Bull or Bear? Dark MAGA Reveals Sinking Social Mood

I don't want to dismiss charts, but right at this moment the chart isn't saying much. There is an inverse head-and-shoulders pattern everyone is talking about. If this is a bull market, it completes. If this is a bear market, it fails.

Here's a long term look at the Nasdaq 100 ETF. The difference between a correction and a bear market is clear.

I don't see how the market goes higher in real terms without something surprising happening. Even if the reopening is perfect and all the supply chain problems evaporate, the economy is going back to pre-2020 growth of about 1.8 percent. Societal stress keeps growing though. The pandemic shook society up and broke people out of old behavioral patterns. Unions are forming against Starbucks, Amazon and so on. The right-wing is going after Disney and finally, there is a chance that the vile 1998 copyright law will be repealed. In short, it's not hard to see the forms of the new consensus taking shape, one where both the left and right are changing the law to favor workers and consumers over corporations.

Revolver: Drain the Disney Copyright Swamp and Make the Public Domain Great Again

As the year 2000 approached, Disney had a problem. Copyrights on some of the company’s earliest cartoons, including “Steamboat Willie,” were set to expire soon. As one 1998 report put it, “[w]ithout copyright term extension, the company faces the potential nightmare of seeing its greatest treasures pass from corporate possession into the public domain.” Americans would be free to reproduce Disney’s public domain works, and even make new stories derived out of that content, without worrying about getting sued for copyright infringement. With “billions of dollars in revenue” at stake the report adds, Mickey Mouse went to Washington.

The story of how the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, known within the copyright bar as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, came to be is pure Swamp. In 1998, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner descended on Trent Lott’s office to ask the Senate Majority Leader for help. “He was very much interested in seeing the copyright bill,” Lott said at the time. As Congressional Quarterly reported, “[b]efore he left the spacious offices of the majority leader at the U.S. Capitol on June 9, Eisner was assured that his company’s pet bill would get the help it needed.”

In addition to Eisner’s visit, the company donated money to key committee leaders, including Republican Congressman Howard Coble of North Carolina, who was then the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Arts and Intellectual Property. Disney also “paid $2,700” to host House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife “for three days at Disney Institute, the company’s educational facility in Orlando.”

When it was all over, Mickey Mouse had his way with the Republican-controlled Congress. With unanimous consent in the Senate and a voice vote in the House, Congress enacted the extension, tacking an additional twenty years onto existing copyright terms.

MAGA to Disney: Take a Hike

Fast forward to today. The extension Disney toiled for on Capitol Hill in 1998 is about to run out. As early as 2024, key Disney cartoons will pass into the public domain. When the company came to Congress in 1998, it struck a decidedly neutral tone, however false those pretenses might have been at the time.

“Mickey Mouse is not a Republican or a Democrat,” a former Disney lobbyist once said. What Rufo’s reporting on Disney’s DIE program shows is that, if that were ever true in the first place, it is no longer the case. Now Mickey is a cartoon Gramsci and Adorno, an open critical theorist. MAGA Republicans must resist Disney’s inevitable call to further extend its copyright control over this entertainment from a bygone America.

Such opposition will no doubt roil Disney. Good. Disney is ashamed of much of this content anyway. The company now adorns old movies with warnings about “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures.” Disney moralizes its audience in these warnings, informing them that “[t]hese stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.” Wait a second. What’s this about moral truth for all time?

Newsweek: What Is Dark MAGA? Trump Supporters Attempt Rebrand for 2024

The aesthetics of the movement are easily recognizable: images edited in red and black or red and blue, featuring people with blue laser eyes often holding weapons or standing in front of neo-Nazi symbols.

Dark MAGA supporters are calling for a ruthless, unforgiving version of Trump to take revenge on his political enemies at the 2024 election - though the movement hasn't been recognized or endorsed by Trump in any form. The former president hasn't yet even formally confirmed whether he'll run for president in 2024.

Hehe. Well I haven't seen what qualifies as neo-Nazi symbols, but consider the newest white power symbol:

If you don't have a sense of humor, you're not going to make it through 2024.

In the description of the #DarkMAGA hashtag creator, as described by the Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET), Dark MAGA represents "Napoleon, being exiled, and then raising a f****** army to attack Europe to attack the elites."

"#DarkMAGA is the aesthetic demand that Trump embrace a harder and more focused approach to the role only he can fill. He was too kindhearted, too forgiving. Dark MAGA demands he learn from his mistakes," writes another Twitter user.

"It's the realization that there is no political solution beyond vengeance," tweets another user.

"If you want to win, if you don't want to repeat the past, you have to get mean; you almost have to embrace the villain role that they're bringing you with," describes another supporter quoted by GNET.

If you don't realize the mainstream media are mentally-unstable, overly emotional people of lower intelligence, then you will fall for their emotional manipulations or retard yourself be believing their lies.

But the bigger story is the social mood signal. Dark MAGA won't go beyond social media trolling unless social mood turns even more negative. It's said that the American public doesn't like negative politicians or negative agendas. Negative ads work, but there has to be a positive message from the campaign. Obama was hope, Trump offered a positive one with MAGA in 2016, Biden was "return to normal." Yet at very low points in social mood, the public does prefer punishing villains.

America has a laundry list of villains with corporations, government, scientists, doctors, media, school boards, school teachers and more conspiring to destroy American families, kill the weak with toxic mRNA shots, wreck the economy, sexually abuse children, instigate nuclear war with Russia, flood the nation with deadly fentanyl, allow rapists, robbers, murderers, drug dealers and who know what else to flow over an unprotected border, big city DAs funded by wealthy Baizuo donors like Soros that let those murderers, rapists and thieves go free, and so on and so forth. Most Democrats are not in favor of the masks, lockdowns, grooming, open borders, vaccines, fentanyl, war with Russia and so on...there is a minority of Baizuo controlling the media and stifling debate. If someone like Trump does promise a dark agenda of vengeance, who knows what level of support it might find in a nation spiraling into the abyss of negative mood. And it's not like the Baizuo haven't been doing the exact same thing to Trump, his supporters, and all manner of left-wing independent thinkers. The ruling class has developed quite a diverse enemies list.

Going back to the markets, to be a bull means betting on authoritarian dictatorship consolidating its control over the Western world. Being a bear means betting that either a different dictatorship will emerge or that the attempt at dictatorship will fail. The bull market is unsustainable without authoritarian economic controls that continue siphoning the wealth of the American people into the pockets of the oligarchs.