Red herrings, identity politics, and the futility of the coming culture wars

Tuesday, 24 January 2017

The Left is in high dudgeon, but for the wrong reasons. Identity politics and the culture wars are turning political ideologies on their heads, with California, a bastion of collectivist social policies, now rebuking the power of the federal government, with some even invoking the Lone Star State secession card. Liberal elites are falling over themselves decrying the end of civilized society with the inauguration of the short-fingered vulgarian, and the professional classes are lamenting the poverty of American culture as all the fascists, racists, and ignorant plebes are now behind the wheel of government and have been given the nuclear codes. The hyperbole has been something to behold among the most frenzied sectors of the Left’s Social Justice League.

The Left has been sleeping with the enemy for decades, and has been co-opted by its own supporters at the highest levels of the public and private sector, as governments and foundations all play their part. Left movements are so often futile because they are all funded by social engineers that have no interest in the goals and values of the citizens at the ground level trying to affect change. A recent case in point: The Clinton Foundation set up a textile factory in Haiti that provides jobs for women, which sounds like a noble mission. A GPS company was then brought in to provide free cell phones and microfinancing to these women, with the ostensible purpose of giving them access to communication tools, capital, and the ability to start their own businesses. Everyone can feel good about public-private cooperation and the spirit of American philanthropy at this point. What was the actual purpose of this venture?

To launder the money and assets siphoned off from the US backed coup and assassination of Libyan president Muammar Ghaddafi, create a prostitution ring for nearby mine and construction workers under the pretext of creating a textile factory and giving women a chance at self-determination, establishing oil pipelines, and enriching the Clinton Foundation. Before any development or finance projects could start, the money needed to be laundered to hide its origin. Enter philanthropist and hedge fund manager George Soros. Soros laundered all of the money by running it through the Clinton Foundation, the Open Society Foundations (a major funder of the Black Lives Matter movement), and creating an endless stream of shell companies, where the funds would then be given through grants to projects like the one described above. The hub of the Libyan (and Syrian) regime change operations is the Clinton Foundation (US backing of ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria may change under the Trump Administration). This is simply one more example in a cavalcade of the incestuous relationships between foundations, military contractors, and the executive and legislative branches of government. One would be hard-pressed to distinguish where one sector ends and other begins.

Until the most recent presidential election, the liberal elites have viewed themselves as an ascendant coalition, which could have been realized except for a fatal decision. They turned their backs on labor and instead catered to the liberal professional class and the financial industry. The liberal professional class, contemptuous of those with dirt under their fingernails and a drawl when they speak, are the technocrats of society – those who believe that technology and science will produce the solutions to move humanity into a bright future, and not necessarily democracy, e.g., Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, et al. At the turn of the 20^th Century this was referred to as scientific management, a method which produced the highly efficient and soul crushing assembly lines of industry – the system that our current education system is modeled after. It is now the sunset of the ascendancy, and the abyss is staring back at us.

Executive power has run afoul of the Constitution since the founding, and has steadily increased nearly at the same rate as the inflation of the dollar, which is not a coincidence. The previous administration’s ceiling is the floor for the incoming administration, and such has been the way of the presidency for decades. Obama was pleasing to the eye and pleasing to the ear, while Trump is neither; and Trump will continue what was continued in perpetuity by Obama – namely, the ever expanding power of the executive branch, while simultaneously allowing the National Security State (aka the Deep State) to get a tighter grip on the levers of power in the United States, which has ignored the Constitution at every turn with bureaucratic procedures like “ORCON – i.e., originator control” (the National Security State’s subpoena-proof method of withholding information from Congress and the American people without explanation). Ultimately futile efforts to penetrate Trump’s id, the subpoena of Trump’s taxes through emoluments lawsuits, the identity politics of the moment proclaiming, “If you force Muslims to register, we will all register as Muslims,” are all controlled opposition narratives designed to distract from the economic and geopolitical realities developing domestically and internationally. In the last election, American citizens were given a choice between the Council on Foreign Relations faction of the Deep State (Clinton), and the organized crime faction of the Deep State (Trump). The latter has always been more ideologically nationalistic than the former.

Since the Presidential Election, those who did not vote for Trump have been slowly working their way through the 5 Stages of Grief. The voters are in Stage 2, anger; while the press has been vacillating between Stages 3 and 5, bargaining and acceptance (in today’s language, “normalization”). What the election has demonstrated in rather stark relief is the profound ignorance of Coastal America about Middle America. The divide between college educated and non-college educated citizens is growing in terms of political ideology, culture, geography, and income. The reality of the “Two Americas” is growing with each passing year. Coastal liberals view the conservative Middle of America in terms of ignorance and anachronism – “They do not know, and if they did know, they would agree with me.” The tribal ethos of Middle America distrusts the Coasts, and more than anything else, feels the contempt and disrespect of their judgment. Rhetorically, Middle America wants respect; and practically, they want the economic opportunities that have been stripped from them by (Coastal) liberal policy makers that have sold their jobs to Mexico and China. These narratives have helped to stoke the coming culture wars. Ultimately, the culture wars will function as a distraction to the electorate in order to make way for the ever-expanding National Security State at home and abroad.

