Weaponizing Washingtons: How Reddit Users Discovered the Key to War Against our Elites
Perhaps one of the largest power distorters on planet earth is money. If you own a bunch of it you have significantly more power than a neighbor who owns none of it.
Like they say, money talks. And in America, it doesn’t just talk, it bites. The United State’s position as owner of the world’s global reserve currency has made U.S. elites the most powerful people on the planet. Go up against the U.S. elite and they’ll weaponize money to make sure you lose.
They’ll buy out your competition. They’ll bankrupt you through never ending lawsuits. They’ll revoke your access to the banking system, leaving you economically stranded. Then, they’ll spend more money than you’ll ever see in your lifetime to lobby congress in order to create laws that further cement their monopolistic powers.
And, if all of that fails, they’ll just ask the government for a bailout.
That’s right, at the end of the day, even if they make every wrong move and you make every right move, their bad decisions are backstopped by the manipulation of the US Dollar. You lose.
You can march in the streets, publish dissident media, storm the capitol, blame the “other side”, run for President, whatever you want — your voice doesn’t matter and you won’t make a difference. The elites have their finger on the beating heart of American power (The Printing Press) and you don’t.
Owning the world’s reserve currency is as good as owning an atomic bomb. Dissent against bad policies is capped because no one wants their bank account taken away. No one wants to be exiled from economic society. No one wants the bomb dropped on their head.
That’s what makes the Reddit WallStreetBets debacle that’s unfolded this week so interesting. For the first time in modern history a group of disenfranchised “plebs” discovered how to use the financial system against the elites. They split the atom. They beat them at their own game!
A small handful of internet sleuths discovered that a massive hedge fund had become over-leveraged in a bet against a dying retail outlet, GameStop. They realized that if they began to purchase shares of this company, that hedge fund would be forced to sell their position, resulting in a catastrophic loss for the fund.
And so that’s exactly what these internet sleuths did.
The ensuing chaos is the kind of thing that can only happen in a society whose main product is the printing of U.S. Dollars.
As the hedge fund got squeezed, nearly every U.S. brokerage firm that handles the buying and selling of stocks prevented their users from buying GameStop stock. In some cases, the brokers FORCED their users to sell back their GameStop stock “for the user’s own safety”. Their coordinated efforts potentially saved the hedge fund from bankruptcy, and the protest ended just like every American protest of the last few decades has ended:
With the elite reestablishing their dominance and putting the little guy back in his place. Game over.
Right?
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps this was a revelatory moment for “the little guy”.
Perhaps it was the first shot across the bow. The start of a much larger war that reframes our current Left vs Right narrative into the Elite vs Everyone Else.
Don’t believe me?
Rumors are swirling that the White House ordered brokerages to stop trading GameStop.
The White House? Why would they get involved? After all, this is just a silly stock pump that only affects a single silly hedge fund… right?
Maybe.
It’s very possible the elites didn’t like the way the plebs played their game and decided to end the party. It’s possible that they stopped trading because they didn’t want the “little guy” to lose money. It’s all certainly possible…
Or…
Reddit discovered the Achille’s heel of the financial system.
Remember March 2020, when the stock market collapsed 50% in a few weeks? One of the reasons this happened was because hedge funds were significantly over-leveraged, and when one hedge fund blew up, it created a cascading domino effect that started to blow them all up.
You see, when you get margin called on a large position, the broker forces you to sell other assets in order to pay for your margin call. When you sell those assets, you nuke the price of those assets, putting pressure on other traders who are also highly leveraged in those assets.
A hedge fund that’s margin called on an over-leveraged position in GameStop stock could be forced to sell their Facebook stock, or Apple stock, to pay off their margin call. That unexpectedly drops the price of Facebook and Apple, which could end up forcing another margin call on a DIFFERENT hedge fund, repeating the process!
It’s a squeeze against the entire financial system.
It’s almost funny to say it, but the GameStop short squeeze might have been an existential risk to the sanctity of our global financial markets. If it had gone on without interference there’s a chance that the entire financial market may have imploded.
The end result was the seizure of traders accounts and the forced liquidation of the “little guy” to prevent a global catastrophe that could have sent the world swirling into a financial apocalypse.
That’s the real story. The elites are acting in the best interest of a system that, should it break, will cause massive problems throughout the world. But it is this very system they work so hard to save that is already causing massive problems to all of us “plebs”. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
As long as the United States has control of the money, our elites will fix these problems the only way they know how: by weaponizing the dollar and printing money. As long as this paradigm exists, mistakes can be glossed over through the manipulation of the world’s reserve currency.
And that is scary as hell. Because the longer this is allowed to continue, the smaller the event must be to destroy the whole system, and the more tyrannical the government must become to prevent misbehavior that might destroy them.
Who would figure that our financial system is so fragile that a nearly bankrupt retail game store could bring the whole thing down!?
This week, Reddit figured this out — and they declared war. A GameStop short squeeze may be the first battle, but this war only ends with a squeeze on the U.S. Dollar.
Citizens of the U.S. are fighting back against a globally financial superpower the only they know how: through the financial system. And things are going to have to get a lot worse before they show signs of ever getting better.
