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Notes -
Netanyahu Conspiracy Theories on X and Mark Levin as MAGA
Quick rundown:
Needless to say, the evidence provided has not dissuaded the rumors on X. I do not think Netanyahu is dead or severely injured, but these anomalies do warrant an explanation.
Why has Netanyahu not had any sort of public presence since March 9th that would be expected from a wartime leader? During the 12-Day War he maintained a public presence and even toured damage sites from missiles and took questions. But now the first time he appears in public in quite some time is is in a pre-recorded video to mock the rumors of his death in a coffee shop?
The easiest answer for the lack of public presence is due to security concerns. But it seems pretty trivial to me for a leader like Netanyahu to maintain a public presence with very low risk, and that risk would certainly be worthy of the benefits of moralizing the Homefront and projecting confidence.
I suspect the reason for this is because Netanyahu wants Trump to be the "face" of the war- several times a day you can see Trump on the News babbling to the media about the war attracting huge amounts of attention, while we can't spare a penny for Netanyahu's own thoughts or leadership at a time it would be expected. In particular, while Trump is clearly trying to muster NATO to join the war, it would be wise for Netanyahu to be far away from weighing in on that question or publicly supporting it because it would do more harm than good.
I do not see how traditional video touchups or filtering would cause the wedding ring to disappear like it did in the video released today, any video editing experts feel free to weigh in. Barring some "yeah I edit videos all the time and I've seen this before", the most likely explanation is that the ring disappearance was a video manipulation, but one intended to misdirect the critics on X- give them a bone to chew on with a false lead.
Mark Levin is MAGA, his critics are not
Rewind to 2016, Mark Levin was an avowed Never-Trumper while the alt-right essentially memed Trump into existence against all expectations. The tables have turned, if it was not already clear what side Trump was on in this feud between the Shapiro/Levin wing of MAGA and the online Right (tbh it was already clear), Trump has picked sides unambiguously:
So there you have it, MAGA has been subsumed, the 2016 alt-right energy that propelled Trump into office is out, hopefully the "plan trusters" now can stop pretending otherwise. For its part Fox News is unsurprisingly 100% behind the war, today they had on another 2016 never-Trumper Ben Shapiro, who gave Trump's Iran War an A+ grade and remarked:
MAGA is not dead, it's the rebranded neo-conservatism. The movement has been subsumed.
Trump is right, MAGA is Trump. He created the whole political movement. The broader alt-right was inchoate and without any opportunity before Trump gave it form.
It’s actually the failure of the alt right that Trump is in power and they can’t get more of what they want. Remember that Scott Adams meme about how Democrats successfully branded Trump as Hitler, then Hitler won? Time for reflection. Mark Levin opposed Trump, now Trump likes him. Time for some reflection.
What I mean is, these impotent Twitter squabbles actually don’t mean anything. The broad base of MAGA still supports Trump and the Republican Party loves Trump. The people braying that Trump has betrayed them, however influential they might be in the small world of right-wing New York / SF influencers — don’t matter. Objectively they don’t matter because Trump has no compunctions about disappointing them. He doesn’t think about them at all. Mark Levin apparently does matter because Trump is thinking about him.
The alt-right is not why Trump won in 2016 at all. It is simply what was easiest for this insular media ecosystem to write about. Insofar as that definition of “MAGA” died it died a long time ago when Milo got canceled for being a pervert and Bannon got fired for leaking like a sieve. But again that’s not what actually matters.
This plan truster is very happy thank you very much.
I'd argue that the alt-right played the important but indirect role of eliciting tendencies from Trump's opposition that were self-radicalizing and self-defeating.
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80% of 2024 Trump voters apparently support the Iran bombing, so "MAGA is Trump" is pretty spot on. The Iran bombing, Epstein files (which I'm incredibly skeptical of) and Trump's undying love for Israel don't seem to put a dent on his popularity with MAGA.
FWIW I'm a Trump supporter and it would take quite a lot for him to lose my support. The reason is very simple: I can sense that the Left has a great deal of hostility and contempt towards, men, white people, and especially white men. And these wokies on the Left have a lot of sway over the Democratic party. Trump is anti-woke, or at least about as anti-woke as one could reasonably hope for.
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Consider the personality and lifestyle of a person who sees a poll in the mail and (1) doesn’t think it’s a scam, (2) trusts institutions, (3) wants their opinion heard by an institution, (4) has the time and interest to answer polls. (WaPo uses SSRS polling which recruits by mailers). This is selecting for (1) the least skeptical Americans, who are more likely to buy-in to propagated narratives, (2) the least independent-thinking of Americans, who trust institutions, (3) the most “authority-pleasing” dispositional types, who are interested in feeling validated by participating in a civic ritual, and (4) the people at home the most with fewer obligations, thus more likely to watch the news.
I don’t know, apparently I am the only person in the world who thinks this kind of polling must be insanely inaccurate due to the infeasibility of polling and determining the personality traits of the very people who would never answer a poll. Everyone seems to trust polling. But I strongly feel that the skeptical and distrusting American will see a poll and throw it away, and that the most “online” American will not go through the trouble of doing a poll. (I am him and he is me). I will die on this hill and if polled my opinion on the hill I will throw away the mailer.
This isn't how all modern polling is done, FYI. My understanding is that a lot of modern polling is compensated, and done online.
We know most modern polling isn't insanely inaccurate because we can track the polling from the past few presidential cycles. Plenty of major polls are off enough to matter, but in knife-fight presidential campaigns a tenth of a percent matters, and because of the Electoral College, gen-pop polling isn't necessarily helpful as to who will win the election. But once you start seeing polls that say "80% X" you generally shouldn't be thinking "well the numbers are actually flipped it's just that they are mostly polling the 20%."
What you should do is look carefully at their sampling methodology and how they phrased the question(s).
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It's not just polling. So much of social science relies on surveys with usually no verification if people are being honest. Which we know they aren't because people often answer what they feel they should be doing, or would like to be doing rather than what they are. See reported vs actual Church attendance. Not to mention so much social science is based solely on WEIRDs who are fairly atypical compared to the average person.
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Well Trump did run on a platform of 'America First' and 'no new wars in the Middle East, in fact Kamala is the one who'll start wars'...
It's like how in the UK, people were voting for Brexit as part of a way to reduce immigration. Then Boris ramped immigration way up. And so now the Tory Party is gone, effectively wiped off the map just after winning a huge electoral victory under a populist platform. Farage is clearly trying to do the same thing, there is this elaborate misdirection about his real agenda and priorities, he wants to get Poles out and bring more Indians in, to neutralize anti-immigration sentiment, he certainly has no problem with Islam... That's what Brexit was really about in his mind, a dog and pony show for the rubes to persuade them that they were being listened to.
Being a populist is easy, you just have to follow through on your promises and give your voters what they want. You've adeptly explained the 'make promises and then betray promises' part. The next arc coming up is 'get shown the door by voters'. Populism is a reaction against politicians who make all these promises and then renege on them.
All Trump had to do is what he said - mass deportations, cutting leftist grifting to dry up the NGO blob, avoiding foreign wars. Not hard! But instead he shows his real priorities - slavish obedience to the latest batch of Israeli 'intelligence' and all the shady Shapiros, Levins and Kushners in his inner circle.
Trump has done more to follow through on his promises to voters than any president in memory. Immigration tariffs deportations taxes emissions regulations vaccine mandates Paris climate accords government layoffs birthright citizenship. He pardoned the J6ers, he moved our Israeli embassy. This is the first net-negative period of migration in fifty years. Like it or not this is what it looks like when Trump keeps his promises — mostly it looks like the base likes it. Which isn’t just to appeal to popularity but to say there is a fairly simple measure of whether Trump’s voters feel betrayed. They do not.
If you think Trump is taking Israeli intelligence over American intelligence you have crazy priors about what is going on in the Oval Office.
He didn't listen to General Caine who warned about all the obvious flaws in the 'bomb Iran' approach that Trump is now discovering the hard way. Someone must've been telling him it would be easy, Iran was about to collapse.
The Israelis have been shovelling out that same old story about Iran being a few months away from a nuclear bomb, they've been going on about that for decades now. But Trump still buys it, he went on about how they were going to get a nuke and would've if he didn't stop them. US intelligence is much more cautious about this.
