Broad brush Trump predictions

Plus, Elite Human Capital!

In last week’s article, we briefly discussed the historical role of the second Trump administration as a clean-up crew bussed in to wipe up the mess after an entirely unextraordinary episode of liberal overindulgence to do what the saner liberals want done, but can’t for a tangle of logistical reasons. This, in fact, was what the more crotchety Dissident Right bloggers were predicting he would do if he won in 2016. That he didn’t manage even that, but rather spurred a dramatic intensification of the Great Awokening, might be significant, but it might just be as simple as he came too early.

If Trump had not, for a mixture of personal reasons, decided to run, it is clear that no-one else would have run (still less won), on a Trumpian programme in 2016. But someone would have in 2024. History is quirky, and random stuff does happen. Sometimes, this random stuff is going against the stream, and goes nowhere, and sometimes it is going with the stream, and accelerates. Trump is genuinely a kind of genius in his ability to access the mind of the 95 IQ man, White and Brown alike, and sensed the potential for mobilizing petit-bourgeois energy against the Woke Wave already in its early stages. But he knew nothing, and cared less, about elite and sub-elite opinion, and ran headlong into the tide precisely as it was swelling up. Now, enough of the elite is exhausted and want the Woke put away. That the same man was at the helm of the premature attack on Wokeism and is now at the helm of the post-Wokeism cleanup crew is basically an accident, and accidents are interesting to look at, but that’s about it.

Vibe Shift

Before making my predictions, an unoriginal observation about the vibe shift. It isn’t happening because the Right is more confident and optimistic than it was in 2016. If you remember that far back, then you know. If you are too young, or have drug-induced brain damage and can’t remember stuff, then ask someone who does. It also isn’t happening because Trump is markedly more popular now than he was then.

Source

So Trump 2.0 does narrowly beat Trump 1.0, but he gets creamed by literally every other president. Rather, the vibe shift is indicative of liberal demoralization. This is actually a complete vindication of Boldmug, who, in the genuinely disorienting wake of Covid and BLM, when it looked to the noob that progressivism was completely unleashed and ready to finally devour it all, correctly predicted that ‘victory’ in electoral politics would be the death of a million enthusiasms carried by the psychological thrill of resistance.

The second reason for the vibe shift is the defection of a significant chunk of the billionaire class to vaguely Trump-sympathetic neutrality. Of course, compared to the era of Woke Capital, that looks like a win, and it is a win, but the preference of money for the lower-tax party is both inherently normal and has been the historical fact almost throughout the whole era of Cthulhu’s leftward drift. This is why it has only been recently that an intelligence gap has opened up between liberals and conservatives. Academic and cultural elites have leaned Left a long time, but money leaned Right and money is correlated with intelligence, so it kind of balanced out. The union of capital and academia was a freak development, symptomatic of a system that had shed its safeguards against disintegration. But the handrails are back, and, eight years later than expected, you’re back in the 1990s, except with gay marriage, unprecedented peacetime debt, and the TFR is in the toilet.

Anyway, I said there would be predictions. I’ll do 2.

Prediction no. 1 - the skin of your palms will be worn to sandpaper from all the facepalming

Basically, there will be repeated incidents of Trump saying, or his administration doing, things that cannot be defended by reasonable, decent-minded people. That in itself is not so important, but the effect is that these actions will be defended by people who are not reasonable, or decent-minded, or even vaguely sane, or even just not completely repulsive to a normal person. In many, probably most, cases, the numnuts things the Trump administration does will, in themselves, be very trivial, or simply bad implementation of a good policy. Inherently, they will be things that could be easily corrected, or things that it is not very important to correct. The problem is that these actions will attract a hive of seriously messed up people to defend them, amplify them, demand their intensification, develop elaborate and palpably insane sophistical demonstrations as to why they instantize the highest form of The Good, and generally just act like mentalists.

What this causes is demoralization. You might say demoralization, deschmoralization; Trump has the power, he wants to use the power, so he can use the power. Just like Assad. Whoops. Vibes are power. Yes, if you are willing to kill enough people, and you are good at it, and you can keep doing it, then you don’t need the vibes. But if not, you do.

