Trump To Purge The Pentagon

The Wall Street Journal reported the first half of this development:

The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.

If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.

As commander in chief, Trump can fire any officer at will, but an outside board whose members he appoints would bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system, signaling across the military that he intends to purge a number of generals and admirals.

. . . The establishment of the board would be in line with Trump’s calls for purging what he views as failed generals, including those involved in the chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to people familiar with the policy discussions. Trump has said he would ask all generals involved in the withdrawal to resign by “noon on Inauguration Day.”

The New Republic somewhat predictably comments,

The executive order draws on General George C. Marshall’s 1940 creation of a “plucking board” led by retired general officers to “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” But that plucking board was to uplift young officers with high potential, not to cull anyone not perfectly aligned with MAGA.

This piece gives more background on Marshall's "plucking board". Marshall, who became Army Chief of Staff in 1939,

devoted himself to preparing the peacetime army “if war came” – a war many Americans still hoped desperately to avoid.

During the First World War, culminating as the First Army’s assistant chief of staff for operations, Marshall had witnessed the problem of field commanders who were past their prime. Marshall’s biographer, noted military historian Forrest Pogue, wrote that in 1939-1941 Marshall “was haunted by recollections of the droves of unfit commanders” that Pershing had sent to reclassification because they “no longer had it.”

. . . To ensure impartiality in the process of eliminating unfit senior officers from consideration for higher-level and combat commands, Marshall appointed six retired officers, headed by his predecessor, General Malin Craig. Marshall’s “plucking board,” as it was called, was “empowered to remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” Those removed were given one year to retire. As Marshall told the board, “Critical times are upon us.”

The "plucking board" was in fact specifically set up to remove incompetent officers, not to uplift those with high potential. The problem with the admirals and generals, as Trump apparently sees it, is that too many have been prmoted on the basis of political correctness, not military capability. In this, it would simply reflect Marshall's aims.

The other half of Trump's new strategy is the nomination of Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary. This piece at Chronicles refers to Hegseth just before his nomination, quoting from his book The War on Warriors: Beyond the Betrayal of the Men and Women Who Keep Us Free, where he says of the current generals,

No matter how poor their performance, they get that promotion—and especially that sweetheart defense contractor job after retirement—but only if they parrot the social justice liturgies of the moment. GI “Joe” deals with half-baked social theories implemented at the unit level, knowing somewhere a general is getting promoted for doing the foolish bidding of an ignorant and/or ideological politician. Joe also knows that if he loses his rifle, he’ll be demoted immediately. But if a general loses a war—or billions of dollars of military equipment—nothing happens.

According to CBS News,

Hegseth is the author of the recent book "The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free," a New York Times bestseller, in which he denounces what he calls the "warped, woke, and caustic policies of our current military."

In it, he blamed former President Barack Obama and the Pentagon for shortfalls in recruitment, claiming they "embraced the social justice messages of gender equity, racial diversity, climate stupidity, and the LGBTQA+ alphabet soup in their recruiting pushes." He continued: "Only one problem: There just aren't enough lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne. Not only do the lesbians not join, but those very same ads turn off the young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks."

So Trump's aim is pretty clearly to finish the task of dismantling the Pentagon's DEI program, remove officers promoted on the basis of DEI, as well as those aligned with it politically, and refocus the US military on its core goals. It's hard to disagree with this.

Kamala's Campaign Spending Shouldn't Have Been A Surprise

They had a staff of 12 to run a twitter feed? https://t.co/yttkQdCjl6

— Daniel Friedman (@DanFriedman81) November 8, 2024

On October 16, I put up an entry with links to post-mortems of Kamala's 2019 campaign for the Democrat presidential nomination. We may recall that she withdrew on December 3 of that year, before the Iowa caucuses and before any of the primaries. One link from 2015 went back even farther to review her pattern of spending, which looks like it's been consistent throughout her political career:

California’s top Senate candidate Kamala Harris has been using her campaign account to fund stays in upscale hotels and first-class airfares during her nearly five-year tenure as state attorney general.

A review by The Hill of California campaign finance records reveals that Harris’s expenditures follow a pattern: The Democratic candidate regularly charges thousands of dollars in luxury travel and hotels to her campaign.

