Author: russelldobular

Will be out in 5-10.

Nancy, ‘Queen of Stonks:’ Why Pelosi Belongs in Prison

by Russell Dobular

“SEC Rule 10b-5 prohibits corporate officers and directors or other insider employees from using confidential corporate information to reap a profit (or avoid a loss) by trading in the Company’s stock. This rule also prohibits “tipping” of confidential corporate information to third parties.

An “insider” is an officer, director, 10% stockholder and anyone who possesses inside information because of his or her relationship with the Company or with an officer, director or principal stockholder of the Company. Rule 10b-5’s application goes considerably beyond just officers, directors and principal stockholders. This rule also covers any employee who has obtained material non-public corporate information, as well as any person who has received a “tip” from an Insider of the Company concerning information about the Company that is material and nonpublic, and trades (i.e. purchase or sells) the Company’s stock or other securities.

This policy also applies to your family members who reside with you, anyone else who lives in your household, and family members who do not live in your household but whose securities transactions are directed by you or are subject to your influence or control, as well as trusts or other entities for which you make investment decisions.”

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Based on all of the above, Nancy and Paul Pelosi should be getting fitted for orange jumpsuits right about now. That’s what would be happening to you or me, or Martha Stewart, were our stock picks to repeatedly, mysteriously, outperform the S&P 500, and leave the annual returns of professional money managers in the dust. Once may be a lucky pick. Twice even. A good year here and there is plausible. But the Pelosis’ “good luck” isn’t confined to a particular company, transaction, or calendar year. Trade after trade and year after year they bury the smartest minds on Wall Street. There is no reasonable explanation for this feat other than the proposition that they are trading on inside information. And really, how could they not be? For a member of Congress, much less the Speaker of the House, to trade stock is like a referee making a bet on the game that they’re about to call. Let’s go back to the summer of 2021 for an example:

In May and June, investment manager and spouse to the Speaker, Paul Pelosi (this is how they work the scam-Nancy doesn’t execute the trades), purchased $11M worth of risky call options in Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (Google), and Nvidia. These types of trades only pay off if the stock reaches a “strike price,” by a certain date. If the target price isn’t met in the proper time frame, the options expire worthless. 

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Adding to the risk was the fact that the House was at the very same moment creating anti-trust legislation that would better regulate large tech companies.  In the end, a few weak proposals were drafted and passed by the House Judiciary Committee, none of which were seen as a major threat to Silicon Valley, and that weren’t brought up for a full vote in the House in any case. All of the stocks Pelosi had purchased went through the roof, partly in response to the toothless proposals.

While this doesn’t constitute hard proof of insider trading (the Pelosi’s are far too wily to do anything that wouldn’t meet the “reasonable doubt” standard in a court of law), the sheer mathematical impossibility of their annual gains simply can not be explained any other way. 

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How good are the Pelosi’s’ trades?  In 2021, they made a 69% gain on their investments. Warren Buffet, widely considered one of the greatest investors of all time, did 20%. So did George Soros, a man so canny that he is often credited with causing a collapse in the British pound in the Fall of 1992 by heavily shorting the currency. Peter Lynch, the Wall Street legend who took Fidelity’s Magellan fund from $18M to $13B between 1977-1990, did 26%. And yet the Pelosi’s left them all in the dust, more than doubling Lynch’s returns, and more than tripling Buffet’s and Soros’.  

Funny side note, the Twitter account “Nancy Pelosi Portfolio Tracker,” which produced the below graphic, was shut down immediately upon Jack Dorsey’s exit as CEO.

This was after they had received a “cease and desist order from a lawyer representing someone high up in the [Political] office.”  Apparently having her corruption laid out for all the world to see on Twitter was putting a bug up the ass of the reigning Queen of Stonks. But as the erstwhile Speaker herself has trenchantly observed, “We are a free market economy.”   

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In that spirit, a plethora of Tik Tok groups and websites have sprung up to track the financial maneuvers of the Speaker and her husband, so that retail investors can pile into trades that are widely perceived as being among that rarest of beasts in the world of stock picking: a sure thing.  Time and again we have seen that any stock the Pelosi’s buy is almost guaranteed to outperform the broader market. 

As Christopher Josephs, co-founder of the social media investing app Iris, which helps users track the investments of celebrities, friends, and political figures, told Yahoo Finance Live, “The reason why Speaker Pelosi became so popular was because every trade she was making inevitably turned out to be such a long-term winner.  Albeit the entire market has gone up significantly, but these are very, very risky bets because she’s been buying LEAP options as opposed to just stock…It started early in 2020 with Crowdstrike (CRWD), and then she bought Tesla (TSLA), and there were some laws passed pro for the EV market…Then she bought Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and then the laws came out that they weren’t going to go after Big Tech.”  Each of the stocks Josephs mentions were up 20-30%, as of October, 2021. 

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But if you, dear peasant, want to grab some crumbs off the Congressional Corruption table by trading like Nancy does, you may not have a lot of time left to get in on the action.  After Business Insider revealed that 54 Congressional lawmakers and 182 senior staffers were in violation of the STOCK ACT, which requires the reporting of all stock trades made by members of Congress and their staffs, momentum began to build for broad reform. 

Moderate Senator Jon Ossoff, of all people, seemingly in response to the Speaker’s contention that members of Congress should be allowed to trade unfettered because capitalism or some shit, has introduced a bill that would ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, with the penalty being total forfeiture of their Congressional salaries.  Senator Josh Hawley is about to introduce a competing bill, which would fine lawmakers their total profits if they are caught trading. Given the kind of money the Pelosi’s and others are making off their insider moves, Hawley’s penalty is probably the one with the most teeth.  Nancy spends more on gourmet ice cream than her Congressional salary can cover.

What neither proposal includes is jail time.  ‘Cause jail is only for the little people.  And occasionally Martha Stewart.

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Detox Hour 1/16: Insane Trump Rally, Fauci Emails, Nancy: Queen of Stonks – Due Dissidence

This Christmas, America is Officially Pottersville

by Russell Dobular

This is a strange holiday season.  To gather, or not to gather: that is the question for many as Omicron bursts onto the scene just in time to turn our seasonal festivities into millions of individual party games of Covid Russian Roulette.  

Does Aunt Jen look a little under the weather?  Or will it be the friend from work who looks perfectly fine that turns Christmas dinner into a super-spreader event?  

Should I go out on New Year’s Eve, or content myself for yet another year with the depressing televised Times Square ball drop? 

Is it okay to go see the local Christmas tree lighting? It’s outdoors after all. But the new strain is twice as contagious as Delta, so will being outside really make a difference?  

