by Sean Jobst
18 December 2024
It has been over a month since elections here in the United States. Beyond distractions of surface-level politics, my guidance here is that politics is downstream from culture (as observed by others) – to which I add, also from the spirit and psyche. Thus, I am more focused on the how and why of the election as it mirrors internal vibe shifts within culture.
The economy,
mass-immigration, genocide in Gaza, and wokeness – these were the decisive
factors in deciding the election; in no particular order, but everything is
connected and traces of each affect us all in one way or another.
The election was a
statement of anger and punishing the Democratic establishment and the current
administration presiding over a worsened economy (all by design, I’d argue).
This establishment is caught-up in their own affluent echo-chambers, assuming that
the glimmer of celebrity and billions of donor boodle would sway the masses
where everyday living couldn’t; and their sociopathic dismissal of people’s basic
concerns.
Not that people should even look to politicians or the political process for solutions when its they who created these conditions in the first place. One political force being humiliated is a cause for celebration, but only with the realization that the victorious side represents a continuity of the same agenda with just some minor tweaks here and there not altering the overall agenda. The corporate duopoly, the Managerial State, will continue to march on as the dialectic assumes its next stage.
Defeat for the State’s Institutions?
Neoliberalism is catching up with its own inner contradictions, revealing itself as blatantly illiberal at all levels, foreign and domestic. This became more blatant as Democrat leaders – Hillary Clinton, Obama, Kerry, Harris – were openly calling free speech a “threat” in the months leading up to the election, arguing for the State to be full-spectrum weaponized against even the remnants that haven’t been eroded. As journalist Michael Shellenberger observes, “Democrats are the party of mass censorship, the weaponization of the CIA, FBI, and DHS, and the politicization of everything.” I agree with this assessment by political analyst and Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy, whose analysis was (interestingly) published in the New York Times despite his own libertarian convictions:
“This was no ordinary contest between two candidates from rival parties: The real choice before voters was between Mr. Trump and everyone else — not only the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and her party, but also Republicans like Liz Cheney, top military officers like Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. John Kelly (also a former chief of staff), outspoken members of the intelligence community and Nobel Prize-winning economists.
“Framed this way, the presidential contest became an example of what’s known in economics as ‘creative destruction.’ His opponents certainly fear that Mr. Trump will destroy American democracy itself.
“To his supporters, however, a vote for Mr. Trump meant a vote to evict a failed leadership class from power and recreate the nation’s institutions under a new set of standards that would better serve American citizens.
“Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. The names themselves are symbolic: In 2016 Mr. Trump ran against a Bush in the Republican primaries and a Clinton in the general election. This time, in a looser sense, he beat a coalition that included Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“Those who see in Mr. Trump a profound rejection of Washington's present conventions are correct. He is like an atheist defying the teachings of a church. The challenge he presents lies not so much in what he does, but in the fact that he calls into question the beliefs on which authority rests. Mr. Trump has shown that the nation's political orthodoxies are bankrupt and the leaders in all our institutions, private as well as public, who stake their claim to authority on their fealty to such orthodoxies, are now vulnerable.
“This may be exactly what voters want and by allying herself with so many troubled and unpopular elites and institutions, Ms. Harris doomed herself. Do Americans think it's healthy that generals who have overseen prolonged and ultimately disastrous wars, are treated with such respect by Mr. Trump's critics? A similar question could be asked about the officials in charge of the intelligence community.” (Daniel McCarthy, “This Is Why Trump Won,” New York Times, Nov. 6, 2024. Excerpts also available beyond the NY Times paywall).
Its not so much an election for Trump as much as against the Democratic establishment, a hope for “change” in the same category as Obama’s victory in 2008 (and with the same inevitable disillusionment by supporters of the elected president, while the other side enable the same things with their preferred puppet – rinse and repeat every cycle). Yet in the immediate, it’s a strong symbol of rejecting the political orthodoxies and dogma, insofar as those were most apparently championed by the Democratic Party while Trump is a different archetype. Neither the populist savior who will "drain" the same swamp he hires much less infringe upon the Deep State, nor the "fascist" aspiring dictator posing a "existential threat" to a "democracy" championed by corporate sock puppets and apologists of oligarchy.
Corporate Media Gatekeepers, Celebrity Pontificates, and “Consultant” Grifters Rendered Irrelevant
One of the best sights to behold is the Corporate media gatekeepers’ meltdown that more people are accessing information from outside their stenographies of authority, rendering them (and their millions in personal profits) irrelevant and untenable for the future. They look down on people so lowly that they assumed touting “celebrities” from their gated communities to lecture the Plebs about groupthink was enough to sway them into the “everything is good” yarn. That Harris picked up more support from billionaires than even Trump – even picking up more of the wealthier voting districts while losing many of their own presumed “marginalized” groups – is lost on such people whose cognitive dissonance remains stuck within the narratives they have been telling themselves their entire lives.
Rather than seizing the opportunity for insight and retrospection, for the Shadow work of integrating into consciousness what they hide behind their unconscious masks, they have merely doubled-down on their delusions. We see this fantastical refusal to even acknowledge mistakes much as those same gatekeepers were bludgeoning a rosy spin upon the economy these past four years. This was epitomized by MSNBC’s Joy Reid claim that Harris ran an’ “historic, flawlessly run campaign” since she “had every prominent celebrity voice”. Or when DNC finance chair Chris Korge wrote a letter praising this regime’s “successful accomplishments, specifically on the economy and inflation”, calling Harris “a strong and flawless candidate who gave voters a vision that would address their most important concerns.” And more recently Harris’ own smug viral rant boasting about wasting over $1.4 billion in donors while talking-down to those naïve and duplicitous enough to have fallen for her propaganda.
We are witnessing their Party imploding from within. The DNC laid off two-thirds of their staffers without any severance pay, so that the DNC Staff Union set up a GoFundMe to get private donations to these laid-off staffers. This is how the Democratic Establishment views their staffers and workers (never mind its voters), while ensuring their consultant class continues to profit from the political machine. Corporate Democrats are openly blaming the Party’s left: Pompous Bill Clinton pointing fingers at “the left” while lamenting those who “demonize” the Establishment who “have a good education.” Other Corporatists seeking leadership over the DNC lest it become “the freak show party.” Unwilling to even look within themselves, they blame the packaging and messaging rather than their policies. Their pointing fingers at others is no surprise, as there is no honor among thieves.
While on the left-side of the Party, the phony outsider Bernie Sanders rightly blames the Democrats’ policies that harm the working-class. Yet he was quick to signal he would safely remain on his Dem-plantation by ruling out he would even consider forming a third-party. Indeed, the Dems used Progressives such as Sanders and AOC as attack dogs (no offense to all decent canines) against Jill Stein/Butch Ware of the Green Party during the election. Cuck Sanders carried water for Biden and Harris after his two betrayals by the DNC, reliably aligning with that same Establishment and thus fully complicit in the anti-worker and war agendas of the Empire. Various left grifters who aligned with Harris scrambling for wherever opportunism takes them next.
Repudiation of Liberalism - and "the Elites"?
None less than
Francis Fukuyama, the poster-boy of Neoliberalism (and its synthesis with
Neocon foreign policy) who famously declared the “end of history” marked by the
“victory” of liberalism, saw this election as representing “a decisive
rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the
understanding of a ‘free society’ has evolved since the 1980s,” as he wrote in the Financial Times, with excerpts available elsewhere. “Donald Trump not only wants to roll back neoliberalism and woke
liberalism, but is a major threat to classical liberalism itself.”
Fukuyama saw this
as ushering in a “new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole,”
although his own previous “end of history” shows how enervated are his analyses.
I would argue that its hyperbolic, as we need only look at the foreign policy
establishment already proliferating into the incoming Trump administration;
look at his picks, some of his own recent assaults against free speech to build on the Surveillance State work enabled for him by
Obama and Biden, not to mention an emboldened Woke Right that wants to continue their work in criminalizing free speech and dissent
against a specific foreign nation. The cult of Woke apparently defeated on one
front – but simply shifted and emboldened on another front.
Nonetheless,
Fukuyama is correct in observing that the Democratic Party replaced even a
rhetorical concern for the working class with (what I would call, paternalistic
control over) a “narrower set of marginalised groups.” Fukuyama identified
Trump’s rhetorical capturing of the public’s distrust in “free markets”
(Corporatism masquerading as such) and the government, with promises of
extensive tariffs and overhauling the Managerial State. “The breadth of the
Republican victory will be interpreted as a strong political mandate confirming
these ideas and allowing Trump to act as he pleases.” I would change his last
analysis to: Allowing Trump to carry out the wishes and pet projects of his
billionaire donors - just as a victorious Harris would’ve carried out those of her
billionaire donors.