. . . While the Harris campaign’s spending has come under scrutiny this election cycle — most recently in a National Journal report on luxury travel — The Hill’s investigation reveals that these expenditure patterns are consistent from January 2011 through the present.

In a standard trip, for example, Harris billed her campaign $2,482.70 in January 2013 for Delta Airlines “airfare for candidate from Washington D.C./campaign events/Presidential Inauguration,” according to state records.

On that same trip Harris stayed in D.C.’s upscale St. Regis hotel, billing her campaign $3,434.74 for a four-night stay, a nightly rate of $858.69.

Questions about Kamala's campaign spending, in other words, are nothing new. The Washington Examiner suggests that there's a great deal we have yet to learn about her 2024 campaign spending:

The Harris campaign declined to comment on its finances. A fuller portrait will be public after the election, as the Federal Election Commission mandates post-general election reports for candidates within 30 days.

In mid-October, the Harris campaign disclosed that it had spent over $880 million this election, almost $526 million greater than the roughly $354 million that the Trump campaign had disclosed spending, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of federal filings. Much of the Harris campaign’s spending was allocated for digital media advertising, polling, and travel from state to state, including to a private jet company called Advanced Aviation.

Payroll and the taxes that accompanied it accounted for $56.6 million of the Harris campaign’s spending. In comparison, the Trump campaign reported spending $9 million on payroll — employing hundreds fewer staff members.

. . . “Event production” was also a staple spending area of the Harris campaign, which notably hosted a star-studded lineup of musicians from Lady Gaga to Katy Perry for an election eve rally.

. . . A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that the Harris campaign spent six figures on building a set for Harris’s appearance on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast with host Alex Cooper. The interview came out in October and was reportedly filmed in a hotel room in Washington, D.C.

What puzzles me is that this has come as such a surprise, when excessive spending was simply part of the Harris package from the start. Via the New York Post:

Lindy Li, who sits on the Democratic National Committee finance committee, raked Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign over the coals, branding it a “$1 billion disaster” and called for accountability after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory,

Li at one point dropped an f-bomb during her television hit while venting that President Biden’s late-stage decision to drop out was a “f— you” to Democrat. She contended that she and others had been misled about Harris’ chances in the election.

“The truth is this is just an end epic disaster, this is a $1 billion disaster,” Li bluntly told “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Saturday.

Li begins to trace the problem back to its origin, at least in part:

On Saturday, Li ripped into the way in which Biden went down, suggesting that his rapid endorsement of Harris was an “f you” to his fellow Democrats. Fox News censored her accidentally dropping the f-bomb on air and Li later restrained herself from using it again.

“I actually think President Biden, the whole endorsing her 30 minutes after he dropped out, I think that was a big, ‘F you’ to the party. ‘If you don’t want me, here’s somebody you may not like, deal with it,’” Li said.

“Kind of like sticking it to the man.”

. . . Li groused that she was “misled” about Harris’ chances by top brass, including campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon.

“I was promised… Jen O’Malley Dillon promised all of us that Harris would win,” she complained. “She even put videos out saying that Harris would win. I believed her, my donors believed her, and so they wrote massive checks. I feel like a lot of us were misled.”

So the problem goes back to Biden, but Biden also chose Kamala as his running mate. And as we see here, she was a known quantity; her 2019 campaign was an expensive disaster just like her 2024 campaign. Biden was allowed to get away with that choice and put her in as an "insurance policy" -- but let's reflect a moment. Wasn't Biden himself a known quantity? His 2020 basement campaign was at minimum a tacit acknowledgement that his condition couldn't stand much public exposure, and we still have a lot to learn about how this was concealed, and for how long.

Nothing about the whole 2024 Democrat campaign should have been a surprise to anyone. If Nancy Pelosi was able to bully Joe into withdrawing in July, she could have done it far earlier. Why didn't she?

Mental Health Crisis?

On October 18, I linked to a YouTube interview of Mark Halperin by Tucker Carlson, where Halperin predicts the outcome of the election:

I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country. I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision for what the future for them and their children could be like, and I think that will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals.

Reading between the lines of Halperin's Morning Meeting podcast since then, where (only for instance) he forbade Sean Spicer from criticizing his friend Ann Selzer, the "gold standard" pollster, for her wacky conclusion that Harris was ahead of Trump by 3 points in Iowa days before the election, it's pretty clear that Halperin was expecting the Trumpists would be the ones who'd have to line up at therapists' offices. In fact, from remarks he's made on the podcast at various times, I think he saw his mission as being the guy who'd lead the Trumpists back to sanity after their loss.

I'm not the only one who's seen Halperin as grasping for an opportunity to rehabilitate himself in this election cycle. Paul Farhi at Vanity Fair was on his case in the past week:

Halperin’s career reassembly reflects today’s fractured media environment, in which the power of traditional media gatekeepers has diminished in recent years as new platforms have flourished. And it speaks to how quickly the collective memory can fade. When his name comes up in news accounts these days, Halperin is often described as a “political analyst,” not by a phrase that once preceded his name: “disgraced journalist.”

In any case, his sense of the election outcome at this point resembles nothing so much as the predictions in March of 2020 that the COVID outbreak would result in mass graves in public parks. Accounts from the real world were much more mundane; for instance, Nate Siver remarked on November 6,

[W]hen I was walking around New York this morning, I was surprised at how normal it all felt.

Nothing like 2016, the last time Donald Trump became president. That was basically the zombie apocalypse. I took the subway to the ABC News offices on Nov. 9 and the man sitting next to me on the 1 train recognized me but could barely get words out. I think he was trying to communicate sympathy. But he was a bad bluffer. His body language betrayed that his real reaction was, “Bro, what the [redacted] just happened?”

There was none of that this time. Maybe a little aloofness. But no funny looks. People were going about their day.

Sundance's impressions at The Conservative Treehouse were similar:

What we discover during this phase is that an unstable leftist population of 0.1% is not being stirred up by the Intelligence Community and the ideological leftist media who support them. Both the IC and their media are frozen.

There is that phase in every abusive relationship when the abuser has run out of manipulation that works. They realize their victims are numb to their efforts; things get quiet.

Worse still for Democrats, the grassroots believers are in full retreat because they are realizing they were gaslit into believing Kamala would win. The leftist influencers are losing their army of foot soldiers who believed them in mass. The dawn of the Great Awakening is upon us.

Well, maybe not everyone. Nate Silver was on the New York sidewalks. The New Yorkers many stories higher were in fact calling their therapists but that's because that's what they could afford to do.

Liberals in deep-blue New York City shocked and disturbed by President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory are flooding shrinks’ inboxes looking for appointments.

“It’s a perfect storm for New York therapists,” said Manhattan psychologist Chloe Carmichael, who estimated she’s received a 15% spike in inquiries from patients. “It’s a repeat of 2016, where a lot of people feel really scared and traumatized and angry.”

. . . On Wednesday morning, New York City-based psychotherapist Alyson Cohen woke up to a deluge of paranoid texts from clients begging for extra appointments this week, many of whom claimed to be “afraid for their futures and that of their children.”

It's hard to avoid thinking these are the 1% of the 1%, and they're doing it as a form of virtue signaling to their peers. For instance, Ella Emhoff, Kamala's stepdaughter:

Ella Emhoff appears to be losing her mind over her stepmother’s loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election.

Emhoff, 25, was photographed sobbing on the sidelines while Vice President Harris delivered her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday.

Less than 24 hours later, the lefty activist daughter of second gentleman Doug Emhoff posted one of the unflattering images of her crying during the speech to her Instagram story, along with the caption, “Truly no words. We are all going to get through this. It just f–king hurts like a bitch right now and that’s ok.

“Just please check in on your people right now,” she wrote to her 503,000 followers. “I’m here for all of you and I love you guys.”

But these reactions are primarily fashion accessories:

We'll have to see if the election outcome continues to feed Mark Halperin's career rehabilitation, but I think he's made several bad calls during this attempt.

It's Suddenly OK To Ask If The 2020 Election Was Stolen

From Robert Spencer at PJ Media:

As of this writing on Friday, Donald Trump’s popular vote total stood at 74,269,316. By the time you see this article and click on that link, however, that total is certain to be higher. Trump’s final popular vote total has now exceeded his official 2020 total of 74,225,926. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has 68,800,347 popular votes, a steep decline from Old Joe Biden’s 2020 total of 81,286,454.

