Permission Structures, a PSYOP Against the American People, & the Big Man Theory

...and the rebellion against it that wasn't supposed to happen

There is a space between and article and a report—perhaps exposé is the correct word—but if you print it out, David Samuels’s latest over at Tablet, Rapid Onset Alignment, is a force to be reckoned with.

If you print it out, it goes well over 30 pages or so depending on what font you use, and is densely packed with insights into what we have all seen going on in the last two decades but never quite stitched together.

Samuels has.

The below my second attempt in commenting on this exposé. I did not like the focus of my first draft, so I ditched it a couple of days ago, printed out a fresh copy, reread, and changed my focus to just two areas. Both revolve around his description of the operationalization of the core of the left’s drive: to control the mechanism of the distribution and use of power.

The left were way ahead of everyone else in seeing how suing social tools, networks both real and online, they could refine social manipulation and enforce compliance through direct and indirect control of institutions public and private—backed up by a pliable legal system. They stole a march on the libertarians and the right for over a decade and once everyone else figured out the game was afoot, it was almost too late to counter. It was a near run thing, as Samuels shows in an almost airtight diagnosis.

Samuels provides the details of the history and players, but toward the end two central meta points broke out from the rest. These are the two things I’ll focus on:

1. Using old school tactics with ideas from David Axelrod but perfected by former President Obama and his fellow travelers, a long-run PSYOP, leveraging institutional control over cultural, media, political, and ultimately legal centers of power, was run against the American people and anyone who stood in their way.

2. The final successful pushback of the last year validated the Big Man theory of history. Axelrod, Obama, Musk, Trump, and Netanyahu. Those four men made, and then broke a new model for political control that, just as it was consolidating complete power, had their grip taken away one finger at a time.

Anyone over 40 will nod their head to the below. Those younger then 40 don’t remember what being an adult was like before the big change at Y2K:

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. ... This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.

This is under-appreciated. Today, anyone with access to an open internet can tap into most of human knowledge, references, and opinion. Audio, video, text—it is all there—in seconds. In the last year, easy access to AI can have anyone digest huge datasets. Easier than making an international phone call two decades ago, you can set up a video call with multiple participants on every continent as if they were all in the same neighborhood.

As with most technology, the early adopters get the edge.

The methodology on which our current universe of political persuasion is based was born before the internet or iPhones existed, in an attempt to do good and win elections while overcoming America’s historical legacy of slavery and racism. Its originator, David Axelrod, was born to be a great American advertising man—his father was a psychologist, and his mother was a top executive at the legendary Mad Men-era New York City ad agency of Young & Rubicam. Instead, following his father’s suicide, Axelrod left New York City for Chicago, where he attended the University of Chicago, and then became a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He then became a political consultant who specialized in electing Black mayoral candidates in white-majority cities. In 2008, Axelrod ran the successful insurgent campaigns that first got Barack Obama the Democratic Party nomination over Hillary Clinton, and then elevated him to the White House.

Axelrod first tested his unique understanding of the theory and practice of public opinion, which he called “permission structures,”…

You would think that someone like Axelrod would be the one trying to pull an up and coming talent like Obama into his orbit. No, that isn’t what happened.

Barack Obama—already imagining himself as a future president of the United States—would seek out the Chicago-based consulting wizard to run his campaigns. But Axelrod wasn’t interested. In fact, Obama would spend more than a decade chasing Axelrod—who was far better connected in Chicago than Obama was—in the hopes that he would provide the necessary magic for his political rise. The other Chicago kingmaker that Obama courted was Jesse Jackson Sr., whose Operation PUSH was the city’s most powerful Black political machine, and who liked Obama even less than Axelrod did. The reality was that Obama did best with rich whites, like the board members of the Joyce Foundation and the Pritzker family.

When Axelrod finally agreed to come onboard, he found that Obama was the perfect candidate to validate his theories of political salesmanship on a national scale. First, he engineered Obama’s successful 2004 Senate campaign—a victory made possible by the old-school maneuver of unsealing Republican candidate Jack Ryan’s divorce papers, on the request of Axelrod’s former colleagues at the Chicago Tribune—and then, very soon afterward, Obama’s campaigns for the presidency, which formally commenced in 2007.

Obama achieved his goal in 2008. In an interesting correlation, that is the same year I signed up for an account at this strange little “microblogging” place called “twitter”. I only signed up to make sure no one took the quirky name of my then four year old blog. Little did I know…

That is when Axelrod saw the shift.

Once in office, though, Axelrod and Obama found that the institutions of public opinion—namely the press, on which Axelrod’s permission structure framework depended—were decaying quickly in the face of the internet. Newspapers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as well as national television networks like CBS, which Axelrod relied on as validators, were now barely able to pay their bills, having lost their monopoly on viewers and advertisers to the internet and to newly emerging social media platforms.

With Obama’s reelection campaign on the horizon in 2012, the White House’s attention turned to selling Obamacare, which would become the signature initiative of the president’s first term in office. Without a healthy, well-functioning press corps that could command the attention and allegiance of voters, the White House would have to manufacture its own world of validators to sell the president’s plan on social media—which it successfully did.

Once Samuels outlines what happened, you will never look at the last decade of political discourse the same way again:

…social media—which was now the larger context in which former prestige “legacy” outlets like The New York Times and NBC News now operated—could now be understood and also made to function as a gigantic automated permission structure machine. Which is to say that, with enough money, operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that had never believed or even heard of before were in fact not only plausible, but already widely accepted within their specific peer groups.

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create.

The Iran deal proved that, with the collapse of the reality-establishing function of professional media, which could no longer afford to field teams of independent, experienced reporters, a talented politician in the White House could indeed stand up his own reality, and use the mechanisms of peer-group pressure and aspirational ambition to get others to adopt it. In fact, the higher one climbed on the social and professional ladder, the more vulnerable to such techniques people turned out to be—making it easy to flip entire echelons of professionals within the country’s increasingly brittle and insecure elite, whose status was now being threatened by the pace and scope of technologically driven change that threatened to make both their expertise and also their professions obsolete. As a test of the use of social media as a permission structure machine, the Iran deal was therefore a necessary prelude to Russiagate, which marked the moment in which the “mainstream media” was folded into the social media machinery that the party controlled, as formerly respected names like “NBC News” or “Harvard professor Lawrence Tribe” were regularly advertised spouting absurdities backed by “top national security sources” and other validators—all of which could be activated or invented on the spot by clever aides with laptops, playing the world’s greatest video game.

Let’s pull the center of that and quote it again. First, I want you to remember how former CNO Gilday debased himself to defend that discredited race-grifter Kendi during his tenure, along with other unnecessary expenditures of personal and institutional capital on pure socio-political, cultural Marxist political plays. How quickly great professionals, leaders of Sailors and a Navy of unmatched power in all of human history, were bullied by academics and otherwise unemployable leftists into falling in line with a cultural Marxist secular religion;

It worked. It worked exceptionally well.

In the wake of Obama’s reelection in 2012, the defection of large swaths of the Silicon Valley elite from the Republican to the Democratic Party led to a tremendous influx of cash into the coffers of the Democratic Party and its associated penumbra of billionaire-funded foundations and NGOs, along with a new willingness of Silicon Valley titans to work directly with the White House—which after all, retained the power, in theory, to regulate their quasi-monopolies out of existence. In field after field, from sex and gender, to church attitudes toward homosexuality, to formerly apolitical sources of public information, to voting practices, to the internal politics of religious groups, to race politics, to what films Americans would watch and how they would henceforth be entertained, the oligarchs would do their part, by helping buy up once independent social spaces and torque them to function as parts of the party’s permission structure machine. The FBI would then do its part, by adopting political categories like “white supremacy” as chief domestic targets, and puppet groups in the vertical, like the ADL and the ACLU, would pretend to be objective watchdogs who just happened to come to the same conclusion.

