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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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