He cites a piece by Victoria Taft, who asks, Did God Rapture Some 15 Million Democrat Voters? If Not, Where'd They Go?

Before the election I wondered if this would happen. After universal mail-out ballots had been curbed in some places for the 2024 election, and despite same-day registration and voting and even outlawing voter ID in California, would America have the same numbers of voters as 2020? Would they show back up?

At this point, it looks as if there could be a significant reduction in Democrat voters from 2020 to 2024.

On Wednesday, the AP fact checkers were on the case:

CLAIM: President Joe Biden won approximately 20 million more votes in the 2020 election than Vice President Kamala Harris earned in the 2024 race, proving either that Trump has cheated his way to a second term or that there was widespread fraud four years ago.

THE FACTS: The claims are unfounded. Votes from Tuesday’s presidential election are still being counted, so any comparison with previous races would not be accurate. In addition, election officials and agencies monitoring the vote have reported no significant issues with Tuesday’s election. Claims of widespread fraud in 2020 have been debunked countless times.

Buit as of Friday afternoon, NBC News's popular vote totals were Trump 73,517,201, Harris 69,204,767, only slightly higher than the numbers Spencer cites. It's highly unlikely that another 11 to 15 million votes will suddenly turn up to match the 2020 figures, but the idea that they might is the whole basis for the fact checkers' argument.

On October 5, I first linked to a report of now Vice President-elect Vance's exchange with comedian Jason Selvig on this subject:

“Who won the 2020 election? Could you just answer? Did Donald Trump win?” Selvig asked.

“Yes,” Vance replied.

After asking Vance to confirm that he was saying Trump won in 2020, Vance replied “Yep.”

As I posted then, Vance has been widening the Overton window to make questions about the 2020 election respectable. But those who now question the legitimacy of the 2024 election are using the disparity to suggest Trump is the one who cheated this year -- all of a sudden, that's beginning to make skepticism about 2020 OK as well. YouTube legal commentator Robert Gouveia discusses this development here:

At 8:40, for instance, he discusses the totals of registered voters who actually voted in Milwaukee precincts in the 2020 election and finds that they remarkably reported totals verging on 100%, and in a few cases exceeding 100%. Robert Spencer at the link above continues,

That Trump would have gotten roughly the same number of votes in 2024 as he did in 2020 is perfectly reasonable. He is, thanks to the left’s relentless campaign of defamation, a highly controversial figure, and while the 2024 campaign certainly changed some people’s minds about him, it is no surprise that his base of support remained roughly the same size that it was the last time around.

But what about that massive drop-off between Old Joe, the most popular president in American history according to his vote total, and Kamala? Not only did eleven million voters not show up for Harris as they did for Biden, but they didn’t go anywhere. Not only did Kamala not get those votes, but there is no comparable increase in anyone else’s vote total.

. . . For four years, it has been impossible even to ask questions about the 2020 election. Those who dared even to suggest that it may not actually have been the most secure election in history have been defamed as conspiracy theorists and deplatformed and silenced accordingly.

The big difference now is that with Trump allies poised to come into the Justice Department, we'll begin to get much more clarity. On Wednesday, my theory was that Kamala, Dougie, and Tim Walz weren't just bad candidates or surrogates, they were all outright annoying, which caused even Democrats to stay home. But that was before people began to raise this new issue of an overall disparity in vote totals betwen 2020 and 2024. Kamala's phony nasal weepiness alone can't explain around 10 million missing voters.

Trump Isn't Messing Around

Via hte New York Post:

Mayor Eric Adams is ending his administration’s controversial program supplying migrants in city shelters with prepaid debit cards to pay for groceries.

The pilot program distributed the preloaded Mastercards to asylum seekers at hotels-turned-shelters, with a family of four receiving about $350 a week to cover the cost of groceries and baby supplies.

The city hired New Jersey-based tech startup Mobility Capital Finance in a $53 million, one-year “emergency” contract that drew backlash when the city failed to conduct a typical bidding process before picking the company.

But with the one year up shortly, the Adams administration decided against renewing the contract, ABC7 reported.

Accxording to this post on X, Adams's decision "reportedly" came after a phone call with Trump yesterday.