Or do we just stay home and do nothing?  Again?

The only tradition we can truly rely on in times like these are the one thing that, by their nature, will never change: our Holiday Movie Classics.

Miracle on 34th Street (favorite line: Of all the isms in the world, the woist of ‘em is ‘commoicialism’), A Christmas Carol (the Alistair Sims version), A Charlie Brown Christmas, A Christmas Story, Home Alone 2, Elf, Polar Express . . .

Even as our world crumbles around us, these remain frozen in time, representing not only a fantasy holiday season, but a fantasy America; one that is vaguely, permanently, stuck somewhere between 1932-1955, and where the nation always lives up to its highest ideals.  

It is a world of small towns, snowy vistas, tow-headed tykes, red rocket sleds, prosperous small businesses, and contented shop keepers. It is an America whose people are innocent and yet somehow possessed of an innate, native wisdom. Salt of the Earth types abound while the bad guys are either banished from the merrymaking in the final reel or invited to join in once they’ve seen the error of their ways. By the end we all learn the true meaning of Christmas, which, in our national cinema, is synonymous with the true meaning of America.  

No film exemplifies the formula better than Frank Capra’s classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. Capra, an Italian immigrant deeply enamored of his adopted nation and its institutions wove together the “America as Christmas” conceit more effectively and explicitly than any other filmmaker before or since. The “no man is poor who has friends,” thing? I tear up every time. Every. Single. Time.

Far from being naïve about the dark side of America, Capra’s two most enduring films, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, both pit his favorite Everyman, Jimmy Stewart, against figures that represent an America gone wrong: greedy old businessman, Mr. Potter, in the former, and the corrupt Washington establishment in the latter.

But in Capra’s telling, one good, plain-spoken man, sure of his purpose and just in his cause, can always triumph over the rapacious and the corrupt. His honesty and truthfulness will ultimately rally the people to his cause, ensuring that the nation will never fall into the hands of the Mr. Potters of the world.  Hell, even that Sam Wainwright “Hee-haw,” jerk comes through in the end.

It goes without saying that this was always a, shall we say, generous version, of how America worked. Ask any black or brown person. Or all the women that Capra would never have considered choosing as a protagonist. But cultural ideals are always made up of myths and fantasies intended to point us towards our better selves. Without stories like It’s a Wonderful Life, would people ever look around at the country they actually live in and realize how far short it falls of what they want it to be? Of what it’s supposed to be? Of what they’ve been told it was?

It is in that spirit that I watch the film now, in this hellish plague year, and come to a terrible conclusion: 2021 America isn’t the one where George Bailey learns what the world would have been like without him and then returns to Bedford Falls with a renewed sense of purpose and vigor. This is America as Pottersville, the dog-eat-dog slum that Mr. Potter creates in Bailey’s absence.

A healthcare system that bankrupts its citizens; a childcare system that is completely unaffordable for the working class; a political system that is entirely owned and operated by the wealthy and corporate interests; an education system whose quality depends on your zip code; a level of wealth inequality that is truly medieval in scale; a news media that only exists to spread elite propaganda; a workforce that hasn’t had a raise in 50 some-odd years, even as productivity has soared; skyrocketing home prices making the market unaffordable for young families while large corporations buy up what little housing stock is left: this is a society that only Mr. Potter could feel at home in.  

For the rest of us, America has become the nightmare place that George beholds after his near-suicide. Like him, we look around at this horror our society has become, bug-eyed, disgusted, confused, and desperate. Only for us, there is no Clarence the Angel to set things right. The closest thing we had was Bernie Sanders and, in the end, he was no match for the forces of greed and ignorance that have taken control of our country. No one is coming to save us. We’re stuck here in Pottersville. Forever.  

And so it is a strange feeling watching these films this year. They are just as they ever were. But we are not the same. Like the boy in Polar Express, we have lost our capacity to Believe, and all the magic bells in the world aren’t going to fix it this time.  

Universal Healthcare might do the trick. Or Student Loan Forgiveness. Drop a $15 Minimum Wage on us and we may hear the music once more. Hell, even dental, vision and hearing coverage for Grandma would go a long way.

But we aren’t getting any of that. Not ever. Not without social collapse and possibly a civil war in between. We know that now.  

No, we don’t live in Bedford Falls. Never did. Us Americans, we’re straight outta Pottersville.

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Detox Hour 1/16: Insane Trump Rally, Fauci Emails, Nancy: Queen of Stonks – Due Dissidence

Photo: It’s A Wonderful Life, Senate Democrats

Russiagate Collapses: Show Us on the Puppet Where the Media Touched You

by Russell Dobular

Hey, Little Liberal. We know you’re probably feeling pretty betrayed right now, and maybe you feel like you can’t express those emotions because they’re too big and scary. Especially because it didn’t just happen to you – most of your friends and family were right there with you hanging on every twist and turn of the Russiagate story for four whole years. What’s even worse is most of them still have a relationship with your abuser. How can you save yourself without confronting them? 

So, you stay silent even as The Maddow walks around free, never taking any responsibility for what she and her friends did to you. You try to move on with your life, but with every new arrest of the people ultimately responsible for turning you into a drooling McCarthyite troll, your feelings of shame, worthlessness and stupidity keep on getting bigger. You try to distract yourself by obsessing on 1/6, but your heart just isn’t in it. When people bring it up you want to scream, “Are we really going to do this again!?  Really?!”  

Now I’m going to tell you something huuuuuge, and it’s important that you listen: there’s nothing wrong with you. Your reaction is a perfectly healthy response to being lied to and gaslit by corporate media for fun and profit for your whole entire little life. Because the truth is, it didn’t start with Russiagate, did it? That’s what made you finally notice the abuse. But it started waaaay before, didn’t it?

WMD’s were the thing that first made you think that maybe something wasn’t right about the relationship. But then they told you it wasn’t the whole media that lied to you, it was just that one Judith Miller woman, and that made it all better.

Then they told you Donald Trump would never be the President. Never, ever, never. Not ever. They promised you that he’d lose in a landslide and that your absolute favoritist boss bitch Hillary might even take Texas. Texas! Boy, would that be something! 

On the day of the election, The New York Times told you Hill had an 84% chance of winning. You were soooooo excited that you never saw it coming. You felt so betrayed when Trump won. Finally, you were ready to walk out on your abuser.  

But then they explained it in a way that made total sense: Russia! It was all Russia’s fault, just like in those old movies from the 80’s. And it was time to go all Rambo on their Commie asses! So not only did you stay in the relationship, you committed to it harder than you ever had before. Because Democracy Dies in Darkness, or something.