Yet the simple
reality is bare: The Democratic Party is a Neoliberal party that still clings
to its fraudulent persona for “the workers”, that it’s the Party of “defending
democracy” even while completely dependent on corporate dollars and relying on coronation
(not even rigged primaries anymore) to crown its figurehead. The Party encases
itself within the tone-deaf cocoon of Identity Politics and Woke that was
deliberated engineered by State/War Machine think-tanks, and then churned out
from their Corporate-funded academic cloisters, to divide et vince the
working- and middle-classes, distract from the bread-and-butter issues actually affecting people’s daily lives.
When the “elites”
from different countries speak the same, regurgitating the very same slogans
and mantras churned out for them by Globalist think-tanks like Club of Rome and
World Economic Forum, embracing shared economic dogmas benefiting the
financiers, and acting in lockstep as with 2020, then clearly that has
been such a consensus. And yet contrary to those who seek a savior, it’s a
grave mistake to just say “the elites” have been defeated. Its not a defeat of
“the elites” but an apparent defeat of some elites so the
Managerial State can shift its focus on other areas while walking back whatever
does not serve their overall agenda.
I am reluctant to ascribe to them the term “elite” with all it connotes of higher values and qualities. Rather, they have revealed themselves to be the most mediocre, unwilling to truly create or think originally, masking their miseries. Witness their parasitic financial system, indeed the nature of government itself which monopolizes the resources of those actually productive within society. As noted by economist Michael Hudson, a parasite first numbs the host and convinces the host to identify with it, or "the economy" in this case. This synchronizes with what Paul Levy has explained about Wetiko, a self-cannibalizing mind-virus that feeds off a host's blind spots.
I see the Gnostic understanding of
the Archons as a counterfeit ruling spirit (but not actual creators or divine
powers) as particularly useful here. Yet insofar as they are an “elite”, then
the insights of the Italian philosopher Gaetano Mosca are pertinent: That there
is always an organized minority that rules over a society, with their replacement only when
enough people of that society embrace one elite’s political formulas over those of another elite.
Writer and journalist Chris Hedges observed this election as a contest between corporate and oligarchic power, the only difference being their methods. Although
disagreeing with his socialist arguments contingent upon seeking solutions from
the very State that has been the tool of corporatism/oligarchy, I agree fully
with his description of an economic civil war within the establishment “played
out on the political stage”. The face of corporate power was Harris, “the
vacuous, empty suit the technocrats adore”, while figurehead Trump is “the
buffoonish mascot of the oligarchs”. “They have each bought up the political
class, the academy and the press. Both are forms of exploitation that
impoverish and disempower the public. Both funnel money upwards into the hands
of the billionaire class.”
Also known as “housebroken capitalism”, corporate power calls
for “constant government policies and fixed trade agreements because they have
made investments that take time, sometimes years, to mature.” This is why Wall
Street is generally tied to the Democratic Party (although some of their ilk
such as Paul Singer and Bill Ackman have accommodated themselves to Trumpism). They
personify the Managerial State and paved the way for the other dialectic to
enlarge their own authority: “The unchecked greed of the corporatists,
the housebroken capitalists, created a small number of billionaires who became
their nemesis, the warlord capitalists.” For purposes of their own stability,
corporate power requires a technocratic government.
Corporate power “pushed through the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), the greatest betrayal of the American working class since
the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which placed crippling restrictions on union
organizing. It revoked the Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall) which separated
commercial banking from investment banking. Tearing down the firewall between
commercial and investment banks led to the global financial meltdown in 2007
and 2008, including the collapse of nearly 500 banks. It pushed through the elimination
of the Fairness Doctrine by the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald
Reagan as well as the Telecommunications Act under Bill Clinton’s presidency,
allowing a handful of corporations to consolidate control of media outlets….Meanwhile,
it piled up massive deficits — the federal budget deficit rose to $1.8 trillion
in 2024, with total national debt approaching $36 trillion — and neglected our
basic infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public
transportation, while spending more on our military than all the other major
powers on Earth combined.”
