(Last) Weekly Roundup: The Day They Turned The Riots Off Edition (With Minimal GameStop Content!)

I'd like to write about GameStop this week --- I'd really like to write about it --- but I think the final act of this drama, namely what will the government do about it? is the most interesting part of the saga, and therefore I'm going to wait. With that said, I want to point out that the Uniparty is already showing its hand on the future of "the wrong people manipulating the stock market": Elizabeth Warren, The Progressive Cherokee Lioness, has already demanded that strong action be taken... against the online forums that allowed retail investors to organize. Oh, you thought she was going to go after the naked-short crowd? I treasure your naivete, dear reader, I really do.

One overlooked aspect of the GameStop craze, beyond the fact that it made one of my racing teammates a multi-millionaire in the course of four days, is that it wiped the nonstop blathering about "insurrection" off the front pages almost everywhere. Yes, dear readers, it was an insurrection, started by Emmanuel Goldstein Donald Trump and the time machine he used to encourage the "Storming" of the Capital after it began. Ignore the fact that said insurrection was mostly unarmed middle-aged people who walked through an open gap and stormed in orderly fashion between two velvet ropes so they could pose with Nancy Pelosi's podium --- there was a dude with zip ties! They were going to kill Mike Pence! For reals! That's why it was so critical to shoot unarmed women in the face! The media has officially declared it an insurrection, like your school principal calling a snow day, and that's what it will always be.

I'm personally not quite ready to let the "insurrection" go, however. In partcular, I want to discuss the most astounding article the New York Times has ever published --- one that demonstrates the Uniparty at its most puissant, while simultaneously giving a booster shot to every conspiracy theory you could possibly imagine. Just in case you don't feel like clicking the jump, I'll give you a preview: it turns out that there is, in fact, a CEO of Anitfa, and you can get him on a Zoom call.

I'm going to use an archive link to the story, "How Democrats Planned For Doomsday", because I have to think that at some point the Times will think twice about publicly victory-lapping in this fashion. In no sane world could you publish this article without consequences; it makes your "Facebook uncle" seem as prescient as Paul M'aud-Dib. Here's the money shot:

The video call was announced on short notice, but more than 900 people quickly joined: a coalition of union officials and racial justice organizers, civil rights lawyers and campaign strategists, pulled together in a matter of hours after the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill. . They convened to craft a plan for answering the onslaught on American democracy, and they soon reached a few key decisions. They would stay off the streets for the moment and hold back from mass demonstrations that could be exposed to an armed mob goaded on by President Donald J. Trump... . ...The meeting was no lucky feat of emergency organizing, nor was the highly disciplined and united front that emerged from it. Instead, it was a climactic event in a long season of planning and coordination by progressives... By the time rioters ransacked the Capitol, the machinery of the left was ready: prepared by months spent sketching out doomsday scenarios and mapping out responses, by countless hours of training exercises and reams of opinion research... . Worried that Mr. Trump might use any unruly demonstrations as pretext for a federal crackdown of the kind seen last summer in Portland, Ore., progressives organized mass gatherings only sparingly and in highly choreographed ways after Nov. 3. In a year of surging political energy across the left and of record-breaking voter turnout, one side has stifled itself to an extraordinary degree during the precarious postelection period. . Since the violence of Jan. 6, progressive leaders have not deployed large-scale public protests at all. Interviews with nearly two dozen leaders involved in the effort, and a review of several hundred pages of planning documents, polling presentations and legal memorandums, revealed an uncommon — and previously unreported — degree of collaboration among progressive groups...

That's really the tip of the insane iceberg, all reported right there in front of you. Curtis Yarvin makes it plain:

Do you remember the dogs of summer? The riots that did $2 billion in damage? The miniature armies in black clothes and black masks? Those were dogs on a leash. They could be turned on and off in one Zoom call. Anything that can be suppressed with “a few key decisions” is not in any way spontaneous. You just read it in the Times—so it must be true, right? And did the people in black show up on the 6th? They did not. . And just who was pressing that button? Go back to “was announced.” Who set up this Zoom call? Who selected the 900 people? What is this list? Wouldn’t you like to know, you fascist peasant? Go back to Dubuque, smoke some heroin and jack off into your Playstation 5. You! Hayseed! Why are you even reading this story? It’s about your betters—for your betters. We now return you to all the news that’s fit to print. . Honestly, stories like this are a liability that shouldn’t even be printed. They appear for one reason: people like to brag. Especially people with mens rea, conscience of guilt.

People like to brag. And this article is chock-full of bragging. In particular, it points out that this 900-organization coalition of the willing had pre-identified every single legal strategy Donald Trump would use. They had attorneys in the right places. They knew the judges. and they knew that the judges, like Stacey Abrams' sister, wouldn't recuse themselves for even the most gross conflicts of interest.

Now, I'm not going to tell you that the election was stolen. I have a feeling that doing so is a great way to find yourself in prison four years from now, the same way that the newly-energized FBI just arrested a dude for making election memes in 2016. But I'm going to ask you this. If you came over to my house tomorrow and I had a team of attorneys going over all the ways that the State of Ohio could accuse me of robbing a bank on March 22, 2021 --- would your first thought be that I had no plans of robbing a bank on that day? If I then detailed to you my plans to attack fifty pieces of "evidence" that the local sheriff would have on March 23 regarding said bank robbery, would your belief in my innocence be enhanced in any way? What if you stopped by my house again on March 30 and I said, "Yeah, they said I robbed the bank, and they had fifty witnesses, and I had aliases prepared against each one of their statements, in detail, well in advance of the accusation," aren't you going to think I'm a bank robber?

We've repeatedly heard two truthy-ish statements from the media in the recent past:

"Antifa has no leader, no central agenda, no organization. Nobody can stop the riots, because there's no organization that could stop them."

I mean, you just read about it in the Times, right? When it was determined that "street action" would hurt Joe Biden, all the "street action" disappeared. It's back now, of course, since it can't do any harm. Antifa may not be a registered LLC, and they may not have a convention in Vegas every year, but there is clearly someone who can turn them off on command. Next statement:

"There was no credible evidence of election fraud. Trump lost every case." Well, Trump certainly lost every case. In case you thought that was due solely to the merits, or lack thereof, of said cases, you have America's paper of record to correct you:

Democratic litigators had been in contact before Election Day with Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, about the possibility of an attempted electoral heist. “We were prepared to counter it,” Ms. Nessel said in an interview.

Oh, you called Dana Nessel ahead of time? This Dana Nessel? For a little friendly chat, Democrat to Democrat, between the woman who will need to run for re-election and the machine that will be paying all the bills for that re-election? And Dana says "We...

We...

...were prepared to counter it"? Who is "we" here? This 900-organization Democratic coalition and the Attorney General? Remember the China GP of 2007, when Ron Dennis said, "We weren't racing Ferrari, we were racing Fernando" and everybody was all like, "Who is 'we'? Doesn't Fernando work for you, too?" Wouldn't you like to have a transcript of the discussions between Democratic litigators and the Democratic AG before Trump's proxies in Michigan hit a stone wall? I would, anyway. I'd probably learn some harsh truths about how the world really works.

Jegath Athilingam, a strategist who helped craft the progressives’ messaging on Michigan, said they had been poised to deliver “more of an aggressive” denunciation of the lawmakers had they colluded with Mr. Trump. . But, she said, “Once he failed in Michigan, a precedent had been set.”

And there you go. Apropos of nothing, the story certainly gives you a sense of America as a nation of immigrants: Donald Trump, famously naturalized from Drumpf, and his recently-arrived Eastern European First Lady brought down by: Anat Shenker-Osorio, Ai-jen Poo, Michael Podhorzer, Deirdre Schifeling, Nelini Stamp, Anna Galland, Art Reyes, Jegath Athilingam, and Rahna Epting. There's room here for a Catch-22 joke:

Yossarian…it was an odious, alien, distasteful name, a name that just did not inspire confidence. It was not at all like such clean, crisp, honest, American names as Cathcart, Peckem and Dreedle.

Jokes aside, there's something fascinating about the idea that the stereotypical-of-politics backroom filled with white dudes smoking cigars is clearly a thing of the past. There's literally not a single Anglo-Saxon anywhere in this passion play, save for the befuddled Michael Pence down there in the basement waiting to get beheaded by the "Q Shaman" while his Praetorians forcibly ventilate the larynxes of female veterans. It helps you see poor old President Biden for what he arguably is: a prop for us rubes here in Middle America, the heroic ancient conqueror of Corn Pop wheeled out and propped up by the folks listed above.

Which is why the Times article exists, by the way: to make sure you know that, after the fact, and to make sure that due fealty is paid to the likes of Shenker-Osorio, Athilingam, Poo, et al. Those evil old white cigar-smokers who put "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes into power back in the day didn't demand a fawning write-up after the fact, but then again they didn't have Instagram, either. It's no fun being the power behind the throne if you can't get a Kindle book deal, or if the other parents idling their Cayennes in the day-school line don't realize that you helped to immanentize the eschaton.

And these Whiz Kids have so much power, now. So much that they needn't fear that Dorothy will pull the curtain and expose them as the Wizard of Oz. They'll draw the curtain back in the Times, for all and sundry to read. Sing along with me: This is how we dooo iiiiiittttttt... It's no longer necessary to dismiss all talk of coordinated Uniparty action as "conspiracy theory". You're now permitted to see the hand that moves the puppet, because what could you possibly do about it? Vote? Where you gonna vote, exactly, and for what?

In the unlikely event that Times readers have any qualms about the construction of a Zoom-call hierarchy that can do everything from shut down "spontaneous protests" to pre-dismiss lawsuits, the article offers the world's least convincing disclaimer at its close:

“We may have walked back from the brink of a dangerous moment in this country, but this cannot be the norm,” said Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn. “It’s not sustainable for democracy.”

I don't want to get all capeshit in this post, but remember the Batman movie where Bruce Wayne constructs a machine to track every living person on the planet by thoroughly "rooting" their cell phones and sending the audio/GPS data back to a central server? Remember how Morgan Freeman doesn't even want to know that said system exists? Remember how it blows itself up at the end of the movie, so you, the capeshit viewer, can be reassured that such a universal-power machine does not exist in the fictional city of Gotham in the equally fictional DC Universe, because that might cause you to be upset in the period of time between now and the next Batman movie?

If you were nervous while watching the aforementioned movie, which has nothing to do with real life, you might also want to be a little nervous about the fact that everybody from the Biden Administration to the de facto CEO of Antifa have collaborated to build a network through which they can coordinate pretty much everything that happens from now on. The "street armies" can be activated, or deactivated, on a whim. Try to stay on their good side.

Ask yourself a question, via which we will wrap up for the week as well: If this Reddit-vs-Wall-Street thing heats up any more, you think the people who built that Zoom network will fail to reactivate it? Do you think that the people who paid Janet Yellen $800,000 in a single year prior to her entirely happenstance selection as Treasury Secretary --- do you think the people who speak for the President and whose brothers also work for major Wall Street players --- do you think that the people who put their money behind the Biden Zoom Machine --- do you think none of those people will suggest that maybe, just maybe, the "street armies" focus in a few, ahem, productive areas? What will Anat Shenker-Osorio do then?

Here's a hint: You'll eventually be able to read about it in the Times.

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For Hagerty last week, I wrote about leather interiors.