For four long years Maddow and her buddies passed you around between them. And the worst part is, you let them. It didn’t matter how many Russiagate stories turned out to be total bs, or how little sense it made that Russia was able to change an election outcome with $100,000 worth of ads on Facebook, or how the same media that was filling up your little head with all this stuff had also gifted Donald Trump with $5B in free advertising, something they never seemed to want to talk about.

You didn’t ask questions, because it was too scary to ask them, and you were hooked. And the truth is, on levels that you’re ashamed to admit, you stuck around because you liked what they were doing to you. It gave you a sense of purpose and meaning. It made you feel like part of a club – like you were one of the good people fighting against absolute evil. Like Star Wars, only with pussy hats instead of lightsabers and sick burns instead of X-wings. Take that, Darth Putin!

Then came the Mueller report. You tried to swallow the “well, he might not have said there was collusion, but he didn’t say there wasn’t either” spin, but it just made you feel cheap and dirty. After that, when you’d see your friends hunkered down in a dark room, letting Bob Acosta, or Joy Ann Reid, wash all over them, you felt the urge to save them. But it was all you could do to save yourself. You stopped watching. You stopped listening. You tried to move on with your life.

But now with the arrest of Michael Sussman for lying to the FBI about his work for the Clinton campaign and Igor Dachenko for basically inventing the Steele dossier, it looks more and more like it was all made up. . .By the Clinton campaign! Even your fav boss bitch lied to you. You feel so used. So ashamed. Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you stop them?

Listen little liberal, that’s just stinking thinking. None of this was your fault. There’s no one to blame for what happened but the people who took advantage of your trusting nature. You were brought up to believe that reporters were trustworthy grownups who based their reporting on this thing called objectivity, and that because of it they’d never lie to you. That made you an easy target. There was nothing you could have done to stop them.

Now is the time for you to reclaim your power. Now is the time for you to look them all in the eye and say, “I am strong! I am powerful! I am not going to go down the rabbit hole of your obsessive 1/6 coverage, not even when the committee hearings start!”

Go ahead! Say it! Say it loud and proud!

Now, don’t you feel better? It’s going to be a long road to recovery Little Liberal, but you’ve taken the first step on your journey to reclaim your personal power today.

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Detox Hour 1/16: Insane Trump Rally, Fauci Emails, Nancy: Queen of Stonks – Due Dissidence

Photo: Rob Walsh, Public Domain Dedication

Weenie Roast: 5 Reasons the Dems Got Toasted, and Why 2022 is Going to Be Even Worse

by Russell Dobular

From a drunken, jibbering James Carville appearing on CNN to lament the state of the race in Virginia a few days out, to the NBC poll that dropped over the weekend showing Joe Biden with a 42% approval rating, there was bad Juju for the Democrats written all over the first major election night of the Biden Presidency. As the results unfolded, with Youngkin holding a lead from jump that shrank but never disappeared, and Ciatterelli holding a much tighter, but also consistent lead in New Jersey, a state that should have been an easy lay-up, the punditocracy cast around for easy explanations while diligently avoiding the hard ones that get your network barred from sit-down interviews with the President.

Everyone’s favorite convert to the Church of Shitlibbery, Nicole Wallace, unbelievably tried to blame the multi-car Democrat electoral pile up on the fact that we pulled out of Afghanistan, as if Americans are sitting around their kitchen tables, sadly lamenting the unfulfilled promise of a woke Kabul.

And all the flavors of racism were invoked, as has become de rigueur in the face of Republican victories: Brianna Keilar at CNN, blamed “dog whistle racism” for Youngkin’s victory in a state that elected its first black female Lieutenant Governor right alongside him, and the ever reliable Queen of Dumb Takes, Joy Ann Reid, confidently declared that parents’ expressed concerns about “education,” (air quotes, Reid’s), is “code for white parents don’t like the idea of teaching about race,” apparently without digging into the demographics of Virginia voters expressing those concerns, a large number of whom were Asian, Latino and African-American.

But the real reason behind these losses and the even more devastating and consequential losses to come is far simpler: no one likes a weenie. If you look up the definition of “weenie” in the dictionary, then plaster the face of pretty much any Democrat you can think of next to it, 9 times out of 10 they’ll go together like outed sex procurers to the powerful and mysterious suicides. 

Okay, that may not be the only reason, but running candidates with faces as eminently punchable as Terry McAuliffe’s, may just not be the winning strategy that it appears to be if you only talk to the kinds of people who don’t want to punch Terry McAuliffe: a tiny subset of Washington insiders and donors, along with maybe a few of his closest relatives, and probably not even those if you get them liquored up enough to be honest about it. 

For everybody else, he’s just a Clinton-era bag man with the same weird Trump fixation that his old Domme Hillary rode right into embittered obscurity. So, here’s the real deal top 5 takeaways that didn’t make it into Politico:

1. Let’s Go Brandon

Honestly, we could just stop here. Nothing better demonstrates the way the left and the right have switched places than the eruption of this phrase and the desperate attempts of the establishment and its media mouthpieces to do what they always do with dissent in the post-Trump era: define it as dangerous right-wing extremism, if not outright domestic terrorism. It used to be the left that tweaked the nose of the powerful with a mix of subversive humor, vulgarity, and impromptu guerilla theater.

“Let’s Go Johnson”

Now it’s the right that challenges the absurd hypocrisy and dishonesty of our institutions by parodying one hapless NBC reporter’s attempt to pretend that “Fuck Joe Biden” wasn’t really being chanted at the NASCAR race she was covering. 

Meanwhile, the left has taken on the role of its one-time nemesis, the humorless censor, ruling every challenge to its authority as uncouth, uncivilized, dangerous, and out of bounds. America has always hated a stiff and a scold, and while those types have occasionally held sway, they’ve never held it for long, and have always been regarded with derision and loathing in the end. Welcome to the beginning of the end.

2. $1,400 Doesn’t Buy As Many Votes As It Used To

What exactly has Joe Biden done for you, other than send out a check for $600 less than what he originally promised?  Now, here’s an even more salient question: what has Joe Biden done for you that Trump wouldn’t have done? Exactly. You see the problem here.

3. You Can Fuck With People’s Heads, But You Better Not Fuck With Their Kids

For several years now, the identitarian left has been proudly touting its support of ideas about race that are derived from Critical Race Theory. As soon as it became clear how deeply unpopular those ideas are, not only with white people, but with many POC, they began to swing between denying that CRT exists (which would be news to originators like Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw), claiming with intentional obtuseness that even if it does exist, it’s a theory about outcomes in the legal system that certainly isn’t being taught to children, and finally, asserting that it doesn’t represent anything more than an attempt to teach America’s history of slavery and segregation in schools.


