The Revenge of the Normies

[jerryskids 5,460]

Good (but long) opinion piece from the Free Press which talks about the "Normies" vs. the "Elites," so this should be up @jonmx's wheelhouse.  I almost called the thread "Why people like Trump," as that is captured herein.  I realize that most Lefties either won't believe what's in here, continuing to think people are dumb and don't get it, which... is consistent with the essay.

Quote

The Revenge of the Normies

In the great global battle for power, the elites are losing. Why? Martin Gurri explains.

A fierce political conflict is raging over much of the democratic world. On one side we find the normies: ordinary people who defend, naively, the historic principles of democracy such as freedom of speech and assembly, the separation of powers, etc. On the other side stand the elites, masters of the great institutions of wealth, knowledge, and power, who insist that extraordinary measures must be taken to save a depraved and self-destructive society from its own history and its own people—that is to say, from the normies.

The elites are driven entirely by the impulse to control. They detest democracy, which keeps getting in their way, and much prefer a golden ideal they possessively call “Our Democracy”—their own rule in perpetuity. Individual rights are unfortunate legacies from a simpler era. The First Amendment, for example, they see as “hamstringing the government in significant ways.” By the way, that was Ketanji Brown Jackson talking, a Supreme Court justice whose job it is to defend the Constitution. Freedom of speech does hamstring government, that’s perfectly true—but only to the elites (who hate the sound of normie voices) is it a bad thing. 

What is the conflict about? 

The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring stuff. That’s what normal means.

The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong, only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”

The normies, by their very nature a disorganized crowd, fight back by pouring into the streets in frighteningly large numbers and electing politicians loathed by the elites, like Donald Trump in the U.S. and Javier Milei in Argentina. The elites, as creatures of hierarchy, are hyper-organized, and can summon to their side the established political parties, the national and transnational bureaucracies, and the activist class. They can get you from above (with government mandates) or from below (with the sloganeering mob) and would seem, therefore, to have all the advantages. Yet the conflict rolls on around the world, undecided, and it’s the elites, it seems to me, who have that frightened, desperate look.

The Jew as a Stand-In for the Normies
On October 7, 2023, the Islamist terror group Hamas burst out of its lair in Gaza and began murdering Israeli civilians. The atrocities perpetrated are well known, in part because the murderers boasted of them online. Before the Israelis could fire a shot in response, they were accused by all right-thinking elites of genocide. And not just Israelis—all “Zionists” were guilty of this crime. And not just Zionists but that scapegoat of history, the Jew, who now stood for the white oppressor and colonizer, the capitalist exploiter, ultimate avatar and expression of all that is deformed in normie society.

In Britain, attacks against Jews skyrocketed to record levels, many of them occurring within the privileged precincts of the universities. As Jews endured public abuse and harassment, the police made it clear they were not in business to protect them. In one infamous incident during an anti-Israel protest, a London police officer threatened to arrest a man for being “quite openly Jewish” and thus causing “a breach of the peace,” even as the mob shouted “Scum!” at the offender. A tarp was hastily thrown over London’s memorial to the Holocaust, to obliterate a monstrous memory and no doubt prevent another breach of the peace.

In France, “antisemitic acts” have “exploded” since October 7, according to the interior minister. Prestige universities like Sciences Po have been “occupied” by angry students demanding an end to the “genocide” in Gaza. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the country’s extreme left, has refused to qualify the murder of over 1,000 Israeli men, women, and children as a “terrorist” act. For Mélenchon, the massacre was simply payback: “violence,” he affirmed, “begets violence.” 

While Europe has a venerable tradition of persecuting Jews, the frenzy reached fever pitch here in the United States: when it comes to the war on normies, we set the tone for the rest of the world. At elite universities like Columbia and Harvard, Jewish students were mobbed, assaulted, and told to “go back to Poland.” The throngs of chanting and posturing zealots on campus made for an intimidating environment: in one poll, more than 50 percent of Jewish university students said they felt “scared” for their safety. Nor was this an irrational attitude. A leading voice at Columbia’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”—personal pronouns: “he/she/they”—boasted online that “I fight to kill” then observed, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

If a similar statement had been made about blacks or gays, the whole panoply of institutional power, from the White House and the media on down, would scream its rage from the rooftops until the rest of us went deaf. But we are talking about the Jews. As in Britain and France, actual antisemitic violence has reached record levels in our country. For the denizens of our institutions, however, that is at worst collateral damage—and for many, it’s a successful experiment in establishing control.

Who are the protesters—and in what sense can they be said to reflect elite opinion? The majority are young herd animals, morally neutered to repeat whatever slogans are fed to them by their generational commissars. Like every decadent class, our elites value leadership and courage much less than conformity. As for the activists, they know little and care less about Palestine or Israel. They belong to the “anti-capitalist” progressive left, which provides the ideological lever with which the elites hope to move the world, and they fully expect that, after being schooled in righteous protest, they will ascend to the positions of power that their parents currently inhabit. Those arrested during the protests later demanded “amnesty,” so their future careers will not be damaged.

There’s an unbearable lightness to these people, but their hatred of traditional society may be accepted as sincere. The Jew, the eternal Other, they take to be the foulest product of that society: a super-capitalist and hyper-normie. He must be put in his place. Anyone with a sense of history can only wonder how many times before this tawdry script has played out.

