Eric Weinstein - Are We on The Brink of a Revolution?

(Sep 8, 2024 01:17 PM)stryder Wrote: There is no magic conspiracy, or super secret organisation.

We also have NATO, WTO, CFR, SEC, ESMA, Bilderberg Group, World Economics Forum, Think Tanks, Global Corporations, IMF, the World Bank, and Central Banks.

These institutions and networks work behind the scenes but collectively have a profound impact on global governance, economic stability, and international relations.

(Sep 8, 2024 04:38 AM)Syne Wrote: CC, what happens if Trump wins? Will that change your seeming conspiratorial view, or will that suddenly be part of the Establishment's plan?

It's just parody of the fact that Dem voters do dominate those areas in numbers (which includes the faux independents who reliably select a particular party). No central coordinating source (conspiracy) is necessary for that to yield major propaganda consequences and controlling influences, but sometimes it takes sarcastically portraying it as such for those who don't seem to relate (or grok how it's possible) any other way.

As for Trump possibly winning despite such, after that "red wave" hallucination of 2022, it's better for GOPers to be partly pessimistic and semi-surprise delighted at the end than instead feeling that depressing tumble from the cliff of over-optimism.

I agree. Republicans should never presume they will win, but I see little evidence that they have... at least in terms of voter turnout, which is how they took the House in 2022.

Why Trump will not be allowed to be President
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JceS1SxEDXg

In the above, Weinstein didn't mention how the Establishment did successfully derail Bernie Sander's own Trump-like ravaging of the primary election system (video at bottom). Which Weinstein deems one of the safety mediums designed to prevent populist demagogues from gaining the final slot. Albeit that early snuffing of Sanders having been possible because of the direct control of the Democratic Party. This also echoes back to Weinstein being told that they superficially cater to the social democrats (what he anachronistically calls "communists") to garner their support. But ultimately sphincter them like most of the radical mascots of the party.

https://www.scivillage.com/thread-16459-...l#pid66290

Weinstein: I think Kamala has some communism in her appeal. It may not be native to her, but I know that the under 30 crowd is playing with Neo-Marxist ideas and that I've been told by the Democratic Party we need their votes. "Don't worry, they won't get anywhere inside the party. We just let them mouth off, and they don't get any legislation passed."

I've been told: "Here's the plan. We need you to stop coming after us. Of course, we're hypocritical, we're courting communists because we need their votes to win. But I guarantee you they won't be able to do any damage if we are elected."

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INTRO: Bernie Sanders explains how the Democratic Party plotted to rob him of winning the Party's nomination after he won the first few primaries. [From Building DSA with Bernie (2019): "Bernie Sanders is the first viable national candidate in living memory who identifies as a democratic socialist, and his campaign has already mobilized masses of working people."]

It was always rigged
https://youtu.be/diwdfsTRd18

VIDEO EXCERPTS: The Establishment got very, very nervous. There were a whole lot of candidates in the Democratic primary, and they said hey, be a good idea if you all dropped out. [...] I won the popular vote in Iowa, I won the New Hampshire Primary. I won the Nevada Primary. Those were the first three, and then front pages of the New York Times conveyed that the Democratic establishment was very nervous. Bernie Sanders could win the whole thing.

There were like 15 different candidates, and they were splitting up the vote, and that's how I was not necessarily getting over 50%, but I was getting more than other people. So I was on the way to victory, and they said. 'Look ,Bernie shouldn't be the candidate. We don't want him to be the candidate: Drop out.' And then a lot of people in one or two days dropped out, [Joe Biden remaining and ascending]...

[...] if you're asking me are we a democracy, in one sense we are ... You can run for office, you can raise your issues. On the other hand, in terms of who has the real power [to get a candidate elected]... Money people do.

[...] I use the term oligarchy. Oligarchy is a society where small numbers of very wealthy people control the economic and political life of the country...

[...] Host: I feel like, to me, it feels like an almost privatized communism.

