by Sean Jobst
25 August 2024
I previously applied a dialectic where the thesis was Biden's humiliation and antithesis the attempted assassination of Trump. While there are many strange factors in that event, the sudden coronation of Kamala Harris now reveals more than just one antithesis. Regicide need not be a physical killing, whether it be Biden's symbolic or Trump's attempted regicide. We can consider the Arthurian legend of a Fisher King who is wounded and senile, rendering his kingdom a wasteland. He can only be replaced by a “pure” one who goes on a “quest” to save the kingdom. This is exactly how the media has anointed Harris – a messianic yearning for the latest “savior”; messiah itself means “anointed”. Her reputation is “pure” and unblemished according to an uncritical media which tolerates not even the slightest criticism of her; the “quest” is her carefully recreated life story turned into one of selfless service to the nation.
They distort archetypal myths of the individual's spirit and journey, into a wholly material quest for authority since they are bound by their own narcissistic and psychopathic lack of true personality and depth. While they act out through rituals, they overplay their hands so are often forced to walk back some of their plans. For example, with the lockdowns and other Rona hysteria. Yet we can make sense of their objectives by knowing that they are bound by their messianic sense of themselves, and adding rituals and symbolisms to their actions since they know these could be more effective. The messianic impulse is embedded in recent American political discourse, certainly blatantly with this current regime.
In 2020, TIME magazine named Biden and Harris as “Person of the Year”, complete with a glowing cover picture of the two as one. Naming their issue "Biden Our Time" as if to compare him with Kronos, the socialist magazine Jacobin greeted Biden's administration with a messianic cover showing a deified Biden surrounded by a four-tiered hierarchy: the three archangels Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton; lesser angels Fauci, Pelosi and Schumer; still-angelic journalists; and a diverse collection of common people wearing masks (unlike the other tiers with their Rona hypocrisy of those pushing policies on the masses they didn't follow themselves) and lacking the halos of the other tiers, at the bottom.
Alongside building up Biden was astroturfing Kamala Harris as his anointed successor. In their joint CNN interview in Dec. 2020, Biden said to a diabolically-smiling Kamala: “If I reach something where there's a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I will develop some disease and say I have to resign." In two separate speeches promoting the jab, he referred to “President Harris”. Biden's handlers carefully managed his public appearances, as admitted by his first press secretary in May 2021. They dragged his marionette strings down along with the country in a perverse ritual. The same media that turned on Biden out of expediency, praises his “selfless service” to protect his “legacy” now that the sacrifice is over – and palace coup successful. There’s no honor among thieves.
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| Donations flowing to the Scapegoat billionaire, while political prisoners languish in jails and dungeons of the Surveillance State |
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| Trump and Zucker, symbionts who made each other |
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| Quite accurate, although I would reverse the roles |
Taking over the helm of CNN in 2013, Zucker found a network with slumping ratings due to rising competitors and evolving technologies increasingly rendering it irrelevant. Trump was one of those who recommended Zucker for the job to Turner Broadcasting System’s chief executive, Phil Kent. Zucker’s unique approach as CNN President was modeling the network after sport broadcasts, on the grounds that “politics is sport”: “Trump, the trash-talking underdog who inspired raw feelings among supporters and detractors alike, was the ideal subject for this narrative framework.” This included “the procession of made-for-TV events – the always news-making interviews; rallies and debates — that helped turn Trump into the Republican front-runner.”
“And as it turns out, the only thing better than having Trump on your network is having him attack it. Far from hurting CNN, Trump’s war against it has amounted to a form of product placement, giving its anchors and correspondents starring roles in the ongoing political drama. It has also been good for business. Last year [2016], CNN’s average daytime audience was up more than 50%, and its prime-time audience 70%. The network earned nearly $1 billion; it was the most profitable year in CNN’s history. Ratings are up again this year, which is expected to be more profitable still.”
CNN was crucial in propelling Trump to the top of the Republican primary race, giving him far more coverage than all his opponents. They were setting up the election as a dialectic between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Even Cambridge Analytica – the svengali of liberal and leftist outlets – shifted its initial support away from Ted Cruz, to Trump after he rode the mainstream network news wave. At the height of Trump’s public campaign rhetoric against the media, Zucker flattered him as “the boss” and said without hesitation: “I have no regrets about the part that I played in his career.” The media continued to benefit throughout Trump’s presidency. CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News all saw their ratings rise 72% in 2019. That same year, Jacobin benefited from a threefold jump in its subscription rates.