Also known as “warlord capitalism”, oligarchic power thrives on chaos and “seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.” I would point out the fact that agencies are regulated by the very corporations involved in their respective industries, while taxation is theft – but I agree about the hypocrisy of cutting taxes for them while perpetuating taxation for the masses (including through the hidden taxes such as inflation etc.). They call for “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but as we can see with Agenda 2025 and the incoming “DOGE” of welfare-queen Elon Musk (who has been profiting from government contracts since the Obama regime), they would merely redirect those Managerial powers into other directions, bolstering the standard bipartisan consensus on foreign policy and the “Intel Community.”
Indeed, Trump said he will increase the Pentagon’s profits and has always boosted the Military-Industrial-Complex despite all rhetoric to the contrary. Its given cover as rebuilding a stronger military decimated by woke policies, but the control of the Pentagon by Big Corporations will be empowered as will be the outsourcing of its cybersecurity to Israel, as continued in his first regime via the blowhard who presided over the World Trade Center attacks. I agree with Butch Ware's analysis that Trump's wars serve different functions than those of the Democrats. While the corporate interests of the technocratic-minded Democrats and conventional Republicans call for the "stable" predictability and mechanical nature of war profits, Trump's oligarchic interests is more of a "personal patronage network" where he rewards those sycophants able to most massage his ego in return for favors.
This is not to deny his willing agency but to underscore his shameless opportunism to sell out to whoever funds (and runs) him, showing his buffoonery is easier to manipulate. I previously discussed this point where sycophants know they can easily manipulate the narcissist who revels in his symbolic role as the one who can reward with favors or hire – but its they who get whatever they want. For example, the same Big Tech oligarchs who previously aligned themselves with the Democrats in 2016 and 2020, with all their censorship efforts (“misinformation” the new threat to groupthink) at the disposal of the State, gets the complete nod from Trump whose narcissism means those currying favors from him as mutual yes-men are now his “friends”. As he recently told a gathering of tech CEOs at his Mar-a-Lago resort: “The first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” He will intensify what we saw his first time around, where such policies as moving the embassy to Jerusalem or recognizing Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights were examples of his patronage network. Otherwise, he is devoid of ideas or ideology.
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Gaza Genocide and the War Factor
Despite the
horrible state of the domestic economy, the establishment always finds a way to
fund wars in Gaza and Ukraine to the tune of countless billions – and the
Republicans, even the leaders of MAGA, eagerly join with the Democrats as it
relates to funding Israel no matter how much it bankrupts America (and Trump
reliably handing more favors to Miriam Adelson and nominating several fanatical
Zio-cucks). Even more, Biden doubled-down on war: Shutting down a reporter’s question on Gaza with the aggressive sarcasm of a senile; giving Zelenskyy the green-light
to long-rang missiles; and seeking an extra $24 billion to his government and even forgiving their debt – while presiding over
America’s own “national” debt as reliable bankers’ figurehead until his
successor takes his role on January 20th. The Corporate media
covered for Harris by lying that the Biden administration was allegedly not directly complicit in Gaza and
was working “tirelessly” for a cease-fire even while giving Netanyahu
everything he wanted.
Harris being tied (not
only as Vice President, but having the very same national security advisors) to
Biden’s funding and arming of the Israeli war-machine in Gaza cannot be denied
an important factor in her defeat. Polling data of Muslim voters in the swing states of Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania proves this, as does the 34 polls as
late as October showed Harris would’ve likely received a 5% boost in those states if she had changed
her position on Gaza. The most symbolic sign of this was majority-Arab
Dearborn’s “historic” shift away from the Democrats. I agree fully with the assessment by Tunisian-British
analyst and geopolitical risk consultant Sami Hamdi, from his interview on “The
Thinking Muslim” podcast – a more accurate assessment of the elections than the
“professional” class of American pollsters and consultants:
"It's not
that Gaza was the main issue of the election. It's that Gaza swung the
election. If the economy was the main pillar of the election, if the issue of
immigration was one of the main pillars of the election, they resulted in a
stalemate between Kamala Harris and between Donald Trump, and Gaza is what
swung it the other way. Gaza is what decided it with these very fine margins
that are in each of the swing states, barring two of them. Each of those swing
states the margin of difference is 2% or less.”
I have previously
documented the alliance between Harris and the Neocons, epitomized by her appearance alongside Liz
Cheney. Devoid of ideology and with an uncanny ability to read the room (and
respond accordingly by rhetoric), Trump played this fact up by rightly calling Cheney a “Muslim-hating warmonger”, and positioned himself as “the candidate of peace.” Harris doubling-down on her support for Cheney,
the Democratic Establishment and Corporate Media rushing to defend Liz Cheney,
further tipped the electoral scales not so much for Trump but against
Harris.
