Erich Vieth

Trial Attorney & Founder of where I connect events of the day to our abilities and limitations as human animals.

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

@pauldrossi @Hebro_Steele @christopherrufo @L0m3z @ItIsHoeMath Thank you for this!

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

Why have so many of our institutions have become so dysfunctional? Further, many of them have become Orwellian, which you can see when you compare their official mission statements with what they actually do. Dylan Ratigan offers this thoughtful analysis.

[Dylan Ratigan @DylanRatigan]

The Billionaires Are Not Victims

One of the great distortions in American political discourse is the idea that populist anger emerges from nowhere — as if millions of people simultaneously became irrational, tribal, or extreme for no reason at all.

I don’t believe that.

I think what we are witnessing across the United States — on both the political right and the political left — is the consequence of a society that increasingly understands, correctly, that its governing institutions are not primarily organized around the public interest.

They are organized around capital concentration.

And until that changes, populism will continue to grow.

Not because people are stupid.

Because people are responding rationally to a system that no longer appears accountable to them.

The immediate conversation that triggered this thought involved the reaction among certain elite circles to the rise of populist political figures and movements in places like New York.

Particularly interesting to me is the tendency among wealthy institutional actors to portray themselves as victims of instability while simultaneously benefiting from — and often helping design — the very incentive structures producing that instability.

Take the billionaire class broadly.

Modern capital is effectively transnational.

It is mobile.
Portable.
Adaptive.

It can move to Miami.
Singapore.
London.
Dubai.

It experiences countries less as civic projects and more as operating environments.

That is not a moral accusation.
It is a structural observation.

The wealthiest people in the world are no longer deeply tethered to the fate of any single municipality, state, or even nation in the way prior industrial elites once were.

Their relationship to place has changed.

And that shift matters politically.

Meanwhile, ordinary citizens remain highly localized.

Their wages are local.
Their housing costs are local.
Their schools are local.
Their hospitals are local.
Their physical safety is local.

They cannot arbitrage geography the way capital can.

So when people feel economic pressure, institutional distrust, or cultural instability, they experience it directly and personally.

And eventually they begin voting against the system itself.

This is where I think many establishment analysts misunderstand modern populism.

The people voting for populist candidates on the right and the people voting for populist candidates on the left are often responding to the same underlying sensation:

That the system is not designed for them anymore.

The language differs.
The aesthetics differ.
The villains differ.

But the emotional root is remarkably similar.

Distrust.
Dislocation.
Extraction.
Humiliation.
Powerlessness.

This is why attempts to reduce everything to “left versus right” increasingly feel inadequate.

The deeper divide may actually be between:

Those who still believe institutions fundamentally serve the public…

and those who believe institutions have become mechanisms for elite coordination and asset protection.

That is a very different political framework.

And once people adopt that framework, traditional partisan messaging begins to lose effectiveness.

None of this means billionaires are evil.

It does not mean markets are bad.
It does not mean success itself is illegitimate.

It means incentives matter.

And if both political parties become financially dependent on the same narrow concentration of capital, the public will inevitably conclude — correctly or incorrectly — that meaningful accountability has disappeared.

When accountability disappears, populism fills the vacuum.

Always.

The irony is that many elite institutions now seem genuinely surprised by the instability surrounding them.

But instability is not random.

A society optimized primarily for asset appreciation and capital mobility while neglecting civic durability, public trust, and broad-based economic participation will eventually produce political volatility.

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

@bhalligan In every human system, truth functions much like fitness does in natural selection. Whenever kind falsehoods are given priority over truth, the system will degrade.

[Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi]

Making readers jump through hoops to find the full quote or original source document is a gross new propaganda technique.

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

@SharylAttkisson Bagels

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

Topology in its purest form: seemingly inescapable knots around wrists, cables, and legs dissolve through a single continuous deformation.

Just the quiet power of knot theory proving our 3D intuition is often a liar.

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

Translation Tip: Whenever a politician or corporate media tells you “X,” translate it to this: Super-rich people who lurk in the shadows demanded that we tell you “X” and we usually obey them even if “X” is false or there is no evidence of “X.”