No, CRT itself isn’t being taught to children, and yes, it did begin as a theory of law. But since its inception, it has morphed into a General Unified Theory of race that colors the way the “soft sciences” and humanities are taught at the university level, and the students who have directly or indirectly absorbed these precepts in the course of their academic training then bring that perspective to the way they teach children. 

This is what parents are reacting to, because most people aren’t all that keen on the idea of having their children taught that they’re divided between race-based oppressed and oppressor classes, before they’re old enough to reliably tie their shoes. Yes, there is a conversation to be had about the way slavery and Jim Crow are taught in schools (badly, like pretty much every other historical topic), but do we really believe that liberal Northern Virginia parents voted for Youngkin because they don’t want their kids learning about Rosa Parks?

These are separate issues that proponents of CRT desperately want to conflate because most people are not actually against teaching children about slavery, but they are very much against having their children taught to see themselves as victims and victimizers. The more Democrats are tied to these ideas, the better for the GOP.

4. Covid Fatigue

Based on where they rank Covid among their concerns, at this point a majority of Americans probably feel that the juice of further lockdowns, mask mandates and general restrictions, isn’t worth the squeeze. This puts the party that’s been blowing Dr. Anthony “what could possibly go wrong with funding gain of function research in China” Fauci for two years running, at a distinct disadvantage. Throw into the mix the fact that Florida and some other Southern states are doing as well, and in some cases better, than covid restriction model citizen states like California and New York, and you’re looking at the makings of virtual GOP hegemony after 2022, as people run right into the arms of the party most likely to just leave them the fuck alone already.

5. Personally, I Could Give Two Shits Who Shits Where, But . . .

. . . maybe that’s not the hill we want to die on? Sometimes I just want to ask Democrats, “Do you know any normal people?”  Y’know, the kind of people who don’t believe there are seven sexes, or at least don’t believe that extreme outliers are all that relevant to their day-to-day existence, and are also deeply uncomfortable with the idea of sharing a bathroom with someone of the opposite biological sex, no matter how they identify? Set aside what your opinions on the subject are; we’re talking political realities here. If I had to come up with a policy proposal that would piss off parents enough to overwhelmingly flip to the GOP, I couldn’t come up with anything better than imposing gender-neutral bathrooms in public schools, without offering single-sex options. All it took was one sexual assault in such a bathroom to undermine the Democrats’ suburban strategy.

This sort of incident was inevitable, not because of gender neutrality, but because unfortunately, sexual assault is a thing, and it’s a thing that sometimes happens in bathrooms. Thing is, when it happens in a gender-neutral bathroom in a public school, now you’ve realized parents’ worst fears, and they’re going to vote accordingly.

On a final note, as I wrote this article, I could already hear the identitarian shitlib pushback. It’s the same pushback you get when you defend Dave Chapelle, or Joe Rogan, or – God forbid! – Jordan Peterson. Meanwhile, Chapelle’s special has a 97% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Joe Rogan continues to be America’s most popular podcaster, and Peterson sells a lot more books than Robin DiAngelo.

Liberals’ response to this evidence of how deeply out of touch they are with most of their fellow citizens usually boils down to: everyone else is stupid, racist, reactionary, and evil. And they aren’t shy about expressing that opinion, as any casual peruser of pretty much any social media platform will have experienced first-hand. Then, after charming the voting public with this behavior day after day for several years running, they are always somehow shocked that when people get a chance to vote on the matter, they’d sooner elect the reanimated corpse of John Wayne Gacy than a Democrat. The response is never to re-evaluate their beliefs or messaging. It’s always to double down on attacking the voters, as was the case after last week’s latest wipe out.

This is not the behavior of people who can or will win elections, policy battles, or anything else. Flame wars and petty cancel crusades do not a meaningful political movement make and that’s more or less all Democrats have got at this point. The future belongs to the other side. Because nobody likes a weenie.

We discuss the 2021 election results and more on episode 125 of the Due Dissidence podcast. Click the player below to hear our full conversation, and subscribe to our podcast and listen on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or any major podcast player.

Image: Don DeBold

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Detox Hour 1/16: Insane Trump Rally, Fauci Emails, Nancy: Queen of Stonks – Due Dissidence

[Satire] Sinema Aides Reveal Her Pact With Satan

“She literally has the devil on speed dial,” says terrified intern

A special Halloween-time investigation by Russell Dobular

Senator Krysten Sinema this week denied claims that she sold her soul to the devil in exchange for earthly power and riches after several former and current aides came forward to make the accusation. 

“Can’t anyone just be bought off anymore?” Sinema replied to one reporter inquiring about her alleged connections to Lucifer, adding, “I also don’t appreciate the sexist ‘in thrall to the Devil’ trope. When it’s a man, he’s simply corrupt. When it’s a woman who’s violated every principle she ever claimed to hold, all of a sudden everyone thinks she’s gone to a crossroads in the middle of Tempe, stripped naked under a full moon, sacrificed an animal of some sort in the delicious night air, possibly an armadillo, and given herself completely to the Dark Lord, body and soul. It’s just wrong and I won’t stand for it.”

Still, rumors persist that through her voting record, Sinema is preparing the way for the antichrist foretold in the Book of Revelations, under the direction of one or several demonic entities. 

According to Arizona State University lecturer and demonology expert, Dr. William Hellstrom, Sinema’s journey from Green Party candidate and immigrants’ rights activist to human pharma cash vacuum attachment is typical of those who sell their souls to the Devil.

“We see this again and again throughout history,” he said from inside a protective circle made up of hastily scrawled ancient runes, “Caligula, Napoleon, even Atilla the Hun; they all started out with noble intentions, but in the end they weren’t able to resist the Prince of Lies. How do you think Nancy Pelosi made $150 million dollars as a sitting member of Congress anyway?  Sinema has already racked up her first million and believe me, she’s just getting started.”

Perhaps most disturbing is the series of disappearances connected to Sinema’s office. Since she was first elected to the Arizona State House in 2011, no less than 12 of the Senator’s interns and staff members have gone missing under mysterious circumstances. 

The pattern has not gone unnoticed by some of the parents and partners of the missing, who have created the non-profit Loved Ones of Missing Krysten Sinema Aides and Interns (LOMKSAI), with the aim of pressuring law enforcement to investigate. 

Mary Cafferty, spokeswoman for the group and mother of one of Sinema’s alleged victims said, “It’s very clear that something evil is going on in that office. Who holds up a vote on lowering prescription drug prices, then just runs off to the gym like nothing happened?  Her familiars in the police department need to stop conspiring with the Beast and do their jobs.”

