Get f*****, establishment
The real story of Reddit's GameStop revolution is the unmasking of real enemies occupying the Democratic establishment and its corporate media and Big Tech supporters.
ONE OF THE MANY ATTRACTIVE features of Maui is the absence of *wankery - no fast Euro/Dubai trash blasting their noses in the bogs, no business school shitbergs loudly scrolling through the Instagram profiles of Love Island slappers - and no Wall Streeters wearing Richard Mille watches scheming about contaminating Lahaina like those who came before them contaminated Mykonos and Ibiza.
Someone like Bill Ackman epitomizes the profile both the sensible and discerning seek to avoid everywhere. The notoriously litigious CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management doesn’t like it when people criticize him for using his network of corrupt corporate media stooges to shittalk stocks he’s just shorted the crap out of. And someone like Bill Ackman was exactly the profile a subreddit I subscribe to had in mind when members organized to promote stocks belonging to, amongst others, the ailing strip mall fixture GameStop. Gradually then suddenly Wall Street institutions whose strategy is to profit off calamity - next to cronyism, the most unnatural extension of capitalism - started losing. As things stand today, like few points in their history.
The most apparent feature of the members in the r/wallstreetbets (WSB) group is a sense of awareness. They are acutely conscious of how much they are loathed, not just by Wall Street, but by the corporate media, by Big Tech - and now almost certainly by America’s new Biden administration too. The second is blue-collar loyalty and memories of 2008 - the bailouts, the subsequent bonuses, and the food banks. Thanks to donations to Hillary Inc, an entitlement complex, and subsequent complacency, these subsidized masters of the universe forgot what a real grudge looks like.
Almost every injustice today involves Big Tech. So it was for WSB traders using the popular app Robinhood to buy the GameStop stock, for - as we’ve briefly explored - ideological, financial, or just the power of viral internet reasons, that the new tech billionaire class promptly decided that no party other than itself warrants profit. For reasons it qualified as “protections for our users”, Robinhood prevented the sale of GameStop and other institution-shorted stocks.
I have no doubt that Robinhood’s founders - inspired by Jack Dorsey and his two fellow wanker Lieutenants at Twitter - thought an exercise benefiting the little people could be easily canceled. Perhaps there were already colorfully pronoun-ed Robinhood employees scrambling together a Black Lives Matter video for YouTube announcing the donation of a marginal sum to defunding the police in a Chinese synthetic fentanyl-ravaged Appalachian town. There, problem solved.
But WSB isn’t a nervous academic accused of making a racist remark. In addition to the travesty of The CARES Act and its consequences, the group has paid close attention to Silicon Valley’s evolving obsession with censorship. Robinhood’s mistake here was to assume these people had something to lose.
Corporate media panicked. MSNBC wheeled out the perennially smug wanker Andrew Ross Sorkin who claimed this was just “pump and dump”. Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors went on record on CNBC accusing the WSB traders of “playing around with their $600 stimulus checks” - arguably 2021’s equivalent of Hillary’s 2016 “deplorables” comment. On CNN, some idiot floated a link between Jan 6th rioters and the traders (at the same time on the same channel, one of the worst men in the history of the world, John Brennan, was arguing that libertarians are today’s jihadis). Google erased over 100k negative reviews of Robinhood; an employee of the firm broke ranks and alleged that the call to ban trading came from the White House itself. If there was ever any illusion that people like AOC are not establishment frauds, Elizabeth Warren, the non-Indian Democratic candidate, shattered it with a veiled warning to WSB’s traders: “you’ll only make the money we give you permission to.” On Friday the Duracell retard in the press room responded to a question about GameStop by emphasizing “that Janet Yellen was the first woman Treasury Secretary” (also: the first woman Treasury Secretary…to have taken over $800k in speaking fees from Melvin Capital - the hedge fund at the heart of the vortex).
Despite there being no grounds for the accusation of racism and no evidence to support it, it still remains Silicon Valley’s go-to for cancelation. VICE and Discord both attempted to empty their bowels here, but it was too late, too absurd.
Meanwhile, the other side was attracting some powerful allies and establishing remarkable bipartisanship conspicuously absent from the American body politic of late. Barstool Sports’ David Portnoy raged in, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan suggested that, were rumors of (Citadel founder - and one of Robinhood’s biggest clients) Ken Griffin being involved in the decision to prevent trading access true, he should - along with Robinhood founders - be jailed. A class action was sparked against Robinhood in New York’s Southern District. Led by **Elon Musk (a longtime adversary of Wall Street’s short sellers), Tyler Winklevoss and a ruthless but thoroughly enjoyable little bastard called Chamath Palihapitiya, formerly of Facebook, the resistance bellowed and Robinhood’s founders blinked. Partial selling was re-instated on Friday the 29th of January.
My guess that it won’t be enough to save them.
At the time of writing, there is no clarity on any kind of result, but to conclude that this is David vs Goliath, a successful non-political disruption, a victory for people systematically excluded from speculation, would be to limit a story that extends some distance beyond finance.
The greedy media, tech, and establishment axis responsible for Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign want to convince you that racism and climate change are not only the two biggest problems facing us today but that ordinary people - like WSB investors - are responsible for them. On the basis that people submit to these manufactured theories, these disgusting people can yank the drawbridges up behind them - John Kerry can rack up the air miles in his private jet en route to climate change conferences, the Guardian and its kind can continue to lie unrestrained, political enemies can be canceled from banks, airlines and even cities.
The real story isn’t about wealth, but about unity - about sensible people from the left and right who have together exposed a sham, fronted by people like Bill Ackman and his friends - but significantly exceeding them. It’s about seeing just how vacuous “community standards” policies and identity politics are, and what these things are really deployed to do.
We appear to have stumbled across one of the most underrated powers of all. That of unmasking. Long may it battle.
*Not entirely true. Nancy Pelosi comes to Maui. She is a dreadful wanker.
**On Friday 29th, the day after Robinhood sabotaged its users, that Elon Musk the US DoJ announced an investigation into SpaceX’s treatment of workers. If you can’t see the link, you are not paying attention.