Great Again, Again

Disclaimer: We are at a historical crossroads, so this is a long post.

The critically acclaimed award-winning 2015 German-language satirical dark comedy Er ist wieder da (He’s back again) based on the eponymous 2012 novel, tells the (fictional) story of a time-travelling Adolf Hitler who finds himself alive and awake in 2014 Berlin.

At first, he is mistaken for an impersonator because of his unabashed rhetoric, but is subsequently propelled to viral social media stardom.

Minor spoilers aside, the true genius of the movie lies in the insight it delivers in its final moments:

When weak and dysfunctional governments fail to provide for the people who elect them, the people are driven to extraordinary larger-than-life individuals.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, global markets were in free-fall and the “War on Terror” and its counterpart the jihad that followed were at their peak. The optimism of the 90’s had come to a thundering halt, and the whole world cheered when a young, eloquent, charismatic man told everyone it didn’t have to be this way. Even in our darkest hours, perhaps all that was needed was the audacity of hope, and so everyone turned to the larger-than-life individual.

I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.

– Joe Biden, 2007

For the better part of the last two decades, we have lived in a culture of widespread deception. Poisonous seeds planted to subvert the will of the general population in the service of the occasional malicious self-preserving interest. Many of these lies are well known, others have miraculously survived within the collective consciousness of people, continuing to warp and distort worldviews.

These phenomena are not exclusive to the western world. Who among us can deny having witnessed the decline before our eyes, of Indian news media to the spectacle that now dominates our screens every evening at 9 pm? Agenda rules the airwaves. Critical issues fade into the background. The collapse of the fifth estate created a vacuum, and the industry as a whole is a psychological operation on an international scale.

Those with the privilege of having seen what happens behind the curtain often pat me on the head and say that it has always been this way, except now it’s more amplified and brazen. That the thin veneer of credibility was window dressing for an already compromised industry. The assurances that we have always been on a collision course with chaos don’t comfort many of us, but it’s true.

Black Mirror

The cultural zeitgeist is palpable. The cross-cultural exchanges that come with globalization are now near-real-time. While every place has its own identity, no place is immune to these forces.

Sometimes this can have bizarre manifestations. For instance, I once saw our national cricket team kneeling for “racial equality” at a sports event after they played the national anthem. They don’t do it anymore. Sometimes the psyop doesn’t land.

Most of the time, it does.

This isn’t limited to pop culture or the news media either. Academia is also compromised, and by extension, our collective progress. Our exploration into the fabric of reality is now shackled by the lie of string theory. For decades now, we - as in all of us, the collective human race, are held back because this untestable mathematically elegant mirage has dominated the field siphoning resources, time, money, careers and the dreams of generations of young physicists are locked in a system that rewards obedience to the orthodoxy and is intolerant of a simple question - “What if you’re wrong?”.

With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.

Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome

– Charlie Munger

Popular culture has no problem recognizing these incongruities. Oil and gas lobbies versus the electric car. The healthcare industry versus unnecessary medical interventions. Political lobbying & term limits versus the very legislators elected to enact these reforms.

However, the very same culture has been weaponized by our institutions across nearly every field to create institutional rot. The mainstreaming of these tactics has brought this infection out in to the open. Groupthink is thriving. Norms have transformed from guiding principles and shared values into weapons of forced conformity. These things existed to serve society and to challenge the orthodoxy for innovation, progress and debate.

What we are left with is the illusion of a debate. We are either shouted down or scolded for questioning the narrative.

Skeptics of demonetization will remember the irrational outbursts that sprung up by posing questions about efficacy. We heard the same outbursts when we asked about vaccines, and for nearly two decades I’ve watched people’s brains break with utter derangement over the cultural Rorschach test that is Donald J. Trump. The flashpoint at the center of the cultural zeitgeist. The final boss. This is where it all comes together.

Blasphemy

Power is not something that is exercised by a single individual or group, but rather a network of relationships and strategies that permeate every aspect of society, shaping behavior, knowledge, and even our sense of self.

– Michel Foucault

Power is diffuse. It is embedded in social structures and operates through norms, institutions, and discourses. Power is not centralized. Discourses create “truths” that reinforce power dynamics. Over time, those “truths” acquire a veneer of immutability; challenge them at your own peril.