You can follow through on 99 promises but if you renege and do the opposite on a high profile promise and can't explain why (Israel was going to strike first, the nuclear weapons that weren't actually being made), it can easily outweigh whatever promises you do make. Especially if it raises oil prices and induces a recession.
We are two weeks into a war and you are declaring that Trump must be blind to “obvious flaws” because Iran hasn’t totally collapsed. Get some perspective. If Trump wanted to we could bomb Iran back to the Stone Age by destroying all their electrical infrastructure. Meanwhile, we are sitting at home.
Trump has always promised to fight Iran and so far this is not another Iraq Forever War.
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All of the energy behind Trump originally came from the “alt right”, who created the memes that boosted his popularity in the first place. They were fighting the likes of Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin. I remember the exact moment when he spoke about Mexican immigration in unadorned speech and how that immediately turned up the support 10x. MAGA is Trump if we’re talking copyright but the nationalism obviously preceded him. You had to be there. The nationalist current began at least four years before Trump’s elections.
He’s on Fox News. That’s pretty much it. Unfortunately he is 80 years old. We had a guy on Fox News, they got rid of him, but now Tucker has his own show. This does allows Tucker to continue the true “alt right” spirit though. We will see where we end up over the next decade, if it looks more like the original MAGA vision or the Mark Levin vision.
I see no organic support for Trump online. I think midterms will tell. I think there are those like myself who will be voting straight D.
I was there before anyone, I was there from escalator day and faced a lot of doubters and social consequence. The arguments I could recount… The nationalist current was formless. It was there but it had no shape. In Britain it arrived in Brexit and then was squandered for ten years because there was no other figure or leader to champion it — look at Britain for an idea of where America could be without Trump, look to Britain for an idea of what “squandering MAGA” would actually mean.
I don’t really believe this “Trump gets everything from Fox News” meme mostly spread by left-wing journalists painting a picture of Trump the simpleton. (By other accounts he consumes a lot of news in all forms.)
However that’s not really my point; if Trump does just get all his idea direct from Fox News, then it’s a failure of the alt-right not to fight for it. Who’s in the editing rooms, who’s in scheduling? Ten years on the feeling is that Fox is basically no better no worse than it used to be — well at least we still have shitposts and memes!
Tucker is a grifter and not a very successful role model for how a political movement should function.
Well if you support unlimited immigration and Minneapolis daycare fraud and never arresting criminals on the trains I don’t really trust your opinions on the original MAGA spirit.
Fox and people like Levin are dying out; viewer average age is 65. And Levin would not allow any genuine MAGA person in his newsroom. It’s just unfortunately not something MAGA can change. This is entrenched media which we always hated. MAGA never cared about Fox.
Tucker was the most popular Fox show, so it worked with Tucker, for a while, until he was fired. Now he is on x: 18 million views on his Nick Fuentes interview on x, 7 million on YouTube, while Levin is lucky to get 4,000 views on his YouTube channel and 150,000 views on his Fox videos. Tucker’s video on Iran is 4.5x the views of Levin, which is insane when you remember that all Levin does is fearmonger Iran to his audience averaging 65yo. But none of that matters because it’s Trump’s favorite show. The Alt Right has no avenue to influence the 80yo Trump like that, they just have to create propaganda and wait it out.
Genuinely makes no sense. What is he grifting? What does grifting even mean to you?
Ok yeah MAGA is weak and powerless Trump has betrayed us you’re right all we can do is post on Twitter. The key thing is that this explanation absolves us of having to do anything differently, because if it were the case that Trump isn’t beyond influencing and we gave up for nothing boy that would be a shame
Well there’s a lot you can do if you support MAGA. You can rally behind its new figures (Tucker, Fuentes, Fishback). You can make propaganda. You can start an organization, for the purposes of propaganda. You can create art, for propaganda. (I really think everything just comes down to propaganda). You can boycott things, and get people to boycott things. Things are decided by money and opinion: get the money, change the opinion. You can ensure that your money only goes to Americans with a pure allegiance, and you can change opinions. The strategy of “spend a decade in the Fox News room for the small chance to persuade Mark Levin” is just not realistic.
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