The Silence of the Normies
The elite dream is to turn the clock back to the day before the internet was invented. Short of that, they wish to turn the web into something like the front page of The New York Times circa 1960. To this end, the Biden administration has engaged in surreptitious schemes to censor social media, most of which have been discovered—see the Twitter Files—and are now being challenged in court. The European Union, a happy coven of elites who don’t have to contend with the First Amendment, has been more successful in deploying privacy and antitrust concerns, along with the usual panic over “disinformation,” to limit what the typical user in Europe can access.

In the race to create a vast silence of the normies and call it democracy, a new contender, Brazil, has suddenly leapfrogged to the head of the pack. That country’s socialist president, who, like Cher, goes by a single name, Lula, believes that his opponents on the populist right thrive only because of lies on social media—and that the latter must be suppressed for the good of all. Accordingly, he has created a “Secretariat for Digital Policies” and appointed a “National Prosecutor for the Defense of Democracy,” whose job it is to bring criminal action against online content that the government finds distasteful. 

In Brazil, it is now against the law to tell “intentional lies” that harm “public policy.” What can such vague language mean? Evidently, only Lula knows.

But the leader of Brazil’s “speech harms democracy” movement isn’t Lula but a Supreme Court judge, Alexandre de Moraes. Because of his position, de Moraes enjoys near-arbitrary power over every aspect of digital content, and he has wielded that power with abandon, throwing speech offenders in prison without trial, for example. He has blocked from social media hundreds of elected officials and political commentators he has deemed guilty of violating truth as he perceives it and endangering democracy as he interprets it. There is no appeal, and the decisions are often concealed from the public.

All those punished are conservative and populist critics of the current government. For the elites, everywhere and always, democracy is legitimate only when under their firm control: there can be little doubt that de Moraes, who is chief judge of the country’s election court, considers it his duty to ensure that the rule of the virtuous is maintained indefinitely.

Digital platforms that fail to bend to these novel standards of accepted speech are summarily penalized. In March 2022, de Moraes suspended the messaging app Telegram for failing to freeze accounts the judge found to be infected with disinformation. Telegram surrendered. In January 2023, however, he fined the app over $230,000 for hosting supporters of the defeated populist president, Jair Bolsonaro.

Brazilian elites share their American counterparts’ revulsion for Elon Musk’s discussion platform, X (formerly known as Twitter). In a Brazilian version of the Twitter Files, Substack journalist Michael Shellenberger has revealed that de Moraes intervened constantly to block populist voices seeking refuge on X. Musk reacted by calling for the judge to be impeached, while de Moraes, who maintains Musk is running a for-profit disinformation campaign, has now opened a criminal investigation on the billionaire.

The quarrel between two narcissistic personalities is low on information but high in entertainment value. For an honest verdict on the matter, I suggest we turn to Shellenberger, who is himself under investigation by Lula’s government for making public the facts of its behavior:

The real extremist spreading disinformation here is de Moraes. If Musk were solely motivated by money, then he would not have stood up to de Moraes, which resulted in the Brazilian government halting all advertising on X, the resignation of X’s top lawyer in Brazil, who feared for his safety, and may result in de Moraes shutting down X in Brazil.

The ‘Far Right’ as a Criminal Offense

Elites require control over the information sphere because their policy obsessions—on immigration, gender, and climate, for example—are not popular with the normies. By necessity, progressive fantasies must be imposed on our mediated reality, even as dissenting opinions are cast out into the dark. The internal combustion engine will destroy the earth; windmills will save it. Trump is a wannabe dictator; Biden, the adult in the room. Antagonists are always “far right”; there’s no such thing as “far left.” The ambition to conquer the empirical world with words approaches magical thinking.

It rarely works. The chaos and contingencies of the digital age allow the normies and their chosen tribunes, the populists, too much room to maneuver. Trump’s rise in the opinion polls would otherwise be inexplicable.

At the moment, a specter haunts the finest minds of Europe: in the June 9 elections for the European Parliament, the “far right” could well emerge as the largest voting bloc. This would be a tectonic shift in the politics of the continent. Many of the parties involved, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, have been treated as pariahs, untouchable by establishment politicians of all stripes. A right-wing victory on June 9 could earn Le Pen what the elites have stubbornly denied her: legitimacy. Consequences follow. As The Guardian fretted, “Will Europe set the stage for President Le Pen?”

Against this fraught background, a gaggle of “national conservatives” met in Brussels at a conference sponsored by something called the Edmund Burke Foundation. Included among the participants were Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, and Brexit promoter Nigel Farage—all heartily detested by the elite left but all familiar, even stodgy, figures in the European landscape. 

Intimidation from local politicians made it difficult to find a venue, as possible sites backed out under pressure. Once the conference at last began, Brussels police arrived in large numbers and banned the proceedings, claiming a threat to the public order. Dazed attendees were forced to scamper into the street. “Thank God for Brexit,” an irate Farage remarked, gazing at the barricades erected by the police to ensure the conference did not resume. 

The raid was ordered by Brussels mayor Emir Kir, an elected official from the righteous left. No reason was given as to why the conference had been considered a danger to public safety. The pretext was flimsy, and the spectacle wouldn’t have looked out of place in Cuba or China. Criticism from Europe’s heads of government was muted and lacking in conviction. 

