US Presidential Election 2024

[liminalOyster]

Seriously. And that link I posted was from f-ing MSN.

[Elihu]

Seriously. And that link I posted was from f-ing MSN.

imo, this is about where the hopin votin cycle begins anew. i'm feeling uneasy about this drumpf mobilization that's going on. the empire is in the "great leaders" phase. anything's possible. watching for the "nobody saw that coming!" development.

[SonicG]

Biden echoing Tim Leary on his death bed: "Why not?"
It was highly doubtful that Trump will sic the Justice Dept. on Hunter anyhow especially in regards to Ukraine - The new regime is going to have it's hands full trying to decouple from that shitshow, so digging into its dirty past is not something they will want or have resources to do imo.
I remember reading about the Hunter/Burisima stuff back in 2014 when it was happening, here or on Moon of Alabama, so it was very telling to see anyone daring to mention any improprieties as being a Russian dupe. Burisma, an energy company paying the son of the US VP 11 million dollars and of a country that hasn't built any new power plants in the post-Soviet era...

Funny aside:

Democratic president Jimmy Carter pardoned, commuted, or rescinded the convictions of 566 people,[25] and in addition to that pardoned over 200,000 Vietnam War draft evaders.[30] Among them are:

Oscar Collazo – Attempted assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1950; commuted to time served in 1979
G. Gordon Liddy – Watergate figure. Convicted for 20 years for conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping; commuted after serving 4+1⁄2 years in 1977.
Peter Yarrow – Singer-songwriter of Peter, Paul and Mary, had pleaded guilty to a morals charge involving a 14-year-old girl in 1970 and served three months in prison, was pardoned in 1980.[31]
Vietnam war draft resisters – Unconditional amnesty issued in the form of a pardon in 1977[30]
Jefferson Davis – President of the Confederate States of America, was arrested and accused of treason in 1865. Charges were brought in 1868 but was absolved of any guilt for participation in the Civil War by President Andrew Johnson's Fourth Amnesty Proclamation on Christmas Day of that year. Posthumously pardoned.
Patty Hearst – Convicted of bank robbery in 1976 after being kidnapped and allegedly brainwashed; sentence commuted in 1979
Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores Rodriguez – opened fire in the U.S. House of Representatives and wounding five Congressmen in 1954; clemency
Frederic B. Ingram – Heir from Tennessee, convicted of bribing government officials in Illinois in 1977; jailed for 16 months.[32] His sentence was commuted by Carter in December 1980.[32]

[Grizzly]

Just like peace prize receiver, Obomber, and the warpig criminals, before him,"we're moving forward, not backwards", ie, No one will be held accountable for anything with ANY administration. EVER.


Bonus:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBgZ7Xlug2D/

[Grizzly]

https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1867611295664505039

HEARTBREAKING moment Sandy Fonzo confronted a judge who was part of the kids-for-cash scheme where 2 judges were receiving millions of dollars to send kids to for-profit prisons.

Her son ended up committing suicide.

Biden just commuted the sentence of one of the judges.

Can Biden look Sandy in the eyes and explain why he commuted the judge’s sentence?

Out going President Biden has commuted the sentences of around 1,500 individuals and pardoned 39 people marking the largest single-day clemency act in modern history, according to the White House. Biden is also talking and considering sweeping ‘preemptive pardons’ Such As Clinton, Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff and others. There was even talk of him pardoning Trump! Which recent events has made that a non issue as all law-fare suits have been dropped, but one that really chaps my ass is the Biden commutes sentence for Kids-for-Cash judge see above. Former Luzerne County Judge Michael Conahan along with Mark A. Ciavarella Jr.
https://www.citizensvoice.com/2024/12/1 ... ash-judge/

[Belligerent Savant]

.

One coda to the dumpster fire known as the Biden admin (likely to be replaced by another variation of a dumpster fire, or perhaps an incremental escalation of dystopia, as part of our continued slide into U.S. Empire degradation/more overt forms of totalitarianism.):

@ggreenwald

Having "Joe Biden", as one of his last acts, bestow a presidential medal on Liz Cheney says so much about the value system of the Democratic Party.

