Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment

This in-depth essay is well worth reading in full, as it provides insight into how social media and "permission structures" were used as tools of Democrat party technocracy and control.

... American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies... most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000... the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate...

... the [Obama] Iran deal made little sense.

... I began to see Obama’s plans for the Middle East not simply as a geopolitical maneuver, but as a device to remake the Democratic Party—which it would do in part by rewiring the machinery that produced what a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1921 book, as “public opinion.”

It was Lippman, not Noam Chomsky, who coined the phrase “manufacturing consent,”...

The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways...

Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built...

In effect, large-scale changes in American mores and behavior were being legislated outside the familiar institutions and processes of representative democracy, through top-down social pressure machinery... in what soon became known as a “whole of society” effort.

The unspoken agreements that obscured the way this social messaging apparatus worked—including Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above...

... Today, Donald Trump is victorious, and Obama is the loser. In fact, he looks physically awful—angry and gaunt, after a summer and fall spent lecturing Black men, and Americans in general, on their failure to vote enthusiastically enough for his chosen heir, Kamala Harris, the worst major party presidential candidate in modern American history...

At home and abroad, Obama’s grand vision has been decisively rejected by the people whose lives it was intended to reorder...

Permission structures, a term taken from advertising, was [David] Axelrod’s secret sauce... Axelrod’s strategy required convincing voters to act against their own prior beliefs...

With Obama’s reelection campaign on the horizon in 2012, the White House’s attention turned to selling Obamacare...The White House sales effort successfully disguised the fact that the new health care program was in fact a new social welfare program that would lower rather than raise the standard of care for most Americans with preexisting health insurance, while providing tens of billions of dollars in guaranteed payments to large pharmaceutical companies and pushing those costs onto employers. Americans would continue to pay more for health care than citizens of any other first world country, while receiving less....

Obamacare was followed by the Iran deal, which was followed by Russiagate, which was followed by COVID...

The permission structure machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod built to replace the Democratic Party was... totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs... regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create...

... Elon Musk, who is notable for having purchased Twitter in 2022... With Musk’s X now open to all comers, the party’s censorship apparatus was effectively dead...

If Obama the global strategist is clearly a failure, and his hand-picked successors at home were a senile old man and a babbling idiot, then the country’s corporate elite and tech oligarchy might rightly question the wisdom of continued payoffs to Obama’s Chicago-style Democratic machine and make peace with Donald Trump instead. Which they did...

As for Barack Obama, I will admit that I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him face the consequences of his own arrogance, obsession with personal power, and efforts at vanquishing the exceptionalism that makes this country different from every other one...

Obama was the turning point, by New Neo, 8 November 2024.

Barack Obama: The Political Genius That Wasn't, by Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann, American Greatness, 14 November 2024.

How Trump Crushed Obama's Legacy, by David Samuels UnHerd, 8 November 2024.

The Evaporation of the Obama Mystique, by Victor Davis Hanson, 12 December 2024.

The Obamas Get Their Comeuppance, by Jack Cashill, American Thinker, 18 November 2024.

Obama’s Weaponization of the DOJ, by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke, Truth Over News, 12 November 2024: Obama’s DOJ Slush Fund used settlements from the 2008 financial crisis to fund left-wing activist groups that are still active today.

Obama and Russiagate: The Untold Story, by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke, Truth Over News, 15 November 2024: Part 2 of our series on how Barack Obama undermined U.S. democracy.

Obama Fueled Russia Collusion Lies in Secret White House Meeting ;by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke, Truth Over News, 4 November 2024.

Obama’s Ukraine Cover Up, by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke, Truth Over News, 20 November 2024.

Obama’s Ukraine Cover Up: Part 3 of our series on how Barack Obama undermined U.S. democracy, by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke, Truth Over News, 29 November 2024.

Obama's Middle East Destabilization: Part 4 of our series on how Barack Obama undermined U.S. democracy, by Jeff Carlson & Hans Mahncke, Truth Over News 1 December 2024.