The European Union guarantees “the right to freedom of peaceful assembly”—but apparently not to everyone, or in every place. Kir made the point bluntly: “The far right is not welcome,” he said. Despite—or maybe because of—their growing popularity in the polls, national conservatives, like the Jews, had become living breachers of the peace.

The Revolt of the Normies and the Confidence Crisis of the Elites

The nature of the global conflict is interpreted very differently by the normies and the elites. The normies believe that digital platforms have brought them into close proximity to the people at the top of the pyramid. They can criticize—loudly and rudely—presidents, journalists, and experts of every kind as equals in the information sphere. They can talk back. Increasingly, they have risen in revolt against these elites and their institutions, which they find self-serving and inept.

Those of you who follow my ramblings know that I believe this to be the most fruitful way to look at the conflict.

The elites disagree. They find it far-fetched to think that the public is growing feistier or more independent: the exact opposite is the case. The normies are viewed by the elites as a “basket of deplorables,” a dull and almost animalistic mass of cravings that are easily manipulated by clever but unscrupulous populists. Fake news on social media hypnotizes the online multitudes and leads them to perdition. How else to explain their surly attitude toward their betters? What other reason could there be for the millions who voted for Trump?

This interpretation has a calming effect on the elites, restoring their faith in the way the world is supposed to work. The conflict, properly understood, isn’t between lowly nobodies and themselves at all. It’s between good (institutional) elites and evil (populist) ones who manipulate the masses. Either way, the elites are always in charge, as God intended. 

The interpretation also contains a ready-made strategy. Social media, of course, must be “regulated.” That goes without saying. But more importantly, populism must be criminalized. The manipulators must be removed by force from the political scene. If, in the name of democracy, the full might of the institutions, particularly the courts, can be unleashed against these demagogues, the normies will lapse into their usual mindless apathy and the long secular struggle will be won.

That’s the program Lula is implementing in Brazil. That’s what Kir did in Brussels. And that’s what President Biden is attempting to do with his nemesis, Trump.

To a neutral observer, Trump’s current trial in New York appears as almost a parody of politicization. The crime he stands accused of is, to put it mildly, obscure. It was allegedly committed in 2016 but the indictment wasn’t unveiled until the 2023 election season—and the trial date was rushed forward so it could be held before the elections. The evidence pertains more to public relations than criminal justice. Trump has been forbidden from leaving New York, placing his campaign in a deep freeze. He has been hit with a gag order, preventing him from making his case before the public. One doesn’t have to be a MAGA fanatic to see this as an exercise in personal and political destruction. It will probably work—if not this time, then the next.

What then? Suppose Trump is convicted of a felony and somehow disqualified from running for the presidency. What follows?

If the normie interpretation is right, and Trump is merely a club in the hands of an angry public, the backlash will be ferocious. Electorally, whoever the Republicans choose to replace Trump will crush Biden on Election Day. Republican majorities in Congress are also likely, and they will arrive from the borderland eager to punish the institutions at the center. The next former president facing criminal prosecution, in that case, will surely be Biden.

The global chieftains of the elite class—Biden, France’s Macron, Germany’s Scholz—are massively unpopular with voters, even their voters. Elected populists like India’s Modi, Hungary’s Orbán, and Italy’s Meloni, on the other hand, are riding high. Around the world, there’s an extraordinarily large number of elections scheduled for this year. An earthquake is coming: the political landscape could well be unrecognizable by 2025.

The elites have been accused of cluelessness, but they have a keen instinct for survival. They can sense impending disaster: the aggressive moralizing, the embrace of a bizarre ideology, the trampling on the norms, all of it is a function of panic. The twenty-first century presents a riddle they have so far been unable to solve. As a class, they own all the big guns and command the strategic heights, yet their prestige has evaporated, and power is slipping like water through their hands.

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and the author of the book The Revolt of the Public. Read his piece “Trump. Again. The Question Is Why?” and follow him on X @mgurri. This piece has been reprinted with permission from Discourse.

https://www.thefp.com/p/martin-gurri-revenge-of-populist-normies?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

tl;dr -- Normal people are increasingly sick of the elites

[wiffleball 4,696]

Trump supporter - " I'd sure like to know where Obama was on 9/11! Always on vacation instead of in the office!"

 

Yeah, that's about all it took. 

[jerryskids 5,460]

30 minutes ago, wiffleball said:

Trump supporter - " I'd sure like to know where Obama was on 9/11! Always on vacation instead of in the office!"

 

Yeah, that's about all it took. 

Wut?   

[wiffleball 4,696]

37 minutes ago, jerryskids said:

Wut?   

 

[jerryskids 5,460]

Just now, wiffleball said:

 

I like you wiff, you know I do, but why are you posting this pablum here?  I'm hoping to start some serious dialog, and perhaps educate folks like yourself why Trump is popular with so many people.  Not a curated set of idiots.   

[Herbivore 920]

8 minutes ago, jerryskids said:

I like you wiff, you know I do, but why are you posting this pablum here?  I'm hoping to start some serious dialog, and perhaps educate folks like yourself why Trump is popular with so many people.  Not a curated set of idiots.   

when I got to "who are the protesters", it was hard to take this seriously. its closer to where was Obama on 9/11 than you think.

