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Bronze Age Pervert and his associated tribe love the word n*****. Amongst other things, it means that any engaged member cannot cash out their ingroup following for mainstream success. Much can be forgiven, but the sacred cows remain sacred. Yet their fondness for hate crimes is constitutively distinct from performing said hate crimes IRL. It’s an affectation, albeit an expensive one, and it help keep the clique weird and interesting and marginal.
If you’re a cool staffer in DC, pedophilia memes are a great way to distinguish between the back and front of house, like the cultural demarcation between chefs and waiters. If you’re a center left dem policy wonk, you spend most days providing obedient assistance to a public official who wields real power. But you are free from the scrutiny pointed at your boss, by and large, and you can engage in taboo violations that would utterly outrage your enemies and discomfort your boss’s base. Those taboo violations aren’t necessarily child abuse, just child abuse memes; art, fashion, jokes. You might get in trouble whenever the peasants kick up a stir, but that’s just proof that you are a debonair cosmopolitan with refined taste.
It’s quite possible that this encourages or facilitates the evils it’s poking fun at. But I’m not sure this explains more of Epstein et. al. than the simpler Mossad blackmail thesis. Powerful people are great targets to exploit, and so there are lots of people who would like favors. On the other side staffers direct a lot of attention towards deniability and message control. Bill Clinton had tons of affairs and is likely a rapist, but he’s known for one event, which occurred in the middle of his presidency. Who cares if John Podesta buys sketchy art, or Hunter Biden smokes crack? Maybe these pedo memers are terrible people, but morality is a pretty weak indicator of job competence; compare LBJ to Jimmy Carter. These days, it all boils down to sides. ‘MAGA’ was a meme aimed straight at the liberal icons, insinuating that things were at least better before the First Black President, or maybe the before all liberalism downstream of the Civil Rights act. This is a heresy, and so we get Trump derangement syndrome. Protecting Children is a similar idol to the right, and so this too triggers an auto-immune type disorder that appeals to the craziest and most engaged audience, sucking up all the oxygen from normie-type political concerns.
Two can play the interpretation game: MAGA was a meme aimed straight at the progressive left’s icons, insinuating that things were at least better before the smooth-talking radical with plot armor, or maybe before all the socialist economics bundled together with anti-racist legislation as a moral cover.
Or, in the spirit of this subthread and as argued by this account at some point, "maga" means witch in Latin, thus serving just yet another small proof about the fact that Donald Trump is the Antichrist.
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It's an interesting angle, but the owners of the abuse art (e.g. Podestas) would be best described as at the top, as opposed to staffers. Ditto for the spirit cooking type events, this is not staffers LARPing in their time off, it's their bosses. Furthermore, the memes in the Balenciaga ads were done by designers who work for themselves for their customers. The choices made there were for the benefit of the client.
That being said, I have no explanation for why elites would engage in this behaviour and then advertise it in these escape-room style random puzzle piece ways.
Podesta is at the top of the Consigliere ladder, but he’s never been elected and never will be. He might be more powerful than Joe Biden de facto but de jure he’s just another employee. This matters only in the political show, but that show is what decides who wins or loses elections. A producer or an agent is only as good as the talent they represent.
The Balenciaga thing seems to be either directly downstream of politics as straightforward trolling the normies, or as pretentious highbrow edginess to differentiate themselves from the mainstream fashion brands. Haute couture does weird stuff for the sake of weirdness, and we’re all talking about Balenciaga now instead of Louie V. Probably a pretty successful and campaign.
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Why wouldn't they? You still seem to be thinking of it from a "this is obviously evil, they must know it is evil, so why would they do that?" perspective. The parent poster already gave one motivation (it mindkills a vocal subset of their opposition); the other aspect is that making obscure references for the benefit of those who get them feels intrinsically rewarding to many people, and the art you are talking about does not actually register as evil to far more people than would be willing to even admit it on the public stage. (I'm one of those people, so feel free to question me to understand this attitude. If I actually actively liked this kind of stuff, I imagine I would also enjoy planting random references to it everywhere. Compare to the Kabbalah jokes all over SSC.)
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The Podestas are very much not the top, they don't hold the office. They are campaign managers and chiefs of staff and fund raisers not office holders. They're at/near the tip top of that totem pole, but office holders are on a whole other totem pole.
Why do you have to hold office to be "the top"? We're not exactly short on "grey eminences".
Because the President's Chief of staff is like a butler, they may manage all the other servants or manage the president's schedule like an executive secretary, but the buck stops with the President.
Putin gave the presidency over to Medvedev before declaring himself Dictator For Life, or whatever his position is, but no one pretended the buck stops with Medvedev. American officials openly admit to lying to Trump about the numbers of troops in the Middle East, because they didn't want him giving orders to pull them. This "butler" model seems completely false.
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