1/Straight talk on DeSantis. Why did he completely flip his position in a day on Ukraine? MONEY. He doesn’t have any himself. To run for POTUS he will need many large donors, some of which come from military-industrial complex, connected to neo-cons. His flip is bad sign…
2/Notice also Nikki Haley - who is an empty vessel without any convictions or ideas - immediately jumped on it, went on media and screamed for total Ukrainian victory and tied it to future conflict with China. Heard neocon radio today praising her for ‘leadership’…She wants $$..
3/DeSantis probably has the right instincts on foreign policy and doesn’t want war. But he’s also no foreign policy buff. His thing is woke stuff in Florida. And again he has no MONEY. So someone yanked his chain and said ‘back off the realist foreign policy or you’re done’…
4/Remember something similar happened with Scott Walker in 2015. He was pushed as a great hope, but when he needed to touch immigration to combat Trump, his donors said no. So he just dropped out b/c he would have NO MONEY…
5/The cold reality in this oligarchic society is that only someone of independent wealth and huge balls can challenge the status quo. DeSantis is fantastic governor, but this Ukraine thing shows he doesn’t have the $$ and doesn’t think he can stand up to donors and win…
6/And this is the hard reality none of the Twitter warriors (whom I like and generally agree with) promoting DeSantis can confront, and why bickering is so low IQ. The problem is the system - it’s a structural problem. DeSantis doesn’t have the independence to buck that system.
7/Epilogue. Here is an example of what I meant by the bickering being ‘low IQ.’ Notice also this thread never endorses Trump. It was making a deeper point about the system:
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Reading this college applications, essays - it's all pretty ridiculous. 4.5 GPAs. 1580 SAT scores. This club and that club. Volunteer work at the hospital or homeless shelter. Math competition.
What a complete waste of a childhood.
It's not just that this is unnecessary, just part of an arms race to get into "the good school." It's that we are completely directing every aspect of someone's life, snuffing out their own potential creativity, so they can get a "good job."
People like to point out the tech geniuses who built businesses in their garage and dropped out of college. Bill Gates and Paul Allen had time on their hands. If they had been directed in all aspects of their lives in this way they would have been competent corporate executives.
Immigrants "do the jobs Americans won't do" not just because of low pay - but because immigrants do them. It becomes a class marker, and Americans feel embarrassed to do them even at reasonable pay. The pay and class thing become a spiral downward.
This will be a tough nut to crack - reinvesting jobs Americans haven't done for a long time with some dignity. It might not even be possible at this point. But I remember driving west years ago and seeing white teenagers working fast food restaurants in North Dakota, which hadn't been a thing in NY for a while. So it's not totally impossible.
The issue with mass immigration and tariffs - reversing them to transform the economy and mindsets - is that this is a project of a generation or two. If Vance loses in 2028, the left and neo-liberals are likely to reverse everything done in this coming 4 years, and render any return impossible.
I don't think there is a "woke left" or a "woke right." I think there are bizarre reactions to conducting an experiment of throwing people together from all parts of the world in the name of economic expediency without ever asking how people would react to it. Multiculturalism isn't natural, doesn't make people happy, and is a challenge to overcome.
When it comes to "racism" - this goes in both directions. People who are the main inhabitants of a place will have racial reactions to feeling that they're being overwhelmed - and the "newcomers" express very similar sentiments. Anti-white rhetoric is every bit as common as "racism" against people who come in.
Even things like the trans craze, which has probably a thousand causes, is related to this total cacophony we've created in previously stable societies in one sense - it is an effort at control. A lot of trans kids are autistic, in need of a sense of order and control - and apparently one way to achieve this is by controlling their own bodies, identities and destinies. This sounds crazy, it does to me too - but there is some literature on it is my understanding.
1/McDonald’s has had an interesting trajectory. If you watch a film from ca 1980, there are scenes of trim privileged white kids hanging out there (Ordinary People). Kids of doctors and lawyers. Well into the 90s it was still a place that middle class kids held a birthday party.
2/Somewhere around 2000, the marketing shifted to blacks. They showed teens on stoops in Brooklyn calling it ‘Mickey Ds.’ This coincided with the total disappearance of the white middle class birthday party - and the set aside party room.
3/Some time later, the marketing didn’t seem targeted at any group at all. It just focused on tasty food that was almost certainly very bad for you. The market was lower class people who were overweight.
The unipolar moment resulted in nearly all American foreign policy officials believing they can just go around the world and do anything they want. They were not challenged in this thinking, and now they mostly are incapable of thinking in a new multipolar world. They've become mediocrities trapped in groupthink, despite all the obvious failures.
Something similar seems to have happened in the political parties. An America on top of the world produced the same kind of politician in both parties who thinks we can just borrow $$ endlessly, bully the entire world endlessly, that the debt doesn't matter. And all the real disputes have centered on fairly trivial social issues. Boys in the girls bathroom is important, but not as important as $35 trillion in debt.
On the GOP side, Trump upended this trajectory. He points out things aren't looking so good at home, that the old way of thinking isn't working. He took out the Bush dynasty. And now you have all kinds of people from JD Vance to DeSantis who are new, more effective kinds of figures.
Something for the Nixon fans. Back in 1974 Jack Margolis, after listening to the Watergate tapes, compiled a slender pamphlet titled "The Poetry of Richard Milhous Nixon." He presented Nixon's remarks as though they were profound ruminations on the issues of the day. Very funny. I will excerpt a few below.
This one deals with the complexity of the times, called "Mixed Emotions"
This one called "One Million Dollars" was Nixon pondering inflation