[jerryskids 5,460]

6 minutes ago, Herbivore said:

when I got to "who are the protesters", it was hard to take this seriously. its closer to where was Obama on 9/11 than you think.

This?

Quote

Who are the protesters—and in what sense can they be said to reflect elite opinion? The majority are young herd animals, morally neutered to repeat whatever slogans are fed to them by their generational commissars. Like every decadent class, our elites value leadership and courage much less than conformity. As for the activists, they know little and care less about Palestine or Israel. They belong to the “anti-capitalist” progressive left, which provides the ideological lever with which the elites hope to move the world, and they fully expect that, after being schooled in righteous protest, they will ascend to the positions of power that their parents currently inhabit. Those arrested during the protests later demanded “amnesty,” so their future careers will not be damaged.

There’s an unbearable lightness to these people, but their hatred of traditional society may be accepted as sincere. The Jew, the eternal Other, they take to be the foulest product of that society: a super-capitalist and hyper-normie. He must be put in his place. Anyone with a sense of history can only wonder how many times before this tawdry script has played out.

He's saying the protesters are young herd animals who belong to the "anti-capitalist" left.  And this is close to "where was Obama on 9/11"?  Sorry but that's crazy.

Please don't make me post videos of idiots from the Left from "on the street" videos, I'm hoping to have a serious discussion.  

[Herbivore 920]

17 minutes ago, jerryskids said:

This?

He's saying the protesters are young herd animals who belong to the "anti-capitalist" left.  And this is close to "where was Obama on 9/11"?  Sorry but that's crazy.

Please don't make me post videos of idiots from the Left from "on the street" videos, I'm hoping to have a serious discussion.  

its the same as in its not serious. that you think its the basis of a series discussion is silly. 

[jerryskids 5,460]

1 minute ago, Herbivore said:

its the same as in its not serious. that you think its the basis of a series discussion is silly. 

The college protests are mostly young herd animals and other anarchists.  Do you dispute this?  Do you honestly think that the majority of them are educated on the history of this situation? That's silly.

Apparently each generation needs to experience the reality that is that the Gazans are a collection of warlike tribes who have no interest in peace, and instead eschew 2-state solutions and elect terrorists intent on killing all Jews. Which is why each and every Arab country says no focking way to letting them in.  But the current generation knows better, it's Israel's fault.  Rinse and repeat.

Congrats, you've sidetracked an attempt to point out why people support Trump.   

[Herbivore 920]

5 minutes ago, jerryskids said:

The college protests are mostly young herd animals and other anarchists.  Do you dispute this?  Do you honestly think that the majority of them are educated on the history of this situation? That's silly.

Apparently each generation needs to experience the reality that is that the Gazans are a collection of warlike tribes who have no interest in peace, and instead eschew 2-state solutions and elect terrorists intent on killing all Jews. Which is why each and every Arab country says no focking way to letting them in.  But the current generation knows better, it's Israel's fault.  Rinse and repeat.

Congrats, you've sidetracked an attempt to point out why people support Trump.   

I don't have a roll call for those protesters, or their true education about Gaza or Isreal. I don't truly know what is going on there. the writer by that point in the article had already made a number of slanted remarks about what the left and elites wanted, such as the impulse control comment. I will go back and reread all, and in full. more later..cheers jerry.

[Hardcore troubadour 13,030]

The problem with our modern day elitists is they aren’t very elite. 

[GutterBoy 2,532]

Trump is an elitist too.

[jerryskids 5,460]

8 minutes ago, Herbivore said:

I don't have a roll call for those protesters, or their true education about Gaza or Isreal. I don't truly know what is going on there. the writer by that point in the article had already made a number of slanted remarks about what the left and elites wanted, such as the impulse control comment. I will go back and reread all, and in full. more later..cheers jerry.

Appreciate it.  Mostly I'm looking to see if it sheds light on why people support Trump, other than being a bunch of knuckledragging phobaphobes. 

[Hardcore troubadour 13,030]

24 minutes ago, GutterBoy said:

Trump is an elitist too.

Ketchup/Steak.  So no. 

[Bier Meister 1,535]

A tale as old as time.

[Hardcore troubadour 13,030]

3 minutes ago, Bier Meister said:

A tale as old as time.

I think it’s different now though. There are many more elitists than in history. Elitists were once a very small group. Plus it’s international now. Many of the elitists get together at places like Davos and don’t hide their intentions. 

[Horseman 1,593]

1 hour ago, Herbivore said:

I don't have a roll call for those protesters, or their true education about Gaza or Isreal. I don't truly know what is going on there. the writer by that point in the article had already made a number of slanted remarks about what the left and elites wanted, such as the impulse control comment. I will go back and reread all, and in full. more later..cheers jerry.

You don't know what's going on so you thought you'd use it in comparison.  Lol. Wow dude.  

[Herbivore 920]

13 hours ago, Horseman said:

You don't know what's going on so you thought you'd use it in comparison.  Lol. Wow dude.  

stfu herd animal

[Nomad99 483]

16 hours ago, Herbivore said:

I don't have a roll call for those protesters, or their true education about Gaza or Isreal.

