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10 of 17. Reverse-potemkin villages

Potemkin villages refer a story about Grigory Potemkin, a Russian official who, in the 18th century, supposedly constructed fake prosperous villages along a route to impress Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea.

It's a term typically used to describe making things look better than they are by having a small piece that looks really good to demonstrate how great things are going.

In reality, around the world but particularly in a shocking number of cities in the US, there are growing tent cities -- reverse potemkin villages standing as monuments not to how great the US is doing, but how terribly it is doing. You can't handwave that away, but the media will try.

9. Keep lying to me about how my personal finances are.

Just before the election, there was a growing trend of videos online of smug newscasters talking to Americans who were suffering telling them "actually, inflation was 0 this month!"

Listen here -- I know how hard it is to put food on my table, don't sit there and try to convince me that I'm lying or wrong about it. They're doing this because they're receiving marching orders from the DNC, which is a disgrace. Life is hard, and it's getting harder. It's harder to get food, it's harder to get shelter, it's harder to buy fuel you need to heat your home or get to work. Anyone looked at the price of a new or even used car lately? It's insane! Ancient used cars are going for prices that would have been premium vehicles not long ago, but "No, you're wrong Mr. John Q. Public, things are perfectly fine."

Around the world, the smug condescention is failing progressive, center-left, and even some center-right parties, and we're seeing a rise in far right parties gaining power where they never did before. The people in charge are asking "Why? Why are they doing this unthinkable thing?" but the reality is that they're doing it out of desperation -- they're watching their way of life disappear, and they can see the gutter they'll be living in rapidly approaching, and if someone on the previously unthinkable far right says "I'm here to help", they'll go there because survival is more important than political correctness.

8 of 17. Inflation

Inflation was always going to be the outcome of the response to COVID. I predicted as such in June of 2020. How could I possibly predict such a thing when nobody else was? I remembered first year economics: If you cut off supply by fiat and increase the money supply, prices will increase. Normally markets will adjust by bringing new production online, but the production was shut down by fiat, and so prices will rise without any real feedback.

According to the CPI, prices for the average person have gone up 20% over the past few years. That fails to account for the fact that food, energy, vehicles, and shelter have been rising faster and for an increasing number of people have been priced out of having one or several of those key things. Cities that used to be beautiful and prosperous have growing tent cities of people who used to be doing ok but have fallen off the treadmil.

Inflation is likely a key piece of this election, and it's one of many things the media has to lie about in order to try to get their preferred candidate elected. When people feel existential terror because they can see they might have to choose between different things on the bottom of maslow's hierarchy of needs, you can't tell people they're actually fine. "don't worry! Lots of people have to pick between food and shelter and heat when they're rich!"

7 of 17. The assassination attempt

If you could go back in time and assassinate Hitler, would you?

Most people would say yes. Hitler was the head of an evil government that triggered a world war and participated in genocide collectively killing tens of millions of people, and so killing Hitler would prevent all that from happening. It would be just.

What about someone who is constantly compared to Hitler by his political enemies? Would it be just to assassinate someone like that?

Everyone knows about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. But from many people's point of view, it was another example of the hatred oozing from the Democrats having real-world consequences. The rightfully elected president in 2016, and nearly elected in 2020, and on track to win 2024, and the rhetoric would make you think he'd gotten the opportunity to run by skinning babies instead of running in the primaries and winning them.

Trump isn't Hitler. He isn't Caesar. He's a relatively moderate political candidate who is mean on twitter sometimes. However, the same week he was shot, some partisans made a video "Skibidi Biden" which tried to tie Trump to Hitler by saying "Trump is using Hitler's language!". Fact check: Trump doesn't use Hitler's language. Hitler speaks German, Trump speaks English. There may be similarities in the rhetoric the two use at times, but I'd like to point out that the same can be said of most political rhetoric. When Justin Trudeau says Canadians have "no culture", Hitler said the same about the Jews. He also said that the unvaccinated shouldn't be allowed to "take up space", which Hitler also said about the Jews. The left in general treated the unvaccinated as "unclean" in a way that appeals to the disgust response in a way that is directly related to Hitler's rhetoric. But today's leftists aren't German national socialists, so perhaps we should calm the rhetoric down.

That rhetoric was perceived as being a direct causal element in the first (and the later) assassination attempts, and it doesn't help the Democrats.

After being shot, while still gushing blood, Trump raised his fist and screamed "Fight! Fight! Fight!" which was great optics, and generated a photo which became iconic of the campaign.