The media has only benefited from the ongoing lawfare against Trump, with more ratings for all the networks, but especially MSNBC which has positioned itself as the most anti-Trump network. Another beneficiary in this symbiosis is Trump himself, who told Variety New York bureau chief, Ramin Satoodeh: "It’s all about one thing: ratings. If you have ratings, you can be the meanest, most horrible human being in the world. There’s only one thing that matters: ratings. You can be nice or you can be mean. You can be evil. You can be horrible. You can be crude or elegant. There’s only one thing that matters, and that’s ratings. If you don’t have ratings, it doesn’t matter." Reflecting back to them the nature of this symbiosis, he fits the convenient role of the Scapegoat and Shadow Projection of his media creators.
Another insider evidence for how the private reality contradicted the public face, is the article “Trump’s Fake War on the Fake News”. It details a cozy relationship between Trump’s White House and the press corps behind the scenes, while public rhetoric projected an apparent war between Trump and the media. Much like my own work, it evokes ritual, citing what anthropologists have observed in tribal societies such as Papua New Guinea of a “ritualized warfare” where a mock battle with insults and arrows is waged to vent emotion and advertise courage while never resulting in any casualties. Stripped down to the most primal human instinct, even in such a “progressive” society as ours can we see this with political theater. Excerpts from the article:
“Behind that theatrical assault, the Trump White House has turned into a kind of playground for the press. We interviewed more than three dozen members of the White House press corps, along with White House staff and outside allies, about the first whirlwind weeks of Trump’s presidency. Rather than a historically toxic relationship, they described a historic gap between the public perception and the private reality.”
“When he is not fulminating on stage or on Twitter, the president himself has mustered a number of cordial interactions with reporters since taking office, often showing them more courtesy than he grants his own staff.”
“As much as West Wing staffers might fantasize about breaking the backs of the mainstream media, they are too divided and too obsessed with their own images to do so. And for all the frustration of covering an administration with a shaky grasp on the truth and a boss whose whims can shift from one moment to the next, reporters have feasted on the conflict and chaos. The White House is a viper’s nest of intrigue and suspicion, a place where aides wage their daily battles via the press and eagerly devour the resulting coverage each morning. The great secret of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is that Trump’s war on the media is a phony one, a reality show that keeps his supporters fired up and distracted while he woos the constituency that really matters to him: journalists.
“‘He built his career by being media-friendly. The last 18 months have been something of an aberration in his approach,’ said Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, a Trump confidant who has known the president for 20 years. ‘I’ve always said he’s just creating a negotiating position by calling the press the enemy of the people. I don’t think he believes that deep down.’”
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| - Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time, 1967 |
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| - Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951 |
The Swamp Will Never Be Drained with Politics
I saw the grift for what it was early on during the 2015 campaign, as he incorporated around him the very sort of Swamp creatures controlling Washington – Wall Street robber-barons, Neocon warmongers, and Israel-Firsters. You can never “Make America Great Again” by giving those same Establishment creatures positions of authority to continue the status quo as every other Republican and Democrat administration. My criticism of his presidency was tempered by the much-greater threat posed by the TDS hypocrisy – and I still maintain that position regarding the current prospect of a Harris/Walz administration. For Trumpism is connected to one individual and lifetime, while TDS hypocrisy exposes something more endemic within the body politic (and repressed psyche).
With the last election, I made a comprehensive critique of a Biden/Harris administration while still criticizing Trump's subservience to Zionism, connections with banksters, and enabling Fauci and the WHO’s medical tyranny. (On the last point, Kamala's VP pick, Tim Walz, is the archetypal Rona tyrant and established a snitch hotline for lockdown "violators" in Minnesota. The juvenile media is now astroturfing this weird petty-tyrant as “Dad” and a “man’s man”). I saw some glimmers of hope toward the end of Trump's presidency specifically related to foreign policy and the War Machine apparently turning against him. I identified signs of a bureaucratic coup which makes more sense in light of what I’ve since learned about the Managerial class. Everything goes back to this class issue, not fake woke distractions; and to the very nature of power dynamics occulted via the entire dialectic.
