Election postcards 2024 #Southern California
Part a: Billionaires, Chilean burglars and "operator" succession.
Orange County
ONE OF THE WORST PODCASTS I have ever listened to is called “ALL-IN” - a bunch of tech bros convinced that what the world really needed to hear was what they muttered at their poker evenings. Two of the hosts are okay-ish - David Sacks, born in Cape Town and former COO of PayPal, and David Friedberg (not sure who his father is). But the other two are painful. Chamath Palihapitiya was once a slippery Facebook executive and Jason Calacanis was one of Uber’s early investors. Both claim to be “moderate” Democrats and hyped the Biden Harris 2020 ticket. Occasionally I’ve listened to some of the things Calacanis says - praise for the obesity drug Ozempic, blaming everyone but Sam Bankman-Fried for Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud and defending the extreme bias of former moderators at Twitter.
You’re nowhere in these elections if you can’t grasp the sentiment that carried Joe Biden and the absolutely brilliant Kamala Harris to the White House in 2020 and here, the one benefit of “ALL-IN” is inadvertently revealed. If there was any fairness to those elections, something Mark Zuckerberg’s behaviour still makes difficult to determine, then the winning duo was transported on a tide of effluent that Calacanis’ pig-headed obstinance captures, reducing that campaign to a high-tech, work-from-home, virtue pageant.
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RKF JNR ANNOUNCED his running mate last week. Amidst a cost of living crisis, a True Detective-style (season 1) deficit vortex and the young’s aspiration for social mobility via property ownership fisted in less than a decade, he chose a billionaire. And not just a normal billionaire, but a half-Chinese single mum who supports abortion and was married to one of Google’s oddball founders. There’s a reason why he did this, according to insiders close to his campaign. RFK Jnr hasn’t been treated particularly well by his own family, the Biden administration - to say nothing of the media. If there is any truth to the suspicion this was a placation choice, he’s may well have ballsed things up: outsider candidates don’t have the luxury of compromise early in the game. Pity - he is a likeable guy.
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THERE HAVE BEEN major issues in American elections before, but never so many in one. November is about mass immigration, fentanyl, homelessness, the cost of living, gas, BlackRock, the deficit, Ukraine and Israel, George Soros-funded district attorneys, the weaponisation of state apparatus against political enemies, bodily autonomy, transgender representation, DEI, net zero, The Supreme Court, Gaza, censorship, The 2nd Amendment, January 6th, minimum wage, Marc Elias, TikTok, China, “the squad”, BLM and the media - as a start. Many of these could occupy single issue status, and, with the exceptions of the 2nd Amendment, abortion and the deficit, most are recent. On the weaponisation stuff, the form of the SA media - Beijing24’s jockeys in particular - never ceases to amaze. Remember 2015? “Oh fuck, Zuma’s only gone and captured the state! Now he’s going to weaponise it against us and we’re all gonna be FUCKED!” And now? “Fucking nooit china, hey Biden - fuck Trump up by weaponising state apparatus IMMEDIATELY.”
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IN 2016, Laguna Beach bucked historical form and voted for Hillary Clinton (“the gays like me,” she reportedly cackled). Much of Orange County was until that year Reagan Republican, but the shift continued into 2020. Then came the Chileans.
The trend started, of all places, in the UK: in 2018, reports of organised burglary gangs from Latin American countries appeared in local newspapers. Homes in sleepy country villages with a casual approach to security were ransacked whilst the owners were out. In 2022, the gangs started targeting similar wealthy profiles in Orange County. Last week a 90-year-old widow down the road returned from a doctor’s appointment to discover her two safes missing. Two of her neighbours were gutted in the weeks previously. Quiet and confrontation-reluctant, the burglars have riled up the county’s jock DA Todd Spitzer, who blames Joe Biden.
Places like Newport Beach and Laguna haven’t felt the sharp end of gangs in ways that other Californian cities and towns like Los Angeles and San Bernardino have. A former realtor in one of O.C’s beach cities knows the widow: “they didn’t take her two guns. If they come again, she says she’ll aim for the face.”
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MOST OF THE INSULTS directed toward Biden - doddering, inappropriate, pathologically dishonest and corrupt - are warranted. I was always under the impression that he was actually quite thick too, an opinion diplomatically courted by based Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas. But one thing that’s ignored, and possibly explains why he’s still the favoured candidate for the Democratic National Convention, is that he was part of the early operator crew, a wily type of establishment specimen who learned how to seize all Washington’s power levers.
This makes sense if you examine the party’s grandees, in particular Nancy Pelosi. They don’t actually know how to do anything - they are not visionaries, pragmatists, effective administrators or even negotiators. Their knowledge of law is restricted to Washington-specific machinations. They get the lobbying / consultancy paradigm; it’s all that has ever mattered to them. In the event that Biden is sacked in August 2024, the most likely successor candidate will need to have been blooded in this filth. With Michelle Obama all but confirmed unavailable, there is only one candidate: Gavin Newsom, Governor of California and a relative of Pelosi. More - much more - about this piece of work in future.
Concern is mounting for the acuity of yet another Biden - this time “Dr” Jill. She isn’t taking the news (begrudgingly) published by newspapers that her patient is behind in several battleground states well. Even Nelson Mandela declared that “there is something wrong with someone who doesn’t become more conservative with age”; here, “Dr” Jill has gone full ideological Benjamin Button - and she’s fewmin’. The shorting of Donald Trump’s little earner DWAC 0.00%↑ aside, perhaps the most notable feature of his rare burst of reasonable fortune in recent weeks is the shifting of image: he is no longer MAGA 2016 - the outsider descending the golden escalator, or KAG 2020 - whose awful campaign was managed by an inept maniac. He is now the wounded populist, which makes him supposedly dangerous to a few (lol), but hopefully, entertaining to the rest of us. After all, that’s the most we can expect from these things right…?
Coming Monday: