“GameStop, a company that sells physical copies of video games next to Auntie Anne’s pretzel shops in dying malls, is the most highly traded asset in the United States… Essentially, many normal-ish people have made a huge bet against gigantic financial institutions and are currently winning.” — Vice, 1/27/21

“Amateur investors, perhaps propelled by a mix of greed and boredom, are looking to teach Wall Street a lesson. They’ve come together on a popular Reddit page, Wall Street Bets, to push the stock of companies like GameStop — up 1,700% — to outrageous highs.” — The New York Times, on Twitter, 1/27/21

The GameStop saga is one of the most fascinating events in a long time. The elites are bent out of shape that a bunch of ordinary users figured out how to make themselves wealthy — using the elites’ rules against them.

I watched closely as this unfolded at the end of January. The best way to explain it is that what you see going on in politics with the Washington establishment, the Deep State, is going on in finance. There are those who are allowed to make the money and those of you who aren’t. And if you figure out how to make a lot of money — or, if you’re like Donald Trump and you figure out how to beat the Deep State and get elected — they’re going to come after you to wipe you out.

That’s what happened with GameStop. A bunch of people on the rollicking discussion website Reddit figured out how to game the investment system and turn it into a profit-making mechanism for themselves. In the process, they began harming the predestined financial winners: the hedge funds. And the establishment swung into action.

So it’s not just politics. Now the elites aren’t just calling us racists, sexists, bigots, homophobes, etc., to try to shame us in order to control us. The name-calling now extends to “amateur investors” driven by “greed,” as noted by The New York Times. Nathaniel Weixel, reporter for The Hill, tweeted about “the overlap between the [Wall Street Bets] people and the Nazis … who stormed the Capitol.” nbc News reporter Ben Collins smeared the GameStop stock buyers as “alt-right weirdos” and “unsavory idiots” with “Nazi hangers-on.” The [UK] Financial Times characterized GameStop purchasers as a “flash mob,” and Bloomberg News called them “a stock market insurrection.”

The message from the financial establishment is clear: you’re not allowed to use the stock market the way we do. You’re not allowed to coordinate to realize large profits. You’re not allowed to make the kind of money we make. The elites maintain these benefits for the elites.

And people know it. “With small-trader enthusiasm for GameStop roiling the stock market,” according to Rasmussen Reports on 2/2/21, “a new … survey finds that 66 percent of likely U.S. voters believe Wall Street insiders manipulate the stock market to their own advantage. Only 13 percent of voters disagree, while 22 percent say they’re not sure.” So almost 90 percent of Americans think the stock market is, or may well be, rigged by the elites. Sounds like a consensus to me.

Being an elite, a member of the establishment, carries many perks, including the ability to guarantee yourself and your kids a cushy financial future, the ability to guarantee yourself a position of some power, depending on who you are in the club of elites.

This extends to far more than just the political world, which this GameStop business makes understandable. That is its value. It’s an enormous teachable moment. It demonstrates that everything is rigged in favor of the elites; GameStop came along and upset that rigging. In matters of politics, you are not permitted to think for yourself on issues. If your speech, your attitude doesn’t benefit the establishment, it has to be censored, canceled, silenced. Well, now with this GameStop story, the same elites who were hell-bent on getting rid of Donald Trump are now trying to tell you what you can and can’t do with your money.

And here’s the rub, folks. According to Vice, with the GameStop stock runup “we are seeing one of the largest wealth transfers from the financial ruling class to the middle and middle-upper classes in recent memory.” But it has not been authorized, you see. This was never supposed to happen. Some “normal-ish” people figured out how to earn a hell of a lot of money using the establishment’s own methods against them, short-squeezing and short-selling.

It all started last year when some random guys on the Wall Street Bets message board discovered that there was massive short-selling of GameStop by hedge funds. Short-selling is betting on the stock price to go down. But you can’t just paper-bet that it will go down; in a short sell you have to put up the money to back up your short. The cash leaves your back pocket. The funds leave your account. So these hedge funds were betting huge on GameStop losing value.

But these random guys who discovered this massive short-selling had fond feelings for GameStop stores. They were angry that the hedge fund elites had basically conspired to kill off a company they liked. But here’s the thing about short-selling: when you discover it, you can thwart it — by betting on the stock price to go up. So the random guys started to buy GameStop stock. And that raised the price. Enough of them bought the stock that it started going way up.

As this was happening, these “normal-ish” guys saw the power they had. They saw they were forcing the hedge funds into a situation where they would not be able to cover their short positions. As they kept buying, the stock skyrocketed. It eventually hit a peak of $482.25 on Jan. 28 — up from $2.57 last April. When people selling short do not have the money to cover what they are betting will happen, it’s called a short-squeeze.

So at this point the squeezed hedge funds were panicking. They went to the media, “These are alt-right guys who are not playing fair.” They characterized them as a bunch of renegades doing damage — exactly what they say about conservatives in the realm of politics, that they’re unfair, stupid, dangerous extremists who’ve got to be silenced. But the motive here was to avoid their own enormous financial losses. According to Reuters, 1/28/21:

Short-sellers are sitting on estimated losses of $70.87 billion from their short positions in U.S. companies so far this year, data from financial data analytics firm Ortex showed on Thursday. The hefty losses come as shares of highly-shorted GameStop jumped more than 1,000 percent in the past week without a clear business reason, forcing short-sellers to buy back into the stock to cover potential losses — defined as a short-squeeze — while retail investors then piled in to benefit from the surge. Chasing shorted companies became a trend among retail traders, rippling across U.S. markets and Europe.

Seventy freaking billion dollars. It got to the point that the hedge funds needed bailouts by other hedge funds, and as their bad bets rippled through the markets, the elites started demanding the government step in. Massachusetts’s top financial regulator William Galvin told Barron’s that the dire situation “calls upon the regulators … to consider simply suspending it [GameStop] for a month and stop trading it.”

And, lo and behold, Robinhood, the commission-free investing website where a lot of these “normal-ish” people were buying stock, shut down trading of GameStop. Just like Big Tech shut down Parler, just like the elites shut down any other conservative attempt at free speech on the internet, so did Big Hedge Fund shut down the GameStop action. The New York Post reported that a server associated with Wall Street Bets was pulled for continuing to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings. The server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation.”

Sound familiar? So they accused people buying stock of the same things they accuse you of on social media: you’re engaging in hate speech. You’re glorifying violence. You’re spreading misinformation.

It’s identical. And it’s important for you to understand that these GameStop buyers did nothing wrong or illegal. They played the same game that hedge fund managers play every day to make a lot of rich people even richer. But that’s not permissible for non-elites. So the markets throttled GameStop trades.

The teachable moment here is how the censorship we conservatives experience from the tech oligarchs is not limited to politics. It’s not limited to who you vote for. No, it extends to how much you’re not permitted to earn. If you find a way within the system they run to earn big money and cause them to lose it, oh, are they going to come after you. For driving the stock price up, which is fair and legal, these guys will be punished, shut down, maligned, called racists, bigots, and extremists engaging in hate speech — because that’s how to shame people to shut them up.

On 2/12/21, cnet, revealed that “at least two government agencies [doj and cftc] are reportedly investigating why” GameStop’s stock price “shot through the roof in late January thanks to traders on Reddit … as well as what roles Reddit and trading app Robinhood played in the stock market craziness.” And right on cue, Rep. Maxine Waters (D, CA) convened hearings (2/18/21) to investigate the GameStop scandal. Because she’s going to rein in the “predatory conduct” of hedge funds. It will never happen, folks. Don’t forget, her husband was a director of a bank that got $12.1 million during the tarp bailout, a capital injection that no similar bank got, all because he was Mr. Maxine Waters. Members in good standing of the elite club.

And speaking of the Swamp, Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen received $810,000 in “speaking fees” from the hedge funds that bailed out one of the primary losers in the GameStop gambit, according to The Federalist. When asked if Yellen would recuse herself from any investigation involving GameStop, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki punted, calling Yellen “one of the world-renowned experts on markets, on the economy, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone she was paid to give her perspective and advice.” Amazing.

As soon as I gave this elites-versus-non-elites analysis on the air, the media immediately objected, “No, there’s nothing to this political comparison Limbaugh’s making. You can’t look at it that way. There’s no political similarity.” That’s how you know I nailed it. And it’s why GameStop’s motto, “power to the players,” is very fitting. Power to the people.

Illustration ©2021 Alamy