But what "Biden" said about Cheney -- an advocate still of countless views liberals denounce` as fascist -- is even more telling:


...
Liz Cheney was and is a vocal advocate of the Iraq war, occupation of Afghanistan, regime change wars in Syria and Libya, and - oh yeah - torture, Guantanamo, rendition, warrantless spying, and every War on Terror abuse.

Dems: she dedicated her career to freedom and decency.

https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1874802468833677612

@ggreenwald

Start polling Liz Cheney as a potential Dem presidential nominee for 2028. Listen to the screeching from Biden's liberal followers when her name is called: like 1950s teenagers who just saw Elvis.

There's no other politician who can provoke this much passion from Democrats:

@Acyn

President Biden awards Presidential Citizens Medal to Liz Cheney

[Video at link]
...
@CommonSenseTodd
·
The democrat party getting into bed with the Cheneys is the most establishment thing the establishment has ever established.

https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1874962218535813471

[Elvis]

taxes 2 dumbshit factory.jpg

[Belligerent Savant]

.
From the same author of this gem:

...

https://x.com/feelsdesperate/status/1879745492089004480[/quote]

Additional astute (though largely mainstream) observations Re: 2024 Election results:

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

Dominic Cummings
Nov 28, 2024

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 (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act) 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 incentivized to try to minimize 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!

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

...

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 (https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/ ... -biden-out)

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
(http://delusions%20of%20npc%20intellige ... ciousness/):

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 2016/20 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’.

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/ ... -narrative

[Belligerent Savant]

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Oh, look. A criminal politician, lying. Par for the course.


https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1881334756304118234

Jake Tapper
@jaketapper

On Dec 3, 2020, I asked President-elect Biden, about reports that Trump was considering preemptive pardons. He said “it concerns me in terms of what kind of precedent it sets, and how the rest of the world looks at us as a nation of laws and justice”

https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/se/dat ... segment/01

11:57 AM · Jan 20, 2025

[Belligerent Savant]

[DrEvil]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9gCyRkpPe8

[DrEvil]

Trump's number just went up to 1700+ (1500 Jan 6-ers), and 6500 of Biden's were for marijuana possession.

As for Biden preemptively pardoning his family, it's dodgy as hell, but it's a reaction to Trump spending the last four years talking about how he will be going after his enemies, including the Biden family, once he's back in power.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Biden also preemptively pardoned that vile actor Fauci. Someone that should have been imprisoned years ago for his crimes against humanity in the 80s (Re: the pushing of harmful products during the "AIDS crisis"), let alone his egregious affronts in the 21st century.

In any event this isn't an opportunity for "whataboutism" as BOTH U.S. major parties are captured and compromised. But under Biden, blatant and brazen totalitarian/fascist measures were enforced (covid-related policies), which led directly to loss of livelihoods AND LIVES.

We'll see how the incremental leveling-up of overt control measures will carry over into this new administration.

I anticipate certain necessary corrections but almost surely other variations of control measures.

Rinse and repeat.

[DrEvil]

They're both shit, but only one is okay with Nazi salutes and people who openly say democracy was a mistake. Trump is putting the robber barons in charge, and all the idiots who voted for him are about to find out what this quote means:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
H.L. Mencken

[Belligerent Savant]

This is surface-level at best assessment.

No matter what anyone suffering from whatever spectrum of TDS may try to litigate in the months/years ahead, there is currently ZERO comparison to the vile acts and affronts perpetrated by the despicable Biden Admin against both U.S. citizens and overseas indigenous peoples. They have easily traversed lower lows.

It will actually be a challenge to reach lower, though I imagine the Trump regime may try to compete and aim for those lows, regardless, albeit under different front-facing guises.

Repeating pop social media refrains Re: Musk's hand gestures won't change that. I am far from a fan of Musk; to the contrary -- and as I've indicated many times here over the years, well before he became a 'darling' of the Right -- I see him for what he is: a wholly manufactured product [masquerading as some sort of visionary billionaire] operating at the behest of the very few. Whatever stupid gestures he presented in public -- either as a trolling exercise or as a consequence of his apparent spectrum range of Autism, etc. -- won't come close to comparing with the OVERT FASCIST actions of the Biden Admin,