Like many people, I enjoyed reading the leaked John Podesta e-mails, back during the 2016 campaign. Most of it was nothing, but it offered a window into the smallness of the people who rule over us. These are people who put a lot of effort into telling us they are smart, sophisticated and engaged in important work. In reality, their inner lives are quite boring, because they are dull people, who have weaseled their way into the circus of national politics. Still, it was interesting to see who talks to whom in Washington.

The thing that has never made any sense to me is how the Clinton Crime Syndicate handled the situation. They instructed the press to ignore it, which they happily did, but the stuff was all over social media for weeks. It was like Team Clinton was unaware of the fact that the internet was where most people get their news. At the minimum they could have played the victim card and maybe got some sympathy points. Instead they went with blaming the Ruskies for hacking Podesta’s e-mail, which was obviously false.

It is easy to get confused about this stuff, as there is so much fake news blasted at us every day. The media has worked hard to rewrite the narrative so that the Russian hacking stuff was “discovered” after the election. In fact, Team Clinton started peddling this Russian hacking line in early October 2016. I recall the presser when Jennifer Palmieri appeared to have Tourette’s, as she kept blurting out “Russian hacking” to every question. It was as if she was having some sort of spasm during the presser.

That’s the main reason the event sticks in my mind. It was such a bizarre performance, I suspected the women was on drugs or possibly drunk. It sounded at the time like a ham-handed effort to shift the focus from Clinton’s troubles. Everything about the presser was odd and the claims made little sense at the time. People who had followed the release of the e-mails knew perfectly well it was a case of an old man using a simple password and letting someone get access to it. But, the press went along with it anyway.

The thing about Hillary Clinton and her people, is they lie a certain way. Most people either deny or provide an alternative narrative that is intended to lead the curious down some other path of inquiry, that avoids the truth. A politicians that gets in a jam will deny knowing about the issue or provide some alternative version of events, that shifts the focus onto some other bad actor. The thing with Hillary Clinton is she likes lying in a way that often reveals some unknown caper she and her people are currently plotting.

Reading the excellent site Conservative Treehouse the other day, I spotted a story on the time line of the FBI scandal. The one thing they do well is put all the news stories and known facts into easy to read timelines. Down in the post they have a screen shot of the text messages between some of the plotters who were manufacturing the fake FISA warrant, claiming Trump’s campaign was plotting with the Russians. Look at the dates. The Clinton Russian hacking claims started right in the middle of that timeline.

This explains that bizarre presser in the campaign and the decision to go with what seemed at the time to be a silly strategy. Someone, most likely Loretta Lynch, told Clinton about the wiretapping of Trump Tower and the spying on the Trump campaign, under the false pretext of Russian meddling. Hillary Clinton, being a notorious bungler, could not help herself. She and her flunkies decided to go with Russian hacking as their strategy to deal with the e-mail stuff. It is speculation, but it fits the timeline and the Clinton pattern of lying.

The other piece of this is the phony dossier the Clinton people paid for that was eventually used by the FBI to get the fraudulent warrants. The Nunes memo puts the date for when Christopher Steele shopped this to the FBI as early July, right after Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton in what was supposed to be a clandestine meeting. It was always assumed that Lynch was there to pass intel onto Bill Clinton, but it is entirely possible that the meeting was about Clinton giving Lynch information they could use against Trump.

I thought from the beginning that the Mueller investigation was an effort to conceal the FBI shenanigans from the public and the political class. Comey was proving to be mentally unstable, so Rosenstein engineered his firing and then recommended a special counsel to investigate the entirely farcical Russian hacking story. Mueller would then put the conspirators on his team, and they would hoover up the evidence of their crimes and keep it sequestered. In time, it would be quietly buried and everyone would move along.

What appears to have happened is someone was onto the caper before Trump took office, possibly the IG, and tipped off some members of Congress. The severity of the problem has scared the political class. If this was just one or two crooked FBI agents, leaders of both parties would grandstand on it and the agents would have been fired. With this case, only a few people appear to be willing to speak publicly at all about it. It’s as if no one wants to be within range of this if the facts every become clear.

That would explain Comey’s pointless book and media tour, obliquely pointing the finger at Loretta Lynch. It would also explain longtime Clinton henchman George Stephanopoulos doing his best to make Comey look like an idiot. Of course, Lynch has been out trashing Comey as well. The Clinton machine wants to make sure Comey is the bad guy in all of this and a desperate Comey is trying to paint himself as a tortured saint. All of which means this was a caper run at a higher level than Andrew McCabe.

