone, whether you’re being paid as an employee, hiring someone to work on your house, or picking up cat litter at the grocery store, the government takes a piece of it.

There’s no reason for this, it’s just because they can.

If you think there is a reason, if you think that taxation is justified because “we need it to pay for our military… or public schools… or roads!”, then I’m going to suggest that you haven’t thought this through. Even if you still believe that we need to have someone steal money from people in order to pay for necessary things (and if you do still believe that, I recommend doing a little reading to correct the problem), you cannot reasonably believe that the way in which these things need to be paid for is by taking a percentage cut of every transaction everyone partakes in.

This makes no sense. No legitimate business operates this way. You don’t go out to dinner and pay some fraction of your income for the meal. Nor do we purchase cars this way, nor clothing, nor homes, nor gasoline… nor anything at all. We pay prices for these things, and those prices make some kind of sense given what it costs to make them and how much other people value them.

So… the government takes money from us – as much as it possibly can – and there’s very little we can do about that. We are then asked to believe that the government will spend the money it has taken in ways that are better for us than the ways we would have spent it.

The next step, is that we get things like million-dollar toilet seats; lots of wars in countries we know nothing about and have no problem with; schools that turn out graduates who can barely read but who fervently believe they need the state in order to function in the world; government agencies that forcibly prevent people from helping each other during natural disasters; and entire states burning to the ground.

Oh, and the government also steals wealth from us by inflating the money supply.

Silk Road, and the advent of cryptocurrency, threatened all of that. By providing a platform for people to make anonymous exchanges, it bypassed the routes by which the state is able to take from us.

And while, no, Bitcoin does not itself provide anonymity, the hope (at least early on) was that it would create an alternate currency that could not be inflated by anyone. That hope may yet bear fruit.

That is why Ross was thrown into a cage for eleven years. Not because he hurt anyone, not because he stole from anyone. Not because he committed any kind of genuine crime (the kind that requires a victim) at all. He was thrown into a cage because he helped to create something that posed an existential threat to someone else’s actual criminal activities.

That’s it.

We will always have criminals among us. There will always be a few – hopefully very few – people who don’t mind using violence to get what they want. But our entire society does not need to be based upon this principle.

The system we currently live with is not one that protects us from criminals, but one that provides a safe space for large-scale criminals: Those who steal and kill with impunity – and who criminalize actions for the rest of us that are not in fact crimes.

The question before us is whether we wish to continue to live in a system that is founded on crime. Silk Road, and all of those who used it, answered that question with a resounding “NO.” We can do that too. We can reject the system of state violence. We can seek out ways to live that do not involve the state and that indeed help to subvert it. We can, each of us, look for ways, not to co-opt the institution of the state, nor to get “our people” in there, but to dismantle it entirely, and build in its place a society founded on genuine law and order, rather than rule by a criminal elite.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s bust outta this joint.

The post Ross Is Free – We Can Be Too! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Bruce McLane.

The post Shots do provide immunity it seems appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

In other words, he is saying that he has proof that it was a Fedsurrection.

The post J6 Political Prisoner Says He Has Evidence Proving Pelosi Was Behind J6 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Rick Rozoff:

Bishop Strickland criticizes Cardinal Dolan for not using the name of Jesus in Trump inauguration prayer

During his prayer, Dolan mentioned several people by name, including Trump, former President Joe Biden, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. However, Jesus’ name was not used once.

Instead, Dolan addressed the prayer to “God, Supreme among the Nations, Supreme on the earth.”

In fact, Dolan was outdone by Protestant Franklin Graham, who ended his prayer “in the name of the King of kings, the Lord of Lords, Your Son, my Savior, and our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

The post Who’s he? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Murray Sabrin writes:

Lew:

One of the best articles about insurance and risk.

The post The World Is Getting Riskier. Americans Don’t Want to Pay for It. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner writes:

Lew,

After years of litigation, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), founded by Del Bigtree who also hosts the High Wire program, has acquired critical FDA safety reports concerning Covid shots. From ICAN: 

During the pandemic, FDA conducted analyses of COVID-19 vaccine adverse events and tried to hide the results from the public. After two years of FOIA requests and lawsuits, FDA finally produced a portion of its “Empirical Bayesian (EB) data mining” reports. This type of analysis was designed to detect COVID-19 vaccine safety signals using VAERS reports. The data should be very revealing as far as what issues FDA was seeing during the vaccine rollout—especially given the agency has kept this data secret for years. This is the first time this critical data has been released to the public.