Sanders: In a way, that's right. That's a very good point. That's an interesting way of looking at it. [clarification: The unscrupulous Soviet-era bureaucrats could be viewed as the proto-versions of oligarchs that arose slash continued after they allowed the Soviet system to finally collapse. They could make more money without the latter. For Bernie and the host, the progressive capitalists holding the reigns in the US ironically correspond to such.]

https://youtu.be/diwdfsTRd18
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/diwdfsTRd18

https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1833564765320581614

"A lot of Kamala supporting skeptics are asking me what I mean by “Donald Trump may not be allowed to become president again” in 2024
I think I am going to use this opportunity to show you why many sceptics, debunkers and educated people who reflexively and derisively target others as conspiracy theorists, are rapidly losing *everyone* smart and independent. Here goes:

I am suggesting that the 2024 election may be “Saved”. I am suggesting that our U.S. democracy may be “Fortified” between now and November. That right now there is a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes”. I am suggesting that Americans may be saved from “Russian electoral interference” by an “informal alliance” involving tech “business titans”.

I am suggesting that the possibility of “a vast, cross-partisan campaign” representing an “an extraordinary shadow effort” hidden, against all odds, from public view by complicit journalists who make sure not to write stories about it and editors who spike any remaining stories that mention it until after the election.
In short, I am suggesting that there is right now a massive “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes”. That “shadow campaigners” are secretly engaged in work that has “touched every aspect of the election” despite the lack of any stories from complicit mainstream news desks.

So what has all this to do with the army of insufferable character-assassins clothed as skeptics who laugh and laugh and laugh at conspiracy theorists?

Well, the conspirators confessed to the above after the 2020 election cycle. That is, it is those actually running cover for conspiracies that most aggressively label and smear those trying to piece together the shadow efforts as “conspiracy theorists”. Imagine a world so perverse where *correctly* labeling an actual conspirator is turned into an act of reputational self-destruction even though the conspirators will later confess and brag about the whole thing while taking open victory laps.

Genius, no? Diabolical genius is still genius.

If that sounds farfetched, pathological, improbable, and diabolical to you, welcome to the club. It does to me, too. But THAT *IS* WHAT HAPPENED exactly back in 2020.

The conspirators still aren’t really telling the truth. But what they *admit* to while bragging and taking victory laps is jaw dropping all the same.

Don’t believe it? Read the confession:"

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

I'm not convinced Trump supporters would have cared if he'd won the 2020 election by either fair or foul tactics. I'm not even sure 'fair or foul' has any meaning - there's just winning and losing - preferably without ending up in prison.

So there was (apparently) a conspiracy to suppress conspiracy theories (irresistibly) one conspiracy to rule them all. Did Trump lose because of things he couldn't control? The 'one conspiracy to rule them all' guys would probably claim it was a good thing he couldn't control 'everything' because if he could've he would've.

(Sep 12, 2024 02:49 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1833564765320581614

[...] I am suggesting that the 2024 election may be “Saved”. I am suggesting that our U.S. democracy may be “Fortified” between now and November. That right now there is a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes”. I am suggesting that Americans may be saved from “Russian electoral interference” by an “informal alliance” involving tech “business titans”.

I am suggesting that the possibility of “a vast, cross-partisan campaign” representing an “an extraordinary shadow effort” hidden, against all odds, from public view by complicit journalists who make sure not to write stories about it and editors who spike any remaining stories that mention it until after the election.

In short, I am suggesting that there is right now a massive “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes”. That “shadow campaigners” are secretly engaged in work that has “touched every aspect of the election” despite the lack of any stories from complicit mainstream news desks.

So what has all this to do with the army of insufferable character-assassins clothed as skeptics who laugh and laugh and laugh at conspiracy theorists?

Well, the conspirators confessed to the above after the 2020 election cycle. That is, it is those actually running cover for conspiracies that most aggressively label and smear those trying to piece together the shadow efforts as “conspiracy theorists”. Imagine a world so perverse where *correctly* labeling an actual conspirator is turned into an act of reputational self-destruction even though the conspirators will later confess and brag about the whole thing while taking open victory laps.

Don’t believe it? Read the confession:

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

While not ruling out the possibility, a core cabal isn't necessary (though I get the potency of framing _X_ in that context). By virtue of the majority of people who work in those applicable areas sharing the same voting orientation and malice toward populism, their interests and local efforts can converge and harmonize from the ground up, creating the appearance of an overarching conspiracy. And, of course, in sharp contrast to everything else, there's no outcry on their part to correct that political imbalance -- via DEI -- in journalism, academia, entertainment industry, applicable organizations, and blue state/city governments and businesses.

