AND SO BEGIN THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR WOMEN: The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think.

There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests.

That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.

It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.

“It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.”

Opening Twitter — X, whatever — to dissenting voices did more to check the Establishment’s power than any one other thing in this century that I can think of.

For progressives, including the staff at Vox, having to make their cases in a free exchange of ideas is dark, indeed.

JONATHAN TURLEY: The final corruption of Joe Biden.

With only 15 minutes to go as president, Joe Biden snatched infamy from the jaws of obscurity.

With record-low polling and widely viewed as a “failed” president, Biden completed his one-man race to the bottom of ethics by issuing preemptive pardons to members of his own family.

The pardons were timed to guarantee that the media would not focus on yet another unethical act by this president. He need not have worried. For four years, the media worked tirelessly to deny or deflect the corruption scandal surrounding the Biden family.

The pardoning of James Biden, Sara Jones Biden, Valerie Biden Owens, John Owens and Francis Biden brought an inescapable clarity to the corruption of what is known in Washington as Biden Inc.

Exit quote:

Biden sealed his legacy with a finality that escapes most presidents. While his diminished mental capacity will remain an issue for historians, his longstanding lack of ethics was conclusively established with these pardons. It was Biden’s final act of corruption.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, BYE: A wave of Trump-demanded departures hits senior leadership at the State Department.

A large number of senior career diplomats who served in politically appointed leadership positions at the State Department have left their posts at the demand of the incoming Trump administration, which plans to install its own people in those positions, according to current and outgoing U.S. officials.

Personnel changes in the senior ranks of the department, like those at all federal agencies, are not uncommon after a presidential election, and career officials serving in those roles are required, just as non-career political appointees, to submit letters of resignation before an incoming administration takes office.

In the past, some of those resignations have not been accepted, allowing career officials to remain in their posts at least temporarily until the new president can nominate his team. That offers some degree of continuity in the day-to-day running of the bureaucracy.

There are plenty of “resistance” bureaucrats who will need to be shown the door with more vigor.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: A Whole Lotta MAGA Goin’ On. “Not only did the inauguration of President Donald Trump live up to my high expectations, it greatly exceeded them. I woke up yesterday filled with kid-on-Christmas-morning energy, as I suspect many of you did. Never mind that I didn’t sleep well, the nation was finally going to be rid of them.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China performs high altitude reusable rocket test with uncertain outcome.

A Chinese state-owned company performed a rocket flight aimed at testing reentry and landing burns late Saturday without announcing the outcome.

The Longxing-2 test article lifted off at around 10:00 p.m. Eastern, Jan. 18 (0300 UTC, Jan. 19) from a makeshift launch area near Haiyang, Shandong province.

Longxing-2 is thought to be a test article for the Long March 12A reusable launcher being developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). The rocket was designed to replicate the first stage of a reusable flight, reaching around 75 kilometers before performing a reentry burn and making a powered descent and splashdown into the Yellow Sea.

Amateur footage captured from near the launch area showed the rocket rise very slowly from the tower and perform an ascent phase with no apparent anomalies. The test was intended to build on a successful 12-kilometer-altitude vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) test performed in June 2024.

SAST published results and footage from the June test, but has so far remained silent on the 75-km attempt, being yet to publish any results or details of the flight more than 24 hours after liftoff. The lack of official updates raises questions about the success of the test, which could indicate challenges during reentry or landing phases.

Not only is space hard but reusable vehicles are even harder — and commies generally don’t stay mum when there’s a public relations coup to be had.

FINALLY, A PRESIDENT WHO IS HAVING FUN AGAIN:

FIGHT THE POWER:

Ireland’s ruling class makes Britain’s look okay. Glad to see there’s still some resistance.

THAT WAS THE QUADRENNIAL THAT WAS:

NOW THAT BIDEN IS SAFELY OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE:  As Alison Somin writes here, any and all regulations promulgated by the federal government pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 are required to have the President’s signature.  If they don’t, they are, in my view, null and void.  Congress was (uncharacteristically) wise in insisting on a Presidential signature back when those statutes were passed.   For some reason, in recent decades this requirement has been ignored.  Incoming Administration officials should take note.

HOLLYWOOD WAS ALREADY IN TROUBLE. THEN DISASTER STRUCK LA:

For months, rank-and-file TV and film workers relied on a mantra to get themselves through a dark time in the industry: “Survive till ’25.”

The slogan came after a stint that included the pandemic, strikes by actors and writers, the long and costly pivot to streaming and the continued migration of industry jobs out of Los Angeles. Hope glimmered for January, with theatrical releases on the runway and shoots in full swing.

Then came the wildfires.

“It’s sort of been the perfect storm,’” says film and TV editor Andrew Kasch, a 20-year Los Angeles veteran who, after a year of unemployment, was giving himself just 12 more months to find work or leave the city. “The people who work on the biggest shows and movies are going to continue to be fine—it’s the rest of us facing an existential crisis.”

Though his home was unscathed, the fires have Kasch, 45, seriously considering moving with his two daughters to live with his parents in Chattanooga, Tenn. His health insurance expires next month, and he fears rising costs of living. “It’s basically been one thing after the other.”

Kasch was one of the Angelenos embracing “Survive till ’25,’” but now his view is a little more arch. “I guess it’s been changed to ‘Exist to ’26.’”

This past week, Hollywood got back to work, with shows such as “Doctor Odyssey,” “9-1-1” and “NCIS” resuming shooting after wildfire shutdowns. But on a broader scale, the decline of production in Los Angeles continues, and with it, the exodus of entertainment workers from the city to hubs in states such as Georgia and New Mexico, or to new careers altogether. The fires shine a light on the tightknit community of Hollywood crew, and leaves those gaffers, grips, costumers, makeup artists, location scouts and others wondering how much longer their dwindling ranks can remain in Los Angeles.

In his latest monthly column at Commentary, Rob Long explores the impact of “The Fire This Time:”

It wasn’t immediately apparent, when the news first started to break, that the fire was going to be quite so disastrous. I moved from Los Angeles to New York several years ago, so I tend to get my local LA news from Facebook and Instagram. But as the pictures started to emerge, I watched the streaming broadcast from KTLA Channel 5 and made a list of everyone I knew who lived in the Palisades—friends, colleagues, business frenemies—and texted each one to ask whether they were safe. It was a huge list—I’ve been in the entertainment business for 35 years —and I was struck by how many in my show-business circle live there. Lived, I should say. Most of my career, it turns out, was in the fire zone.

Which makes sense if you’ve ever been to the Pacific Palisades. It’s true that it’s a very rich area, but it also feels like a very normal, very down-to-earth small town. There are hardware stores and delis that have been there for decades, along with the kind of boutiques you’d find in any upscale suburb in America: a place for high-end sporting goods, a gifty kind of bookstore, a place to buy expensive candles. The local public high school was top-notch, and it even had a thriving Episcopal church. They’ve all been burned to the ground.

There were movie stars in the Palisades, whom you’d see in the grocery stores and Peet’s Coffee, both now destroyed. But the place was mostly the support village for the entertainment business. It’s where you lived if you were one of the thousands of people who worked in show business but wasn’t famous. If you were meeting a talent manager for lunch but neither of you wanted to make it a big deal, you met in the Palisades. If you were in the checkout line at the Gelson’s supermarket on Sunset—gone now—you might, as I did years ago, bump into a network executive and find out that your show is about to be cancelled. The Palisades was the central nervous system for show business. It’s anyone’s guess where that will be now that the Palisades is a pile of ashes and embers.

This recent dashcam video shows what the Palisades looked like before the fire. It’s a bit like holiday snapshots taken during a visit to the World Trade Center in 2000 or the summer of 2001. In this case, it was likely just some video created because it’s so easy to hit the record button these days — but one that becomes very precious after tragedy strikes and the world is upended.

PUTIN’S STUPID WAR: Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts. “Russian volunteer military detachments continue efforts to boost manpower by recruiting women into the Russian Armed Forces. Former Roscosmos (Russian space agency) head and Zaporizhia Oblast occupation senator Dmitry Rogozin reported on January 19 that the Russian BARS-Sarmat Detachment (Russian Combat Army Reserve) is recruiting specialists and unskilled men and women from across Russia to participate in combat operations in Ukraine. The post follows recent Russian promotional activities highlighting the recruitment of Russian women to various combat units in the Russian Armed Forces.”

Much more at the link. I’d just add that it’s one thing to give women combat roles when the Nazis are at the gates of Moscow, and quite another to try and take one more ruined little settlement in Ukraine.

That the US Army has done the same is a peacetime extravagance that I hope we’ll ditch sooner rather than later.

Previously: “This is pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel, unless they’ve got a brigade of the Tsar’s Own Cavalry in cold storage somewhere.”

It’ll be nice for everyone involved now that we have a peacemaker back in the White House.

THE SUICIDE OF EXPERTISE: On Millennial Snot.

What is Millennial Snot? Where did it come from? How did it become the prevailing liberal voice? What exactly is the matter with these people? And are we going to have to suffer this obnoxious style forever?

The nerds who never got over high school

Liberals who have time to goof around on social media all day are probably nerds with more-or-less fake laptop jobs. They aren’t working class, otherwise they’d be working all day, but they aren’t terribly successful either, otherwise they’d have better things to do. The Bluesky-American sits awkwardly in the middle, and this feeds his resentment. He got good grades. He’s credentialed, and believes he’s smarter than his boss. He should be running things. If only society weren’t so dumb. If only society were fair, like when he was in school, when a kind teacher rewarded his intelligence and punished ne’erdowells.

Pity the “front row kid,” the wordcel who grinds his youth away for straight A’s only to find that the spoils of the market go to the back row goober who inherits his dad’s used car lot. If only there was some way to turn society upside down, so the front row kid could be on top. If only society could be more like grade school…

That would be a start, but the nerd doesn’t just want to be recognized for his intelligence. He also desperately wants to be cool. He wants to prove to the world that he won’t be shoved into a locker any more. He’s with it now, he uses the latest teen slang, he “understands the assignment.” This is how you get balding hetero professors saying stuff like “she ate and left no crumbs,” and “big mad” and other phrases that will sound embarrassingly dated in a few weeks.

The liberal has developed an argot that combines everything he thinks is cool. And what is that, exactly?

Libs know they’re smarter than you but they’re often not as successful as they’d like to be. The resulting inferiority and superiority complexes send the liberal into convulsions of contempt toward healthy, well-adjusted, normal people, along with an attendant parasocial identification with figures they think of as downtrodden underdogs. Underdogs are cool.

They hate the straight, successful white man, and love everything else – want to be everything else. So they talk like everything and anything else. Their speech and writing is characterized by diction, syntax, and tone that reflects their resentment, and their writing has evolved into a nauseating melange of underdog-speak. They’re LARPing as snotty teenage girls, sassy black ladies, tongue-rolling drag queens, blue-collar whites (paging hicklib Tim Walz), or potty-mouthed children. Underdogs, all.

Read the whole thing.