An initial review of the records produced has revealed a long list of adverse events that far surpassed FDA’s “standard alert threshold”—meaning, there is (or should have been) great concern on the part of federal health authorities who were privy to this data. As just one example, ICAN discovered that “heavy menstrual bleeding” and “menstruation irregular” began showing up on the reports as early as April 2021!

The EB analyses are one type of report that FDA and CDC were supposed to be producing as part of the safety monitoring of the COVID-19 vaccines. If you recall, CDC planned to detect safety signals using a method called Proportional Reporting Ratio, or PRR. After denying that any PRR records existed, ICAN was forced to sue in order to obtain CDC’s PRR data. Once we received it, it became exceedingly clear why CDC tried to keep it buried: numerous concerning conditions far exceeded CDC’s threshold for safety detection! We expect to see much of the same with the EB data.

ICAN is working on an in-depth analysis of this sought-after EB data and will update you with its findings. We encourage other independent analysts to do the same.

The post More Evidence the FDA Knew the Covid Shots Weren’t Safe appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin:

NY Post

Perhaps Putin should pay attention.  See what Trump did to Vince McMahon.

The post Trump Gives Putin Ukraine-War Ultimatum appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes a friend:

Have just re-read The New Book of Martyrs by French novelist Georges Duhamel. Duhamel was an army surgeon throughout the four years of World War I; this volume was published in the third year of that war. The author later became one of the preeminent novelists of the last century but, as is not infrequently the case, one not valued at his true worth. The New Book of Martyrs, linked below, was based on his direct experience treating war wounded on the Western Front. It is written with great gentleness and compassion, but I cannot imagine anyone reading the book, especially the chapter titled Sacrifice, who reading or hearing the word war isn’t overcome with horror and revulsion.

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Thanks John Smith:

Boston Review

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Andy Thomas writes:

“If it’s not Vitamin C or Vitamin D, don’t put it in your body unless you absolutely have to.”

See here.

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Writes Gail Appel:

Where is PETA?

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The post Mad Blitz! Trump Hits The Ground RUNNING! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Zero Hedge

The post All Federal DEI Offices To Be Closed By Wednesday EOD, Workers Placed On Paid Leave: White House appeared first on LewRockwell.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò congratulated Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. elections, deeming it a divine intervention against the ‘criminal’ New World Order and calling on Christians to pray for Trump’s success in dismantling ‘deep state’ influence.

Editor’s note: The following story is taken from a brief post on X (formerly Twitter) by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò following the election of Donald Trump as 47th President of the United States of America.

(LifeSiteNews) — Donald J. Trump’s victory in the electoral competition for the presidency of the United States of America constitutes a historic moment in the dramatic events of the present and marks a formidable setback for the criminal plan of the New World Order.

“I express my warmest congratulations to President Trump, while I thank Our Lord for having prevented the United States and the Western world from definitively falling into the tentacles of the deep state and globalist tyranny.

“The battle against the subversive elite of psychopathic criminals who hold the West hostage is not over; it now begins.

“I urge American Catholics and all Christians to pray for President Trump, so that the Lord may protect him in this transition phase towards taking office in the White House, guiding him in the unavoidable eradication of the lobby of corrupt and perverted people subservient to the deep state. His determined action against the traitors of the nation will also weaken the work of the deep church, which today holds the Catholic Church hostage.”

The post Archbishop Viganò: Trump’s Victory is a Formidable Setback for the New World Order appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks David Martin.

Mike Whitney

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Writes Ginny Garner:

Catholic Vote

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The fires in Los Angeles have been the most devastating in the city’s history. A full account of the causes of the conflagration can’t be attempted here, but in this week’s column, I’d like to talk about the responsibility of environmentalism for what happened.

By “environmentalism,” I mean a movement that is hostile to human beings, their private homes, and to industrial growth. Some of its advocates want to do away with people altogether. Instead, environmentalists want to preserve the natural world in its pristine purity.

In Los Angeles and its surrounding communities, there is an abundance of lush vegetation.  Further, there is usually very little rain during the fall and winter seasons. LA does get some rain in the spring, but as Coim Toibin remarks, “In the spring, the rain makes the scrub and the brush grow stronger so when they get dry later in the year they are liable to burn more strongly.”  This problem is exacerbated by fierce Santa Ana winds that can rapidly spread any fire that has started.