The media response to all this is typical and expected. After expressing rhetoric that led to the assassination attempt for years straight, when Trump said "Fight! Fight! Fight!" the first thing the press did was pooh pooh him for not turning down the political temperature. That's just another example of the broken media. With one hand endorsing assassination because after all Trump is Hitler, and with the other demanding a man still bleeding from the assassination attempt that nearly killed him and did kill one other innocent person act like a buddhist monk who has lost all attachment to the physical world.

6 of 17. Trump's Conviction

Where do I start with Trump's conviction? Well, how about I start in 2016 when the Democrats were saying that locking up your political opponents was the epitome of evil and anyone who did it was clearly Hitler. Now, Donald Trump never actually locked up Hillary Clinton, as far as any of us can tell he never even tried. In interviews he says that for the unity of the country he decided not to. But you know what happened after that? A bunch of prosecutors ran for office saying explicitly that they would if elected lock up Donald Trump. And unlike Donald trump, they tried to follow through on their promise.

People have come up with salacious descriptions of what Donald Trump was charged for, that's not really accurate. Ultimately, what he was charged with is mislabeling a line item on an accounting ledger. Mislabeling a line item on an accounting ledger is typically not even a felony on it's own, it's a misdemeanor that is outside of the statute of limitations, but the attorney general in New York found a way to make the fact that he mislabeled line item on an accounting ledger into a felony because he's the president, and that the statute of limitations didn't apply because he's the president.

A lot of people are cheering for the conviction of Donald Trump, and I think that those people should really think about what they're cheering for. Back in 2016, people correctly said that it was not good behavior to be locking up political opponents, but apparently losing a single election is enough to throw all morals and ethics and principles to the wind.

The left are deeply hypocritical. They all cheered when Trump was arrested and convicted of trumped up charges, but supported violent riots for 6 months in opposition to police. Everyone saw it, and nobody believes it was actually the good guys in action except for extremist monsters or people who don't see individuals as worth anything so it doesn't matter if innocent people are harmed in pursuit of the platonic greater good.

I wonder if the same people who cheer for Donald Trump's arrest over having the wrong label on an accounting document and happily call him a felon would cheer the same as Nelson Mandela was arrested? Do they happily call Mandela a felon? It seems to me like these people will hate whoever they're told to hate, so I'm sure that the answer would be yes if they were told to.

I have a personal hypothesis that this railroading of Donald Trump helped him with the black vote. Black voters don't like crime, they hate being harassed by police and railroaded into convictions they feel their family and friends didn't deserve. Seeing a presidential candidate harassed and railroaded like they saw their friends and family being railroaded in my estimation is part of the reason why a historic 26% of black voters are now saying they're interested in Trump.

5 of 17. Kamala Harris has never had to legitimately win anything in her life

Harris has never had to win an election that wasn't demographically rigged and with the full support of an overwhelming political machine. Her entire career was within California, a single party state, with the backing of powerful interests. When she had to win something on her own when she tried to become the presidential candidate in 2020, she failed in her presidential candidacy in 2020 before anyone else, so was essentially appointed to the vice presidency on Joe Biden's victory. The Biden administration has kept her hidden away for 3 and a half years because they know she's unlikable and looks poor to the public.

When you run for president you have an establishment behind you, but so does your opponent. You don't have an automatic demographic advantage -- there have been Republican presidents and Democrat presidents, and the winner needed to win over not just the base but the center swing voters. All of this bodes very poorly for someone who has never had to win a contest like that.

4 of 17. Kamala Harris is thoroughly unlikable

The problem with Harris is that she's totally unlikable. Her few instances of talking during her vice presidency provide some examples of bizarre lizardman traits like the clip where she explains "Ukraine is a small country and Russia is a big country and Russia is invading Ukraine and that's bad" like she's describing global politics to a toddler.

Most new political candidates want to get out there and tell the world about who they are, but Harris started trying the Biden basement strategy only to discover that It isn't 2020 anymore, and people aren't going to accept an absentee political campaign. It also isn't 2016 anymore, even people who were previously on the same page of accepting the media spin at face value are much more cynical, especially living through tough times while the media breathlessly tells them about how good everything is. You can't lie about so many big things and keep most people's trust.

About half way through October, A video montage of Kamala Harris giving the same speech over and over again went viral. She's a Papier Mache candidate.