There have been enough publicized on air interviews with these ignorant drones regarding the subject that you should be well educated on 2 things.

1. Their knowledge (or lack of) on the event & Hamas.

2. A basic history of Israel & Gaza.

The fact that YOU, at this point, can't speak to that.......is a clear indicator that you shouldn't be posting at all.

[wiffleball 4,696]

 

[jerryskids 5,460]

4 minutes ago, wiffleball said:

 

A lot of truth there.  Some, notsomuch.  But the basic message of hard-working blue collar people feeling disenfranchised by the political power elite is definitely true.

Where I disagree is this "Trump comes from a silver spoon so he doesn't empathize with the people" thing.  Back in 2016 I'd have bet a lot of money that Trump knew the name and life story of his driver or doorman better than Hillary.  Hillary IMO was the epitome of an elite who held common people with disdain.  

I'd make the same bet about Biden, but it wouldn't be fair, because he has limited mental capacity these days, so he doesn't remember a lot of things.

[Hardcore troubadour 13,030]

Trump won in 2016 by flipping 80 counties that went for Obama twice in the swing states. So I guess they all became racist rednecks in four short years. Or maybe, like with the black voters now, they figured out that the democrats aren’t really concerned with helping them. But whatever, Gutterboys idiot from the truck has it all figured out. 

[Herbivore 920]

On 5/22/2024 at 4:35 PM, jerryskids said:

The Revenge of the Normies

In the great global battle for power, the elites are losing. Why? Martin Gurri explains.

A fierce political conflict is raging over much of the democratic world. On one side we find the normies: ordinary people who defend, naively, the historic principles of democracy such as freedom of speech and assembly, the separation of powers, etc. On the other side stand the elites, masters of the great institutions of wealth, knowledge, and power, who insist that extraordinary measures must be taken to save a depraved and self-destructive society from its own history and its own people—that is to say, from the normies. I disagree with the premise, such as there are just 2 sides(like gender its a spectrum ), but for the sake of the argument its fine. I would say its dubious to claim that the normies defend the principles of democracy. I believe you could say there are Dem normies and elites, and there are Rep normies and elites.

The elites are driven entirely by the impulse to control. They detest democracy, which keeps getting in their way, and much prefer a golden ideal they possessively call “Our Democracy”—their own rule in perpetuity.(These last 2 sentences are straight fear mongering) Individual rights are unfortunate legacies from a simpler era. The First Amendment, for example, they see as “hamstringing the government in significant ways.” By the way, that was Ketanji Brown Jackson talking, a Supreme Court justice whose job it is to defend the Constitution. Freedom of speech does hamstring government, that’s perfectly true—but only to the elites (who hate the sound of normie voices) is it a bad thing.(Unless you can find different info, this whole thing is very misleading..That might very well be the correct interpretation. But Jackson's take—that such a view could place too much restraint on the government—is one that's held by many, including, it appears, some of her more conservative colleagues. Kavanaugh, for example, invoked his experience working with government press staff, who regularly call reporters to criticize them and try to influence their coverage. Would it be illegal for the feds to prosecute those journalists for pieces that cast them in a negative light? Absolutely. Is it beyond the pale for the government to express what it believes to be true in seeking better coverage? Not necessarily, Kavanaugh said.

What is the conflict about? 

The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring stuff. That’s what normal means.

The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong, only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”(fear mongering nonsense)

The normies, by their very nature a disorganized crowd, fight back by pouring into the streets in frighteningly large numbers and electing politicians loathed by the elites, like Donald Trump in the U.S. and Javier Milei in Argentina. The elites, as creatures of hierarchy, are hyper-organized, and can summon to their side the established political parties, the national and transnational bureaucracies, and the activist class. They can get you from above (with government mandates) or from below (with the sloganeering mob) and would seem, therefore, to have all the advantages. Yet the conflict rolls on around the world, undecided, and it’s the elites, it seems to me, who have that frightened, desperate look.(Trump is not loathed by elites just because he is adored by rubes. while he might not be a standard R, he Prez'ed like an R. Either way, he would be the 1 example of an outlier in this country, it does not imply that frighteningly large numbers are pouring into the streets electing Trump etc. That's why the writer is adding Milei, he doesn't have enough to justify his comments regarding the US.)

The Jew as a Stand-In for the Normies
On October 7, 2023, the Islamist terror group Hamas burst out of its lair in Gaza and began murdering Israeli civilians. The atrocities perpetrated are well known, in part because the murderers boasted of them online. Before the Israelis could fire a shot in response, they were accused by all right-thinking elites of genocide.(Yeah, I don't think so, all, really?) And not just Israelis—all “Zionists” were guilty of this crime. And not just Zionists but that scapegoat of history, the Jew, who now stood for the white oppressor and colonizer, the capitalist exploiter, ultimate avatar and expression of all that is deformed in normie society.(really piling on here)

In Britain, attacks against Jews skyrocketed to record levels, many of them occurring within the privileged precincts of the universities. As Jews endured public abuse and harassment, the police made it clear they were not in business to protect them. In one infamous incident during an anti-Israel protest, a London police officer threatened to arrest a man for being “quite openly Jewish” and thus causing “a breach of the peace,” even as the mob shouted “Scum!” at the offender. A tarp was hastily thrown over London’s memorial to the Holocaust, to obliterate a monstrous memory and no doubt prevent another breach of the peace.(I don't believe the writer is backing up the implication. Is a tarp over a memorial an attack? Someone called someone Scum! I guess no one is safe.)

In France, “antisemitic acts” have “exploded” since October 7, according to the interior minister. Prestige universities like Sciences Po have been “occupied” by angry students demanding an end to the “genocide” in Gaza. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the country’s extreme left, has refused to qualify the murder of over 1,000 Israeli men, women, and children as a “terrorist” act. For Mélenchon, the massacre was simply payback: “violence,” he affirmed, “begets violence.” (I certainly don't know enough about Melenchon, maybe he could cite the violence that begat this violence. Without additional context, that the writer could have probably shared, this is a hollow point.)

While Europe has a venerable tradition of persecuting Jews, the frenzy reached fever pitch here in the United States: when it comes to the war on normies, we set the tone for the rest of the world. At elite universities like Columbia and Harvard, Jewish students were mobbed, assaulted, and told to “go back to Poland.” The throngs of chanting and posturing zealots on campus made for an intimidating environment: in one poll, more than 50 percent of Jewish university students said they felt “scared” for their safety. Nor was this an irrational attitude. A leading voice at Columbia’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment”—personal pronouns: “he/she/they”—boasted online that “I fight to kill” then observed, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”(Fever pitch, Set the tone..holy hyperbole. How many students have been injured? But yeah, the writer found a good quote from some knob.)

If a similar statement had been made about blacks or gays, the whole panoply of institutional power, from the White House and the media on down, would scream its rage from the rooftops until the rest of us went deaf. But we are talking about the Jews. As in Britain and France, actual antisemitic violence has reached record levels in our country. For the denizens of our institutions, however, that is at worst collateral damage—and for many, it’s a successful experiment in establishing control.(everytime this argument is made is just whining to me..if this was a R, if this was a white guy, if this was christian..waaah.)

Who are the protesters—and in what sense can they be said to reflect elite opinion? The majority are young herd animals, morally neutered to repeat whatever slogans are fed to them by their generational commissars. Like every decadent class, our elites value leadership and courage much less than conformity. As for the activists, they know little and care less about Palestine or Israel. They belong to the “anti-capitalist” progressive left, which provides the ideological lever with which the elites hope to move the world, and they fully expect that, after being schooled in righteous protest, they will ascend to the positions of power that their parents currently inhabit. Those arrested during the protests later demanded “amnesty,” so their future careers will not be damaged.(again, I am not at the protests, nor would likely go to any protest. Rs seem to do this a lot...any position someone has on a topic that doesn't follow R ideology, must have been learned by following, not by that Ds life experience, etc. Its lazy, and something the R troglodytes are very ready to believe, never considering that they might be the ones being led.)

There’s an unbearable lightness to these people, but their hatred of traditional society(This is not a serious article) may be accepted as sincere. The Jew, the eternal Other, they take to be the foulest product of that society: a super-capitalist and hyper-normie. He must be put in his place. Anyone with a sense of history can only wonder how many times before this tawdry script has played out.

The Silence of the Normies
The elite dream is to turn the clock back to the day before the internet was invented. Short of that, they wish to turn the web into something like the front page of The New York Times circa 1960. To this end, the Biden administration has engaged in surreptitious schemes to censor social media, most of which have been discovered—see the Twitter Files—and are now being challenged in court. The European Union, a happy coven of elites who don’t have to contend with the First Amendment, has been more successful in deploying privacy and antitrust concerns, along with the usual panic over “disinformation,” to limit what the typical user in Europe can access.

In the race to create a vast silence of the normies and call it democracy, a new contender, Brazil, has suddenly leapfrogged to the head of the pack. That country’s socialist president, who, like Cher, goes by a single name, Lula, believes that his opponents on the populist right thrive only because of lies on social media—and that the latter must be suppressed for the good of all. Accordingly, he has created a “Secretariat for Digital Policies” and appointed a “National Prosecutor for the Defense of Democracy,” whose job it is to bring criminal action against online content that the government finds distasteful. 

In Brazil, it is now against the law to tell “intentional lies” that harm “public policy.” What can such vague language mean? Evidently, only Lula knows.

But the leader of Brazil’s “speech harms democracy” movement isn’t Lula but a Supreme Court judge, Alexandre de Moraes. Because of his position, de Moraes enjoys near-arbitrary power over every aspect of digital content, and he has wielded that power with abandon, throwing speech offenders in prison without trial, for example. He has blocked from social media hundreds of elected officials and political commentators he has deemed guilty of violating truth as he perceives it and endangering democracy as he interprets it. There is no appeal, and the decisions are often concealed from the public.

All those punished are conservative and populist critics of the current government. For the elites, everywhere and always, democracy is legitimate only when under their firm control: there can be little doubt that de Moraes, who is chief judge of the country’s election court, considers it his duty to ensure that the rule of the virtuous is maintained indefinitely.

Digital platforms that fail to bend to these novel standards of accepted speech are summarily penalized. In March 2022, de Moraes suspended the messaging app Telegram for failing to freeze accounts the judge found to be infected with disinformation. Telegram surrendered. In January 2023, however, he fined the app over $230,000 for hosting supporters of the defeated populist president, Jair Bolsonaro.