NEW: Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams announces that NYC will no longer be issuing vouchers to illegal immigrants.

Remarkable. Trump gets elected and everyone falls in line.

The decision came one day after Adams reportedly had a phone call with Trump.

"As we move… pic.twitter.com/gI8HyJiqdg

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 8, 2024

It sounds as though the New York program is at least a first cousin to the programs in Sprinmgfield, OH; Charleroi, PA; Aurora, CO; El Paso, TX; and elsewhere, whereby federal funds authorized by "emergency", "temporary" or "experimental" programs are routed through NGOs to for-profit companies and various other third parties that benefit from the illegals. All that's needed is to cut a single link in the chain for the whole scheme to fall apart.It sounds like Trump's people knmow what's going on, and we'll see more of this even before Trump resumes office.

According to Politico, federal employees are anticipating similar moves:

Federal employees throughout the executive branch are panicking at the thought of another Trump administration.

Former President Donald Trump has pledged to “demolish the deep state.” His running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, has said Trump ought to fire “every civil servant in the administrative state.” It’s not just campaign-trail bluster. In the waning days of his first administration, Trump sought to make it easier to fire federal employees — a move that was quickly reversed by the Biden administration.

In fact, this is item 1 on Trump's plan to dismantle the deep state:

Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the Deep State.

1. “Immediately reissue my 2020 executive order, restoring the President's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats.”

2. “Clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus.”

3. “Totally reform… pic.twitter.com/Xhg297uWCe

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 8, 2024

This applies especially to the FBI:

The Washington Times learned through several anonymous bureau sources that senior executives who run the agency were “stunned” and “shell-shocked” by Mr. Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

“You know the fit test? How they let the standards slack on the fit test?” the first FBI source said, referring to the agency’s physical fitness requirements. “Everyone’s going to have a real problem when they’re running for the door.”

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Director Paul Abbate have little chance of remaining at the bureau by the time Mr. Trump is sworn into office, sources say.

. . . Others on the 7th floor of the FBI are so concerned about their own jobs that they are likely to flood the Washington, D.C., private security job market, sources say.

According to most of the sources, no one in the FBI at a GS-14 level or higher is safe from losing their job after Mr. Trump is sworn in, and they fully expect the president-elect to “smash the place to pieces when he gets in,” and that it will be a “bloodbath.”

Former FBI whistleblower George Hill told The Washington Times that people in the agency say the current state of the FBI is “frazzled.”

“I have friends still at the Bureau telling me that no less than 50 Senior Executives (SES) are scrambling to retire ASAP,” he said.

A few commentators have also raised statements Mitt Romney raised during the 2012 election cycle about "self deportation":

The term “self-deportation” has found its way into the GOP presidential primary race, with candidate Mitt Romney outlining a vague immigration platform which includes "self-deportation," or the idea that unauthorized immigrants will voluntarily choose to leave the U.S. if life here is made unbearable enough.

What I think we're beginning to see is a scramble in a number of quarters to get out of Trump's way even before he's inaugurated, in other words, a self-execution of Trump's promises either out of fear or a desire to stay on his good side.

Following The Money

I've begun to see some productive insights into the election results, and I'll probably be bringing more of these up in coming days. But I continue to be influenced by Ferdinand Lundberg (1902-1995), best known for his 1969 book, The Rich and the Super-Rich. I think he was a proto-Trumpian populist whose view was that American politics, media, and popular culture, at least in the 20th century, were dominated by the behind-the-scenes interlocking interests of the post-Civil War industrial fortunes.

So let's look at the election through a Lundbergian lens. The first thing to note is that the billionaires didn't operate behind the scenes in this election. Trump himself is one of them, after all. George Soros had Tim Walz to dinner at his condo; Mark Cuban was a Harris surrogate. Bobby Kennedy Jr joined the Trump campaign. Most notably, Elon Musk donated heavily to the Trump campaign and became a highly visible surrogate. Other, lower-profile Silicon Valley types were heavy donors to both campaigns.

The best insights so far into how the money moved, and why, over the campaign is at Conservative Treehouse.

You will remember last year when I dug deep into the financial system around Twitter, Elon Musk’s purchase, and the viability of the business model. In short, by the time he reached October/November ’23 there was going to be no way for Musk to continue operating Twitter without some serious change in financial construct.