What is the Cathedral?¹ Some might say it is a machine for producing ideas. Is it? Do the ideas matter, even at all? Remember that whole Covid thing? It was, what, three years ago, right? We had this idea that oldies dying of a cough was such a terrible thing that you could just arrest people for walking outside. Remember this?

Some people still believe in this idea. They checked the internet and, yep, respiratory viruses still exist, people still die, grandad’s still immunocompromised, germ theory’s still true, more or less. You see them sometimes at the mall, with some weird thing over their face, maybe even with gloves. You try not to look, or, if you’re cruel, you don’t. Don’t they know that was before? And who’s idea was it anyway? Curtis Yarvin’s? WTF?

No, the Cathedral is a machine for producing vibes. There are a lot of problems with this machine. It is criminally, irreparably insane, for one. But at producing vibes, it’s money. No machine is perfect, though, and when it’s been revved up to full for too long, it starts to splutter. It needs to cool off first, and then it needs some fuel to get moving again. There are few different fuels that will do, but an evergreen one is indignation.

A little taster of how this is going to work is the cancellation of PEFPAR. Now, most people don’t care about PEFPAR. I don’t. But of the people who do care about PEFPAR, it’s at least a 80-20 split in favour. Among people who care and are not obviously deranged it’s 100-0, or as close as makes no odds. Yes, there’s an argument that we can’t just keep subsidizing Africans to outbreed everyone else, until the whole world is Africa.² But that’s some dark s**t right there. AIDs is a nasty way to go out, especially for a kid. And if that’s your thing, there are a hell of a lot more effective ways to suppress population growth than promoting AIDs. Ask Bill Gates.

Now, the truth is that this is no big deal at all. Un-cancelling PEFPAR was really just about clicking a button. When people got upset about cancelling PEFPAR, all anyone needed to say was ‘yes, that appears to be an oversight, I trust it will be corrected shortly’. Instead, in proportion to how online you are, you got to witness a rush, unseemly for sure, but more than that, just really, really weird, to present new versions of morality that make no sense at all, and make normal people just disgusted.

You could write a whole book about the dynamics and incentive structures that make people stab themselves in the face like this (someone should actually literally write a book about this). The need to post first, the need to post fresh, the FOMO. It’s not just that, though. There is another problem with the ‘I trust it will be corrected shortly’ take, which is that you can’t.

Ever since the Cathedral was discovered, hiding in plain sight, the question has been this: get rid of it, or replace it? The first option is what formalism, neocameralism and patchwork is all about. So that would be swell. The easier option, though, to the untrained eye, is to just set up your own version. When you try, what you find is that the problem of converting data/information into opinion/policy isn’t really easy, it’s really hard. In economics, everyone knows about the calculation problem, and it has no good solution. The best thing we have is still the best thing we had a hundred years ago, and it isn’t great. Actually, it kind of sucks, but it sucks a lot less than the alternatives. The same thing is true for political or moral information. The Cathedral isn’t a stable globe-dominating equilibrium because the problem is easy, but because the problem is hard. Right now there are earnest right wing pundits of various degrees of radicalization who are working on an artfully-crafted piece recommending that the Trump administration doesn’t do some piece of dumb, crazy nonsense. Sorry, Moldbug has spoken:³

The problem is: you think of this as a self-correcting system. So you think: if I tap it on the shoulder and tell it it’s wrong, it will say “Oh! Thank you, sir! Why, I had no idea I was wrong!”

If there was a self-correcting system, it would beat all comers and you’d be living under it already. Of course, it should be easy to get the Trump administration not to pressure Romania to drop charges against Andrew Tate. After all, he is a pimp, and a rapist, and just dirt. Your best bet is to work your way through the rolodex of White House officials and twist some ears. Your worst bet is to try and push water uphill through the Right Wing media system. It will end up in the same pool at the bottom where everyone is taking a dump.