In order to cope with these difficult circumstances, it is necessary to follow a policy of controlled burning. According to David Stockman, “The failure to do just such controlled burns is exactly what is behind the LA wildfire today. That is, a dramatically larger human footprint in the fire-prone shrub-lands and chaparral (dwarf trees) areas along the coasts has increased the risk residents will start fires, accidentally or otherwise. California’s population doubled from 1970 to 2020, from about 20 million people to nearly 40 million people, and nearly all of the gain was in the coastal areas.

Under those conditions, California’s strong, naturally-occurring winds, which crest periodically, as is occurring at the moment, are the main culprit which fuels and spreads the human-set blazes in the shrub-lands. The Diablo winds in the north of the state and the Santa Ana winds in the south can actually reach hurricane force, as has also been the case this week. As the winds move West over California mountains and down toward the coast, they compress, warm and intensify.

These winds, in turn, blow flames and carry embers, spreading the fires quickly before they can be contained. And on top of that, the Santa Ana winds also function as Mother Nature’s blow-dryer. As they come down the mountains toward the sea, the hot winds dry the surface vegetation and deadwood rapidly and powerfully, paving the way for the blowing embers to fuel the spread of wildfires down the slopes.”

A policy of controlled burning is needed to deal with this, but the environmentalists oppose this, because they want to keep as much of the lush vegetation in place as possible.  “We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

In short, if you don’t clear and burn-out the deadwood, you build-up nature-defying tinder-boxes that then require only a lightening strike, a spark from an un-repaired power line or human carelessness to ignite into a raging inferno. As one 40-year conservationist and expert summarized,

There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”

It is also necessary to supply vast amounts of water to the area, but again the environmentalists oppose this. The water might disturb the habitats of a few fish and snails. This is in their insane view, a bar to what is necessary to protect the lives and property of millions of people. David Stockman explains: “In this case, state and Federal politicians have simultaneously curtailed the supply of water available to Los Angeles firefighters in order to protect so-called endangered species. Specifically, southern California is being held hostage by sharp curtailment of the water pumping rates from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in order to protect the Delta Smelt and Chinook Salmon.”

Also, fire hydrants must be kept up-to-date and equipped to handle large scale blazes. Enough fire fighters must be hired to cope with potential emergencies. In a free society, hydrants and fire fighters would be supplied by the market, but we unfortunately do not live in a free society, and it is up to the government to take care of these matters.

But Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is not interested in such matters. She was out of the city, on one of her perpetual junkets abroad, when the fires started, even though it was a matter of public knowledge that Los Angeles was in a dangerous period. The Los Angeles Times reported: “As the Palisades fire exploded in Los Angeles on Jan. 7, Mayor Karen Bass was posing for photos at an embassy cocktail party in Ghana, pictures posted on social media show.” She is, by the way, a revolutionary Communist: “Back in the 1970s, community activist Karen Bass went on at least 15 trips to Cuba, many with a group known as the Venceremos Brigade, a Marxist group started by the Castro regime to subvert American interests, weaken democracies, and spread communism around the world.”

As you would expect from such a person, Bass doe not care about public safety: “But Bass was accused of deploying sleight of hand to minimize the many very real dramas surrounding water that hindered efforts to douse the flames.

While the tanks were indeed full before the fire broke out, by Wednesday fire hydrants in Palisades had run out of water, as they are not designed for such mass-scale wildfires.

All of the three water tanks in Palisades and several fire hydrants temporarily lost water because of the high demand, as experts have explained the system is not built to fight major blazes.

The water system used to fight the Palisades fire buckled under the demands of what turned out to be the most destructive fire in city history, with some hydrants running dry as they were overstressed without assistance from firefighting aircraft for hours early Wednesday.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom is no better. As Mises Institute President Tom DiLorenzo says: “For the past two years, under the guidance/dictates of Nancy Pelosi’s nephew (aka governor of California), LA County has been sending firefighting equipment, including fire trucks, to Ukraine. Is it constitutional for a state to have its own foreign policy?  Is there really a line in the LA County budget for fire trucks for Ukraine?  Which LA County politicians ran on a platform of:  ‘Vote for me and I’ll give our firefighting equipment away to the dictator of Ukraine”?  Did anyone vote for this, or is the Newsom dictatorship really no different from the ones in Ukraine or North Korea?”

Let’s do everything we can to reverse the policies of these anti-human environmentalists!

The post Environmentalism and the Los Angeles Fires appeared first on LewRockwell.