Brazilian elites share their American counterparts’ revulsion for Elon Musk’s discussion platform, X (formerly known as Twitter). In a Brazilian version of the Twitter Files, Substack journalist Michael Shellenberger has revealed that de Moraes intervened constantly to block populist voices seeking refuge on X. Musk reacted by calling for the judge to be impeached, while de Moraes, who maintains Musk is running a for-profit disinformation campaign, has now opened a criminal investigation on the billionaire.

The quarrel between two narcissistic personalities is low on information but high in entertainment value. For an honest verdict on the matter, I suggest we turn to Shellenberger, who is himself under investigation by Lula’s government for making public the facts of its behavior:

The real extremist spreading disinformation here is de Moraes. If Musk were solely motivated by money, then he would not have stood up to de Moraes, which resulted in the Brazilian government halting all advertising on X, the resignation of X’s top lawyer in Brazil, who feared for his safety, and may result in de Moraes shutting down X in Brazil.(A lot on Brazil there..not sure how this relates to why people would want Trump, or even how it relates to the normies. Fearmongering portion of the article maybe?)

The ‘Far Right’ as a Criminal Offense

Elites require control over the information sphere because their policy obsessions—on immigration, gender, and climate, for example—are not popular with the normies(I would say far more people support these agendas in some capacity than the writer believes..and therefore would label this as suggestion). By necessity, progressive fantasies must be imposed on our mediated reality, even as dissenting opinions are cast out into the dark. The internal combustion engine will destroy the earth; windmills will save it. Trump is a wannabe dictator; Biden, the adult in the room. Antagonists are always “far right”; there’s no such thing as “far left.”(there are many labels to "far left" groups) The ambition to conquer the empirical world with words approaches magical thinking.

It rarely works. The chaos and contingencies of the digital age allow the normies and their chosen tribunes, the populists, too much room to maneuver. Trump’s rise in the opinion polls would otherwise be inexplicable(unless maybe many of those followers were knuckledraggers).

At the moment, a specter haunts the finest minds of Europe: in the June 9 elections for the European Parliament, the “far right” could well emerge as the largest voting bloc. This would be a tectonic shift in the politics of the continent. Many of the parties involved, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, have been treated as pariahs, untouchable by establishment politicians of all stripes. A right-wing victory on June 9 could earn Le Pen what the elites have stubbornly denied her: legitimacy. Consequences follow. As The Guardian fretted, “Will Europe set the stage for President Le Pen?”

Against this fraught background, a gaggle of “national conservatives” met in Brussels at a conference sponsored by something called the Edmund Burke Foundation. Included among the participants were Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, and Brexit promoter Nigel Farage—all heartily detested by the elite left but all familiar, even stodgy, figures in the European landscape. (Does anyone in the UK believe Brexit was a good idea?, who likes Orban?)

Intimidation from local politicians made it difficult to find a venue, as possible sites backed out under pressure. Once the conference at last began, Brussels police arrived in large numbers and banned the proceedings, claiming a threat to the public order. Dazed attendees were forced to scamper into the street. “Thank God for Brexit,” an irate Farage remarked, gazing at the barricades erected by the police to ensure the conference did not resume. 

The raid was ordered by Brussels mayor Emir Kir, an elected official from the righteous left. No reason was given as to why the conference had been considered a danger to public safety. The pretext was flimsy, and the spectacle wouldn’t have looked out of place in Cuba or China. Criticism from Europe’s heads of government was muted and lacking in conviction. 

The European Union guarantees “the right to freedom of peaceful assembly”—but apparently not to everyone, or in every place. Kir made the point bluntly: “The far right is not welcome,” he said. Despite—or maybe because of—their growing popularity in the polls, national conservatives, like the Jews, had become living breachers of the peace.(I don't see anything in the EU portion of this article that relates to normies..but maybe some dbags had an issue in Belgium with their stupid rally)

The Revolt of the Normies and the Confidence Crisis of the Elites

The nature of the global conflict is interpreted very differently by the normies and the elites. The normies believe that digital platforms have brought them into close proximity to the people at the top of the pyramid. They can criticize—loudly and rudely—presidents, journalists, and experts of every kind as equals in the information sphere. They can talk back. Increasingly, they have risen in revolt against these elites and their institutions, which they find self-serving and inept.(the internet has certainly enabled the inept to shout others are inept)

Those of you who follow my ramblings know that I believe this to be the most fruitful way to look at the conflict.

The elites disagree. They find it far-fetched to think that the public is growing feistier or more independent: the exact opposite is the case.(yeah, I don't know about that, sounds like this guy is setting up a response to his own imagined reality) The normies are viewed by the elites as a “basket of deplorables,”(“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”) ..the writer here is intentionally misrepresenting Clinton's quote, like so many Rs have done since she made it..this article is a suggestion not an editorial) a dull and almost animalistic mass of cravings that are easily manipulated by clever but unscrupulous populists(Nope). Fake news on social media hypnotizes the online multitudes and leads them to perdition. How else to explain their surly attitude toward their betters? What other reason could there be for the millions who voted for Trump?(he was an R, in a country that has been 50/50 in Rs and Ds for a while now. People for whatever reason hated Hillary, so he won in 16. Many of those same Rs voted for him in 20, just not enough to win. Often D votes D, and R votes R. 