In some ways, she reminds me of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Those two may have had opinions and stances of their own at one point, but once they became the presidential candidates, they became mindless avatars of the party. Anything you might have liked or disliked about them went away because they were just the walking talking Republican party. In the same way, Kamala Harris hasn't shown any sort of personal capacity to be the chief executive. She comes off as someone who won't be leading, she'll be taking orders. Who does the president take orders from? This, combined with her status as an installed candidate by party elites suggests she'll be working for those who installed her through backroom deals, and her poor articulation of actual policies she as an individual running for president wants suggests she won't really have any.

In the end, she needed to go out there and tell America why they should vote for her, but every time she did her chances of becoming President got smaller and smaller because people realized they just didn't like her much.

3 of 17. The palace coup

Once it became impossible to cover up Joe's condition any longer, Party elites and major donors immediately started pushing for his ouster. According to some (admittedly unconfirmed at this time and unlikely to be confirmed fully) sources, Joe Biden was given an ultimatum: Step down as the presidential candidate "willingly", or face the disgrace of being removed using the 25th amendment of the constitution which allows an unfit President to be removed from office.

The way Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president was Joe Biden won the primaries, but after the first debate the Democrats had a palace coup and forced him to step down from the presidential campaign, anointing Kamala Harris in his place. She won 0 votes in the primaries, but was nonetheless selected as the Presidential nominee through backroom deals.

The major factual elements here are not up for debate, though they could be interpreted differently than I presented it. If you believe the official narrative, Joe (who that Friday said he'd never surrender) suddenly released a suspicious letter on his X account, stepping down despite being the primary winner. Without any new primary being run, Kamala was crowned the candidate by the delegates. Maybe it really was like that, nothing decietful or backroom about it. (But it's politics -- do you really believe that?)

Now the match-up was Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris was the lowest rated vice president of all time in a recent survey, but now the press had their new mission: Pump up the new candidate as if it's not just a 4 year presidential term. Without really even showing up anywhere, the entire establishment media machine went to work talking about how great and wonderful Kamala Harris is.

2 of 17. Joe Biden's cognitive decline

There were already concerns in 2020 about Joe Biden, but the character of the COVID election and the hysteria of the media helped him run a campaign essentially "from his basement". The press ran Joe Biden's campaign in 2020, and used massive amounts of long built-up credibility to get him elected. Joe Biden also had a strong halo effect due to his association with the popular Obama Campaign. With the media attacking the Trump administration non-stop, as well as establishment factions with the Republican party actively attacking the Trump faction (Trump had the executive, the house, and the senate in his first half, but faced high levels of pushback from within the Republican party), as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and more importantly the global response to COVID, he was in a prime position to lose 2020, and he did. Now he and his team think there were voting irregularities that contributed to that loss, I tend to think the situation itself was more than enough.

For the next 3 and a half years the Biden Administration with Harris as VP continued going along, and there were a lot of challenges. To be fair to this Administration, there was no way to avoid the consequences of the COVID lockdowns. Inflation was inevitable. Supply chain disruptions were inevitable. This was going to be a tough 4 years no matter who was in charge.

Going into the 2024 election, the media was claiming Joe Biden was "sharp as a tack". There's a video on YouTube of dozens of news anchors using the same exact phrase, as if they were getting fed lines from a common source. The plan was for Joe to run in 2024, beat Trump again (The line of thought being that it's easier fighting a defensive battle from the presidency), and by 2028 Trump wouldn't really be capable of running for President again so the threat would be over and MAGA would be defeated.

The obvious problem was that even in 2020, Joe Biden wasn't the same man he was when he was Vice President 4 years earlier. Verbal slips like "I'll take immediate steps to deploy shuanamanaprezure" or "batacathcare" suggested a mind that wasn't firing right. Moments like Biden biting his wife's finger out of nowhere suggested something going on with impulse control circuitry in his brain. Biden would eventually go on to take more vacation days than any President before him, and the gaffes seemed to get more numerous.

The final straw was the first debate with Donald Trump. He seemed confused, and barely there. He mumbled through sentences, and overall he displayed the worst thing he could have displayed: The suggestion that Trump had been telling the truth about Joe Biden since 2020 and the media and the Democratic Party had been covering it up.

At that point, Joe was already selected in the primaries as the candidate, so something happened that was unexpected, except to people who have been paying close attention since 2020.

1 of 17. The fraudulent media machine ever since 2016

The headlines read: "FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump win White House"

It's a headline that had lots of people very mad, resulted in multiple congressional investigations, and sent at least one member of Trump's campaign to jail.

But the problem is, the headline was totally fake.

By 2018, the author of the Steele dossier admitted the dossier was fake, created solely to help Hillary Clinton dispute the 2016 election. Ultimately, the Clinton Campaign was charged by the election commission with the illegal act and fined over $100,000.

