Did you know there's a "vibe shift" underway, and it has grown to encompass the entire world?
It's true. When you hear something that surprises or shocks you (Trudeau visits Trump or Zuckerberg contributes to Trump's inauguration), ask yourself, "Would this have happened a year ago?"
Santiago Pliego, an influencer, wrote earlier this year, "Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition."
The losers in this vibe shift? The gender nazis, the race hustlers, the "Diversity, equity, and inclusion" mafia, and everyone else who lives by the idea that life is a mirage that we can arbitrarily change its outline when it suits us.
I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled.
Pliego explained what this vibe shift was all about.
The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete.
The Vibe Shift is a healthy suspicion of credentialism and a return to human judgment.
The Vibe Shift is living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth—whatever the cost.
Trump didn't start the vibe shift, but he certainly benefitted from it. His election set off a chain reaction of sometimes shocking but mostly encouraging events breathtaking in their implications for the future.
I've been reading Niall Ferguson since his book "Virtual History" changed my big-picture view of history 25 years ago. He claims in his article in the Free Press that one aspect of the shift was the extraordinarily rapid way the vibe shift became a global phenomenon. Following Trump's election on November 5, consider what happened in the world.
The German government imploded, the French government fell, the South Korean government is teetering and may fall within hours, and Syria collapsed. Russian President Vladimir Putin woke up and realized Trump wasn't going to simply hand him Ukraine. Russia's current offensive in Ukraine has picked up in intensity as Putin tries to grab all the territory he can before Trump takes office.
"Meanwhile, the Russian currency weakens, China slides deeper into deflation, and Iran’s economy reels," writes Ferguson. On the plus side, Bitcoin is up, stocks rally, the dollar rallies, and Tesla rallies.
Not a bad six weeks, eh?
It's the vibe, man.
If the vibe shift in culture is about founder mode versus diversity, equity, and inclusion committees, the global vibe shift is about peace through strength versus chaos through de-escalation. It’s Daddy’s Home—not the fraying liberal international order.
“It must be nice, it must be nice,” sang Lin-Manuel Miranda, “to have Washington on your side.” It must be nice to have Trump, too. The Argentine president, Javier Milei—a radical libertarian who has taken a chainsaw to the bloated bureaucracy of Buenos Aires—is one of the lucky few foreign leaders on whom Trump smiles. The global vibe shift is very good for Milei because in many ways, he started it. A year ago, at Davos, he was treated as a kind of Mad Hatter. Now he’s in the Palm Beach Rat Pack, right next to Don and Elon. If Milei needs more help from the International Monetary Fund, he’ll get it.
The jury is still out on Javier Milei's "experiment." He's getting a lot of people angry at him, and considering that he rules a country with a history of military coups (seven in the 20th century alone), it's hard to say how long he can last.
But he is making fundamental changes that if allowed to continue, will transform the country. Internationally, he's become something of a rock star. The vibe is shifting.
Perhaps nowhere has the vibe been more strongly felt than in the Middle East. The fall of Syria is having extraordinary consequences on the power arrangements in the region that few would have thought possible even a year ago.
Biden wants us to think it's his doing.
“For years the main backers of Assad have been Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, but over the last week their support collapsed, all three of them because all three of them are far weaker today than they were when I took office,” he said on Sunday.
I assure you, Joe, you had absolutely nothing to do with Assad's fall, and your incompetence probably delayed his exit for a couple of years.
Trump took the opportunity of Assad's fall to look for peace in Ukraine.
"Assad is gone. He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer," he said. "There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever. Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success. . . . There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. . . . I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!"
The usual purveyors of banal commentary want to hail Assad’s fall as a victory for democracy over tyranny. But no one should delude themselves about what has just happened in Syria. It’s not the wind of freedom that is blowing through the streets of Damascus because, as is so often the case in the Arab world, the people who overthrew Assad are radical Islamists. Op-eds about a new morning in Damascus seem like they were written in 2011. They completely miss the vibe shift.
The reality is that we are witnessing the complete and total unraveling of the disastrous foreign policy that began under Obama and was picked up again by Biden, the perverse effect of which was to strengthen both Iran and Russia.
"I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me," said Abraham Lincoln. Like Trump, Lincoln was also riding a shifting vibe. He knew he couldn't control it. He only hoped to influence it.
The vibe shift will bring great change. It could also destroy us. The world is in upheaval, and no one can say how it will all shake out in the end.
