'Unhinged madman': US politicians react to Trump's expletive-laden threat to Iran

[Bluetus]

40. I'm not saying that the MAGA people have suddenly become informed, reasonable, and intelligent

I am only saying that as a "movement" it is fractured.

I don't know that we have looked enough at that whole life-cycle. Clearly the teabag thing predated MAGA. The teabag was nearly 100% astroturf, in the same sense that Trump paid people to cheer him down the escalator. It was stage management, but it worked because the legacy media is always looking for something they can declare to be news. This is cheap content for them. They don't need any news bureaus, foreign offices, or famous reporters. A couple of interns with a camera can get the job done.

That was really the culmination of 60 years of effort by the industrial pollution society led by Fred Koch and later, his sons. That still survives as a force, in the form of the Heritage Foundation and other similar groups. But they are losing their influence.

Trump was able to make himself the face of the teabag people, effectively wrestling that away from Koch and friends and rebranding as MAGA. That was a dominant force, but the rise of the Tech Bros, crypto mavens, and master market manipulators created a cadre that were able to control riches far greater than anything Koch ever did. Koch (privately held) has revenues of about $125 billion a year. That's a lot. And if it were a public company, that might be valued at 2X or 3X revenues, or about $500 billion. In contrast, the tech bros control companies in industries that value at 10x - 25x earnings, even giving trillion dollar valuations to companies that have few or no profits. And then you add crypto to that, which is another $3-4 trillion, some of which is concentrated in the hands of the tech bros.

People like Koch who make real things (pipelines, refineries, paper products, etc) have lost most of their influence to the people who dream things. So, what does that tell us about the future of MAGA. Well, we still have at least the vestiges of an electoral system, so whoever is in charge needs to manipulate public opinion. Obviously their preference is to buy the mass media companies, But ultimately they need the MAGA dumbasses to cast votes. Trump is on his way out and the MAGA movement, per se, is fractured. But the MAGA dumbasses are all still there for the taking. They aren't any less idiotic than they were 10 years ago.

Watch this space.