Is a so-called Presidential “preemptive pardon” consistent with the intent and language of the Constitution? All that the Constitution says about the matter is this:

”…he (the President)  shall have the power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” {Article 2, Section 2} In the first important case to deal with these issues  ( Ex Parte Garland 71 U.S. 333, 1866) the Supreme Court (in the context of someone pardoned but still  excluded from the (state) practice of law) said the following:

“The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment. The power is not subject to legislative control.”

And it is THIS interpretation of the pardoning power that was (still) used, for instance, in the “preemptive” pardoning of Richard Nixon who, although disgraced, had not been charged with any criminal offense against the federal government. Ditto for the Biden preemptive pardons.

My comments:

a. The original language in the Constitution never explicitly mentions any “preemptive” pardoning power. Moreover, the use of the term “offenses” in the Constitution appears to imply that something legal (some process; some finding; some  determination) has ALREADY begun or occured and that the presidential pardon applies to that offense or set of offenses. If this is correct, that would rule out any preemptive pardoning power.

b. Now the language from the 1866 case cited above (and the legal foundation for the notion that a preemptive pardon is Constitutional) clearly broadens the pardoning power beyond what the Founders wrote or likely reasonably intended. After all, an “offense” PRIOR to some legal proceeding,  is NOT an offense in any legal sense but only an “alleged (legal) offense.” Nowhere, however, does the pardoning power in the Constitution even hint that the President  could pardon someone  for some ALLEGED offense against the Government; or that THAT  power could somehow be “unlimited” and beyond all legislative review. It appears, then,  that the SC majority in 1866 pulled that far broader interpretation of the pardoning power right out of thin air or, more accurately, right out of a very different theory of post Civil War Presidential prerogatives.

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The ‘strange defeat’ is that of Europe’s ‘curious’ inability to understand Ukraine or its military mechanics.

The essayist and military strategist, Aurelien, has written a paper entitled: The Strange Defeat (original in French). The ‘strange defeat’ being that of Europe’s ‘curious’ inability to understand Ukraine or its military mechanics.

Aurelien highlights the strange lack of realism by which the West has approached the crisis —

“ …and the almost pathological dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and actions. Yet, even as the situation deteriorates, and the Russian forces advance everywhere, there is no sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding – and it is very likely that it will continue to live in its alternative construction of reality until it is forcibly expelled”.

The writer continues in some detail (omitted here) to explain why NATO has no strategy for Ukraine and no real operational plan:

“It has only a series of ad hoc initiatives, linked together by vague aspirations that have no connection with real life plus the hope that ‘something [beneficial] will occur’. Our current Western political leaders have never had to develop such skills. Yet it is actually worse than that: not having developed these skills, not having advisers who have developed them, they cannot really understand what the Russians are doing, how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of chess or Go – and are trying to figure out who is winning”.

“What exactly was their goal? Now, responses such as ‘to send a message to Putin’, ‘complicate Russian logistics’, or ‘improve morale at home’ are no longer allowed. What I want to know is what is expected in concrete terms? What are the tangible results of their ‘messaging’? Can they guarantee that it will be understood? Have you anticipated the possible reactions of the Russians – and what will you do then?”

The essential problem, Aurelien bluntly concludes, is that:

“our political classes and their parasites have no idea how to deal with such crises, or even how to understand them. The war in Ukraine involves forces that are orders of magnitude larger than any Western nation has deployed on operations since 1945 … Instead of real strategic objectives, they have only slogans and fanciful proposals”.

Coldly put, the author explains that for complex reasons connected with the nature of western modernity, the liberal élites simply are not competent or professional in matters of security. And they do not understand its nature.

U.S. cultural critic Walter Kirn makes rather similar claims in a very different, yet related, context: California Fires and America’s Competency Crisis –

“Los Angeles is in flames, yet California’s leaders seem helpless, unmasking a generation of public investment in non-essential services [that leaves the Authorities floundering amidst the predicted occurrence of the fires]”.

On a Joe Rogan podcast earlier this month, a firefighter goes: “It’s just going to be the right wind and fire’s going to start in the right place and it’s going to burn through LA all the way to the ocean, and there’s not a f***ing thing we can do about it”.

Kirn observes:

“This isn’t the first fire or set of fires in Malibu. Just a few years ago, there were big fires. There always are. They’re inevitable. But having built this giant city in this place with this vulnerability, there are measures that can be taken to contain and to fend off the worst”.

