Our Rulers and their Groupthink

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August 16, 2022

The question that keeps us Benighted folks awake at night is whether the campaign against Donald Trump is run out of some secret office deep in the intelligence community, or whether it is a kind of Keystone Kops operation, a bunch of bureaucrats and swamp creatures that just can’t let go of their collective annoyance that Trump is a thing.

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I tend towards the Keystone Kops interpretation, because the overall impression I get of the ongoing anti-Trump fireworks display is that the show is not very well planned, and the fireworks aren’t that good.

I got some help last week from a piece by Dr. Robert Malone. He’s the guy that got into trouble for challenging the official COVID line put out by our health administrative overlords. Malone refers us to the science on Groupthink: what it is and how it works, according to social psychologist Irving Janis.

Irving Janis developed the concept of groupthink to explain the disordered decision-making process that occurs in groups whose members work together over an extended period of time.

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Hmm. “Disordered.” I wonder what he means by that.

Here is what tends to happen in these groups:

The group develops an illusion of invulnerability that causes them to be excessively optimistic about the potential outcomes of their actions.

Group members believe in the inherent accuracy of the group’s beliefs or the inherent goodness of the group itself.

The group exerts pressure on people who disagree with the group’s decisions.

The group creates the illusion that everyone agrees with the group by censoring dissenting beliefs. Some members of the group take it upon themselves to become ‘mindguards’ and correct dissenting beliefs.

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In a corporation — even a big corporation — there is always the market to provide a reality check, eventually. In electoral politics, there are always the voters to correct your big mistakes.

But in a perpetual bureaucracy there is no such feedback, and so journalist Alex Berenson gets banned from Twitter because health bureaucrat “Andrew Slavitt, senior advisor to President Biden’s Covid response team, complained specifically” to Twitter about Berenson’s “disinfo.”

Yeah, yeah. We’re trying to save the world here. Only you are not, Andrew Slavitt. You are just a mid-level Bidenoid twerp trying to make the Biden administration look good and get the American people to fall into line.

By the way. What’s all this about the White House asking Twitter: will no one rid me of this turbulent journalist? How come that the Internet isn’t melting down over this? Why, I’d say it’s even worse than the worst days of McCarthyism and HCUA. At least Old Joe McCarthy and Young Dick Nixon had the decency to chase Commies in public. Here we have a twerp aide-or-staffer doing a little side shuffle on the QT with @jack. Which do you think is worse?

It makes me think that the old saying about “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is wrong. It’s not our enemies that are the problem; we know what they are up to. The real danger is that one of ours will go out and do something really stupid and wreck the whole operation. “But I was only trying to help!”

And when you think back over the entire seven-year campaign against Trump it all seems so second-rate and bumbling: the Steele dossier; the FBI lovebirds; the Comey self-admiration society; the two-year Mueller investigation; the Pelosi-driven impeachments; the January 6 committee show trial. And now the Mar-a-Lago raid.

I think the least credible leak I heard with respect to Mar-a-Lago was the nuclear secrets thing. You know what I think? I think that the nuclear codes were changed at 11:59:59.9999999 on January 20, 2021. At the latest. Indeed, my nickel says that at least ten Andrew Slavitt clones called up the Pentagon in the days before Biden took over to make sure that Trump could not do anything Trumpish with our sacred nuclear codes. And I bet the guy with the “football” was checked out — with a confidential call to Google’s location database — to make sure that nobody in his family had been detected within 20 miles of a Trump Car Parade.

Or maybe the FBI was concerned that Trump had the super-duper plans of the Pentagon’s Non-binary Nuclear Weapons Task Force for a hypersonic nuclear missile that will take down all the white supremacist “hate” groups in the world in a single strike. Given the alleged interest of J. Edgar Hoover in non-binary activities, back in the day, I can understand the agency’s concern.

I think that the biggest weakness of our educated rulers is their groupthink notion that they are really smart. On the contrary: a really smart ruling class would teach its recruits in ruling-class boot-camp; “don’t think you are so smart.” Before they even get to declare their pronouns.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: PxHere

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