Peer pressure. Permission structures. Fear. Desire to be in the in group. Bullies and their victims. Again, constants in the human condition, but in overdrive by those who understood how to use new information mediums to accentuate it.

Then COVID and chaos...which then brought opportunity.

As COVID provided cover for increasingly extreme and rapid manifestations of rapid political enlightenment, numbers of formerly quiescent citizens began to rebel against the new order. Unable to locate where the instructions were coming from, they blamed elites, medical authorities, the deep state, Klaus Schwab, the leadership of Black Lives Matter, Bill Gates, and dozens of other more or less nefarious players, but without being able to identity the process that kept generating new thought-contagions and giving them the seeming force of law. The game was in fact new enough that Donald Trump didn’t get it before it was too late for his reelection chances, championing lockdowns and COVID vaccines while failing to pay attention to the Democratic lawyers who were changing election laws in key states. Once Joe Biden was safely installed in the White House, Obama’s Democratic Party could look forward to smooth sailing—protected by new election laws, the party’s control over major information platforms, the FBI, and the White House, and a government-led campaign of lawfare against Trump. It was hard to see how the party could lose for at least another generation, if ever again.

People knew that something was not right, but could not see the hidden hand. They could see the effects, but could not see the cause.

Old methods. New tools.

The permission structure machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod built … is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong. The party is the ghost in the machine, which appears to run on automatic pilot, using the human desire for companionship and social connection as fuel for an effort to detach individuals from their own desires and substitute the dictates of the party, which is granted the unlimited right to enforce its superior opinions on all of mankind.

This is why those who had experience as citizens of the former Soviet Union, captive nations of the Warsaw Pact, and communist horror shows like Cuba were some of the first to see what was going on.

This all looks familiar…though in a much diluted and less deadly form.

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia…

How many times have you looked at people and institutions and wondered, “What happened? Have they lost their mind? I worked with them three years ago. I don’t recognize any of this?”

Well, this should help explain things. It wasn’t you. It was them.

What the permission structure machine seeks to do is to undo the millennia-long work of consciousness by once again locating consciousness outside of the self—but clothing it as an internal product via the mechanized propagation of what Marxists used to call “false consciousness.” But where the progenitors of “false consciousness” in the Marxist lexicon are villains, working on behalf of the capitalist order by preventing workers from being cognizant of their own interests, the mechanized permission structure machine offers the reverse: The “false consciousness” it seeks to propagate is a positive instrument of the party’s attempt to establish the reign of justice on earth. Which is why the natural outcome of the automation of permission structures is not humor, however cynical, but institutionalized schizophrenia, instantiated within the structure of the bicameral mind. No matter how the bots that animate the mechanism position themselves, for whatever low-end careerist purpose, the voices they listen to come from outside. They are incapable of being truth-tellers, because they have no truth to tell. They are creatures of the machine.

That is also where the model starts to fall apart, and what we are seeing play out now.

I was but a young junior officer plowing through PQS as the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact fell apart. They were staunch communists, until they weren’t. Change can happen fast.

The machine is still running, but it is breaking and its masters already scattering to safe harbors or trying to change out of their uniforms, but what is breaking the machine?

That brings us to the second half of the second part I mentioned at the start; the Big Man theory of history.

It took three powerful men, each of whom had the advantage of operating entirely in public, and with massive and obvious real-world consequences, to rupture the apparatus of false consciousness that Obama built. In doing so, they saved the world—for the moment, at least. While history will judge whether their achievements were lasting, it is clear that if they hadn’t acted as they did, we would still be living inside the machine.

The first of these men was Elon Musk…

And the critical part of that was the cute little micro-blogging site I first used 17 years ago as just a place to advertise my blog posts and now I have over 24,000 followers, X:

Twitter’s significance, as part of the party’s permission structure machinery, was key in part because, as the history of platforms and companies like Facebook, Google, Uber, Instagram. and TikTok shows, advantages of scale tend naturally toward localized monopolies. Twitter could play the signaling and coordinating function that it did in part because it was a monopoly, which is why Obama, Axelrod, Plouffe, etc. all had Twitter accounts. It’s why the FBI came on board Twitter, to ensure that the tilt of the platform was coordinated with the FBI’s role in the party’s “whole of society” censorship efforts—whether directed against “disinformation,” or COVID measures, or “white supremacy,” or Donald Trump, or “insurrectionists.”

…

It is certainly plausible that someone in Obama’s universe saw the danger in selling Twitter to Musk. That it happened anyway suggests—as in the case of the lawfare campaign against Trump—that they hubristically believed in their own propagandistic accounts of their adversary as venal, corrupt, and weak, and of their own practical and moral superiority. Unable to think outside their own box, they may have reasonably expected that Musk could be constrained by the need to keep his advertisers by retaining the existing tilt of the platform’s algorithms for as long as the platform itself continued to matter. To keep Musk in line, the party could cut the platform’s advertising revenues by half or more at will by having its adjuncts in the censorship business label it a sinkhole of racism and depravity, and getting it banned from Europe and other global markets. As the reputational cost spread, Musk would have no choice but to eat a loss of tens of billions of dollars and sell, or else face the destruction of his other businesses—which the party could speed up by canceling contracts with NASA and other government agencies and opening multiple SEC and Justice Department investigations that would further augment his reputational risk—until he agreed to kiss the ring.

They tried exactly that, but they misjudged the man—and themselves.

Obama’s operatives shared the same character flaw as their master, a kind of brittle, Ivy League know-it-all-ness that demanded that they always be the smartest person in the room.

…

Faced with the party’s regime of increasing direct censorship over social media, Musk was aware, in a way his adversaries were not, that the party’s ambitions to control content meant that he was coming perilously close to losing control over his own personal dream space, which provides a large share of the value of his companies. Once Donald Trump, a former president of the United States, was thrown off Twitter, the equation became quite obvious: Either the party would control Twitter, in which case Elon Musk was next up for shadow-banning, fact-checking, and eventual exile, at a cost of however many hundreds of billions of dollars to his personal brand, i.e., his companies, or else Musk could assert his own control over that space, by buying Twitter. When measured against the likely losses that would result from being silenced and thrown off the site, and his likely subsequent difficulties in raising public and private capital, $44 billion was therefore an entirely reasonable cost for Musk to pay. The hitch in Musk’s plan to buy Twitter was that it relied on the party being stupid enough to sell it to him. Luckily, unbelievably, they were that stupid—while crowing loudly that Musk was a sucker.

Oops.

It is clear by now that the Obama party were the suckers—not Musk. In fact, the party’s belated war on Twitter’s new owner only served to convince other Silicon Valley oligarchs that whatever reputational risks they might incur by backing Donald Trump would be outweighed by the direct risks that party weaponization of federal regulatory structures, which gave it effective control of markets and banks, would pose to their businesses. By letting Twitter go, and then making war on its new owner, in a belated attempt to get him to do their bidding, the Obama party showed both the scope of its ambition and also its hubris—a combination that split the country’s oligarchy on the eve of the key election that would have allowed the party to consolidate its power.

With Musk’s X now open to all comers, the party’s censorship apparatus was effectively dead. A new counter-permission structure machine was now erected, licensing all kinds of views, some of which were novel and welcome, and others of which were noxious. Which is how opinion in a free society is supposed to operate.

Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter was in turn a necessary precondition for the election of Donald Trump, which was in turn made possible by Trump’s own split-second decision on July 13, 2024, to turn his head fractionally to the right while delivering a speech in a field in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Trump’s head turn was a perfect example of an event that has no explanation outside the favor of the gods, or whatever modern equivalent involving wind factors and directional probabilities you might prefer to the word “God.” Trump was fated to win, just as Achilles was fated to overcome Hector, because the gods, or if you prefer the forces of cosmic randomness, were on his side, on that day, at that moment. That move not only saved his life by allowing him to escape an assassin’s bullet; it revitalized his chi and set in motion a series of subsequent events that generated a reordering of the entire world.

That is the best description for what we have seen that I have seen put in print.