This interpretation has a calming effect on the elites, restoring their faith in the way the world is supposed to work. The conflict, properly understood, isn’t between lowly nobodies and themselves at all. It’s between good (institutional) elites and evil (populist) ones who manipulate the masses. Either way, the elites are always in charge, as God intended. (This is such a hollow comment, especially in a capitalist society. I believe we would all want our physician to be highly educated, our Financial Planner as well, the captain of the ship to be highly educated and experienced.)

The interpretation also contains a ready-made strategy. Social media, of course, must be “regulated.” That goes without saying. But more importantly, populism must be criminalized. The manipulators must be removed by force from the political scene. If, in the name of democracy, the full might of the institutions, particularly the courts, can be unleashed against these demagogues, the normies will lapse into their usual mindless apathy and the long secular struggle will be won.(fear mongering)

That’s the program Lula is implementing in Brazil. That’s what Kir did in Brussels. And that’s what President Biden is attempting to do with his nemesis, Trump.(No, but nice victim claiming)

To a neutral observer, Trump’s current trial in New York appears as almost a parody of politicization.(agree to disagree) The crime he stands accused of is, to put it mildly, obscure. It was allegedly committed in 2016 but the indictment wasn’t unveiled until the 2023 election season(—and the trial date was rushed forward so it could be held before the elections. The evidence pertains more to public relations than criminal justice. Trump has been forbidden from leaving New York, placing his campaign in a deep freeze.(he can leave NY, he has, not sure how this article date ties in to this article) He has been hit with a gag order, preventing him from making his case before the public.(his gag order doesn't prevent him from making his case for President) One doesn’t have to be a MAGA fanatic to see this as an exercise in personal and political destruction.(yes, you do) It will probably work—if not this time, then the next.

What then? Suppose Trump is convicted of a felony and somehow disqualified from running for the presidency. What follows? (life goes on and we will all be fine)

If the normie interpretation is right, and Trump is merely a club in the hands of an angry public, the backlash will be ferocious. Electorally, whoever the Republicans choose to replace Trump will crush Biden on Election Day. Republican majorities in Congress are also likely, and they will arrive from the borderland eager to punish the institutions at the center. The next former president facing criminal prosecution, in that case, will surely be Biden.(I do think I few Rs would have a very good chance in Nov, not so much in Congress)

The global chieftains of the elite class—Biden, France’s Macron, Germany’s Scholz—are massively unpopular with voters, even their voters. Elected populists like India’s Modi, Hungary’s Orbán, and Italy’s Meloni, on the other hand, are riding high. Around the world, there’s an extraordinarily large number of elections scheduled for this year. An earthquake is coming: the political landscape could well be unrecognizable by 2025.(should be interesting)

The elites have been accused of cluelessness, but they have a keen instinct for survival. They can sense impending disaster: the aggressive moralizing, the embrace of a bizarre ideology, the trampling on the norms, all of it is a function of panic. The twenty-first century presents a riddle they have so far been unable to solve. As a class, they own all the big guns and command the strategic heights, yet their prestige has evaporated, and power is slipping like water through their hands.(not sure what to make of this close to the article, the elites have not been able to solve the riddle(?) they all own the big guns(?) Is this a rally cry for the "normies" to attack what this guy sees as elites?)

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and the author of the book The Revolt of the Public. Read his piece “Trump. Again. The Question Is Why?” and follow him on X @mgurri. This piece has been reprinted with permission from Discourse.

Ultimately, I don't think it sheds light on why someone would vote for Trump

regarding tl,dr normies are getting sick of elites...They are not, they just want their own elites. 

Happy Memorial Day! 

[Cdub100 3,473]

On 5/22/2024 at 4:35 PM, jerryskids said:

Good (but long) opinion piece from the Free Press which talks about the "Normies" vs. the "Elites," so this should be up @jonmx's wheelhouse.  I almost called the thread "Why people like Trump," as that is captured herein.  I realize that most Lefties either won't believe what's in here, continuing to think people are dumb and don't get it, which... is consistent with the essay.

https://www.thefp.com/p/martin-gurri-revenge-of-populist-normies?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

tl;dr -- Normal people are increasingly sick of the elites

It's weird he doesn't connect Jews to the elites Considering they are always overwhelmingly over-represented within those elite groups. Instead, he tries to paint them as some sort of victim. Hamas attacking Israel was awful, but the genocidal response has gone way overboard.  To the point, the entire world has asked them to stop but Israel and the US government (with an overwhelmingly Jewish representation) keep blocking it. It's like the saying the jew cries out in pain as he strikes you.

I also disagree the "normies" are winning. No, they are not. It's laughable that a former CIA agent wrote that and people lap it up. No, the normies are losing big time. 

[jerryskids 5,460]

21 hours ago, Herbivore said:

Ultimately, I don't think it sheds light on why someone would vote for Trump

regarding tl,dr normies are getting sick of elites...They are not, they just want their own elites. 

Happy Memorial Day! 

I appreciate the response; I'll try to read through it today and respond if needed.