Dissident Right writer Pedro Gonzalez, assistant editor of American Greatness and Chronicles, has spoken of the Trump movement degenerating into a “MAGA, Inc.” grift. Trump tapped into the undercurrent of populism and promised to “drain the swamp” in 2016 but ended up being swayed by the Party establishment to ruling according to their orthodoxies instead of the populist rhetoric that got him elected. “By the end of his presidency, he was basically governing like Paul Ryan. That’s not how he campaigned.” Aside from entrusting those Establishment figures, he appointed and trusted the counsel of “people who would be at home either under a Bush or Obama administration.” These include various Neoliberals like his many picks from Goldman Sachs, and especially his son-in-law, Jared Kushner (who also brought links to Chabad and various media and tech oligarchs), who had a direct say over policies; or Neocons who had already been decades deep in the D.C. Swamp.
Aside from Kushner's Middle East activities overlapping into the next administration, and closely linked with his personal business interests, foreign policy was also given over to Bush-era Neocons such as Bolton and Pompeo, or revolving-door Military-Industrial-Complex generals such as Mattis, who were the very antithesis of “end endless wars” and “America First”. Nor did rhetoric match actual domestic policies, even much-touted efforts to end mass-immigration and deport illegals fell short of the reality, with even less border enforcement than his two predecessors, and included a series of “partial successes” and visa schemes of Establishment figures such as Kushner, Lindsey Graham, and Chad Wolf. Such rhetoric is more about optics than actual policy as also with the current “Border Czar”.
At the very least this indicates a poor choice of judging character – one wouldn’t have to fire someone if they weren’t hired in the first place. But seeing that conscious actions are downstream from the unconscious psyche, it also indicates Trump’s pattern of surrounding himself with various “yes-men” who have their own agendas, that what matters more to him is the psychological need of having a bruised ego massaged rather than any true commitment to an “America First” policy. We see this with the string of endorsements Trump has made of many Establishment and Neocon figures, often even over actual “MAGA” outsiders. As Gonzalez writes, “The problem with the Republican Party in the post-Trump era is that otherwise bad candidates can rehabilitate their images by pledging allegiance to the ‘MAGA agenda’—whatever that means. Candidates are weighed and measured on ‘loyalty’ to Trump rather than the substance of their political ideas.”
The myopic Trump looks too much at himself and is easily distracted by stupid social media feuds, extolling himself as the victim (which we will see more in the next article about Mimetics and the Scapegoat ritual) of lawfare, while this distracts from the thousands of political prisoners from the 6th January psyop (who were led to that honeytrap by their own naivete and an entrapment set up by the State) and others languishing in the dungeons and subject to the financial privations of the Surveillance State. The shady (to put it mildly) factors surrounding the 2020 election were exploited to rake in tens of millions, whom small-time donors had donated specifically for litigation to contest the results, but only a small fraction were actually used for that purpose, the majority instead funneled into a new PAC called “Save America” and also put at the disposal of the RNC Establishment. So it was that big-money donors enjoyed the purposes for which their donations were given, while most common donors gave for a different purpose than how the money was used.
Having actually governed one administration, any claims to be the anti-establishment outsider are redundant. The “magic was lost” from even the populist rhetoric of 2016, with a new swamp created at Mar-a-Lago that merely wants to return to the D.C. swamp. Even the recent RNC showcased such Neocon establishment figures as Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, and Mike Pompeo, who will apparently play some role or have some credence in a second Trump administration. I save the last words on this point to commentator Ryan Girdusky: “In 2016, Trump’s message to working-class Americans was, ‘You’re being screwed.’ Trump said to them, ‘You’re not part of the elites; I am, and I know how broken it is, so I can fix the system.’ Trump made immigration and trade central to his platform for that reason—because the people who are in control don’t care about these Americans. First, he views his time in office as a ‘Camelot’ period where everything was going well, and we just have to bring it all back. Second, the message went from ‘You’re being screwed’ to ‘I’m being screwed.’”
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| Alexis de Tocqueville's warning: "I know of no country where there is in general less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America." (Democracy in America, 1825) Now more prescient than ever with the DNC. |
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| War is Peace. Servitude is Freedom....Willful Ignorance and Shameless Compliance IS Joy |
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| "You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe." |