When a sportsperson from my country wins olympic gold or when our cricket team wins the world cup it has zero bearing on my life. My taxes remain the same, my income doesn’t change, I still drive the same car, and I still live in the same house. This too manifests in bizarre ways as evidenced by the millions of Manchester United fans who have never been to Manchester and don’t know where it is on the map.

Whether or not he knows it (he probably doesn’t) President Trump is the standard-bearer for heterodox thought. The accidental mascot of the rennaisance. The lightning rod for collective disillusionment of a world that is exhausted of being told what to think and being told what not to say by humorless scolds that inhabit the contemporary cultural elite. He didn’t invent the cultural shift that brought him here, but he is the ultimate expression of its collective defiance. As he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy, he did so during the perfect storm of institutional rot, populist rage and the collapse of the media landscape under the weight of its own contradictions.

Donald Trump is a very imperfect instrument, but he’s an armor piercing shell

– Steven K Bannon

Nobody ever thought that the wrecking ball that demolished the old guard and gatekeepers of the institutional narrative would come in the form of a sleazy real-estate developer from manhattan. He isn’t just a symptom of the problem, he’s also a catalyst against it. His brash, unfiltered disregard for norms and decorum steers the conversation to places it would have never gone before.

The downstream effects didn’t get a chance to manifest during his first term, but we’re starting to see them today. Within mere months of his election, a significant share of both American political parties and the news media, along with the intelligence agencies conspired to concoct the biggest government scandal since watergate, where a sitting President was accused of conspiring with the Russian government to steal an election. This was “Crossfire Hurricane”.

For the uninitiated - an FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith doctored an email from the CIA and used the fraudulent email to obtain a surveillance warrant to spy on the entire Trump campaign, under the disingenuous premise that there were members of the campaign with ties to the Russian government. In the eventual upheaval when the truth emerged, Clinesmith was found guilty but sentenced to probation.

The media eagerly amplified the narrative, feeding the public a steady diet of innuendo and half-truths about collusion. For years, the idea of a Russian puppet president dominated the headlines, sowing distrust and polarization. But when the truth emerged - when the Mueller report failed to substantiate the claims of collusion, and when Clinesmith was convicted for his actions, the damage was already done.

The scandal wasn’t just about Trump—it was about the lengths to which the establishment would go to protect itself from disruption. Crossfire Hurricane exposed the depths of the symbiotic relationship between the media, the political elite, and the intelligence community, all working together to delegitimize a presidency they couldn’t control. And in doing so, it vindicated the skepticism of those who had long suspected that the system wasn’t just biased but fundamentally corrupt.

Everything’s a Lie

It was clear in 2015 itself that all the pieces were in place.

In this part of the world we had already seen the effectiveness of an “IT Cell” and appreciated its ability to reduce people into automatons. Partisanship became extreme. It destroyed friendships and broke families. We went from a generally apolitical consensus that our institutions were generally corrupt and that political parties were part of the problem, to a hyper-partisan population split into two equally clueless factions centered around whatever psyop the machine threw at us. With over a billion people involved, it was clear that this model worked.

On the other side of the world, the same model was in play. Manufactured conformity. But first, Bernie Sanders had to step aside.

It was her turn.

I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.

The funding arrangement with Hillary for America and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.

I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.

“Hello, senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”

– Donna Brazile Op-Ed, Politico

The rigging of the United States Democratic Party Primary nomination process in 2015 was the second turning point in the cultural zeitgeist that occurred at the time. The first was “gamergate”, a niche controversy that sparked within a highly engaged terminally online community that began with debates over ethics in journalistic coverage - stemming from accusations of pay-for-play reviews and other quid-pro-quo relationships between publishers and journalists, to a full-blown cultural flashpoint between progressives and reactionaries. The gaming press, mainstream outlets, and cultural critics framed the movement as a monolithic, misogynistic harassment campaign, ignoring the more complex grievances about journalistic collusion, bias, and censorship.

The one-sidedness of the coverage shattered the integrity of the media in the eyes of a very young, very online generation of men around the world, whose opinion of the media transformed from a watchdog of accountability to a gatekeeper of approved narratives.

Then came the election.

Two high-profile email leaks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta pulled back the curtain on the web of relationships between the media and the political class. The leaks also revealed the extent to which digital psyops could be weaponized, not just by governments and institutions but by independent actors like WikiLeaks, further destabilizing trust in traditional sources of authority.

Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this

One of the least appreciated aspects of the email saga was how blatant some of the language was. Behind the safety of what was assumed to be a private communications channel, the brazenness of what was really going on was full-blown.

On the one hand, traditional media sources were spinning the prevailing narratives over the dangers of misinformation. On the other were emails like this. They were caught. Coordinating with campaign officials, seeking approval for angles, sharing drafts before publication - actions that stripped away any pretense of objectivity. It wasn’t just occasional lapses or errors in judgment; it was systemic and deliberate.

Then there was the cover-up:

And the gaslighting:

And the psyops continued, to the point that people had to be broken out of them with videos like this:

And the tiresome saga of racism:

Same model. Same psyop. Different country. Same effect.

A culture of deceptive edits

The playbook is everywhere, and some of the most significant sources of information of our time have been compromised. Wikipedia is among the worst culprits. For instance, the aforementioned hoax about the disabled reporter exists unchallenged on the website to this day under the corresponding entry for the reporter.

With a broken news media, the training data for language models has worse ramifications. As a simple experiment, I ran the gauntlet with ChatGPT over one simple issue - “Why is support of Donald J Trump often associated with racism?”. Here’s how it turned out:

After a back-and-forth of about 20 messages (some of which triggered the moderation filter, and prevents my ability to link the thread here), here’s where it landed.

Because it comes from China

By 2020, chaos had reached its tipping point. Everything was broken, and the world was set for authoritarian lockdowns that may have spanned years were it not for “Operation Warp Speed.” At the time, the greatest vaccine skepticism came from everywhere—critics and supporters alike. How can you develop a vaccine in less than a year? Trump was defiant.

He threw the full weight of his administration behind an unprecedented effort to accelerate vaccine development. Pundits rolled their eyes, and his largest support base abandoned him, many of them were opposed to vaccines, period. While the bureaucracy prepared for lockdowns spanning multiple years, Trump dismissed the establishment and went his own way. Ironically, the same people who once lambasted his every move pivoted to championing the vaccines as soon as a new administration took office, as if rebranding the effort erased its origins.

At a moment when the world was on the brink of prolonged isolation, economic collapse, and mass hysteria, one man was willing to make the audacious statement that solutions could be found without succumbing to endless cycles of fear and control. He didn’t just challenge the timeline for vaccine development, he challenged the fatalism that had gripped global leadership. While governments around the world settled into the rhetoric of “this is the new normal,” it emerged that disruption - even the Trump-esque chaotic, messy disruption is what you need to save the world.

Despite being its greatest champion, he put freedom first. He vigorously opposed the idea of mandates. To Trump, they were a choice but not a requirement. Here too, critics painted the opposition as reckless and made him the poster child of the anti-vaccine movement. A living contradiction. The nuance of his position - advocating for the vaccine while opposing force, was deliberately lost in a narrative that thrived on binary conflicts, and a population accustomed to a steady diet of junk news lapped it up.

And so the man who saved the world was forced out for the man who sold the world. In the middle of the night, large mysterious mail-in ballot dumps from last-minute shoe-horned procedures propelled Trump out of office. Hours of hearings were held on dubious voting-day anomalies all of which were suppressed by the media and thrown out by the judiciary due to lack of standing. Given the unprecedented nature of the complaints and the situation created by the pandemic, no redressal mechanisms existed in the process. Riots ensued at the capitol and Trump was unceremoniously banned from all public platforms.

What followed was a crackdown on liberties that would make Mao proud.

In his recent interview on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Mark Zuckerberg outlined the degree to which the Biden administration used intimidation and the threat of government retribution against Meta to unleash a wave of censorship on billions of social media users all over the world. Similar stories emerged from Twitter, all of which came to light following Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. Other western countries followed suit. Canadian Truckers who protested vaccine mandates had their bank accounts frozen for participating in their democratic right to oppose the rule. On the political front, prosecutions reminiscent of banana republics ensued with over 90 different felony charges levied against candidate Trump to prevent his second term. For the uninitiated, every case relies on a novel, unprecedented legal theory intended to convict for a host of infractions ranging from bookkeeping errors by his accountant, to “espionage” due to arguments over classified documents.

Meanwhile, Record inflation, soaring oil prices, economic turmoil, war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East, the resurgence of radical Islamic terror - everything came back with a vengeance, and the psyops continued. Despite the disasters unfolding all over the world, the establishment threw its own weight behind a second term for President Joe Biden.

The Return of the King

Throwback to my Facebook meme on election night 2016 - the year everything changed

To defy the prevailing winds of opinion, like I and so many others have for ten years, stems from more than just the inclination to resist the siren call of fashionable consensus. It requires a certain fortitude and lonely valor, especially in the face of the unrelenting abuse and dismissal in our direction for years.

Courage is not the bellowing of a brute insisting that the earth is flat while perched on its curvature. Courage must be tethered to reason, principle and to above all a higher truth. It is not enough to stand against the tide, but to know why the tide flows the way it does and what moral ground one seeks to claim when opposing it. This is not some contrarian opposition for its own sake, it is a deep skepticism of power especially when it’s so clear what that power is being used to do in how it distorts and maligns entire groups of people using deceptive means, and poisons our discourse. Courage is also, as I learned last year, the beating heart of a 75-year old man brought to his knees grazed by sniper fire, designated traitor, collaborator, racist, abuser, and every label in the book, only to emerge moments later - not to run, but resolute and determined to continue the fight.

Unlike recent times where figures like Elon Musk, David Sacks, Joe Rogan and others have paved the way for others to voice their support by creating the necessary permission structure, the road has not always been that frictionless. It often takes courage in the face of social pressure to conform. It isn’t always easy or pragmatic to talk about the culture war, especially in the face of hysteria, and I’ve often chosen to ignore it, but to do so is to allow institutional rot to go unchallenged.

Healthy skepticism of power goes in all directions. Trump will fail many tests more than once, and he has many times before. When that happens, no amount of bluster from his defenders can make their stand one of principle, and there is a huge army of sycophants that will emerge when he does. I have no interest in being one of them, but I recognize the temptation not to cede even an inch of ground to the bad-faith menace that represents the contemporary ideological left.

For the first time in a decade, the tide is turning in the culture war and nature is healing. It’s common for many to brush off and dismiss my premise, but my filter is accurate because it predicts well, and we’re already starting to see its impact. Trump is the standard-bearer for heterodox thought, and with his ascendancy, the prevailing “HR department culture” wanes.

Meta and Boeing recently killed their DEI program and more will follow. Skeptics will claim this is out of fear of reprisal from the administration, but the programs existed through the entirety of the first Trump term as well. Mission-focused companies with merit based teams who don’t “bring their whole selves to work” should be the norm, and I expect more of this to take shape. If an employee brings a perspective to the table because of their background or identity - that’s merit, not diversity. The lens of merit should be the only one that matters. It’s irresponsible and bigoted to apply any other. This is the correct direction, and it’s important to fight to keep it this way, lest activists take root again. ESG will be next. Climate Change has long been the victim of grifters exploiting a genuine crisis to enrich themselves, but it is a solved problem on the timeframe horizon where it matters.

The veil of censorship has also been finally lifted. Twitter and Meta have ended Third-Party Fact-Checking Programs, diminishing the power of activists who had captured the content moderation industry. The broader trend of companies reevaluating their roles in regulating discourse will continue in this (correct) direction. Open dialogue without fear of corporate gatekeeping will increase the available window for agreement, disagreement and form a path towards consensus.

If the trend continues, I also predict that in the next few years creativity will return to the arts. No longer bogged down by the scourge of political correctness, creative expression will be free to try something new, because courage is contagious. The age of remakes and sequels will give way to new interesting stories.

At this crossroads, we’ve lived through a decade of weak, dysfunctional governments and quasi-government entities that have stood in the way of progress in so many ways. Economies are underperforming, kleptocracies are thriving and regional wars and conflicts have bubbled into violent conflicts, with Taiwan around the corner.

Not unlike the jersey-clad Manchester United fan down the street, tonight - MAGA hat included, I turn to the larger-than-life individual and join millions around the world, who, like myself, celebrate a return to the vibe of the 1990s, fuelled by optimism, hope and good humor, with the belief that the cultural zeitgeist is finally in a better place.