Their attitude was
epitomized by Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman’s post-electoral rant:
“I refuse to pander on that. So, Dearborn delivered for Trump? Okay,
congratulations. You’re going to love the next Muslim ban.” Apparently in
Democrat sharia its halal (even recommended) to bomb Muslims but only haram
if Trump rhetorically wants to ban immigrants. Their meltdowns since the
election have shown that in many ways, TDS acts like a truth serum where
Liberals reveal themselves to be the most guilty of the vileness they
project upon others – the result of a Shadow repressed under layers of virtue
signaling and smug paternalism. As noted by Palestinian researcher Raja Abdulhaq:
“As soon as early
election results pointed to a clear victory for former President Donald Trump,
liberals took to social media to criticise American Muslims, Arabs and Latinos
for not fully supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. Social media posts
ranged from calls to deport Muslims and Latinos to wishing for Trump to
unleash more destruction on Gaza. This backlash tactlessly showed the dynamics
of how white liberals view the role of minorities, especially Muslims and
Arabs, in American politics. In a classic display of the white saviour complex,
these communities were blamed for ‘not knowing what's best for them’, as though
Harris was running altruistically to protect them from the dangers of a second
Trump presidency.”
Does Trump represent a rejection of the Neocons? In my previous article, I touched upon his appointment of many Israel-First fanatics, people who promise to green light American support for any move toward Eretz Israel and using the State’s institutions to crack down on free-speech when it relates to Israel. His picks are indistinguishable from Neocons in both their records and rhetoric, one notably a self-professed "recovering Neocon" while championing the same warmongering policies against the enemies of Israel. Much is made of the Cheneys aligning with Harris, or Trump’s refusal to give Haley and Pompeo a position (a simple game to placate the MAGA base, not because he “opposes” those Neocons on principle). We can actually speak of an emergent class of Neo-Neocons, who can shift their focus and rhetoric as chameleons rather than a distinct divergence (their main difference being on Russia and not the Middle East). I fully agree with this assessment by investigative journalist Michael Tracey:
"The time has
come to retire the term ‘neocon.’ While this ignoble moniker may have once
described an identifiable ideological tendency, and even a tangible,
elite-driven political movement, ‘neocon’ has come to be used almost
exclusively as a nebulous slur — always a tell-tale sign of a term’s
diminishing utility. To label someone a ‘neocon’ now most commonly functions as
a sort of political pump-fake, with a phantom blob of ‘neocons’ always
allegedly conniving to undermine Donald Trump — or whom Trump always finds
himself accidentally empowering, despite his best instincts. This self-serving
formulation presents Trump as having divergent interests with the reviled ‘neocons,’
even as Trump consistently installs them to prominent government positions and
pursues their preferred policy objectives."
Continuity of the Decaying Empire
The Deep State is
most applicable to the foreign policy establishment that remains entrenched no
matter who heads the regime, as documented by Aaron Good in his book, American Exception. This is increasingly
aware even to the most slumbered, such that polls from May 2024 referred to “a dying empire led by bad people.” Comparisons between Imperial Rome and America
are so obvious they have become cliches people repeat while being detached from
what it means in their personal lives. Yet this has long been the case, hidden
under the surface gaze of those still blind to conceive of the United States as
still a Republic, much less the “democracy” sham peddled by political
mouthpieces of oligarchy to give the Plebs the illusion of choice in this
rigged system. We can point to the prescient words of Garet Garrett from 1952:
“We have crossed
the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer
is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night: the precise
moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: 'You are now entering
Imperium.' Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying:
'Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.' And now,
not far ahead, is a sign that reads: 'No U-turns.'”
Empire is internal
decay and authority projected outward. Oswald Spengler identified it with Civilization
– itself a decline away from the higher cycles, which is Culture – where creative
energies are shifted to maintain authority through ever-more authoritarian
means. There is more talk of battling other civilizations, more domestic censorship
even while claiming to fight for “democracy” abroad, and innumerable other
symptoms that are clearly part and parcel of our state today. Gore Vidal marked
the US becoming a debtor nation as the signpost of the Empire’s decline. “Empires
are restless organisms. They must constantly renew themselves; should an empire
start leaking energy, it will die,” as he wrote in 1986. “Like most modern empires, ours rested not so much on military prowess
as on economic primacy.”
