Millions of people around the world have been enraptured by the WallStreetBets saga. A few small online traders discovered that a hedge fund had massively overshorted video game retailer GameStop, and initiated a short squeeze that made a few ordinary investors millionaires while sending a Wall Street darling to the brink of bankruptcy. The response from the press, Wall Street, and even the Biden White House has been deranged. A few traders making money at the expense of a hedge fund has been treated as a national scandal.
The WallStreetBets crackdown, coming just one week after Joe Biden took office, shows the tactics the new regime plans to use to keep the masses in line. Although superficially a financial matter, WallStreetBets is actually being treated like a peasant uprising. Those in power, terrified and enraged at having their status threatened, are overreacting and throwing out all the rules in a flailing attempt to keep things under control.
The desperation has been so obvious that it was broadcast on TV to tens of millions of people. Leon Cooperman, who ought to be better-adjusted considering he is a billionaire, fumed on television about how beating a hedge fund was an “attack” on the rich.
Of course, in real life, short sellers have always been vulnerable to so-called “bull raids.” GameStop’s rise isn’t the first short squeeze in history. In 2008, a short squeeze of Volkswagen temporarily turned it into the world’s most valuable company.
No, the offense here is that this time, a hedge fund was the victim of an aggressive financial play, rather than the perpetrator of it, and that the winners gloated as they did so. The supposed champions of the free market are outraged that the free market actually worked.
The meltdown produced grotesque outburts. Ordinary retail investors were compared with rioters storming the U.S. Capitol:
Inevitably, there came wild allegations of Russian meddling.
Along with the outbursts came serious efforts to restrict the rights of individual people. RobinHood and other trading apps restricted users from buying stakes, not just in GameStop, but in other companies like AMC that were also being promoted on WallStreetBets. When users responded by barraging RobinHood’s app with negative reviews, Google scrubbed them:
Discord, meanwhile, banned WallStreetBets’s discussion page, implausibly claiming the ban was coincidental and due to “hate speech” and “spreading misinformation.”
Nobody is fooled. The WallStreetBets Discord had more than 200,000 members. The idea of collectively punishing a group larger than Baton Rouge, Louisiana because of offensive posts by a few users is ridiculous. The Discord was taken down for political reasons, which is what this is all about. WallStreetBets is an irreverent community where users call themselves “fags” and share Pepe memes. It doesn’t matter if the community is actually right-wing (in reality, its users span the entire political spectrum). It refuses to pay homage to the ridiculous, narrow pieties of the modern left, so the moment it began achieving success, those in power targeted it.
The similarities between WallStreetBets and the wider crackdown on conservatives after the Capitol riot are striking. In both cases, authorities flagrantly rewrote the rules on the fly to benefit themselves. In both cases, it’s clear these newly rewritten rules only selectively apply, and will never be used against those who enjoy favor with the powerful. America didn’t get a border wall because “walls don’t work,” but Congress will get a wall to protect itself. Antifa is “just an idea,” but everybody even three degrees removed from the Capitol riots must be targeted as a would-be “insurrectionist.” With both WallStreetBets and the Capitol, the reaction is only partly about the event itself. It’s also about sending a message: What they can do to them they can do to you as well. If they get away with these stunts, they will use the same exploits again and again.
What’s their end goal? There likely isn’t one. The corrupt ruling class of the Globalist American Empire has become so flimsy and degraded that long-term planning is practically beyond it. Everything is emotional fragility, brittleness, and overreaction to immediate events. But even with no plan, the end result is easy to foresee: A society where nobody dares to speak or act, publicly or anonymously, without perfect ideological adherence. A country where the peasants are kept in line.
And we’re barely more than a week into the Biden Administration. Buckle up, things are going to get wild.
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