As for disinformation campaigns to protect those ideologically biased communities by introducing viral memes that ridicule those who call them out... That goes all the way back to the Red Scare days, when humanities scholars began protecting themselves by writing various pieces encouraging that idea that all concerns about Marxism and generic collectivism were nutjob stuff.

Which was a partially justified defense approach, since the "communist hunters" back then were also broadly targeting [merely] sympathetic individuals, pinkos, and "quiet socialists" (who weren't really full-blown activists). But literary intellectuals primarily did it to protect themselves. They were the legit "gold at the end of the rainbow" that the "Van Helsing" slayers would eventually stumble upon in their crypts. (The Two Cultures)

It's striking how literary intellectuals (those who became leaders) utilized populism themselves at the beginning, in countries like Russia. Soap-box performing as liberators of straight, cisgender, European proles in the 19th and early 20th-centuries. But then gradually (in North America) discarding them in favor of marginalized population groups and wealthy or power-elite individuals that were benefactors to their movements.

Doubtless, the intelligentsia had always had secret contempt for the proles (deeming the latter uncultivated and superstitious brutes). But they kept that hid in the beginning because they needed to recruit them as activists and soldiers for implementing their overthrow of governments, and their rise to philosopher king (secular priesthood) and bureaucrat (social justice lordship) status.

There are classic leftists (like Sanders mimics at times) who still revolve around or emphasize the grunt working-class. But some of those grunts are the kind of left-populists that RFK-Jr draws and handed over to Trump, rather the Red State betrayers that infuriate the Lord Protectors (progressives and social democrats), who seem to have historically lost track of "who abandoned who" first.

Quote:By virtue of the majority of people who work in those applicable areas sharing the same voting orientation and malice toward populism, their interests and local efforts can converge and harmonize from the ground up, creating the appearance of an overarching conspiracy.

Isn't that a risk in any free democracy--that large swathes of population will tend to adhere to some political values over others? If for instance the mainstream media is driven by a liberal agenda, isn't established religion equally driven by a conservative agenda? The intelligensia may generally espouse leftist values, but corporate lobbies and industrialist billionaires generally promote capitalist values. I infer from this that the culture war is still alive and well and being fought on many fronts. Which is as it always has been.

(Sep 12, 2024 08:11 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:

Quote:By virtue of the majority of people who work in those applicable areas sharing the same voting orientation and malice toward populism, their interests and local efforts can converge and harmonize from the ground up, creating the appearance of an overarching conspiracy.

Isn't that a risk in any free democracy--that large swathes of population will tend to adhere to some political values over others? If for instance the mainstream media is driven by a liberal agenda, isn't established religion equally driven by a conservative agenda? The intelligensia may generally espouse leftist values, but corporate lobbies and industrialist billionaires generally promote capitalist values. I infer from this that the culture war is still alive and well and being fought on many fronts. Which is as it always has been.

Yah, I'm just focusing on the antipopulism segment that Weinstein seems to be addressing. Both left interests and capitalist interests actually align under that, which he references with respect to tech "business titans" being involved in the so-called "conspiracy".

Although the original Progressive Era was concurrent with early communist parties in the US, the two factions were distinct in that progressives only desired reform under capitalism (not doing away with the latter). Though what "progressivism" means today has been muddled-up, viewing it as "public-image conscious" capitalists and social agenda sponsors cooperating together is still more on target. Along with their antipathy toward populism.

The below is Europe oriented, but that's actually good because it prevents the US obsession with Trump from cluttering things up. And delves into a similar massive coordination of journalism, academia/education, entertainment, business community, and organizations in Europe, being mobilized to obstruct populist activity.

The underlying irony being that "liberal democracy" does not want the voice of the rabble or "ordinary people" (both their rogue left, rogue right, and potentially even rogue "centrist" passions) interfering in the intellectual processes guiding government. Portraying such as a threat that must be contained, albeit that conceptually conflicting with the very idea of "democracy" itself in some areas ("rule by the people").
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https://revdem.ceu.edu/2021/03/19/the-po...ipopulism/

EXCERPTS: The mainstream media and academia as well as political elites identify populist movements as the most important threat to the current liberal democratic regime. Populist actors have indeed unsettled and begun reshaping the European political landscape.