This wasn’t a simple case of poor reporting; it was a deliberate push of disinformation.

The headlines read: "Trump On Charlottesville Neo-Nazis: 'You Had People That Were Very Fine People'"

It's a headline that had lots of people up in arms, lots of people ready to fight against Trump, ready to vote against Trump.

But the problem is, the headline was totally fake.

"And I don't mean neo nazis and white supremacists, those people should be condemned totally" - the actual words, the exact opposite of the story.

This is not up for debate—the transcript is there for anyone to read. The fact that this lie continues to circulate years later is nothing short of shameful.

The headline said: "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say"

It's a headline that had a lot of people up in arms, thinking that Donald Trump would produce something false like that, attacking family of a sitting president with made up information from a foreign power!

But the problem is, the headline was totally fake.

In the end, Hunter Biden was convicted of at least one crime as a result of the data on the laptop and ultimately it was proven to be real.

The media and social platforms actively interfered in the democratic process by burying a story that could have impacted the election, all based on a lie.

In the west, there's a story of "the boy who cried wolf". It's the story from our pastoral past, and a young boy who a couple times screamed "Wolf! Wolf!" and the village came to protect against the wolves, but the child was lying. Eventually, the child actually sees a wolf, scream and hoots and hollers, and is eaten by wolves. The lesson is that you must be very careful no to lie, because eventually people stop paying attention to you. The press kept on publishing stories that were false to help "their side", and chipped away at their credibility. Today, the establishment media is suffering because people stopped believing them.

The political establishment has responded by stepping up threats to violate the law of the land by "regulating misinformation and disinformation", which is in fact code for "shutting down any story we don't like". For all the politicians who call for such illegal laws who pushed the above disinformation, what punishment would they accept today for their transgressions? (I'm guessing none?)

This probably felt like the right thing to do to "fight Trump", but it's a strategy which is damaging the establishment media's ability to report, and importantly, it's reducing their power as a tool to help push elections in one direction or another.

This election cycle continued with these themes, with a statement that without Trump's proposed tariffs the a bloodbath in the auto industry being mischaracterized by the establishment media as a threat of political violence. In an election cycle where the press is pushing against other currents, they need credibility and keep spending it unwisely.

0 of 17. The 2008 Election

In 2008, something unusual happened: The Republicans got absolutely destroyed, and rightfully so.

The Republicans won a lot of support after September 11, 2001, and they used that support to implement a lot of policies and push for a lot of things. They pushed for the USAPATRIOT act and the surveillance state. They brought hawkish neoconservatism to its peak invading two nations with the assumption that they would be greeted as liberators and would magically implement democracy in an unstable region without much democracy. They pushed economic policies which had some short-term growth but ultimately led to the 2008 financial crisis, which was the biggest financial crisis since the great recession, and given how much institutional power the Republicans had at that time, it very much appeared that they owned the recession.

The Democrats ended up winning big after that. They won the presidency. They had a supermajority in the senate for a short time. They had a healthy majority in congress, and as we know they had a majority on the supreme court. Among millennials, surveys at the time suggested that 70% of millennials leaned progressive, and even in businesses, many thought they'd spend more on brands that supported political causes.

This represented a tectonic shift in politics at the time, and the Democrats were at a huge advantage. The Republicans had no choice, they had to start working on new strategies. We saw the tea party strategy come out, snagged from Ron Paul imo, but it was shut down pretty quickly by namecalling ("Teabaggers"), they tried doubling down on neoconservatism, and that was a non-starter. The Democrats had a full 8 years of essentially steamrolling the competition. Since there was essentially no competition out of the Republican field, it looks like that was going to be the case indefinitely.

However, in 2015, something highly unusual happened: a new candidate emerged with new ideas. Donald Trump was described as a bull in a china shop. The Democrats didn't like him, not so much because they thought he could win but because he represented chaos that could mess up their plans, and so after initially supporting him thinking he was the weakest candidate, they went to work putting their full attack machine into action.

Someone once described Donald Trump as a 90s democrat, and I tend to agree with that summary. Mean tweets aside, there are a lot of policy positions where Donald Trump is to the left of Bill Clinton.. Bill Clinton implemented workfare, trying to get people off of federal welfare programs, where Trump didn't really touch those programs. Bill Clinton signed the defense of marriage act which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and other than a couple times where he was blustering, Donald Trump is the first elected president to openly support gay marriage on the day of his inauguration. Many people forget that Elian Gonzalez was taken from his uncle under Bill Clinton and returned to Cuba by force. Bill Clinton worked with the Republicans to dramatically reduce spending and almost balanced budgeting by his final year.