So, what happened?

Larry Ellison happened.

In a little-known background conversation that President Trump is well aware of, Oracle founder Larry Ellison said, “I will not allow Musk to fall.” Thus, an immediate and opportune alignment began that shows the strategic thinking of billionaire Larry Ellison.

Ellison gains around $50 billion per year from his operations. Oracle is huge. The X-platform subsequently began big contracts with Oracle. Twitter’s fate is now intrinsically linked to Ellison. Nuf said.

. . . As a direct consequence of Musk’s position, Larry Ellison -by extension Oracle- is now easily positioned to be the biggest beneficiary of a Trump win. Ellison is the biggest influence operation; but as all influence and leverage operations go, he’s also the quietest influence.

Larry Ellison (Oracle) is the hand on the Elon Musk Marionette. All Musk moves are with this background alignment as the underpinning.

But another insight here is into Jeff Bezos's intervention with the Washington Post's editorial policy, reversing its tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, which amounted to a tacit endorsement of Trump in 2024. Why did Bezos do this? Well, if Larry Ellison is the puppet master pulling Elon Musk's strings, which in effect then control Trump, then

the biggest loser was set to be Larry Ellison’s billionaire competitor, Jeff Bezos (Amazon).

Jeff Bezos needs to position himself to avoid being totally shut out from White House influence ability. The non-endorsement was the first move. The shift in ideological alignment within the Washington Post . . . is the second move. Bezos is mitigating and strategizing risk. That’s what is going on.

These are not media outlets in your traditional frame of reference. These are influence operations aligned with the interests of the billionaires behind them. It’s a game of thrones thing. Each interest has their own advocacy group. That’s what you would call “modern media”. Bezos has the Washington Post, Ellison positioned himself with Twitter; the intent is the same.

The biggest winners from the Trump victory will be Larry Ellison (Oracle), his super influence operator Elon Musk, and their smaller -albeit ideologically similar- friend, Peter Thiel (Palantir).

This is the inside baseball stuff that circles the President Trump campaign orbit in very close proximity. This is the command-and-control influence operation that determines outcomes. When Trump wins, these interests are positioned for strongest influence.

If you want to really understand what is happening, follow this background context as the intellectual filter and you will be watching President Trump Term-2 politics with clear eyes. However, always remember, these are their personal interests. As long as they align with MAGA, all is cool. If their personal interests diverge from MAGA, we will have a problem.

This is very much in the spirit of Ferdinand Lundberg, except that Lundberg saw the super-rich as a group of about 60 families whose fortunes were inherited from the post-Civil War robber barons and whose interests were interlocked. It didn't much matter if the Hearsts or the Ochs-Sulzbergers controlled media; they were effectively the same interests.

Notice the fortunes behind Trump and Harris now -- much of the money is from Silicon Valley, a whole new industry, or set of industries, based on computers and the internet. The 19th-century fortunes are fading into the background. The oldest money directly involved in the 2024 campaign is from the Kennedys, but the founder of the fortune, Joseph Kennedy Sr, (1888-1969) was from a different generation than J P Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, or Henry Ford, and his fortune didn't come from basic industries like steel, railroads, oil, or automobiles; he was into real estate, liquor distribution, and Hollywood.

I think the older money came from a tradition whose greatest fear was a world proletarian revolution on the paradigm of the Soviet Union, which that level of wealth had begun to fear well before 1917. Their political strategy was aimed at averting this revolution, and on one hand, they created a multigenerational intelligence-driven deep state designed to subvert that effort. On the other, they supported a Fabian socialist political strategy aimed at symbolic appeasement of working-class demands without actually improving working-class conditions.

Lundberg understood that this consensus strategy created the New Deal on one hand and the FBI-CIA on the other, and it was partially successful at least insofar as it averted Marxist-Leninist revolution without threatening the interests of the super-rich until the failure of the Marxist-Leninist model late in the 20th century. The problem is that the Fabian socialist program and the intelligence-driven state have outlived their usefulness while continuing to demand unsustainable expense.

