Subverting the hero of legend is a fad that’s risen to prominence in postmodern fiction. Years back, Brandon Sanderson wrote a take on the trope wherein the dark lord wins. Instead of having a new hero rise up to depose the tyrant, he had a gang of rogues rob the dark lord blind.
Contra the hordes of wand-waving philistines online, it may be Sanderson’s fantasy, not JK Rowling’s, that most accurately describes the current popular resistance to a Death Cult.
Consider the band of digital robin hoods whose joke at a major hedge fund’s expense may now threaten the whole banking system. They started pumping up the price of GameStop stock on a lark. Now the gag has taken on a life of its own to the point that neither the hedge funds nor the big banks that agreed to cover their risk have the money to cover their exposure. We could be looking at a crisis worse than the 2008 housing bust, and all because of some meddling kids.
In reality, the fault for the big short’s fallout doesn’t lie with the Wallstreetbets pranksters. They simply observed the rules of the system our elites set up to enrich themselves and decided to game that system better than the self-styled experts. Anyone pointing fingers at WSB for squeezing the shorted stock can’t help but draw attention to the hedge funds’ shorting of GME stock in excess of 100%. People are starting to ask why such a wildly risky practice is even legal in the first place.
Our presumed betters in Big Finance never expected anyone to question their operations. Nor did they expect outsiders to so decisively outmaneuver them. The Wall Street oracles kept the discipline of the secret that we have a tiered economy. The big money plays were tacitly off limits to the little people.
The fatal flaw in this tiered system was that it relied on the illusion of an open economy. Seeing multi-billion-dollar banks get government bailouts while regular people lost their shirts undermined the illusion. Now, WSB has painted the big banks into a corner where their only way out is to shatter the illusion completely.
Hence the all-out panic sweeping Wall Street and their paid media shills. Being Mammon worshipers, they assumed the WSB autists could be enticed to sell their shares. What our elites didn’t count on was that they’ve aroused so much hatred among ordinary people, many of those people would forgo millions of dollars to see hedge fund managers reduced to penury.
The big banks’ only choice is to call in their markers and force the Feds to impose absurdly draconian trading regulations. These new rules must needs stipulate that the only purpose of the stock market is to make rich people even richer. Enacting such measures would be suicidally foolish, but our rulers will do it anyway. They’ll have to.
That’s why the GameStonk imbroglio has been a major white pill. The people who rule over us think of themselves as Machiavellian Michael Corleones. Instead, they’re a pack of Fredos with a mean streak. Sadism wedded to ineptness is a poor combination for rulers who want to stay in power for long.
The dark lords’ tower certainly has other weak points and blind spots. The more our rulers grind the people under their heel, the more those people will be inclined to seek out and exploit those weak points–even at rising personal risk. A man who’s lost everything and has nothing to look forward to really is free to do anything.
A common lament among technocratic dissidents is to predict that advances in technology will artificially prolong the Death Cult regime. After all, the Stasi didn’t have drones or backdoors in consumer software. WSB’s devastating antics prove the tech coin has a flip side. The modern day commissars are neither smart nor creative. Their gross overreach has ensured an ample supply of tech-savvy dissidents who will always learn to exploit the rules better than the rulers.
Just wait until this realization spreads, and multiple independent troll groups start gaming different parts of the system simultaneously. It’s not hard to picture a day during Puppet Pal Joe’s term when bond markets are thrust into a similar crisis, pranksters exploit Ivy League schools’ admissions rules to smear egg on academia’s face, and a major Hollywood studio faces a hostile takeover planned on Gab.
Destroying the Death Cult regime’s legitimacy by showcasing its incompetence will achieve more in a shorter time than Trump did in four years or the GOP has in 40.
On the subject of Trump, our rulers are already mired in a crisis sparked by his departure. First, in their total lack of foresight they failed to reckon with the fact that controlling everything means they own every disaster. Stripped of office, Trump no longer makes a convincing scapegoat. That’s an existential problem for the Death Cult, since no cult can survive without a devil.
Many commenters, including yours truly, figured that Trump would go gentle into that good night. The Left would soon forget Orange Man, as they did Bush before him, and anoint a new Hitler–Ted Cruz, or perhaps DeSantis.
The problem the Cult has run up against is that to be a compelling threat, the Devil must be the most powerful force for evil imaginable. Trump publicly defeated every other prominent Republican back in 2015. Everyone other contender for the devil horns sounds like a milquetoast low-tax liberal by comparison. Not even the most hysterical Death Cultists really think Rand Paul will put them in camps.
So far, it looks like the Cult is doubling down on pushing Trump as the bogeyman. Their attempts to keep people panicked over a private citizen with zero political power are falling flat. Imagine if Lucifer renounced the crown of Hell and went into real estate.
It’s looking more and more like the Death Cult’s seizure of total power was a wish on a monkey’s paw. The narrative they rode to victory is quickly collapsing, and doubling down on it–as they must–is making them hordes of new enemies every day.
The Cult’s reign of terror might be brief after all, barring an unforeseen turn of events. And the unforeseen turns have a history of benefitting us instead.
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Not even the death cult can explain why letting someone sell stock they don't open, in the hopes of buying it back at a lower price is different from putting the rent money on number 22. The game is up. In retrospect, the cult should have left these folks to their video games with their scantily clad princesses and anatomically improbable archaeologists.
The Cultists can't help but double down because in their fanaticism they tarred everyone else as Nazis. And, as they themselves keep repeating, you don't negotiate with Nazis.
The enemy has run headlong into a Xanatos Gambit. Any compromise with fatally undermine the moral superiority claims their authority rests on. Doubling down will only turn up the heat on the pressure cooker bomb.
If I was still a childless bachelor, I would participate in a hostile takeover of the Washington Post. I would kick in a few grand if I could write an OpEd for the first post-takeover issue. In this OpEd, I would mock everyone reading it for paying to read a piece of cheap toilet paper that hasn't been relevant since Watergate.
Though I acknowledge the severity of the marriage crisis, God can turn even that evil to serve His plan.
There is a vast army of single men whom the system has rendered joyless and hopeless. They are realizing that this was done to them and who did it.
Brian
And some will become sufficiently wealthy they'll become 'attractive' to women who decry how poor and unappealing their potential suitors are presently
xavier
That seems like the raw material of a Crusader army, if they take the white pill and find Jesus, or an American Al Qaeda, if they don't
If you're reading this and you're still young and single, don't waste it. My greatest joy from that era was planting churches in South America, and I could only do it because I had no dependents and was young enough to work 20 hours a day for three weeks straight. My greatest regret is that I didn't do more.