Author to demagogue. The destructive, corrosive effect of a Trump in your closet.
Or being in a Trump closet and coming out. Coming out a clone but one speaking cleaner. A younger clone we deal with over years into tomorrow.
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Yes the Universities need constant attention. Yes things are now unfair. Yes, money talks, and in the second video hear it. Not as obvious in the first. The first video looks at tribalism. It is analytical. The second aims to cement the worse of tribalism. For which It is argues in a cliche way. For career movement. Adversarial, speaking to a tribe to advance to tribal Chief. (One intermediate step having to be suffered.)
Do you think the audience in either video are your tribe? With your best interests as their motivation for listening?
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Damaged goods are damaged goods.
If you don't want damaged goods, do something.
Or have two Orbans, young and old. Exchangeable only after four years.
Four years of mischief.
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With Musk and Thiel you have money talking. Not Goldman Sachs money. From a different coast of the nation, that money saying take path B, path A is wrong. Where A or B, it is money that will be driving the car.
With that, globalism vs tribalism, with bosses likeminded - either path - about being in the driver's seat and choosing the route.
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FURTHER: There always is a Wikipedia page, with Vance's showing an ongoing and compelling ability to bend to winds, not breaking. change colors to fit surroundings, but do not grow substantially larger in adapting. JD grows. Chaining, not mixing, metaphors is its own reward, though questionable, stylistically.
There is a lengthy Politico Mag item - about a cottage industry New Conservative pair and not directly about Vance, but which in 2923 noted:
Their host was American Moment, a small but scrappy organization that’s quietly reshaping the conservative establishment in Washington. Founded in 2021 with the backing of now-Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, the group is part of a broader movement that’s underway in Washington to recruit right-leaning staffers to help the next Republican president — whoever that may be — wage war on the “deep state” and entrench the populist political revolt that began with the Trump administration.
The broader movement link is in the original item. Like a needle/haystack thing, Vance and that broader movement in the same paragraph fits actualities.
Ever alert to changing moods of the day, an undated item where we can guess, JD wrote:
https://americanmind.org/memo/end-the-globalization-gravy-train/
in which, mid-item, he wrote:
The Chinese state has unleashed a plague that, if we’re lucky, will merely be the worst in a decade rather than the worst in a generation. The CCP has lied and manipulated international institutions in a way that ensures the deaths of thousands of additional Americans.
The virus has revealed an American economy built on consumption, reliant for production on regimes either indifferent or actively hostile to our national interest. Production, where it still exists in our country, clusters in megacities, where “knowledge economy” workers live uptown from the low-wage servants (disproportionately immigrants) who clean their laundry, care for their children, and serve their food.
Perhaps we shouldn’t build our cities like that. Perhaps we should make things in America. And if not all things, then at least enough so that the next time China unleashes a plague, it can’t threaten us with a loss of medicines and protective equipment.
These are more important debates than whether we should end our lockdowns. Our economy is based on consumption, debt, financialization, and sloth. There is no end to the lockdown that returns our country to health or prosperity if it ignores these facts. The minute before COVID-19 hit, our stock market was at an all-time high, yet our middle class had only seen its net assets grow by 4 percent in over a decade. We have shut down health care facilities—even those far from overwhelmed by COVID-19—to preserve face masks and rubber gloves, because we don’t make enough in our own country for a time of crisis. Can we honestly say the most important question in our public life is whether we should be allowed to eat at restaurants that many would avoid anyways?
[...]
The specter of “the donors” hangs over many private conversations among conservative intellectuals these days. The donors who provide an overwhelming share of the capital to conservative campaigns and institutions have quite literally gotten rich off of the “Washington consensus” of neoliberalism and globalization. Accordingly, there are things you’re not allowed to say—about tax rates, the social value of financial engineering, and the size of government, especially—and things you must say—also about tax rates, the social value of financial engineering, and the size of government. Any departures from orthodoxy must be qualified—“this doesn’t mean we’re for big government”—if the check writers might see or hear.
In my experience, most people are aware of this pressure, even if they agree entirely with the priorities of Conservatism, Inc. Recently, after I publicly criticized donor influence on the conservative movement, one young conservative journalist told me privately that he’d like to join in, but “brutal self-awareness of my non-profit status prevents me.”
It has always been thus. Or at least, it has been thus for a very long time.
Elon and Thiel, now those are healthy donors, not otherwise?
FURTHER: Why concentrate on JD? If Trump is elected, he is so broken by age, mental decline and bad habits to not last four years. Yes or no, likely or not, that is the premise. That going into the 2028 election cycle JD could be the incumbent, without Republican challengers, and would have a chance at a full two terms of his own to further his mischief, whatever it has become by bending to winds before then. What winds? You tell me. The man is intellectually so pliant I could barely guess. But he is very, very ambitious. For a "hillbilly." An Orban of Appalachia. Perhaps not.