Its not even that American
Empire truly acts in the interests of the United States, but completely
contrary to it as a parasitic entity upon the body politic, mining our minds to
feed its Machine as surely as it mines the world’s resources for its own full
spectrum dominance. Nay, it has always been the project of an oligarchic elite using
this country as the personal vehicle for their specific interests. Both Parties
enable a decaying Empire to desperately kick the can down of its own demise,
projecting this “power” abroad while increasing rapid domestic decay – all to
protect the profits of their donors at all costs. Even more than that, to this
oligarchic elite was grafted a Zionist elite that ultimately rose in prominence
such that the number one foreign policy priority of the American Empire seems
to be fighting Israel’s wars and bleeding its own treasury, infringing even the
vestiges of its sovereignty, harming its own reputation abroad, and declining
itself for the authority of their lobby.
I remember as one who came of political age with 9/11 and the “War on Terror”, just how non-interventionism was associated with heretics confined to the “fringes”. Yet the undercurrent has been existent within this country, long before my own ancestors came to these shores in the early and mid 20th century. We can point to the great intellectual minds like Thoreau and the Transcendentalists who opposed Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War, the insights of Lysander Spooner who saw the government’s overreach through the Civil War, the luminaries associated with the American Anti-Imperialist League that opposed waging war against another decaying empire, onwards and onwards, including those who declared themselves America First – long before that term was hijacked, or hysterical Globalists went into hissy fits about even the phrase itself. I have seen the Overton Window being moved within my own lifetime, thanks in no small part to the tireless work of Ron Paul and others.
This push-and-pull towards and against Empire has existed within America and will continue to do so, with greater skepticism towards endless wars or even being so focused outward. We just need to be vigilant in calling out the MIGA grift as one seeking to make Empire and Israel great again at America’s expense.
Woke Decadence,
Death Culture, and Self-Hexing Hysterics
When I say that Woke was also a factor in the election, its not Wokeness on its own as much as the insistent focus on clinging to it by the Democratic Party and much of the Establishment no matter the economic issues faced by the population. The Woke mind-virus peaked but then imploded based on its own insanities, while the vapidness of Identity Politics were used to blunt bread-and-butter issues. Culture Wars were engineered to create divisions easily exploited by the ruling class. This is because they know most issues facing people are what can be called 70%-30% or 80%-20% on which there is general agreement. However, these other issues can and do polarize people into two poles of a dialectic that respects nothing but rigid binaries and absolute dogmas. Elites are created within the elites to then speak for their dialectic to ensure that all remain herded safely within acceptable groupthink.
So the academic
laboratories created by the Frankfurt School, and the cultural power of CIA front
institutions, turned the United States into a laboratory for their own
decadence masquerading as “culture”. They created divisions where there were
fewer – many already existing, but not necessarily to the point of culture wars
since there is an innate live and let live ethos held by most people. They want
us to believe rather than think. They don't want coherence, but
demoralization so that people are conditioned on what to believe rather than
going deep within themselves on what to think. Their objective is to
change the perception of reality, using a barrage of conflicting information often created out of the
very same think-tanks and funded by the same oligarchs, so people no longer
know what to think, taking them even further from their innate capacity to
think.
As war is always the health of the State, the Empire then projected this decadence outward through institutions such as National Endowment for Democracies and USAID, where recovering Trotskyites still nostalgic about “international revolution” and Neoliberals obsessed about managing all aspects of society within their own image, could export their ideas through Empire. Couple this with the National Security State’s impulse to perpetual growth – not of peace and prosperity, but always war and authoritarianism. Through Woke, the Empire has also been focused on projecting the cultural power of its elite, over a crumbling infrastructure in the core. It has hastened the United States’ descent into a “developing country” even by the standards of its own political formulas like “democracy” and “equity”.
One value that
Woke and the Culture Wars had on this election is in allowing us to see with
discernment, people revealing their true nature in the process. There have been
many self-hexing rituals founded on outright insanity. Trump’s victory was met with
the hysteria of some who declared the “death” of all joy since that was all personified into the vapid empty suit of Kamala Harris.