The concept of fourth generation war is credited to the paleoconservative thinker William S. Lind and it remains a popular topic on the Dissident Right today. The idea is that rather than direct conflict between professional armies, 4GW conflicts are ones where non-state entities, possibly sponsored by a state actor, use propaganda, subversion, terrorism, and disinformation to undermine domestic support for state actors. The weak non-state actor uses stealth and cunning to bypass the strength of the state actor.

The concept is not without its critics. The term “fourth generation” implies it is new or part of a natural progression. The term “guerrilla war” dates to Napoleon and the Vendée could be called a fourth generation war, even though it occurred in the age of first generation war. The use of subversion and psychological war date to the dawn of settled societies. The non-state actor, using irregular tactics against a state actor, possessing superior military strength, dates to the rise of the state itself.

This is more of a language issue, than anything else, but the concept is a useful starting point, when thinking about social conflict in the modern age. For example, the Left’s fetish for doxing heretics is a facet of the new kind of politics in the surveillance state. It is not just the unmasking, but the fact that the heretic will be known forever, just by putting his name in a google search. Everyone now has a permanent record, so the people in control threaten those who challenge them, with a negative entry on their permanent record.

Another aspect of this is the moral role of corporations. It is one thing to have your name plastered all over the internet as a heretic. It is quite another to find yourself banned from the internet. Social media companies are not just companies selling your personal information. They see themselves as morality police. Instead of jailing dissidents or banning inconvenient speech, the ruling class uses its social control to threaten the social capital of their enemies. Whatever you want to label it, ours is the age of social war.

The question though, is what does the other side look like in this social war? Given the disparity in power, resistance to the ruling orthodoxy will have to be irregular, but within the narrow bounds of the law. It will also have to operate in the social sphere. An obvious example is the meme war that the alt-right waged on social media during the last election. The swarming of mainstream accounts with mockery and criticism scrambled the signals in the Progressive echo chamber. Conformation became cacophony for them.

That was an ad hoc response, but going forward, a more complex and organized effort will inevitably develop. You see hints of it with the Identity Evropa guys. They stay out of the spotlight and perform guerrilla marketing style actions, like hanging banners over highway overpasses and putting up posters around Progressive strongholds. The subtle message being sent is “We are in your neighborhoods, walking among you.” It is a form of psychological warfare that encourages the dissidents and freaks out the Progressives.

Of course, an aspect of the social war has been with us since Dan Rather was exposed back in the Bush years. The last two decades since then has been a steady discrediting of the main propaganda organs, by pranksters, honest citizens and partisans. Every time some dope on cable falls for a Sam Hyde prank after a shooting, the mainstream media becomes a bit more useless as a weapon. Trump won the White House largely by riding the fake news wave. The mass media has been turned into a liability.

In all probability, a weapon the resistance will use against the orthodoxy is a take on what the guerrilla movements have always done to conquerors. Occupying forces inevitably rely of collaborators to control the local population. Targeting collaborators and their handlers not only scares the collaborators, it sows distrust in the occupiers about the reliability of the collaborators. In a prior age, this meant violence. In the information age, it means operations that turns the paranoia of the Left against its own people.

We see glimpses of how this will work whenever “It’s OK To Be White” signs turn up at a workplace or college campus. The company hustles everyone off to a re-education camp and the college campus has a day of mourning. When Greg Conte was revealed to be a member of the alt-right, the school spent the rest of the school year investigating its staff, looking for heretics. Now, imagine if Conte was not a heretic, just a guy caught up in a witch hunt, orchestrated by subversives pulling a clever prank on the school.

Following this through to a logical conclusion, the ruling classes of western societies will be engaged in an endless war to undermine the moral legitimacy of their own people. The resistance will be engaged in a war to discredit the factual legitimacy of the ruling classes. One side cannot be trusted because they believe the wrong things, while the other side cannot be trusted because they lie all the time. Eventually, the people will have to decide if they want to side with the heretics or side with the liars.

That’s what is unique about this new brand of social conflict. In prior guerrilla wars, the public was nothing more than camouflage for the resistance and an obstacle for the occupiers. In the information age, the public is the battle field. Instead of winning turf, the goal is to win the crowd. Good humor, cleverness and daring are more useful than power and intimidation. The hail fellow well met is hard to hate, even when he is causing trouble. The severe prude is impossible to love, even when she is right.

To their credit, the people in charge have understood this for some time. It is why they have unleashed the social media hounds on the heretics. At some level, they know they cannot win playing straight up, so they cheat. The other side is still too disorganized and leaderless to have a coherent plan, but there are signs they are figuring it out. Ultimately, the dissidents need to win turf by winning converts and that means exploiting their freedom of intellectual movement, to outmaneuver the people in charge.