Thus what I think we're seeing is a new generation of influential wealth looking for a new strategy, since the old one has outlived its usefulness and is unaffordable -- the level of debt has surpassed the ability simply to pass the expense on to the working and middle classes. But neither Musk nor Trump is driving the innovation, it's people like Ellison, with Bezos now looking for a piece of the action; Warren Buffett is also tentatively and quietly joining that side, though only as long as it suits his purpose. Gates, Soros, and a lot of the older money are still on the side of the old cold war and quasi-appeasement strategy, with the middle and working classes bearing the cost.

Words Of Wisdom From Sean Trende

I've never understood the point of Sean Trende, or in fact of Real Clear Politics. I've commented on his obtuseness many times here. A week ago, I saw this piece at RCP, Please Don’t Pay (Much) Attention to Early Voting Numbers. I had an instinct that, although it was conventional wisdom, it wasn't going to age well, and I bookmarked it for review after the election. Here's what he said:

Every two years around this time, we finally get [solid numbers] in the form of early voting data. Like manna, these data seem heaven-sent, tempting those who analyze elections into making predictions about the future.

And, every two years around this time, I find myself writing the same column with the same message: Don’t do that. It is not manna. It is more akin to a poisoned chalice offered to a thirsty man.

. . . To see why this is a problem, it is useful to think of a party’s vote total as a part of an equation: The number of votes cast early times the party’s share of the early vote, plus the number of votes cast on Election Day times the party’s share of the Election Day vote. If you do this for both parties, you can calculate a winner.

Here’s the rub: We have only one of those four numbers. All we know is the number of votes being cast early. We might guess at a party’s vote share among the early votes by registration data, but even this is a fraught endeavor since we don’t know how registered independents are voting (if the state has party registration at all).

. . . Republicans are actively encouraging their voters to turn out early. So maybe what we’re seeing in states like North Carolina and Nevada is Republican enthusiasm in early voting that will result in fewer Election Day voters turning out. In other words, the strong Republican performances in early voting might cause a smaller Republican Election Day vote.

Except that that by November 4, the day before the election, even CNN could see what Trende couldn't:

The key states of North Carolina and Georgia both saw record numbers of voters participate in early in-person voting, with the totals in Georgia exceeding the numbers from 2020. The total pre-election voting in North Carolina, however, was still lower than four years ago due to significantly fewer people choosing to vote by mail.

. . . Republicans have made up more of the pre-election vote than they did in 2020. The Trump campaign made more of an effort this year to encourage Republicans to vote early and by mail, a major shift from messaging against pre-election voting in 2020.

Across the 27 states for which Catalist has comparable data, registered Democrats have cast 37% of pre-election ballots, while registered Republicans have cast 35%. That’s a significant tightening in the partisan gap since 2020, when, at the same point and in the same states, registered Democrats held a 12-percentage point lead – 42% to 30%.

In four of the seven key states that will likely decide the presidential election, voters register by party, and in every one of them, Republicans have made up a larger share of the pre-election vote than they did at the same time four years ago. Democrats in these states have overall decreased their share compared with 2020.

In other w0rds, by looking closely at early voting numbers, which Trende said please don't do, CNN came up with important insights into the election night outcome, which seem to have evaded Trende. Jim Hoft at The Gatewaay Pundit points out another intriguing development:

It’s still a bit early in the counting but it appears that Democrats and Kamala Harris not only lost the 2024 election to former President Donald Trump but they lost around 15 million votes in the past four years.

In 2020 Democrats and the legacy media claimed that Joe Biden tallied 81 million votes to defeat President Donald Trump who gained 74 million votes – more votes than any US president in history.

. . . Fast forward to 2024.

So far in 2024 Kamala Harris and Democrats were only able to must[er] 66 million votes – down 15 million from their 2020 total.

Those numbers are expected to rise in the coming days but it is unlikely that Kamala will get anywhere near 80 million votes.

On one hnnd, I think the shift in strategy to early voting was a consequence of Trump's seizure of the Republican National Committee during the 2024 primary season, control he never quite had in 2020. On the other, the decrease in Democrat vote count was almost certainly due to what I pointed out Monday, that Kamala, Dougie, and Tim Walz weren't just bad candidates or surrogates, they were all outright annoying, which caused even Democrats to stay home.

So far, neither Sean Trende nor anyone else at RCP has pointed this out.