We’ve reached an interesting waypoint in the political landscape. It’s one that has a lot of seasoned political analysts scratching their heads and wondering “how can this be?” Their befuddlement comes from a source they’d neither enjoy hearing about or admit to once they had - they’re confused about what’s happening because they’ve been so invested in spreading the lies and false narratives that truth now looks like something foreign and hard to understand. They don’t realize that they’ve gone so far into the realm of the absurd it’s starting to cause some dissonance and discomfort even among those who usually support them. That could pose a problem for our would-be totalitarian collective. This is usually the time in a political or social movement when opposing forces notice the slippage and correctly interpret it as weakness. When the minority sees the leadership and the mouthpieces of the Party start to flounder, start to lose control of the messaging, start to fail in their attempts to keep a lid on rational dissent, it can mean some new energy injected into the resistance. I’m dubious about Americans’ ability to consolidate that dissent into something meaningful, but laying that aside for a moment, I want to look at what’s in the tea leaves right now.
One of the most important things that the Democrats have failed to grasp, and this really is a massive, massive issue for them, is that they are currently led by and unified behind a deeply corrupt president. The evidence that Joe Biden has been selling access and influence for decades is both plentiful and incontrovertible. Despite the press and the White House trying every rhetorical, political, and legal maneuver to weasel-word their way around the issues, no one with a rational mind looks at the Bill of Grievances against Joe Biden and thinks there’s nothing there. What’s more, the same people who are defending him and trying to dismiss actions like his illegal storage of classified materials, his strong-arming and extortion of Ukraine, and his extensive efforts to hide payments from China are going after former president Trump for all the same things. America watched as the Russia investigation against Trump crumbled. We all saw that the FBI invented lies in order to falsify FISA warrant applications to spy on someone they just simply didn’t like. We watched a US Executive agency turn on the Executive Branch and use false evidence to open a bogus investigation that revealed not one single iota of evidence of any connection between Trump and Russia. We watched that same investigation reveal a landslide of evidence that, in fact, Hillary Clinton had ties to Russia and used them to create the bogus evidence the Justice Department ran with. This was directly on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s wildly irresponsible and patently illegal use of unapproved servers to transmit and store classified information and her destruction of evidence after a Congressional subpoena. America watched her behavior excused on live TV by the Director of the FBI even as that same FBI took false evidence from Clinton and lied to FISA courts to open an investigation on Trump. America watched as Trump was impeached by a partisan Democrat House of Representatives for “quid pro quo” with Ukraine. The same partisan Democrat House of Representatives tried to sell the story that Joe Biden bragging about strong arming the Ukrainian government using a billion dollars of US aid to fire a prosecutor that was looking into his son’s company was “not quid pro quo.” Not the same thing at all. Because reasons. Uh huh. Highly partisan democrats and anti-Trump members of the intelligence community also rallied around “their guy” and wrote a letter dismissing one of the most damning collections of evidence ever released as “Russian Disinformation.” The government locked down any attempts to share the evidence or references to it, calling on social media platforms to ban major news outlets and lone voices alike if they made reference to it. They not only violated the First Amendment in this action, they sold a major propaganda operation to the American People in a direct effort to influence the outcome of an election. They admitted as much under oath in front of Congress once it was too late to make a difference. They did it, they didn’t deny doing it, and they knew they were full of shit the whole time they did it. And what happened? Trump is pilloried for trying to influence the outcome of the election.
What’s happening is clear to many of us. It’s not so clear, though, to the people still trying to sell the lies. Permit me a brief digression… In robotics, there is an effect the Japanese call bukimi no tani - the “uncanny valley” effect. It is a phenomenon that postulates that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. In other words, there is an innate sense within us when a thing looks remarkably human, but is not human, that we should be wary of it. Bringing it back to the tea leaves of the present political landscape, it’s reasonable to assess that the Democrats who are pushing lie after lie, demonstrating hypocrisy after hypocrisy, do not realize that while they may be attempting to look like real politicians and public servants, they are not anything remotely close to that. Despite the fact that they look superficially like the moderates and libertarians and republicans they serve with, they are in fact power-hungry authoritarians seeking to use the system as their own private weapon to crush any dissent and consolidate their hold on everything from culture to finance to the legal system to government itself. If that sounds alarmist, consider: when the current crop of Democrat leaders began their political careers, it was the Vietnam era. They were the dissenters. They were the ones calling for the government to mind its own business and get out of the way of everyday people just trying to live their lives. They were the ones crying out to end wars. They used the playbook written by Saul Alinsky - Rules for Radicals - to organize their movement and push for power. And frankly, they did it well! But if you read Alinsky’s work, even he acknowledges that any revolutionary movement first seeks to gain power. Once gained, however, it must change its focus to keeping power, and to making sure the new “have-nots” cannot usurp them. The “revolution” must become its own “counter-revolution,” or the power it has gained will soon be lost. In so doing, the revolutionaries that sought to gain power for the have-nots immediately become their new oppressors. Alinsky’s words, not mine. I think if we were to graph the actions of Democrats over the last 50 years, we would see that they’ve executed that playbook nearly to the letter. And they have indeed become the New Oppressors Alinsky warned that they would. They bear all the hallmarks he told us to look for, trying to stamp out dissent, control culture, control education, control language. The path and the end result are exactly what was predicted by the framers of their political revolution when it began. Looking ahead on that same predictive path, the next step is for the current minority to put an end to their rule. Before we lost the plot here, let’s be very clear what I mean by “minority.” What I mean is the group of people who face unequal treatment under the law by those who control the legal system. I mean those who are constantly damned in the press, those whose ideas and history are cut from education, whose patriotism and genuine love of country are called terrorism by the people in power. They are the ones whose speech is silenced, whose thoughts and opinions are censored. They’re the ones who are attacked by a weaponized government for doing the things the Party considers routine.
When we see these waypoints in the landscape, these hypocrisies that play out in front of us every day, this rage and fear exhibited toward any form of dissent, this dual-system of justice - one for the Party and one for everyone else; when we see the revolutionaries of yesterday become the oppressors and consolidators of power today, the tea leaves are pretty clear. It’s in this collection of indicators that much of the disbelief and confusion on the Left could be cleared up. George Stephanopoulus said recently on his show “Republicans almost unaimously on that stage several days ago said they would vote for a convicted felon. Did you ever think you’d see the day?” Donna Brazile noted, commenting on a poll that showed Trump and Biden deadlocked at 46-46 nationwide “When I looked at that poll, the Wall Street Journal, I said this could keep me up at night.” How, dear talking heads, could you possibly be confused? How is it hard to understand? When a deeply corrupt system lays bare its corruption and its hypocrisy for years on end targeting someone for invented crimes, all while ignoring the same actual crimes committed by its own “elite,” when that system feels compelled to silence its opponents by any means necessary, no matter how corrupt or false, the attacks of that system become a badge of honor. The corrupt players who seek to silence Trump, even if it means inventing crimes and falsifying evidence and rallying the organs of Federal Government against him, even if it means silencing true stories about their own corruption while inventing stories about his, even if it means manipulating the press to change the outcome of an election while charging him with trying to overturn the results of an election - these corrupt players are only accomplishing one thing with all this. They’re putting the brightest of all possible spotlights on their own corruption. They’re showing all of us, even the ones committed to not listening, that there is a deep and abiding hypocrisy within the current system that simply will not allow for any kind of individual, independent thought. To have a place within the corruption of this system, one must be equally corrupt. Anything less is a threat, and all threats to the current power structure must be stamped out with extreme prejudice. Every time they take some kind of contrived, far-reaching action against Trump, it highlights a dozen instances of the same offenses within the ranks of the Party Elite that are dutifully and comprehensively ignored. They’re making him into a symbol he never could have been without their efforts to stop him. In so doing, they are deeply engraving the line between “Us” and “Them” in a way they won’t soon be able to deny.
Now, I said at the outset of this entry that I’m dubious about Americans’ ability to consolidate that dissent into something meaningful. I don’t know that Trump is the right “leader” for a movement that upsets the apple cart of the present Totalitarians. I don’t know that he isn’t, either. What I see, though, is a reluctance on the part of the people to throw off the corrupt system and put in the work of building it back as it should be. I’ve seen it in the last several elections and in the mid-terms. There is a malaise among voters that there’s just no winning, that it’s a hopeless endeavor either way, so fuck it. As long as there is no fire in the bellies of the people with the most to gain, there simply won’t be any sort of mass change. But that’s another conversation entirely.