“To fob it off on climate change, as I say, is a wonderful thing to tell yourself, but none of this started yesterday. My only point is this, has it done everything it can to prepare for an inevitable, unavoidable situation that perhaps in scale differs from the past, but certainly not in kind? Are its leaders up to the job? There’s not a lot of sign that they are. They haven’t been able to deal with things like homelessness without fires. So the question of whether all those things have been done, whether they’ve been done well, whether there was adequate water in fire hydrants, whether they were working at all, things like that, and whether the fire department was properly trained or properly staffed, all those questions are going to arise”.

“And as far as the competency crisis goes, I think that there will be ample material to portray this as aggravated by incompetence. California’s a state that’s become notorious for spending a lot of money on things that don’t work, on high-speed rail lines that never are constructed, on all sorts of construction projects and infrastructure projects that never come to pass. And in that context, I think this will be devastating to the power structure of California”.

“In a larger sense though, it’s going to remind people that a politics that has been for years now about language and philosophical constructs such as equity and so on, is going to be seen as having failed in the most essential way, to protect people. And that these people are powerful and influential and privileged is going to make that happen faster and in a more prominent fashion”.

To which his colleague, journalist Matt Taibbi, responds:

“But pulling back in a broader sense, we do have a crisis of competency in this country. It has had a huge impact on American politics”. Kirn: “[Americans] They’re going to want less concern for the philosophical and/or even long-term political questions of equity and so on, I predict, and they’re going to want to lay in a minimum expectation of competence in natural disasters. In other words, this is a time when the priorities shift and I think that big change is coming, big, big change, because we look like we’ve been dealing with luxury problems, and we’ve certainly been dealing with other countries’ problems, Ukraine or whoever it might be, with massive funding. There are people in North Carolina right now still recovering from a flood and having a very difficult time as winter comes, which it doesn’t in LA in the same way, or as winter consolidates itself, I guess”;

“So looking forward, it’s not a question of blame, it’s what are people going to want? What are people going to value? What are they going to prize? Are their priorities going to shift? I think they will shift big time. Los Angeles will be a touchstone and it will be a touchstone for a new approach to government”.

So we have this ‘divorce from reality’ and consequent ‘Competency Crisis’ – whether in California; Ukraine or Europe. Where lie the roots to this malaise? U.S. writer David Samuels believes this to be the answer:

“In his last days in office … President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war, a war that fused the security infrastructure with the social media platforms – where the war supposedly was being fought”.

However, collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, had made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy – and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices – in entirely new ways.

During the Trump years, Obama used these tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power centre for himself – one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party which he succeeded in refashioning in his own image, Samuels writes.

The ‘permission structure’ machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod (a highly successful Chicago political consultant), built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and ‘better’ beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure – effectively turning Axelrod’s construct into ‘an omnipotent thought-machine’, Samuels suggests:

“The term ‘echo chambers’ describes the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs deliberately created an entirely new class of experts who mutually credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible”.

The aim was for a platoon of aides, armed with laptops or smart phones, to ‘run’ with the latest inspired Party meme and to immediately repeat, and repeat it, across platforms, giving the appearance of an overwhelming tide of consensus filling the country. And thus giving people the ‘permission structure’ of apparent wide public assent to believe propositions that formerly they would never have supported.

“Where this analysis went wrong is the same place that the Obama team’s analysis of Trump went wrong: The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that could generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight. The newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable”.

“At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune. Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week. It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power”.

“In the end, however, the fever broke”. The credibility of Élites imploded.

Samuels account amounts to a stark warning of the danger associated with distance opening up between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged, and managed, from the White House. “This possibility opened the door to a new potential for a large-scale disaster – like the war in Iraq”, Samuels suggests. (Samuels does not specifically mention Ukraine, although this is implied throughout the argument).

This – both the Obama tale, as told by David Samuels, and Walter Kirn’s story of California – augment Aurelien’s point about Ukraine and European military incompetence and lack of professionalism on the field: It is one of allowing a schism to open up between contrived narrative and reality – “which”, Samuels warns “is to say that, with enough money, operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that they had never believed; or even heard of before: Were in fact not only plausible, but already widely accepted within their specific peer groups”.

It constitutes the path to disaster – even risking nuclear disaster in the case of the Ukraine conflict. Will the ‘Competency Crisis’ reaching across such varied terrain trigger a re-think as Walter Kirn – a writer on cultural change – insists?

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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