Instapundit on the horror that is Michael Bloomberg

I think it's safe to say that Michael Bloomberg can no longer be laughed at and dismissed. I think a lot of people who had been laughing are now sitting up, taking notice, and in some cases, reacting with dawning horror—yours truly included. One of the points Tim Pool made in his video (see this post) was that Donald Trump only partially self-funded his relatively shoestring-budget campaign (a third or a fourth of what Hillary Clinton spent, and focusing on free media like YouTube and Twitter); most of his funds came through honest grass-roots efforts. Bloomberg, by contrast, is an order of magnitude richer than Trump and appears to be entirely self-funding his current efforts. Pool complains—and I agree—that we really ought to have instituted strict campaign-finance reforms long before now to stop exactly this sort of thing from happening. But it's too late: we now have a megalomaniacal midget-juggernaut who thinks he can $$$ his way to the brass ring.

They say that, if you're encountering flak, you must be close to the target. It's a measure of how prominent and dangerous Bloomberg has become that the slings and arrows are now, at long last, starting to appear. Here are a few good ones that I saw on Instapundit:

Mike Bloomberg says farmers aren't smart enough to code. (from this entry)

Bloomberg Caught On Tape Saying the Elderly Should Be Denied Medical Care Because of Cost Overruns. (from this entry)

Bloomberg says many ‘black and Latino males’ don’t ‘know how to behave in the workplace,’ in newly uncovered 2011 video. (from this entry)

Michael Bloomberg Built a $54 Billion Company That Women Who Work There Call A Toxic, Sexually Charged Nightmare For Women. (from this entry)

Let me put this in perspective: I'm pretty sure that, even if Michael Bloomberg ends up as the Democrat front-runner, Trump will win reelection. But Bloomberg represents a sinister swing of Foucault's Pendulum: how many more oscillations before someone really does buy his way into the Oval Office? (Granted: if you're a liberal divorced from the facts, you're probably saying this about Trump already...)

Every election cycle, my own stupidity, general lack of awareness, and inability to read trends get thrown back at me. In 2016, I dismissed Trump, thinking him a vain idiot and a joke—unserious, too dumb to understand how Washington works, and ill-equipped to run a country. I learned my lesson. Now, in 2020, Michael Bloomberg has come along to show me that I've still got blind spots to spare. I obviously have a lot to learn about politics and people, even as old as I am. Bloomberg, as former mayor of New York City, barely registered on my consciousness back in the day. I don't think I even remember him for his stop-and-frisk policies; if anything, I associate him with a micromanaging nanny-statism through which he tried to regulate New Yorkers' salt and sugar intake by slapping rules on what stores and restaurants could sell to normal citizens. "It's for your own good" is a sure sign that a given policy is liberal. Well, like everyone else, I'll be studying up on Bloomberg from here on in.

CODA: I'm not the only one with a blind spot. Even a sharp prognosticator like Styx can be wrong. Look at this older video in which Styx is initially dismissive about Bloomberg:

Now look at this more recent video in which Styx takes Bloomberg more seriously:


Even Styx gets things wrong once in a while.

ADDENDUM: a few years back, I guess I did have some intuition about Bloomberg when I created the following animated GIF: