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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 11/18/16

Welcome to the Brave New (Trumpolitical/Trumponomic) World

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From Strategic Culture


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This does not mean that the Soros regime change racket and its multiple tentacles, in parallel to the Clinton machine-dominated DNC, will quit. Plan A -- Maidan in the USA -- is not exactly a winner among the masses. Thus Plan B -- long-term harassment -- was decided this past weekend at a summit in a Washington hotel.

The endless snowflake whining -- we lost the presidential election because of rogue FBI, WikiLeaks, the Russians, etc. -- was predictable. Yet among the corrupt-to-the-core DNC it seems like no apparatchik has ever read Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Or is familiar with how showbiz -- and talk radio -- works.

Paris is arguably the world capital of critical thinking. Perplexed Parisian intellectual circles at least have found out that the current pan-Western crisis is not only about economics, politics, finance, security and immigration; it's about political discourse itself.

The easy chic cafe diagnostic is that Trump's victory is the symptom of language distorting reality by playing to emotions. It's true that complex rational discourse does not deliver anymore. The masses don't read 3,000-word essays; this is for the elites and self-described experts . But they do respond to outrageous tweets. More than ever, perception is indeed reality.

Thus the amalgam between Trump and the Front National (FN) in France, led by Marine Le Pen, also a master communicator capable of turning primary emotions into political reality. No wonder white supremacist Breitbart News -- Trump's informal Ministry of Information -- will increase its exposure in France and support Le Pen.

What the Paris debate gets right is that nationalist isolationism across the West -- using amalgam and clever terminological shortcuts -- has become a credible solution to cure national identity. Thus the appeal of ditching the EU, among countless Europeans, as a credible alternative against unemployment, as well as a means of increasing security. It's a Trump Remixed syndrome; barbed wire (metaphorical and otherwise) as a possible choice for re-launching economic growth.

With Trump's victory being analyzed as the defeat of political discourse, or the victory of the controversial word, what the Paris debate gets totally wrong is promoting lofty exhortations to reconcile oneself with complexity as the only solution. The challenge is actually how to do nuance and complexity in only a few words at a time.

Words, words, words

What sophisticated intellectual analyses don't get is that Team Trump strategized a running reality show showcasing -- what else -- a brand. Dialogue was kept to a -- tweet -- minimum. Trump himself unveiled it; These are just words. The Clinton (cash) machine fell into the trap and took these words literally. These were in fact metaphors -- understandable by a fourth grader and delivered by a man boy impersonating a fourth grader.

In his CBS interview this past Sunday, Trump admitted the obvious; he won because of the power of social networks, despite the Clinton cash machine spending much more money than I did. Trump has over 28 million followers combined on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. This supposedly hidden minority dribbled any poll modeling available. And outside the Beltway and Hollywood, they were everywhere.

Trump perfected the art of simplified political discourse cutting off the middlemen -- while reducing corporate/mainstream media, in the process, to no more than a pathetic footnote. The New York Times -- all the news that are irrelevant to print ? -- has been a sorry show in itself, promising on the record to report world news more accurately.

It's not that Trump, on the record, had not sent a warning; "I'm very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words." And he knows how to get maximum effect out of minimum (word) investment. Mega-investor Peter Thiel totally got it, telling the National Press Club in Washington how the media is always taking Trump literally.

Thiel stressed, shortly before the election, that a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, "Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?" or, you know, "How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?" What they hear is we're going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.

So what if Trump was killing syntax via his loud and inarticulate outbursts? The meaning was always clear. The pile up of exploding rhetorical devices was always targeted at tapping into raw emotion. Thus the avalanche of us and them; yuuuuge superlatives (amazing, tremendous potential, wonderful); all kinds of hyperbole; non-stop repetition; calculated stutter enhancing his trademark improvised delivery; and a sea of euphemisms (grabbing women by the p*ssy? Nah; just plain old locker room talk).

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Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia (more...)
 

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