“OK,” I can hear some of you, “I can get Musk and Trump, but how does Netanyahu get in this mix?”

Don’t forget, Israel has been in a proxy war with Iran for 15 months. I grew up being told that, “All Israel’s wars have to be short wars.” Yet, here we are, 15 months and running.

Then there was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave the story a further epic dimension by returning to the original field of battle. Bibi, as you may recall, played the role of Obama’s piñata during the fight over the Iran deal, fated to go down to defeat by opposing the will of a sitting U.S. president on a foreign policy question that most Americans cared very little about. But this past summer, Netanyahu turned himself into the active party, with the means to reverse Obama’s achievement and unveil the origins of his power grab, by showing that the “peace deal” that he had sold to the American people—founded on the idea that Iran was itself a formidable adversary—was a mess of lies. Iran was not and never was a regional power, capable of “balancing” traditional American allies. It was a totalitarian shit hole regime that is deeply hated by its own people and throughout the region, entirely dependent on American backing in its efforts to gain a nuclear bomb.

Ever wonder why the pro-Iran American left hated Netanyahu?

Israel was not to invade Rafah, a prohibition that ensured that Hamas could regularly bring in supplies and cash through the tunnels beneath its border with Egypt while ensuring the survival of its command-and-control structure, allowing it to reassume control of Gaza once the war was over, thereby assuring the success of U.S. policy, which was that Israel’s military invasion of Gaza must serve as the prelude to establishing a Palestinian state—an effort in which Hamas was a necessary partner, representing the Iranian interest, and must therefore be preserved in some part, even after being cut down to size.

Netanyahu’s decision to override the U.S. and take Rafah would turn out to be the prelude to a further series of stunning strategic moves which would enable Israel to smash the Iranian regional position and take full control of her own destiny. After conquering Rafah, in a campaign that the U.S. had said would be impossible without large-scale civilian casualties, Netanyahu proceeded to run the table in a series of rapid-fire blows whose only real point of comparison is Israel’s historic victory in the Six-Day War. In fact, given the odds he faced, and the magnitude of the victories he has won, that comparison may be unfair to Netanyahu, who has provided history with one of the very few examples of an isolated local client redrawing the strategic map of the region against the will of a dominant global power.

Israel proved how wrong Obama, Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan—and as such their entire foreign policy world-view—were. With the election of Trump, it is hard to see how that world-view could claw its way back to credibility.

When their approach to the world and our nation’s threats is seen as a naked failure, it is only natural that eyes will turn home.

Parallel to the collapse of the new regional order that Obama decreed for the Middle East has been the collapse of the Obama-led domestic order at home. The coincidence marks the end of Obama’s pretensions to be a new kind of world leader, running a new world order of his own making from his iPhone, grounded in his own strange combination of nihilism and virtue-mongering.

In fact, it can be argued that there is no coincidence here at all, since the division between Obama’s program abroad and his role at home is largely artificial.

This is “one of those moments in history” we are at. A pivot point. I’m not sure where it is headed, but like in 1991, I am confident it won’t be a u-turn to what was.

I can’t see what can be, but I am quite confident that whatever it is, it won’t be unburdened by what was. Nothing is.

At the end of the day, Elon Musk may take ketamine all day long while wandering the halls of his own mind in a purple silk caftan. Donald Trump may be an agent of chaos who destroys more than he saves. Benjamin Netanyahu may or may not make peace with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who may or may not turn out to be a good guy. Regardless of their faults, all three men shared a common trait at a critical moment in history—they trusted their own stubbornness against the mirror world of digitally based conformity. The human future rests on individuals in all walks of life and representing all parties and all currents of opinion being brave and independent-minded enough to make that same choice.

As for Barack Obama, I will admit that I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him face the consequences of his own arrogance, obsession with personal power, and efforts at vanquishing the exceptionalism that makes this country different from every other one. But I guess, as a wise man once explained: “Life’s a bitch.”

If you have not already, do read the whole thing. I’ve only scratched the surface of superb autopsy of the last 20+ years.