One wan and clearly terrified intern who spoke only on condition of anonymity painted a chilling picture of life inside Sinema’s office, “Everyone has to wear a sweater because it’s always freezing, even in the middle of summer and that’s without air conditioning. It can be 90 degrees out and you can still see your breath. Of the staff that was here when I started, I’m the only one left.  And also, I’ve been having these crazy dreams of her scratching at my window, asking to be invited in.  And after every disappearance, she seems, like, I don’t know . . . younger.” 

Here she paused, her eyes darting nervously as if afraid someone might be listening, before whispering, “I’m afraid I’m going to be next.”

This is a developing story. 

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Detox Hour 1/16: Insane Trump Rally, Fauci Emails, Nancy: Queen of Stonks – Due Dissidence

Photo: Elizabeth D. Herman, NYT (altered for use)

Biden’s Failing Presidency is a Tragic Reflection of America’s Decline

by Russell Dobular

These days Joe Biden is a tragic figure and also a symbolic one. As he dodders and mumbles his way through the rare press conference and occasional speech, it’s hard not to feel like we’re into the final scenes of King Lear, with the monarch’s mind crumbling under the weight of too many cruel realities arriving at a time in life when he is least able to manage them. Watching him try – and fail repeatedly – to master situations from Covid to Afghanistan to a dysfunctional Congress, gives one the uncomfortable feeling, no matter your politics, of catching a glimpse at our own national reflection. 

If Trump represented America’s wounded Id having a tantrum, Biden is its increasingly out of touch Ego, seeing a man of 35 in the mirror, even as everyone around him prepares to fight over the estate he’s going to be leaving behind very shortly.

As in any great tragedy, the seeds of Biden’s destruction were sown in the very moment of his triumph. Having resoundingly lost the first three primary states, he was rescued only by divine intervention, or the Democratic Party equivalent: an intercession by his old boss, Barack. But there are consequences for foisting a candidate on the public that no one particularly likes, trusts, or believes in. In exit polls, 44% of Biden supporters saw their vote as a rejection of Trump. Only 54% saw it as a vote for Biden. For Trump, those numbers were 22% and 75% respectively.

It could be a case of Yeats’ lines regarding the lack of conviction among the best while the worst are full of “passionate intensity,” playing out in real time, but it probably has more to do with the fact that Trump’s voters actively chose Trump. 

Biden, on the other hand, was never anything more than a hastily constructed bulwark against the party’s rising progressive wing.  That’s a flimsy premise for a presidency and was never going to hold up for very long to the scrutiny that comes with the job. It’s also a weak hand to play in negotiations with both official Republicans and the unofficial ones within his own party.  

Manchin has so little care about incurring the historically unpopular Biden’s wrath (only Trump was more disliked at this point in presidency) that he literally talked down to his own voters from the stern of his yacht this week as they demanded he support $3.5T in infrastructure spending. And Sinema seems to take a special delight in defying him, as if she’s fantasizing about all the lucrative board memberships she’s going to accumulate when her public service is done and she’s able to cash in her chits.   

If we get an infrastructure bill at all, it’s going to be even more woefully inadequate to meeting the needs of the moment than the one currently under consideration.  

It’s often been observed by his opponents on the left that Biden turned out to be better than anyone expected, but that’s only because the bar for his presidency had been set at a subterranean level. This is the man who gleefully incarcerated a generation of black men, while bragging that his crime bill would “do everything but hang people for jay walking.” Anything short of riding up to the White House on a horse in full Grand Wizard regalia to take the oath of office was going to look like a miracle of late-in-life progressive conversion.

Yes, Biden is better than anyone expected him to be. But he isn’t nearly as good as we needed him to be. We needed the FDR, or failing that, at least the LBJ that Biden reportedly sees himself as. What we got is a walking, talking, daily reminder of just how far we’ve fallen as a country. His befuddlement, frustration and ineffectiveness are our own, as is his nostalgia for a time when we had more turns left in the game, and our possible moves seemed infinite.  

A serious nation that is qualified to lead the world, even in a lets-start-pointless-wars-in-order-to-enrich-our-corporations kind of a way, would never have elected Biden or his predecessor. Our allies and enemies alike have noticed and their way of dealing with the United States is now along the lines of the way one deals with a crazy, rich uncle.  Think about the inheritance. Smile and nod. Remind yourself that he won’t be around for much longer.

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Detox Hour 1/16: Insane Trump Rally, Fauci Emails, Nancy: Queen of Stonks – Due Dissidence

Photo: Gage Skidmore

Andrew Cuomo’s Legacy Exposes the Hypocrisy of Democrats and Their Voters

by Russell Dobular

If God is a novelist, he has a disposition towards the trite, the obvious, and the too on-the-nose.  Case in point: Andrew Cuomo.  If one wanted to write a book whose theme was personal and political hypocrisy, you couldn’t do any better than to produce one in which liberals rally around one notoriously corrupt bully, in order to demonstrate their rejection of another.  In the annals of liberal idiocy, the cult of Cuomo ranks right up there with running Hillary Clinton for President and Michelle Obama unironically describing real-life war criminal George W. Bush, as her “partner in crime.”

Some may object that we didn’t know about Cuomo’s lechery until Lindsay Boylan opened the floodgates by coming forward. But we knew enough to know that Cuomo was a lying degenerate from way back. If you ask a Democrat which state in America is the most corrupt, they’re likely to name a Republican stronghold like Florida, or Texas, but in reality, based on the number of its political leaders prosecuted and convicted, that honor goes to Cuomo’s very own Empire State. The Governor’s response to that was to shut down the Moreland commission, which had been charged with investigating corruption in the state and going to war with Attorney General Preet Bharara who demanded that its files be preserved as possible evidence. This all played out even as his top aide was sentenced to six years in prison for bribery.  

And that’s just scratching the surface of what we already knew about Cuomo before the pandemic. Once it started there were a lot of voices speaking out against his newfound status as champion of the people and exemplar of good government. There were the front-line health care workers pointing out that New York had the worst outbreak on Earth, partly because Cuomo had been cutting the budget for public health and city hospitals for years. There was Assemblyman Ron Kim, begging anyone who would listen to look into the connection between Cuomo’s donations from the Greater New York Hospital Alliance (GNYHA) and the liability shield he created for nursing homes, thereby protecting them from lawsuits connected to Covid related illness and deaths in their facilities. Combined with Cuomo’s policy of forcing nursing homes to take Covid patients (a policy that might have led to the death of Kim’s own Uncle), it’s estimated at least 1,000 elderly New Yorkers died needlessly even as Democrats were loudly celebrating their “Cuomosexuality.”  Knowing his braindead and singularly incurious fan base would never hold him accountable, Cuomo even cut the Medicaid budget during the pandemic. 