Failure to integrate their Shadows made so many of them rear their ugly heads
with many liberal and leftist pundits showing open contempt for the same demographics they had long declared themselves paternal “protectors”
over. Even though abortion is not truly at risk in this country, there has been
such an obsessive focus on it as the central issue that one has to
wonder if there isn’t a fetishization of abortion for its own sake –
especially by people it doesn’t even affect.
Generally, there has been an embrace of a death culture – itself a symbol of decline, away from the life-affirming ethos of a healthy culture. How women’s rights are reduced to “reproductive freedom”, not caring that all are losing their other freedoms through an authoritarian State. Their eagerness to rehabilitate and make common cause with warmongers, so that hypothetical life is considered more valuable than thousands of lives reduced to nameless “collateral” statistics. This political culture of death is also manifested in the apocalyptic hysteria where perceived “ordeals” pale in comparison to the real wars, genocide, and problems facing people around the world.
Yet as I’ve previously written, TDS is a safe
refuge for the worst warmongers and war criminals, Wall Street robber-barons,
and crook politicians to recast themselves as paragons of virtue and
"democracy" in the public consciousness. It’s a symptom of the
powerlessness, wanting to be lulled back into the slumber of politics being
“out of sight, out of mind”. While such people will only double-down on their delusions,
watch for even the elites who pushed much of this to shift focus. The
Managerial State is always willing to walk back and drop some things to safeguard the ultimate agenda.
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Conclusion – The Simulacra
of Representation
In 1991, the
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote a book with the provocative title, The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place. He criticized the media and intellectual classes
for their passive roles as bystanders, as they watched this war that was the
first one truly broadcast on a mass-scale. Baudrillard noted the sheer scale of
bombs dropped on Iraq vis a vis the convoys of fleeing Iraqi troops, as if the
elites wanted to prove to themselves they were fighting a real enemy. The media
eagerly played its role in this, and indeed CNN owed much of its start to this
time. Yet the outcome was much the same as before the war started. Baudrillard
thus argued that, whereas before this time war was governed by Clausewitz’s
observation of “the continuation of politics by other means,” the Gulf War
marked the beginning of “the continuation of the absence of politics by other
means.” More insidiously, he noted how the public was unable to distinguish
simulacra from the real world where such death and destruction becomes “unreal”.
One can only imagine how Baudrillard would regard the emergence of AI bombs and
drone warfare.
Extending this from warfare into all aspects of the State, simulacra clearly manifests itself within the electoral process – especially the presidential elections, where each one is touted as the “most important” election ever upon which can hang all the hopes and fears their mined minds can manifest. “People are so content with having exchanged political participation for political representation that there will inevitably come a time when there will be no more need for pretense,” as noted by Troy Southgate. Taking it back to Gnosis and the nature of the Archons, the elites give us simulations to interact with, a model of reality, so that we don’t interact with the reality itself.
Such is the nature of the simulation we are living in, where the Archons can only manufacture simulations that mimic reality but can never be reality. We remain on the outside of their club which is safeguarded despite its apparent split between two sides. The political theater is staged continuously where the audience watches in silence as the actors on stage play the roles made for them by those behind the scenes. Compliance is manufactured by people who project their innate power away from themselves and onto “the” authorities. Its simply been obscured from people by "representation" - even as silent bystanders - in this political theater.
"While you're being all upset that Trump has power, 'oh no, Trump has power,' 'it's going to be a 'dictatorship,' why did you vote to have anyone have such power? And did it not occur to you that sooner or later when you support widespread unlimited authoritarian control in the name of 'goodness', that power might fall into the hands of somebody you don't like and somebody you don't agree with? Because here's the thing: You want Republicans robbed by way of taxation to fund the things that you think are important - free health care, free college, universal basic income, whatever it might be. And the Republicans want you robbed by way of taxation to fund the things that they want, whether its a gigantic military or more Police State garbage. That's not a fundamental different, you both agree to the premise of having a gigantic powerful ruling class that's robbing the hell out of all of us and passing all manner of authoritarian controls. You differ with the 'horrible Trumpites' only in the specifics of who you want robbed and what you want the stolen loot spent on." (Larken Rose, "Liberals: 'Why? Why? Why?'," , Nov. 9, 2024)
The presidency "squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat. The presidency—by which I mean the executive state—is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while it steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power in itself and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, the business, the charity, and the community." (Lew Rockwell, "The Presidency is the Greatest Threat," Aug. 30, 2024)
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