2020 will go down as the year most people remember complying with two weeks to flatten the curve, “supporting” BLM/Antifa as they took their anger out on 150 federal buildings, untold private businesses and killing hundreds and then becoming deputized to enforce the various mask mandates until looking forward to Operation Warp Speed’s vaccines. The rest of us saw many of our family members, friends and co-workers become happy with the chains that have, loving the safety they feel from the government religion. The most common word for 2020 was “stupid” for those of us that could think critically. Logic seemed missing as feeings ruled.
Well enough about 2020 as that year is in our rear-view mirror, already in 2021 we can see the trends and chart the trajectory. As 2021 dawned it became very apparent that the grand merger has happened, big business and big government are indeed one in the same. In the past it was one thing to see the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) in action in Vietnam, the Cold War and quickly followed by Gulf War I, Afghanistan, the Iraq Invasion and then the Democrats, seeing the lure of MIC lobbyist money, sparked Libya and Syria. But what emerged in 2020 was another MIC, the Medical Industrial Complex and its partner by way of the Bill Gates connection, another MIC, the Media Industrial Complex including big tech and MSM.
Angelo Codevilla’s 19JAN2021 article is a great place to review how it all happened and gives us a glimpse into the future. He writes:
In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans’ movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.
Corporate America and the Federal Government have teamed up on a final assault of anything that rings of individual liberty, freedom and Natural rights. The shift towards USSR-think has been astounding, but so many in their corporate jobs that required years in socialist universities are blind toward any problem. Between their remote status and their student loan debt, they are as dependent on government as those that are on welfare.
Angelo goes on:
Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment. Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience, and they punish.
This is 2021 and beyond. This is the squeeze. Between big business and those directly dependent on the government, obedience will be the main thing as the compliance of 2020 made the elite ever so bold in this assault.
“the United States of America is now a classic oligarchy”
Angelo does a great job in charting the course of this moment back to the late 1800’s and shows how our grandparents and parents were also blind to this trajectory. Personally, for me the rot came in 1787 with the secret penning of the US Constitution when Patrick Henry said “I smell a rat”
Angelo also shows the recent acceleration of America’s path to oligarchy, through a catalyst called Donald Trump:
Thus, as the oligarchy set about negating the 2016 electorate’s attempt to stop its consolidation of power, Trump had assured them that they would neither be impeded as they did so nor pay a price. Donald Trump is not responsible for the oligarchy’s power. But he was indispensable to it.
Trump’s rise gave clarity to the Resistance as to who they were up against and gave fuel to motivate them to rally their allies:
#TheResistance rallied every part of the ruling class to mutually supporting efforts. Nothing encourages, amplifies, or seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as does being part of a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob—especially when all can be sure they are acting safely, gratuitously. Success supercharges them. #TheResistance fostered the sense in the ruling class’ members that they are more right, more superior, and more entitled than they had ever imagined. It made millions of people feel bigger and better about themselves than they ever had.
Moral superiors, not unlike how the North felt toward the South in 1861, that being just as racist, or even more than their Southern brothers, they felt as though they were on the right side and could justify ANYTHING that stood in their way of making the whole country “right”. Talk about a narrative that cost 750,000 lives, not unlike other totalitarian narratives of Mao, Stalin and Hitler that cost millions.
The trigger for this rapid transition was non other than a virus with an IFR of 0.01%, the scary Covid-19 and Trump’s actions in mid-March 2020:
Because the power to crush the general population’s resistance to itself is the oligarchy’s single-minded focus, it was able to bend fears of COVID to that purpose. Thus, it gathered more power with more consequences than the oligarchs could have imagined.
But only President Trump’s complaisance made this possible. His message to the American people had been not to panic, be mindful of the scientific facts—you can’t stop it, and it’s not that bad—while mitigating its effects on vulnerable populations. But on March 15, Trump bent, and agreed to counsel people to suspend normal life for two weeks to “slow the spread,” so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Two weeks later, the New York Times crowed that Trump, having been told “hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon,” had been stampeded into “abandoning his goal of reopening the country by Easter.” He agreed to support the “experts’” definition of what “soon” might mean. By accrediting the complex of government, industry, and media’s good faith and expertise, Trump validated their plans to use COVID as a vehicle for enhancing their power.
The Covid-19 express was then followed by the BLM/Antifa distraction once Trump’s impeachment process concluded, and this would give cover to the oligarchy all the way to election day:
The oligarchy’s proximate objective, preventing the 2020 presidential election from validating the previous one’s results, overrode all others. The powers it had seized under COVID’s cover, added to the plethora that it had exercised since the 2016 campaign’s beginning, had surely cowered some opposition. But as November 2020 loomed, no one could be sure how much it also had energized.
Few people were happy to be locked down. It was a safe bet that not a few were unhappy at being called systemically racist. The oligarchy, its powers notwithstanding, could not be sure how people would vote. That is why it acted to take the presidential election’s outcome out of the hands of those who would cast the votes and to place it as much as possible in the hands of its members who would count the votes.
I know Trump saw this coming, he barked about this up to election day but only did something when it was too late:
Pennsylvania et. al. answered Texas’s late lawsuit by arguing it demanded the invalidation of votes that had been cast in good faith. True. But Texas argued that letting stand the results of an election carried out contrary to the Constitution devalued the votes cast in states such as Texas that had held the election in a constitutional manner. Also true. Without comment, the Supreme Court chose to privilege the set of voters on the oligarchy’s side over those of their opponents. Had the lawsuit come well before the election, no such choice would have existed. Typically, the Trump Administration substituted bluster for action.
So now, what does the future hold? Well as long as the oligarchy can stay united in its hate for 74 million Americans that voted for Trump, it can do quite a bit of pent-up damage from the last 4 years that they hope to recover from:
The logic of hate and disdain of ordinary Americans is not only what binds the oligarchy together. It is the only substitute it has for any moral-ethical-intellectual point of reference. Donald Trump’s impotent, inglorious reaction to his defeat offered irresistible temptations to the oligarchy’s several sectors to celebrate victory by vying to hurt whoever had supported the president. But permanent war against some 74 million fellow citizens is a foredoomed approach to governing.
The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis—in short, as some kind of criminals—to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for prosecuting them. Neither Congress nor any state’s legislature legislated any of this. Rather, the several parts of America’s economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this war, uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously.
Division keeps the eye off government’s own short-comings, which they are many, but in order to stay relevant, they all have to stay “in the loop”.
In summary, Angelo states that in effect, the actions of the woke-elites sends a message loud and clear to those who treasure family and community, and business no matter how small. Separate!
In sum, intending to relegate conservative America to society’s servile sidelines, the oligarchy’s members drew a clear, sharp line between themselves and that America. By telling conservative Americans “these institutions and corporations, are ours, not yours,” they freed conservative America of moral obligations toward them and themselves. By abandoning conservative America, they oblige conservative America to abandon them and seek its own way.
If there were a way to do this peacefully like the USSR did that would be great. But I do not see the ruling elite as giving up ANYTHING they value in this separation. Please note how the so-called American Civil War ended, with the southern region ruined in poverty for 100 years!
Time to be wise as serpents as we who value the individual over the collective, freedom over slavery and family over government chart our future.
Peace out
-SF1