And yet, right up until State Attorney General Letitia James dropped her report confirming the credibility of claims that 11 women had made against the Governor ranging from crude flirtation to sexual assault, only 21% of NY Democrats thought Cuomo should resign and 50% actually wanted him to run for a fourth term. Remember, these were the same people who couldn’t jack off at night without Tweeting a reference to Trump’s “grab ‘em by the pussy,” comment on Access Hollywood.  But when it came to Cuomo?  Fuck it. Franken. Have to stop eating our own, etc., etc.  

So, listen, God, we have a few notes on the manuscript. We’ve put them all here in this podcast. Take it in, maybe do some edits, ‘cause this whole Cuomo thing?  It’s just not credible that so many people would be so scorchingly hypocritical all at the same time without any of them noticing, much less that an entire political party could be made up of people like this. I dunno, maybe throw in a spaceship, some dinosaurs, that’s up to you, you’re the artist. Just, do better. I mean, just look at this montage of the media praising a man that every political insider on the planet knew was a goon and a bully.  Who’s going to believe this is real?

We discuss Cuomo’s resignation and more on episode 117 of the Due Dissidence podcast. Click the player below to hear our full conversation, and subscribe to the Due Dissidence podcast on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or any major podcast player.

Photo: Diana Robinson

No One is Coming to Save You: Why Gen Z is Giving Up on Democracy

by Russell Dobular

“You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy.”

Arthur Jensen, Network

For years, leftists have been digging through the internet archives to prove that when Democrats are in power, they never actually deliver on their promises to the voters, even when it’s fully within their power to do so.  It’s been a tough case to make, especially to Blue Magaworld, for whom Barack Obama is something akin to a secular saint. Try to talk about how he abandoned the public option before negotiations on Obamacare even began, or about how he put pressure on Senators who refused to vote for the bill without it instead of on the ones who dug their heels in on having it included, and the most common response from Democrats will be, “But the Republicans!” Never mind the fact that Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote, which means the Democrats could have done anything in theory, right up to and including Universal Health Care. The idea that the party, or God forbid, Obama himself, might have anything to do with the band-aid-on-a-gunshot-wound nature of the policy is anathema to most Democrats. Any attempt to persuade them otherwise is quickly vaporized by their repeated exposure to brain-melting doses of Morning Joe.

But now we’re seeing it all play out in real time in ways that are difficult for even the most mimosa-addled brunch liberal to ignore. No one can now deny that when Democrats were given a once in a generation shot to raise the minimum wage, not even to the $24 it would be if it had risen with inflation and productivity growth over the past 50 years, but to just roughly 60% of that wage, they hid behind the Senate Parliamentarian, an excuse so laughable that they might have been better off just telling the truth: the donors don’t want you to have a living wage, so we ain’t doing it. The refreshing honesty may have scored them more points than the transparent bullshit they ultimately went with. And as if to drive the point home, when Bernie introduced a $15 per hour amendment to the latest Corona relief package, 8 Democrats voted against it, apparently without fear of consequence from the White House, or from the voters. 

They know their suburban base could give a flying fuck about what the person who hands them their order at the drive-through earns, and if the White House really wanted it, they would have rained down hellfire on any Dem who threatened to hold up relief to stop it. So now we know there will be no living wage for American workers for at minimum a generation, at least not without a mass uprising, or general strike. And if the Democrats won’t provide that most basic of necessities, what hope is there for free college or universal health care? Zero, to none.

Enter, Gen Z.  Even the most open-minded, and thoughtful person, is inevitably bound to understand the world through the lens of the past. This is intrinsic to how the brain works: we create conceptual frames as a shortcut to having to evaluate each new experience and piece of information on its own terms. That’s why you don’t have to figure out what money is when you’re in a foreign country, with a currency you’ve never seen before, but it’s also why we tend not to fully understand the world we live in as we get older. Our frameworks grow increasingly disconnected from the cumulative changes of our lifetimes, until eventually you’re a boomer watching Joe Biden, but seeing FDR. Or a millennial or Gen Xer, still believing in political solutions to our problems. As the non-fight over the minimum wage demonstrates, there are no political solutions under our current system. We’re simply the neighborhood people forced to pick between two rival gangs, both of which are going to extort us, and either one of which might destroy us if we defy them. No help is coming. We’re on our own.

The next generation, unburdened by the distorting lens of the past, have already figured this out.  Far from being the left-wing, big-government, identitarians that we’ve been led to expect, Gen Z is shaping up to be a cohort of politically incorrect, bootstrap-pulling, libertarians.  According to a recent study, 77% of those 14-21 report that they earn their own money working, and 21% had a savings account before they were 10. And while as the most diverse generation in history, they have liberal views on cultural diversity, with 78% describing themselves as liberal to moderate on social issues, they are also deeply skeptical of the woke project, with 79% calling “political correctness” a problem.

This jog towards the right is an inevitable consequence of having grown up in a world where banks and large corporations are able to get away with murder, literally in some cases, while our elected officials do little to nothing to improve the lives of average citizens.  It’s also a natural response to the endless and seemingly unresolvable culture wars to conclude that the best way to address such irreconcilable differences would be to fall back on the libertarian solution of letting everyone go their own way. What else is a young person to make of how our society functions, other than: cover your ass and don’t expect any help from anybody, least of all the government.

The modern left, unlike our 60’s forbears, has been nursing a dream not of an impractical Marxist utopia, but simply of the U.S. joining the rest of the Western world in providing basic necessities like education and healthcare. We really haven’t contemplated the idea that the U.S. will continue to go its own hyper-capitalist way, cementing its status as the gun-toting, feudal, corporate-governed freakshow of the West. In the end, we’re still Americans, and as Americans we’re predisposed to believe that the good guys will come out on top in the final reel. But the kids ain’t buying it. Which means our related assumption that the cavalry is coming eventually in the form of generational change is probably misplaced.

The only thing that may shift the trajectory is the total and inevitable economic collapse that will result if Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) turns out to be a lot of horseshit.  Our national debt is now greater than our annual GDP. MMT holds that a country with control of its own currency can’t go bankrupt, because it can issue more currency to pay its debts, along with new debt to cover the old debts.  But MMT doesn’t consider a scenario in which no one wants to buy the newly issued debt, and it ignores the fact that every country that has ever tried to money-print its way out of debt, went into a death spiral of hyper-inflation.  It’s hard to be a libertarian in a world where you need a wheelbarrow full of cash to go to the grocery store, so such a scenario could cause Gen Z to rethink the wisdom of bootstrap economics.  But then again, they could see it as an opportunity to just go full Mad Max. I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t see the appeal of roaming the plains of an ungoverned America in search of opportunity and adventure. Maybe join up with a thief, a strongman, and Karen Allen, for some kind of black market smuggling gig, while occasionally rescuing enslaved Amazon workers from the mines.

But I digress.  The left is in what Allen Ginsberg called, “diamond hell.”  Hard edges and unyielding realities on every side: in front of us, a government that can’t be reformed through democratic means, and behind us, a generation that’s given up on trying. To one side we have the option of rainbow fascism, and on the other, the more traditional variety. This is normally the place in the article where you’re supposed to offer some kind of call to action, or way out of the problems you’ve laid out, but honestly, I got nothing.

A modern country whose system of government is so broken that it can’t raise the minimum wage, even with the “left” party in charge of all the House, the Senate, and the presidency, is a country that has already effectively become a failed state. The only question now is; when does the curtain fall, and how do we respond when it does? Regular order democracy under these circumstances is the little button they put on New York City lampposts that are supposed to change the red light to green. They don’t actually do anything. They’re only there to make people feel like they have a say.

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Detox Hour 1/16: Insane Trump Rally, Fauci Emails, Nancy: Queen of Stonks – Due Dissidence

Photo: C-SPAN

Rainbow Bombs and Broken Promises: Things are Finally Getting Back to Normal

by Russell Dobular

I’ve been holding my fire, ’cause fair is fair; we had to give Biden a little time to either break his previous mold or prove to be the war mongering corporate stooge he’s always been. The latter was always more likely but there was a slim chance that a man of his advanced years would want to be remembered for something besides mass incarceration and making it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. I know exactly two voters who thought Biden should be the president on his own merits, and not just relative to Trump, but I know a lot of people who got caught up in the “Dear Leader,” state TV style coverage of the inauguration. Those folks are mostly silent now as Biden demonstrates the kind of bait and switch “leadership” that’s made the Democratic brand so toxic since the Clinton era. Let’s take a look:

Silence on the Amazon Union Vote, Then a Half Endorsement

The self-described “union man” remained entirely silent as Amazon workers voted to unionize in Alabama, until under pressure from even friendlies in the press, he finally issued a lukewarm statement supporting the vote.  Not the union necessarily, just the vote. This is inarguably an improvement over his old boss, who took $400 million from organized labor then screwed them over for 8 years like it was his job (which, along with a 22% spike in Obamacare premiums in several swing states right before the 2016 election, is a criminally under-examined element of Trump’s victory),  but it seems like a union man might want to be a little less ambiguous about his support for the most important union drive since the 30’s.  The fact that Jay Carney, Biden’s communications director in the Obama White House, is now doing the Lord’s work as Amazon’s chief PR flack, ain’t helping the optics among those who are paying attention. Like the workers taking the vote.

Hiding Behind the Senate Parliamentarian to Avoid Increasing the Minimum Wage.

This is a classic Democratic Party maneuver: pretending that you can’t do something that you actually can do because of procedural obstacles or Republican opposition. That’s how Barack got away with dropping the promised public option from Obamacare, after making a secret backroom deal with insurance and drug companies. In reality, Harris can overrule the Parliamentarian.  So why doesn’t Biden have her do it? It goes back to the General Unifying Theory of the Democratic Party: the donors wouldn’t like it.  Most of the time when Democrat politicians say one thing and do another, all you have to do is follow the money to figure out what they’re doing and why.  

Bombing Syria

‘Cause why not? Especially on a Friday. Just a little TGIF love to all the defense contractors.  And let’s face it, nothing says, “America’s Back Baby!” like bombing the fuck out of a Muslim country.  And when you pluck a Defense Secretary right from the board of Raytheon, you’re kind of telling people straight out that we’re going to be finding lots and lots of pretexts over the next four years for making lots and lots of bombs. At least we’ve got a black man bombing brown people now, which is surely a great comfort to them.

Going Small on Student Debt

Biden claimed at a town hall that he can waive $10,000 in student debt, but not $50,000, once again using the procedure excuse. There’s actually no legal basis for that claim. He just doesn’t really want to waive student debt. Which should come as no surprise, given that Biden is as personally responsible for the system of student debt peonage we have today as any living politician.

Going Big on Neera Tanden

While soft-pedaling it on every key policy promise, he’s still pushing corrupt political hack and professional asshole, Neera Tanden, for a job which she is completely unqualified for, while hiding behind claims of racism and sexism as the nomination blows up in his face. Someone told me after the election that the “smart money” was on Biden appointing some progressives to his cabinet in a spirit of reconciliation. Given that Biden wouldn’t even hire them for his campaign, the real “smart money” knew he wouldn’t put any in his cabinet. Instead, they’ve tried to rebrand people like Tanden, who in the past has advocated for cutting social security and Medicare, and invading Libya for their oil, as progressive. Not like the Blue MAGA’s are going to argue.

Turning $2,000 Checks into $1,400 Checks

When you stand up in the middle of Georgia and loudly declare that if the voters elect Democrats to the Senate, they’ll be getting $2,000 checks “immediately,” most of them think that means they’ll be getting $2,000 checks immediately. Not $1400 checks eventually. If you don’t understand why that might piss people off, you’ve probably never really, really needed money right away, or been in a position where $600 was all that stood between you and homelessness. That being the case, your political opinions here are about as useful as fishing tackle in the Mojave. For the sake of not making more Republican voters, you might wanna sit this one out.

That’s an incomplete list of some of the lowlights of the new administration. I ain’t gonna go so far as to say that the new boss is the same as the immediately preceding boss, but the new old boss is definitely shaping up to be the same as all the Democratic bosses we’ve had from Clinton on down. Which is disappointing, but shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who looked into Biden’s record before they voted for him, a group that presumably excludes most of the people who did so in the primaries.

The difference for Biden from the most recent Democratic presidents is that he has assumed power in a much poorer, sicker, and more desperate America, with an organized left that’s paying attention. Sure, the suburban base would watch Biden take a shit on the desk in the Oval Office and call it ice cream, but the number of people who are that mindless has dwindled in direct proportion to the share of national wealth that ends up in the hands of the citizenry. That’s the thing about crooks: they never know when to leave well enough alone. They always have to push it, until they break it. America has been driven to a breaking point by its oligarchs and a corrupt political system whose primary purpose is to serve their interests, and Biden is the last person to summon the imagination or political will to either understand what America finally snapping is going to look like or do what would need to be done to prevent that from happening.

