From Vox Day Ben Shapiro hates middle class America
and the related tweet
If Blackrock is willing to take the risk of leveraging up to buy single-family housing at above-market prices, that their prerogative. So long as they own the downside risk. No bailouts. Ever.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 10, 2021
The homes are going to continue to be bought up, like it or not. Prices will keep going up too in these handful of desirable urban and suburban regions. There is simply too much demand and not enough supply, even without Blackrock, for housing to ever be affordable in such regions. This forces people to move outward, away from where the decent-paying jobs are, meaning long commutes.
The problem that Vox, RamZ, and others face is that they are fighting the current, and their efforts have been ineffective at lessening the popularity of Jordan Peterson, Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, and the like. Tweets by the aforementioned individuals get thousands of likes and retweets, indicative of significant engagement and popularity. Even if some of the comments are critical, as we see with the aforementioned Ben Shapiro tweet, The Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro are still huge, successful brands. What seems so self-evident and obvious to Vox and his followers, does not propagate outside of the confines of his blog and its readers.
Shapiro being anti-Trump means nothing anyway because it’s not like being pro-Trump is any different as far as policy or outcomes is concerned; it’s just that Trump does a better job signaling that he supports the middle class, not that he actually does. Bannon recently said on his radio show that he supported higher taxes on the very rich and excoriated the ultra-wealthy elite. Trump heeded Bannon and pushed for higher taxes; of course, taxes for the wealthy went lower.
Ben Shapiro is popular in part because he is successful in his personal life and in business, projects confidence, and is high status, and the views he espouses also confer status. People are attracted to individuals who exude these qualities, in the hope that such qualities will rub off on whoever adopts them. ‘Facts don’t care about your feelings’ and other popular aphorisms are lingua franca of the socially-acceptable transgressor. Same or the huge popularity of Michael Knowles, Dan Crenshaw, and others. Not only is there a large audience and a lot of revenue, but there is also significant overlap between them in terms of followers because they promote each other. For the alt/dissident-right to become more popular means it has to become more socially acceptable and confer status, which is circular or a catch-22, but I don’t see any other way.
It’s possible that home prices are going up because wealthier whites (liberal, conservative or green) are being herded into smaller and more desirable locations in order to escape diversitopia. It’s a kind of compound effect. The upper 5% in Rest of the World countries (ROW) have guards, walls, 5-star hotel restaurants, etc. As a harbinger, Nancy Pelosi wants a permanent wall around the Capitol.
The big problem with ROW countries (like China) concerning competition is that there’s no feedback loop. The employees are more like serfs and the mandarins don’t listen to them concerning real problems. In the West, employees (and possibly Boards) and government bureaucrats are more likely to damage competitiveness in order to achieve diversity, inclusion and equity; things that are irrelevant and even harmful to the bottom line.