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

Jeffrey Sachs: "Trump's entire framework is completely phony and it's completely phony because Iran did not want nuclear weapons. They signed an agreement that there would not be nuclear weapons and then Trump ripped it up. Now, why did he rip it up in 2018 and why was there a standing ovation in Congress? Because this is Israel's policy, because Congress and the White House are owned by radical, militant, crazy Zionists in Israel, Bibi, Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, who want a war with Iran, and Trump is a puppet here. He does not have an independent capacity. Maybe he's not bright enough. Maybe he's blackmailed. We don't understand entirely, but the standing ovation reflects the Zionist lobby in the United States. This is Israel's war, and like so many of America's wars, they're trying to bring us into their fight, which is not our fight, when I say so many of our wars, the United States has been drawn by Israel into the wars in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, across the Middle East. These are not wars for American security. They're not even wars for Israel's security. They're wars for Israel's hegemony in the region. They're wars by Israel to take out any opponent in the region or any counterweight in the region. So the United States tasked the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government. That was Obama that started that one. Trump continued it. Trump even said, I put the current leader of Syria into power. Yeah, that's a CIA operation. It was Israel that got the United States to go to war with Libya in 2011 leading to the next 15 years of chaos in that country. It is Israel that got the United States into the Iraq war in 2003. This is all so thoroughly documented at this point that that was not a war under mistaken pretenses of weapons of mass destruction. That was a PR campaign to justify Bibi's war.

And the reason why it's most likely that Trump will attack is the following: The American people don't want it. The Iranians have said they don't want nuclear weapons. The regional leaders have said, Don't go to war. Other leaders around the world, President Putin, President Xi and others have told the United States that is a terrible idea. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have told Trump this is a terrible idea. Trump's political advisers have told Trump this is disastrous because the American people don't want this. But that's all on one side. The other side is Bibi, is Israel, is Miriam Adelson, who else? We don't know exactly why, but this is the point. Trump is being overwhelmingly advised by everybody, by his military, by leaders in the region, by his political advisors, and not the least by the American people: don't do this. But it's so strange and discouraging. There isn't an honest word that comes out of Washington because of this Zionist lobby right now. And there is was no coverage whatsoever, by the way that when Rubio said a couple of weeks ago, look, we need a broad-based negotiation, and the Iranians said two days later in a speech in Doha by the foreign minister, yes, here's a path to peace, The two state solution, a state of Palestine, Israel, mutual respect, peace. That wasn't even picked up in our newspapers. [We] are subject to mass propaganda. And Trump lied every word that we just watched, and the Congress stood up and applauded him. But that's for a reason. That is the chokehold on American politics that this Zionist lobby has right now. And we need to break that chokehold for our own security."

[Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil @ivan_8848]

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Negotiation or Escalation? Trump’s Iran Crossroads

Congress and the White House are owned by radical, militant, crazy Zionists

In Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, who want a war with Iran.

Trump is a puppet.

Trump lied every word that we just watched, and the Congress stood up and applauded him, but that's for a reason.
That is the chokehold on American politics that this Zionist lobby has right now, and we need to break that chokehold for our own security.

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

@peterbakernyt Maybe Trump should ask Netanyahu to explain this contradiction to the US public.

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

@walterkirn In other words, we can't trust people to think for themselves.

[Sayer Ji @sayerjigmi]

This article took 5 years to write. It may be the most important thing I’ve ever published.

The evidentiary chain documented within has profound implications for national security, the viability of our Constitution, and the current US-UK special relationship. I believe congressional investigators, diplomatic channels, and lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic will want to apprise themselves of this information.

One thing is certain: if it weren’t for the coordinated effort to destroy our voices, @SecKennedy would not be a cabinet member today. That campaign backfired — catastrophically — and this is the moment of full revelation.

The international censorship apparatus has every reason to keep you from reading this.
Please don’t let them win. Read and share widely.

👉 https://t.co/QKU1S3yyOT

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

Brandolini's Law, applied to everything. "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

"Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain."

— Thomas Sowell

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

Chris Hedges offers a history lesson: "The U.S. and Israel foolishly believe they can bomb their way to decapitating the Iranian government and installing a client regime. That this non-reality-based belief system failed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya eludes them." https://t.co/sULLjVMtha

[Jay Nordlinger @jaynordlinger]

Historians may conclude that Americans simply got bored with freedom, stability, and prosperity -- the fruits of ordered liberty -- and said, "Let's just burn the whole thing down." An act of national and historic vandalism.

[Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi]

How Politicians Smear The World, Vol. 1: The Contract

As the scandal involving British spying on journalists deepens, we're learning more about connections to earlier scandals in the U.S. and beyond. Part One in a Series
https://t.co/9JjBV62O1Z

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

@walterkirn Agreed. https://t.co/buvjaQKxX1

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

The recent Epstein document drop proves that we know only 1% of what is really going on in DC. That is how the system is designed. https://t.co/buvjaQKxX1

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

@Glenn_Diesen Grok says this translation is not accurate. https://t.co/HA4sxNs5bw

[Erich Vieth @erichvieth]

@RealSLokhova Real investigations would require investigators of the investigators bc no empowered entity seems untouched by Epstein's fractal network. Investigations of Epstein today fail because he was an avatar for a vast tangled system of enabling politicians, billionaires and banks.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Recorded back in the 1960s, John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) made an excellent satirical commentary exposing the friend-enemy distinction as being at the heart of both far-left and rar-right extremism, inter alia, including its psychological appeal.