Right now we are in the sanity peak. All Rightoid slop creator bot has to do is post the news headline with an appropriately perky emoji and thousands of likes are guaranteed. When things slow down, the quest for content starts anew, and a thousand Nancy Maces stand ready to fill it. This whole system was completely broken before the election. Nothing happened to fix it; to the contrary, it considers itself vindicated. So buckle up.

The Great Replacement

Prediction 2. Trump is going to exhibit undeniable signs of dementia

In 2020, Biden was 78. There was already fairly decent evidence that he was losing his mind, but also plenty of countervailing material to give plausible deniability. Like most people becoming demented, his mental decay exhibited itself in the progressive, slow exaggeration of traits and foibles for which he had already been known, including those which were generally held to be endearing. Trump is 78. If you know how to look, you can see the same thing happening.

Roughly a quarter of people in their 80s have dementia, Trump has a family history of dementia, he eats seed oils all day, and he has a very stressful job, so the priors are at least 50-50. Have you ever had a mad old relative who used social media? Just scroll.

This is perhaps not very important. It will be very demoralizing to watch the grifter circuit produce escalating levels of cope about how slurring words is a superpower, but demoralization is happening either way. I just think it’s good to happen, so I’m putting it in there to pad out the article and have a testable prediction I can mine for content a few years from now. Win win.

Appendix: Elite Human Capital

The term Elite Human Capital was popularized by Anatoly Karlin after he made the very unexpected discovery that Russia is not great at military logistics, and decided he needed a whole new ideology. It’s only been a couple of years, but I feel like I have hated the term for ever. Barely a day goes by without a rightoid friend of mine sending me some leftazoid freakshow specimen with a caption along the lines of ‘so this is your Elite Human Capital, huh?’. I’m not sure I have used the term myself even once, but it has a queer resonance that attaches itself to anyone who finds anything objectional about the rightoid freak show.

For a new concept, an unusual volume of sophistry has been written about it, and trusted friend of this blog, Richard Hanania, apparently wants to turn this sophistry into a book. So let me say some obvious things.

1. ‘Capital’ means goods that are used as productive inputs.

2. ‘Human capital’ refers to human beings that can be used as productive inputs.

3. ‘Elite Human Capital’ means the human beings that have the most productive inputs.

Anatoly Karlin’s original observation was that Elite Human Capital innately tends to support economic and social liberalism, and so that is the trend to bet on, long term. Big, if true. But then Karlin got butthurt about Bill Ackman getting commie campus trash in trouble, and since Bill Ackman is just obviously Elite Human Capital, the term had to be redefined to mean educated liberals. So the updated version of the theory just says ‘educated liberals are liberals’, which is true, but not big.

However, the original definition is perfectly sound. Some machines are more valuable than others, and some humans are more valuable than others. As Austrian economics tells us, there’s no way of working out which capital is more valuable other than looking at its market price. So who is the most Elite Human Capital? Duh.

Elon Musk is a really weird guy. In between conceiving this article in my head and being able to sit down and write it, a new aspect of this weirdness was revealed. But he is the most Elite Human Capital person in the world, fact. That the Trump administration is doing anything interesting at all, is essentially down to the fact that Elon got redpilled online after his kid was groomed into growing tits.⁴ This was always something that could have happened, in the sense that there was never anything there to stop it. But it didn’t happen, and it could have just kept not happening forever because billionaires are subject to the same general pressures to conform as most people and they have no natural reason to be radically dissatisfied with the present system. When it did happen, the nature of money as stored power revealed itself exactly as you might expect. Of course, Elon Musk could do with cutting down his redpill intake quite significantly while upping the quality, but one of him, pointed in whichever direction it may be, is worth a million drones. Imagine what a few more could do.

1. I think you mean SYNAGOGUE, kek.

2

Gonna have to tap the sign here.

3. Any middling idiot can be boki in old Moldbug articles; it takes a true idiot to be boki in old Moldbug comments.

4. Another aspect, as Jack Laurel points out, is that DOGE is putting into place a watered-down version of tactics originally advocated by Moldbug, rather than anything suggested by those who have insisted over the past 20 years on ‘doing something’.