I see a lot of people worried about how old the leading presidential candidates from both parties will be if elected in two years. Those concerns are fair. Biden is already eighty and Trump is seventy-six. The bench is thin and dwindles with each misstep or unsavory label. We’re probably stuck with an octogenarian election cycle. But that’s someone else’s problem. I have a much bigger age problem on my hands. I would go so far as to call it existential for a whole swath of the electorate. You see George Soros is now ninety-two years old. He probably has what, maybe a few years left if we’re lucky? Which means I have to find a suitable alternative boogeyman as quickly as possible.
Not that I’m complaining or anything. I’m honored to have been selected for this prestigious, albeit unofficial role, working towards an important American goal. I was a little surprised when the job was offered to me. My grandfather served in intelligence, then worked his way up to cabinet secretary before retiring to serve on a few boards in the private sector, where he started to develop a nice fortune that still bears fruit today. My father followed in his footsteps, somewhat. He was in the Army reserves, then went the prestigious law school route – Supreme Court clerkship, corporate law firm partner, rainmaking donor.
My career is just getting started. I finished an undergrad degree a few months ago and now I’m taking a one year sabbatical in the private sector while I work on my law school applications and “build relationships.” So when the joint American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, and Americans for Prosperity – the AEIHFFSAP for short – reached out I can only assume it was because of my bourgeoning resume and the fact that I’m a Gen Zer who has grown up in the political world. It’s amazing how much you learn just existing within it. But that’s a story for another day.
At AEIHFFSAP we work out of a literal bunker. Every morning me and my staff of fifteen – hand chosen by me of course – walk into a Walmart in suburban Virginia in our freshly laundered suits where we enter our bunker through a trap door in the vegan foods department. I chose the location for a reason. We want to be as close to the average American as possible, study their habits, internalize their needs. Walmart’s don’t usually have vegan foods departments, and neither does this one, really. We created a department that would get absolutely no foot traffic. The last thing we need is someone seeing my people disappear through a secret door. It would raise “pizzagate” level conspiracy theories. Though now that I think of it, it’s not the worst idea. Maybe having the mainstream media chase us down a rabbit hole, if you will, can help us somehow. I’m not sure how. I’ll have to think about it.
Down in the bunker the work follows a pretty reasonable pace and we’ve kind of gelled into a well oiled machine. In the morning we gather in the main conference room and review high level stats from the previous day on all the Soros replacement ideas we’re currently floating in the marketplace. Nothing is really popping yet to be honest. Nothing with the pull of that one name, but that takes time. I’d settle for some basic lighthearted vitriol on social media to get the tide of fake narratives flowing. Most of the trial balloons we send out fizzle our pretty quickly, and that’s with support from all the PR muscle AEIHFFSAP can collectively pool together to push whatever we want, not to mention sympathetic people and organizations with even more power. I’m sure you can guess what media company I’m referring to, though we of course have no official front channel or back channel relationship with any news organization. That needs to be clear.
After lunch we usually gather in the conference room again to brainstorm new ideas. We throw whatever comes to mind up on the white board, debate the particulars, then cull the list down to a few that will get tested over the course of the evening. Some of our tests can run for weeks or months, others die in a day or two, if the proverbial men upstairs don’t like them, and won’t lend them any official support through unofficial channels. The choice stuff goes through focus groups and that kind of thing for more scientific measures of impact on that national conversation. My hope is that one day whatever we put out comes back to us, but magnified and on steroids. It’s a dream scenario.
So you’re probably curious what all that means in practice right? You want to know what actual ideas are borne in this little laboratory of ours. I’m always reluctant to let my favorite cats out of their bag, but what the hell. Nobody reads this liberal rag anyway.
My current favorite is two sides of the same coin kind of deal. Whenever Soros dies we’ll go on insinuating that he’s still alive and funding every liberal project and conspiracy imaginable. We think that could be possible until he reaches an age of something like one hundred and five. After that our statisticians think it will lose its luster. The other side of that is to insinuate that he’s already dead and doing his liberal puppeteering from the grave through an act of wizardry, which admittedly isn’t much of a leap from what he is already associated with online. That one is tricky for obvious reasons, but doable we think. What else? Here are some others that have had success and could be winners, in no particular order:
- We designate a leader of Antifa with full bio of elite upbringing, foreign sounding name, fabulous wealth, and detestable liberal values.
- We rekindle the Obama Kenya thing, but this time he’s also the de-facto leader of a pan-African cabal. That one has the potential for universe creation, the holy grail, really. It requires Marvel, DC level world building.
- AOC becomes the stand-in for Soros, but we haven’t figured out how to make her secretly wealthy to fund liberal causes and be a prominent voice. It’s tricky.
- We divide up the boogeyman duties among various Hollywood types who champion woke causes until one naturally emerges as a leader.
Now that I’ve written all of that out I realize it isn’t much. Soros is such a perfect foil because nobody could pick him out of a lineup or even tell you what he does for work, yet the name itself elicits such a strong negative reaction. It’s like wokeness or CRT, right? Someone has to keep the train of meaningless things to hate on the tracks and sometimes I fear I’m not up to the task. Whenever I get down I just remind myself that I was born to save the country, just like my father and grandfather did before me.
GLAZ 