‘Sides that, unlike Slick Willy, and Barack, Biden is a congenital moron, with the speaking skills of an angry drunk two steps into the program.  Imagine Uncle Joe trying to sell people on the idea that the meaning of “is” is up for debate, as Clinton did, or fake-drinking poisoned Flint water to convince people that its safe, as Obama did in a bit of black-on-black prop comedy violence. While the press has been applying the same kind of obscurantism that critics deploy to convince us that crappy modern art isn’t crappy to Biden’s God-awful speeches and town hall appearances, there’s only so much they can do to cover for a man so intrinsically dumb that he had to drop out of his first run for the Presidency after getting caught plagiarizing a speech, without even bothering to change its biographical details.   

Given that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer in his prime, putting a sundowning Biden in charge of a crumbling America was always bound to look something like this. Cabinet appointments that often feel like they were produced in a process that involved shaking up two paper bags, with one labelled, “Donors We Have To Fellate” and another labelled, “Members of an Identity Group,” then affixing the results to a corkboard; identity politics deflections from all questions about or criticisms of said appointments (the real purpose of the aforementioned corkboard selection process); bullshitting about what he can and can’t do without Bill and Barack’s ability to really convince anybody; picking the kinds of pointless fights that angry drunks pick, like the one currently unfolding over Tanden.

And we haven’t even crossed the 100 day mark yet, after which things always get a lot harder, even for a President who didn’t Forrest Gump his way into the job.  We’re rushing quickly towards the day when the North Korea-style press coverage, can no longer credibly paper over Biden’s deep flaws and personal defects.  Which is why reports of the demise of the Republican Party should be regarded as greatly premature.

We discuss these topics and more on episode 108 of the Due Dissidence podcast. Listen to our full conversation by clicking the player below:

Subscribe to the Due Dissidence podcast on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or any major podcast player!

Photo: Jonathan Ernst, Reuters

The Kids Are Alright: Wall Street Bets is As American As Butch and Sundance

by Russell Dobular

“We like the stock.” – Jim Cramer, January 28, 2021

Except for a few rare moments of populist uprising big enough to force concessions from elites (the labor movements of the late 19th-early 20th century), the story we tell ourselves about our own history, is mostly the story of the upper classes.  Thus, when we think of the 60’s, we think of hippies at Woodstock, even though there were never more than 500,000 hippies, and they were mostly drawn from middle to upper-middle class homes. The majority of young boomers at the time were too busy working, raising families, and fighting in Viet Nam, to be cheering on Hendrix at Woodstock. 

Similarly, when we think of millennials and Gen Z, we think of fragile, wokester snowflakes, more concerned with pronouns and speech codes than systemic corruption in our political and financial system. But this only represents a small fraction of their generational cohort and it’s mostly the fraction that’s fortunate enough to have gotten through two decades of endless war, financial ruin, and now a once-in-a-century pandemic, without ever having to work at a Wendy’s. 

The media never tells us what the two-thirdsrds of people under 30, without a 4-year college degree think, except to represent them as quasi-human, Trump-loving, 4-chan using, white supremacist, troglodytes.  But a perusal of Wall Street Bets on Reddit, where the greatest frontal assault on Wall Street in its 232-year history was conceived and hatched by a bunch of broke kids, many of them with low wage fast food and retail service jobs, tells a very different story.

Funny, irreverent, self-effacing, generous, savvy, pissed-off, and decidedly un-PC, the Wall Street Bets community reads a lot like what you might have gotten if Abbie Hoffman had written the screenplay for Oceans 11.  They’re pulling off the heist of the century and they know it.  And the best part is the people they’re stealing from not only deserve it but have all directly or indirectly had a hand in creating the land of no opportunity that is the only America they’ve ever known. WSB is full of stories from young adults who experienced the 2008 financial crisis through the eyes of a child who helplessly watched their parents lose the house, or the family business go bust.  And it’s also rife with stories of people donating a portion of their windfall to charity; children’s hospitals are a favorite recipient.

One lucky winner who swore he’d bring bags of peanuts with $100 bills taped to them and give them out to the workers at his local Game Stop if the stock price hit $60, did just that.

There’s a fierce determination not to be like the greedy hedge fund assholes they’re robbing that’s completely unexpected if you’ve only been exposed to media accounts of the sub-reddit, which predictably attempt to paint its users as unusually finance obsessed Nazis.

And then there are the kinds of pranks that a bunch of teenagers and twentysomethings flush with more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives and animated by a loathing for institutions would pull.  After Robin Hood shut down trading on Game Stop, AMC, and a host of other WSB targeted stocks, one newly wealthy Game Stop investor hired a private plane to fly over Robin Hood’s San Francisco headquarters for an hour, trailing a banner emblazoned with the legend, “Suck My Nuts Robin Hood.”

Renting out billboards and filling them with taunting messages aimed at the hedge funds they’ve gone to war with, has also been a favorite use of Game Stop winnings.

In the face of overwhelming odds, and in many cases, deep personal hardship, the WSB community has used their ingenuity to find a way to strike back at the system that’s screwed them all their lives and make a lot of money doing it.  With can-do spirit, cynical humor, and stick-to-itiveness (“diamond hands” is a favorite phrase, which means, a person who will never sell, even if the price dips wildly), they’ve taken on the whole financial establishment, and exposed its corruption in a way that no social movement of the past several decades has been able to achieve. 

In other words, this army of retail investors, some of whom are buying just one or two shares of Game Stop, in order to support the cause, better exemplify the qualities of individual initiative and outside the box thinking that have always been at the heart of the American myth, than anyone or anything we’ve seen represented in our politics and media for a long, long time. 

Turns out the American spirit isn’t dead, its just not on the TV.  To find it, open yourself a reddit account and wander on over to Wall Street Bets.  The self-described “smooth brained monkeys, autists, and pranksters” over there will probably bring a smile to your face, maybe for the first time in awhile. Unless you own a hedge fund, in which case, you should probably cover your short now; I haven’t personally examined them, but as far as I can tell from the price action, these folks have diamond hands.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article should be construed as financial advice.  The author holds positions in AMC and Sundial and plans on opening a position in Game Stop at market opening, simply because he likes the stock.

For more on this topic, listen to episode 104 of the Due Dissidence podcast by clicking the player below, and subscribe to the Due Dissidence podcast on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Castbox, Google Podcasts, or any major podcast player:

Images: Twitter, Reddit