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Unknown A
As we discussed earlier this week, Argentina's president just hyped a massive crypto shitcoin pump and dump, which effectively robbed his own biggest supporters. The whole thing was ultimately quite similar to the scheme Trump also pulled. And lo and behold, some of the same people were involved in this Argentina Libra rug poll as we're involved in the melania rug pull YouTube scam. Investigator Coffeezilla managed to score an interview with one of these fraudsters. And there was a particular part that helped me put together something I've been trying to articulate since the beginning of Trump 2.0, whether with regard to Doge Maha or the new return to outright colonialism and imperialism. The moment came towards the end of the interview after this scammer, his name is Hayden Davis, admits that all crypto is quote, dog shit. How then does he justify his role in massive repeated scams of people using this quote unquote, dog shit?
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Unknown A
Take a listen what he had to say.
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Unknown B
I'm very pro getting everything away from regulated markets, but I, but I'm now recognized because I think that that's another game. I think that's an insider game. Right? Whether it's, if it's the Pelosi's of the world or the, you know, stock game, that's an insider game too. It's just a different type and people have to be more careful. But capital markets are an insider game. The whole thing is like I'm never, nobody's ever going to convince me that it's not rigged. Banks pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year to do illegal because they can make more money other ways like I could keep going on with, with after, after. I think if you're gonna die on the Sword of Meme Coins being, you know, insider this or sniping that like you're full of. Because there's, every market in the world is like that, that makes a shitload of money.
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Unknown C
Well, yeah, I just, I just want, I just want to put a, a note in that. If your argument for capital markets is, you know, they, they are rigged, that's actually an argument for more regulation against rigging than it is for less. Like you wouldn't look at a rigged game and go, hey guys, let's take away all the rules we had in place anyway to try to stop it getting rigged, right?
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Unknown B
Yeah, but then you have to trust, then you have to trust the regulators and most of them are being paid off. And that's been proven time and time forever. Because human.
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Unknown C
Yeah, but, but, but, but once again, the conclusion to, like, seeing problems in the world is not like, you realize, like, your brakes aren't working correctly. It's not to go like, hey, the brake manufacturers paid off, so let's just not have brakes at all. It's going. It's methodically approaching it and going, okay, we need to advocate for more regulation here. We need to advocate for more rules here. Saying like, oh, yeah, it's all rigged isn't the dunk that people think it is on rules in general? Does that make sense?
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Unknown B
Sure. But it doesn't matter like that to me. Like that to me is kind of a mute, a little bit of a mute point, because it's like, it doesn't matter. The people that have the most money, the most access, and the most control, which is insiders in any market in the world always win.
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Unknown A
So Hayden basically says, well, mainstream financial markets are scammy too, so I'm going to get mine with an even more brazen scam. Coffey, of course, correctly points out the answer to financial fraud is better laws, enforcement, less corruption. But Hayden's already made up his mind. Since the big banks are imperfect, we should just give up on policing things like rug polls, insider trading, and outright theft. Now, that philosophy actually seems to me to be pretty core to the ethos of Trump 2.0. It's a dark nihilism that effectively says, look, everything's bad, so let's just make it worse. Since the financial system is gamed by insiders, let's just go full open scam. Since money has infected politics, let's just take open bribes. Since we've been hypocritical about international law, let's just revert to pure barbarism. It's an ethos that I think is very much at the core of the anarcho capitalist ideology that Elon and Project 2025 architect Russ Vogt have infused the second Trump administration with.
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Unknown A
Since governments can't fully check corporate power, just disband the government, privatize all functions, and let the oligarch CEO dictators run wild. Don't believe me? Just listen to Marc Andreessen, as influential a person as any in this administration, explain how since democracy will always be flawed, we should just openly embrace oligarchy.
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Unknown D
So the iron law of oligarchy basically says democracy is fake. There's always a ruling class, there's always a ruling elite structurally. And he said the reason for that is because the masses can't organize. What's the fundamental problem? Whether the mass is 25,000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country. The masses can't organize. The majority cannot organize. Only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority, every single one. And so basically the presumption that we are in a democracy is just sort of by definition fake. Now, good news for the U.S. it turns out the founders understood this. And so of course they didn't give us a direct democracy, they gave us a representative democracy, right?
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Unknown D
And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch. But so anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always and everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. And basically the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you're fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any sort of shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what's happening.
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Unknown A
So the basic message here is democracy is fake. So just give up on letting people have a say and embrace your billionaire overlords. You can see how this ideology also tied to the ideas of Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, the so called Dark Enlightenment or neoreactionary movements. How this provides a very convenient philosophical backdrop for Elon to execute on his own plans and personally selected goals for humanity. Else Elon, he wants total power. And this ideology provides him a pathway to exactly that. I've been reading Walter Isaacson's biography on Elon. One thing you really get is how he has personally cast himself as the savior of humanity, launches SpaceX. That's a sort of insane boondoggle at the start. He believes he must personally guarantee humanity's future as a multi planetary species. Never mind that none of us voted for this CEO dictator king to destroy the lives of working class people in order to chase his Martian dream.
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Unknown A
If Elon's multiplanetary goal takes shredding the Constitution, so be it. If it takes sentencing kids with HIV in Africa to death, so be it. If it takes hijacking the entire resources of the United States government to funnel into SpaceX, so be it. But in order for the public to just sit back and watch their data and their tax dollars and their voice in our government all plundered by the richest man on Earth, some critical mass has to be convinced that the government wasn't really worth saving anyway. That their voice in our government and their rights that are protected by that government were not really worth preserving after all, that perhaps all those things were fake to begin with, as Andreessen wants them to believe. And the role of this ideology of nihilism is to persuade Americans of exactly that. And look, I actually understand some of the appeal.
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Unknown A
There's a feel of honesty to this level of nihilism, to saying, as Hayden Davis did, well, the insiders always come out on top, so why not just celebrate it or democracy never can be perfected, so let's just embrace our oligarchs. It's an appeal that has kind of always been at the core of Trump helps to explain why, even though he lies more than probably any person I've ever known outside of Elon, why so many people continue to view him as an exceptionally honest politician. He doesn't bother to hide his schemes, doesn't bother to hide his crimes. He will just say, we want Ukraine for the rare earths rather than dressing it up in democracy language. He will just say, we're going to permanently remove every Palestinian from Gaza rather than pretending that some sovereign state for Palestinians is just around the corner. Rather than doing a little insider trading a la most of Congress, he will just launch his own shitcoin to openly scam his own people to the tune of billions of dollars rather than spin the truth in a way that's shady but still has some connection to reality.
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Unknown A
He'll just make shit up out of thin air and really doesn't care if you know it, that it's an out and out lie. This brazenness gives his lies somehow the vibe of honesty, the everything is bad, let's make it worse. Nihilism also provides another kind of psychological reward because it prizes a total lack of self restraint. If big banks are rigging the system, why should Hayden Davis restrain himself from running mass scams? If politicians spin and obfuscate, why shouldn't you lie and cheat to get ahead? And what fun really ultimately is self restraint feels good to let loose, say and do whatever you want to do. That removal of the burden of self restraint was experienced as a sort of liberation for plenty after Trump won. In the immediate aftermath of Trump's victory, a top banker delightedly told the Financial Times how happy he was that he could use slurs in the workplace again, quote, I feel liberated, one top banker told the paper.
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Unknown A
We can say the R word and the P word without the fear of getting canceled, except he actually said them. It's a new dawn. In fact, the most celebrated quality in Trump world is shamelessness. The more you're willing to openly contradict previously held beliefs, operate with total and complete hypocrisy, the more successful you're going to be, the more you can turn off your feelings of empathy concern for others, the more based you are. So you can, as Elon has, brand yourself as the ultimate guarantor of free speech in one breath and in the very next call for journalists at a troublesome media outlet outlet to be jailed. You can, as Trump did, position yourself as the party of workers as you gut every aspect of worker rights. You can, as RFK Jr. Did, claim you're on a mission to make America healthy again and then say absolutely nothing as a seed oil lobbyist disinstalled at the USDA and life saving disease research is gutted.
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Unknown A
You can compile an ASMR video of migrants being deported so your most deranged supporters can be stimulated by the visuals of human beings treated as animals. So based, Elon replied, these lies, cruelties and hypocrisy, they all trigger outrage. An outrage generation is the most valuable currency in Trump world. Those with the shamelessness to trigger the most of it rise the highest. But at the core of all of this is that ethos that since the institutions let you down, you may as well have a bacchanal burning it all to the ground, letting your own worst impulses and those of the society and human nature itself run wild. It's whataboutism brought to its logical conclusion. Since Hillary sent emails on a private server, how can anyone complain about Elon and his hackers downloading all the data of the entire federal government? Since the insiders always come out on top, why not just give the insiders everything up front to begin with?
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Unknown A
Since the voices of the masses were being drowned out by the wealthy, just hand over all the keys to the wealthiest person on the entire planet. To borrow Coffeezilla's analogy here, their answer to the brakes failing is to rip the brakes down entirely and send the car careening towards a cliff. Listen, it's a fun and easy solution right up until the crash. Much harder, of course, is the work of building up institutions, making them strong, making them credible. Much harder is checking the rich and the powerful bringing back a balance of power to working people. Much harder is checking imperial power and restoring a semblance of global cooperation and respect. But to use an Elon phrase here, society is at a fork in the road. On one path lies a rebuilt New Deal with capital checked, a government unafraid of standing up to the wealthy, a social contract that provides stability, prosperity for everyone.
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Unknown A
On the other path lies the societal equivalent of a crypto pump and dump scheme where for a brief moment you might actually feel like you're winning right before the rug is pulled and insiders like Elon Andreessen, Peter Thiel, the Trumps, the rest of the billionaire class rob you blind. To be honest, we might already be set irrevocably on that bump and dump path, but it is our responsibility to our loved ones, our kids, future generations, to never stop fighting and to never stop believing fundamentally that humans are capable of more than just burning it all down. And Ryan, I was curious in particular your thoughts on that. Andreessen hey guys, if you want to.
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Unknown C
See what I had to say to Crystal's monologue, not just this one, all of them going back to the very beginning. Become a Premium subscriber today. BreakingPoints.com.