Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,

There’s a great moment in Mad Max: Fury Road where they roll up to a naked woman chained to a tower and Max utters one of his, like, fourteen lines in the movie, “That’s bait.”

This is a metaphor for literally the entire media landscape in the age of social media.

Since Trump’s victory last Tuesday the Usual Suspects have chummed the waters with every possible bad idea to dishearten and undermine that victory. It’s all bait.

We weren’t 24 hours removed from Kamala Harris’ concession speech, a carbon copy of the one Hillary Clinton gave in 2016, where she said, “Fight” 20 times, before the first big piece of red meat was thrown down in front of libertarians to virtue signal over… Ending the Fed.

FOMC Chair Jerome Powell was forced to field a question during the post-meeting presser about stepping down if asked to by President-Elect Trump.

Powell “closed the fucking door” on that with one word, “No.”

At which point everyone was shocked, shocked I say!, to find out that the Fed Chair cannot be removed because the President didn’t like him. The same goes for Supreme Court justices, for example. This is politics folks, not philosophy. I’m not endorsing this situation but I am pointing out that those who have been parroting “End the Fed” since Ron Paul ran in 2008 should have known this.

So, given this background, one has to conclude it’s the dirtiest of dirty politics designed to create divisions within the MAGA crowd at a time when we should be coming together on the right issues, staffing the new administration, discussing which departments to cut, how to finance the debt.

In other words, we should be setting the tempo, rather than responding to it by those most vulnerable to a US government and Federal Reserve in lock-step to defend US sovereignty.

For more than a year I told you there would be two big targets for the Democrats in this election cycle, Jerome Powell and Elon Musk.

Powell is Public Enemy #1 over his aggressively tight monetary policy which all Austrians should be rejoicing over rather than concocting ever more lurid arguments about ‘stealth QE.’ For systemic thinkers, having a one-level flow chart on something as important and germane as monetary policy is, frankly, a pretty lazy and pathetic look.

Musk has now challenged Powell for the top spot for exclusion from Davos’ Happy Holidays Card List because of how Twitter and Starlink have thrown sand in the gears of their narrative generation engine, as I wrote about last week.

Going back to Powell, since the March 2023 banking crisis, which he fomented for political reasons and raised interest rates in the middle of, just to make sure everyone who mattered got the fucking memo, I eventually stopped being sick of Elizabeth Warren’s HR nanny routine from atop the Senate Banking Committee and simply started laughing at her.

She issued stern letters demanding the Fed lower interest rates at seemingly every FOMC meeting, trying to gin up controversy over the Fed. And it wasn’t to give anyone relief, or for the children, it was to help Democrats win the election and loosen the death grip Powell’s ‘higher for longer’ policy had on European capital markets.

But thanks to this silly question by a junior staffer at Politico, now the ‘Woke Left’ and the ‘Woke Right’ are having their fee-fees stroked by the remnants of the old banking cartels they both believe they are fighting here.

If it wasn’t so gods-damned important I’d be chuckling in Collapsitarian.

A Buffett at the Waffle House

Next up was the bait thrown at trad conservatives over people like Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley. The biggest tell that Trump was likely to win in a landslide was the intelligence blob floating the rumor weeks ago that Trump still liked Pompeo and that Big Mike was sniffing around as either Secretary of State or Defense.

That’s chum, folks. And Trump put the hammer down on it after a couple of days letting it percolate. He should have quashed it sooner. But, who am I to give the Master of the Overton Window advice on such matters?

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1855393067517559198

Haley was also a non-starter. He hates her. Her career now starts and ends every day with, “More Coffee?” and “Scattered, Smothered, and Chunked? Got it, hunny.”

In fact, you know Trump hates Marco Rubio as much as he does Haley because I believe the rumor about him becoming Secretary of State.

How else are you going to get RINO “Little Marco” and his really big Manila Envelope Quotient (MEQ) out of the Senate and replaced by someone who will actually work with Trump, rather than against him on the big legislation that needs to get passed in 2025?

Promote him, keep him on a short leash about reforming Foggy Bottom, and let him grandstand on CHY-Na. And if he doesn’t do what’s asked of him? “You’re Fired!”

And if I’m wrong and Rubio is just more Neocon bait, then Masal Tov! Oi vey.

That rumor about Mike Rogers to head the CIA and everything else you’ve seen… all bait. All lame attempts to flood the zone with bad information and drive wedges between Trump’s biggest supporters and him.

If you can’t pick up on crude attempts at British divide and rule at this stage of the game, maybe you just suck at the game.

It took the leaking of a secret ballot organized by outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to finally wake people up to the depths to which the bureaucratic immune system is fighting back against the chemotherapy Trump’s win represents.

If Marjorie Taylor Greene helps stop John Cornyn from becoming our leader in the Senate, I’ll take back most of the mean things I’ve said about her.

Most of them.

Schadenfreude in Berlin

Trump’s win caused a political earthquake in Berlin as the German government collapsed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz tried to meet a cash call to his creditors on Ukraine. FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner refused to approve another 6 billion euros to Ukraine. But Germany is out of money this fiscal year and it needed to go to the Bundestag. So Scholz fired him and Lindner pulled the FDP out of the coalition.

Now the situation in Germany is in the kind of flux we usually only see in places being color revolution’d.

They are so desperate to hold onto power we’re now being regaled with the latest fantasy of the “Saxony Separatists,” all 3 of them, as the latest reason to ban Alternative for Germany (AfD) and keep them from participating in the upcoming snap elections.

Again, that’s bait for the German Boomers. Even if the ban doesn’t work, it will knock a couple of points off AfD’s national totals. But, they are just doing tactical retreats here. It’s not winning, it’s more trying to not lose immediately.

Because the cultural and demographic shift against this globalist insanity has already occurred.

We’re watching the old political order in Germany, held together previously by the iron fist of Angela “Stasi” Merkel, come apart at the seams. The idea that Germans would simply vote themselves out of existence because of their collective guilt was never really a starter.

At some point the German industrialist class would make their presence felt. Trump’s victory likely catalyzed this.

Davos’ whole project depended on using the generational imprint of everyone post-WWII to manufacture political realities at odds with the self-interests of those people. But that puts a time limit on the project. It had to happen before the generations that fought WWII and grew up in the rebuilding phase died off.

For example, for Germans it was their collective shame over Hitler. For Japan, it was the shame of being bombed by the Americans. For America it was stoking our self-reliance into self-righteousness.

As Howard Lutnick pointed out on CNBC a few months ago, we rebuilt these people through our dominance and allowing them to put tariffs on our goods to regenerate their local economies. Those tariffs are still in place and it’s time to remove them by negotiating much better deals for everyone.

But the demographic shift has happened. We saw it in the state elections in Germany this September, where AfD saw huge gains among the 18-29 year olds. The same thing has been happening in Greece in the aftermath of the German/EU strip-mining of the country after their multiple sovereign debt crises.

In the US the kids are moving away from the libertine Boomers. Even the Millennials are finally fulfilling their desires for authenticity, after now surviving three national bankruptcies during their lifetimes — Y2K, Lehman Bros. and COVID-19.

This allowed for Gen-X to finally come into their own and deliver the result the world needed.

So, please folks. Take the wins. Jack out of the Twitter spew for a few days. They want you anxious and afraid. It’s all they have left. Because we just told them we don’t want what they are offering or need what they’ve sold us.

Trust in the result you delivered just a little. This isn’t the same story as 2016.

Trust in media has not only collapsed, it’s now reached its terminal phase. We just broke The Wire, why on earth would we want to repair it by giving their crudity credibility?