It turns out that for a lot of Republicans, and a lot of Independents, the MAGA platform had a lot to like. Of course, it was tough to know what was true or not (Trump is a master of innane bluster, and so said a lot of things that were never going to be true such as getting Mexico to pay for his border wall, or paying down the federal debt by the end of his first term)

In an upset victory, Donald Trump won the 2016 election, changing all the assumptions held since 2008.

-1 of 17. Trump isn't a very good candidate

Reality is, Donald Trump isn't a very good candidate.

Most Republicans will admit that. He's boorish, he's got a lot of personal moral failings. His ideology is all over the map, and self-contradictory. You can't achieve all the things he promises, many of the bullet points he's talking about are mutually exclusive, like balancing the budget but increasing spending and cutting taxes. We saw that in his first term, that obviously the real world doesn't match with flapping your jaw.

Fiscal conservatives hate the way Trump dealt with budgets and they're going to continue to be disappointed. He's proposed a lot of specific tax cuts he'll likely deliver on, but he's also talking about new ways of spending money.

Libertarians don't like him for not pardoning Assange and Snowden, seeing their charges as overreach by the state, as well as some of his decisions such as his bump stock ban following the Los Vegas shooting.

New right folks are upset about many of his appointments such as John Bolton who most Trump supporters consider a real swamp creature as his secretary of state.

Religious conservatives don't like his stance on abortion or IVF because it's far too moderate and he's said he won't ban either at a federal level. It turns out murdering innocents isn't really something you can negotiate, people who believe abortion is murder won't like it being legal in any capacity, certainly not in the wide range blue states will allow it.

A lot of conservatives don't like that he brought in a rapper to the RNC. She raps about being a prostitute, which is not in any way in line with traditional moral values, upsetting social conservatives.

And then there's all the reasons for people on the left to hate Trump, which I don't need to list because the media has listed all the reasons and many more they invented.

So if Trump wins, it's a harsh indictment on anyone who is running against him. You ran against someone with this many weakness, and you lost. Joe Biden ran a campaign from his basement and won. that's how weak you can be and still beat Trump.

(Alternative title: Huh, I didn't expect that. Here's why.)

I started this article a couple months before the election because I figured a record of what probably happened would make sense, and I'm releasing it on the day we know who won. I personally think there's no way Harris wins, and a bunch of the electorate will be totally confused because they fail the important axiom of Sun Tzu: "Know your enemy and know yourself and you will win 1000 battles" -- they don't know their enemy and they don't know themselves, so they lose.

I already kind of expect a certain response to a post like this. The right won't really be that interested in what I have to say here because they already know, and the left will want to downvote and report it into oblivion because that's what they've become. As for the center? Well, I guess it depends how they lean. The real chads will see what I've got to say to see if it actually helps describe what happened just now at all. I mean, if I'm wrong, I'm just an idiot on the Internet, so who cares?

On the fediverse I've been cast down from the good graces of the wokerati for my wrongthink, but I wasn't so different from them not so long ago. In 2008 I hoped Obama would win like most people my age, but in 2015 I hoped Trudeau would win like most people my age. I'm not a US citizen, didn't vote in this or any US election (though I've joked about illegally immigrating to vote since a certain political party down there seems to think illegal immigrants voting is the best thing ever), so this is a view from someone who doesn't really have a direct horse in the race. I have my opinions about each option and I'll be clear with those, but keep in mind at the end of the day I'm not a Republican, it's not physically possible. (Oh, but if you're thinking of moving up here to get away from the maga chuds, don't bother. By this time next year there'll be a huge majority government headed by Pierre Poilievre, who is a J.D. Vance type character on the right. If you think he can't be that bad, Alex Jones specifically called him out as good people. If you want to go somewhere 'friendly', England just voted in a Labour majority, go hang out with them)

For those keeping track, in the 2024 election, Joe Biden won the Democratic primary, and the entire media claimed he was "sharp as a tack" (they all used the exact same phrase oddly enough), until the first debate which showed the world that wasn't really the case anymore. There was a palace coup, and Joe "stepped down", and Kamala Harris was coronated the new candidate. They didn't run a primary at all, she got the position through backroom deals (which we'll talk about in a bit).

Starting at -1 (because it isn't really a point as to why Kamala lost), moving onto 0 (because it's just our backdrop), and then from there on we'll discuss all the reasons Kamala just lost the presidential election.