In response to this, European institutions and their agencies and think-tanks hurl themselves into obsessive anti-populist agendas in the name of humanity, cosmopolitanism, human rights, social justice or other empty signifiers that have become so commonplace in the repertoire of the EU institutions.

Even though most of these developments are worrying, the focus on the so-called populist movements obfuscates the limits and the contradictions inherent in the very idea of liberal capitalism itself. How do we move beyond the current impasse of the mainstream discourse, caught between a moral denunciation of the fallacies of the system and a refusal to take stock of the motivations of these newly emerging (constitutional) projects?

The year of 1989 marked the triumph of liberal capitalism. [...] The mainstream academic thinking is currently largely unable to look beyond the paradigm established in 1989, which solidified a particular version of not just the European project, but also the ideological dominance of liberalism. Nor has it come up with a workable analysis of either populism or the crisis of the liberal project.

The current political situation is debated in narrowly liberal democratic and Western centric elitist frameworks, usually asking “how to prevent the escalation of populism”, how to provide a “remedy for this pathology of modern democracy” and “maintain” or restore existing political order”.

The veil of populism managed to capture the imagination of many academics and journalists and has become a very powerful catch-all phrase to describe political projects which profess to divert from or reform the current political and institutional paradigm. In other words, populism is usually understood as an “unusual and pathological” turn in (Western) politics that needs to be combated.

[...] what we have on our hands is a multi-layered conflict of identity, history, values, religion and interpretations of the meaning of democracy. ... The growing influence of non–democratic bodies and mechanisms, including central banks, constitutional and other courts, regulatory bodies, and international treaties, which are deployed to combat the worrying developments ... only further exacerbates the crisis. Populism creates a political discourse that extends beyond legal framing, and the rule of law (as a policy) is unable to contain this emerging discourse...

I find this description of populism an accurate and helpful way of understanding many of the rightwing movements of the last century. While generally held to be pejorative, I think it sheds light on the inner workings of these movements and how they gain power in democracies over time, even here in our own nation.

"Populism is a political phenomenon that takes the form of movements and leaders who proclaim a major rift between a supposedly united, good and virtuous people, and a homogeneous, perverse elite permanently plotting against the former. Consequently, populists assert the boundless sovereignty of the people, which must be expressed through unlimited referendums, and the intrinsic superiority of direct democracy over what they consider to be outdated forms of liberal and representative democracy.

According to populists, no issue is complicated, there are only simple and immediate solutions. Their fundamental Manichaen worldview leads them to select scapegoats: elites and - most frequently - immigrants, foreigners, Muslims or Jews. Finally, populism is characterized by the concentration of power in the hands of a leader who supposedly embodies the people.

Populism offers a belief system, plays on emotions, cultivates nostalgia and seeks to make people dream. It is both a composite and a flexible ideology that merges with the remnants of traditional political cultures and a strategy for attaining power. Once that is achieved, it turns into a ‘political style’. A wide variety of populisms exist, on the Right and Left ends of the political spectrum, yet far-Right ones are much more pervasive.

Several Right-wing populists have achieved significant electoral success in recent years. This is the case in Poland, Hungary, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Latvia, Sweden and Germany. Populists are in power in Hungary, Poland and in the Czech Republic.

Right-wing populists have much in common. They reject all ruling elites and other political parties, whom they accuse of hijacking democracy. Distrustful of globalization to varying degrees, they assert the need for strong national sovereignty above all else and emphasize national interests. Their idea of the nation is based on ethnicity and identity, thereby rejecting foreigners and immigrants. They do not hesitate to inflate figures regarding the presence of these groups on their soil, or even to ring the alarm about the "great replacement" allegedly underway. Almost all of them denounce Islam as a threat to their country’s entire cultural heritage, which they reframe in their own image. They promise to be resolute defenders against the "multiculturalism" that they abhor. Finally, they present themselves as the best possible guarantors of security and authority in the face of delinquency, criminality and a threat of decay."---
https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/exp...left-right