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Did you catch this in 2016?
Posted on: June 6, 2025 at 07:56:12 CT
KCT-BoneTiger MU
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A strange, fascinating story broke last week, one that contains the darkness of the Trump campaign and that has, like the Trump campaign at times, the cadence of a joke. A thirty-two-year-old man named Colin Lokey confessed to Bloomberg that, until days earlier, he had been one of the unknown authors of Zero Hedge, a blog that combines analysis of the financial markets, emphasizing the essential corruption of Wall Street, with what CNNMoney once called “a deeply conspiratorial, anti-establishment and pessimistic view of the world.” Each post on Zero Hedge is written under the pseudonym Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s character from “Fight Club,” a workingman’s nihilist. Lokey revealed to Bloomberg last week that Durden was actually three men: two wealthy financial analysts, Daniel Ivandjiiski and Tim Backshall, and Lokey, a recent M.B.A. from East Tennessee State University—their hired hand.
By his own account, Lokey was writing as many as fifteen posts a day, among them most of the political pieces. The gig had a certain formula, he told Bloomberg: “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” For Zero Hedge, Syria was a special obsession, a sign of the essential strength of authoritarian regimes and the weakness of democracies. (“Putin Is Winning the Final Chess Match with Obama,” one Zero Hedge article claimed last fall.) The pace of the propaganda was too much for Lokey; last month, he checked himself into a hospital, believing he was on the verge of a panic attack. The populism seemed false to him. “Two guys who live a lifestyle you can only dream of are pretending to speak for you,” he wrote. The “unmasking” that Bloomberg promised in its headline was really two, one inside the other. Remove the Tyler Durden mask and there were Backshall and Ivandjiiski, two successful bankers pushing populism. Remove the mask again and there was Lokey, pretending to be them. “This isn’t a revolution,” Lokey wrote. “It’s a joke.”
The suspicion that populist revolutionaries might not mean everything they say has surrounded Trump’s campaign from the beginning. His personal ambition to be President has seemed almost painfully obvious, but about the populist nature of his candidacy there has been more room for doubt. The wall at the border, the religious tests for immigrants: Could he really mean that? Last week, Paul Manafort, one of Trump’s chief advisers, tried to reassure Republican National Committee members that the candidate has been simply “playing a part” for the primaries. Then Trump doubled down on some of his most outrageous positions. The wink between Trump and his supporters has been so sustained that it’s hard to tell which parts of his populism each side understands as theatre, and which parts are for real.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/is-the-alt-right-for-real
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-29/unmasking-the-men-behind-zero-hedge-wall-street-s-renegade-blog
By his own account, Lokey was writing as many as fifteen posts a day, among them most of the political pieces. The gig had a certain formula, he told Bloomberg: “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” For Zero Hedge, Syria was a special obsession, a sign of the essential strength of authoritarian regimes and the weakness of democracies. (“Putin Is Winning the Final Chess Match with Obama,” one Zero Hedge article claimed last fall.) The pace of the propaganda was too much for Lokey; last month, he checked himself into a hospital, believing he was on the verge of a panic attack. The populism seemed false to him. “Two guys who live a lifestyle you can only dream of are pretending to speak for you,” he wrote. The “unmasking” that Bloomberg promised in its headline was really two, one inside the other. Remove the Tyler Durden mask and there were Backshall and Ivandjiiski, two successful bankers pushing populism. Remove the mask again and there was Lokey, pretending to be them. “This isn’t a revolution,” Lokey wrote. “It’s a joke.”
The suspicion that populist revolutionaries might not mean everything they say has surrounded Trump’s campaign from the beginning. His personal ambition to be President has seemed almost painfully obvious, but about the populist nature of his candidacy there has been more room for doubt. The wall at the border, the religious tests for immigrants: Could he really mean that? Last week, Paul Manafort, one of Trump’s chief advisers, tried to reassure Republican National Committee members that the candidate has been simply “playing a part” for the primaries. Then Trump doubled down on some of his most outrageous positions. The wink between Trump and his supporters has been so sustained that it’s hard to tell which parts of his populism each side understands as theatre, and which parts are for real.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/is-the-alt-right-for-real
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-29/unmasking-the-men-behind-zero-hedge-wall-street-s-renegade-blog
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Did you catch this in 2016? - KCT-BoneTiger MU - 6/6 07:56:12