In all of the discussions about the eventual winner of any US presidential selection, it is routinely ignored that no mandate exists regardless of who wins, and has never existed. Conservatively, about 50-55% of the voting age population (VAP) votes in US presidential selections (much less in mid-term and local elections), and approximately 50% of that total goes to the eventual winner. This means that 25% of the VAP is ostensibly choosing who will run the country. This is not a mandate. Do the other 50% that do not vote have no opinion about what happens to the country? No. They are sufficiently disgusted by the choices given to them and/or believe they are being constantly lied to by politicians and think the system is corrupt beyond repair, and perhaps have chosen other means by which to make their voices heard besides voting. This is the great myth of the mandate in electoral politics. When one speaks about Candidate X’s electoral victory, and how X% of group X (women, men, minorities, rich, poor, etc.) voted for him/her, what one really means is that, “Out of the 25% of the VAP that voted for winning Candidate X, X% voted for him/her.” This is an incredibly small number when compared to the VAP (often into the single digits).

Part of the challenge of understanding the political and economic realities of the world lies in ideological presuppositions and the rhetoric used to describe the world by the thought leaders whose job it is to obfuscate reality. The current ideological frames used by systems of education and the media are based on red herring oppositions such as Democrat vs. Republican, Left vs. Right, Liberal vs. Conservative, and today, Globalism vs. Nationalism – the great false choice of the 21^st Century. These ideologies avoid the genuine oppositions that exist and prevent democracy and freedom from flourishing. The real socio-economic cleavages that have existed since the formation of civilization are Centralization vs. Decentralization, Labor vs. Capital, and Equality vs. Freedom. Is power concentrated in the hands of a few, or is it diffused over large groups? Whose interests are more represented within the socio-economic structure of society, workers or owners? How should individual rights be measured against society as a whole? These are the fundamental questions which get to the heart of the matter and reveal the real struggles that are taking place on a global scale.

The relentless focus and importance paid to political rhetoric is itself a psyop. If one carefully examines the three fundamental concepts citizens should be focused on – “Cui bono?,” “Follow the money,” and “Actions speak louder than words” – one will fully understand how the political system functions (what they are doing and why). Rhetoric is for public consumption and designed to distract from reality and rarely holds any resemblance to the truth. If one keeps in mind that governments are amoral institutions that seek a limited number of things (territory, drugs, weapons, money, labor power, natural resources: water, minerals, oil & gas; aka power), one will arrive at a much clearer understanding of what is happening in the world while we go about our daily lives, instead of being unaware of all that goes on in our name. The Deep State is stronger than ever and on the march, continually using our time and labor to fight wars, sell drugs, poison the planet, etc.

Information silos created by Bayesian computer algorithms facilitate the impressions that each particular group has of itself, and of others. Its purpose is to give people a false sense of agency, freedom, and to shape their attitudes and actions in ways agreeable to central planners. It also has the intended effect of preventing discourse across ideological lines, as the algorithms are designed to allow only those that agree with one another to see their content on social networking sites. This keeps them coming back for more, i.e., clickbait. Social network swarming techniques are driving social justice narratives away from the tectonic shifts taking place on the domestic and international stage. The greatest threat to this form of social engineering is spontaneous order out of seeming chaos, i.e., what results from human action, not human design. Additionally, a reorientation towards de-centralization, labor, and freedom will help to completely undermine the controlled opposition programs which are currently being implemented by social engineers.

Moving forward, the challenge to the participants and fellow travelers of the recent inspiring and historical Women’s March will be to avoid being used as a tool of the real opposition (the Deep State), and step back away from the tribe from time to time to get a clearer view of all agendas, free of righteous indignation, in the hope that political and supra-political solutions will become more apparent to the change-agents at the ground level. The Progressive Movement and liberal media have been on an 8 year hiatus while the financial industry has continued to rob the store – as is always the case during Democrat administrations. They are once again awakening, but to a braver, newer world.  With the advent of “alternative facts”, and “fake news” (aka “Conspiracy Theory 2.0”), Operation Mockingbird’s methodology has become far more sophisticated, which will require all of us to be more intellectually discerning and cast a long view, avoiding hackneyed slogans and partisan propaganda, in hopes of gleaming a hint of the end game in order to have the power to affect the outcome.

“Organisation is, after all, only a means to an end. When it becomes an end in itself, it kills the spirit and the vital initiative of its members and sets up that domination by mediocrity which is the characteristic of all bureaucracies.”

~Rudolph Rocker