The Road To Ruin

Posted on October 19, 2023 by thezman

When studying the two great revolutionary events in European history, the thing that always jumps out is how revolution was something of an accident. In both cases, the ruling class had chances to avert disaster. The sovereign had people in his inner circle or just on the edge of it who warned about the brewing trouble. In the case of Tsar Nicholas, his ascent to the throne was due to the ongoing unrest. Yet, in both cases the ruling class never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Dig further into the many unforced errors and the root cause is often a stubbornness on the part of the king, the tsar, or the aristocracy. They looked at every small compromise as a potential slippery slope. Instead of taking advantage of opportunities presented to them by their disgruntled subjects, they dug in their heels and made themselves seem like the unreasonable party. As a result, they left themselves little room to make necessary reforms in order to head off disaster.

We may be seeing something similar in the battle to select a new Speaker of the House, which is now in its third week. Kevin McCarthy was booted from the post to start October because he broke all but one promise he made to secure the job. The one promise he kept was to reduce the number of votes required to bring forth a motion to vacate the chair, as in remove him from the job. Because he broke all of his other promises, this was the avenue to remove him.

The House Republicans are now struggling to find a replacement. The first choice, one supported by the donor class and the Democrats, was Steve Scalise, but he reminded the rebels in the party too much of Kevin McCarthy. Like McCarthy, Scalise owes his existence to his ability to spread donor money around to those who fink on Republican voters on behalf of the donor class. Trading one fink for another would have made the Freedom Caucus complicit in the finkery, so they demurred.

Next up is Jim Jordan, who is not exactly Tiberius Gracchus, but he is a serious man who is a capable political operator. He shares many of the views held by the Freedom Caucus and the back benchers of the party. This is why the people in charge tried to bump him off years ago with a phony sex scandal. They are now trying to revive that smear campaign to derail his Speaker bid. The zombies in the Republican caucus have now been activated against him.

Lost in the jibber-jabber and scheming is the fact that the donor class opposes Jordan primarily due to his politics. The Republicans sell themselves to their voters as a conservative party and Jordan is what you should expect from the sales pitch, but the donors oppose him because he is the sales pitch. They argue that having a Speaker who tries to act on the party platform is bad for business. In other words, they admit the party platform is nothing more than a scam on their voters.

The truth is this is a fight of symbolism, not real policy. A Speaker Jordan will not be substantively different from Speaker McCarthy or Speaker Pelosi. Spending bills will be a bit more transparent, and they will not drop minutes before the vote. The bills themselves will not change. From the perspective of the economic elites who control the political system, they lose nothing with Speaker Jordan, other than a bit of their pride for having had to make this small concession.

That is the core issue. It is the same issue that turned the Trump years from a golden opportunity into an ongoing crisis. The people who are actually in charge could have gotten any deal they wanted from Trump. He would have signed off on amnesty, for example, as long as he got his wall money. The people in charge could not bring themselves to give a rube from the shtetl this tiny concession. Instead, they made war on him and the public as a whole.

We are seeing the same thing in the House. McCarthy’s string pullers were furious that he gave in on those small items to secure the gavel. They were apoplectic when he started to follow through on them. Lost to the mists of time is the fact he promised to release the J6 tapes in full. He gave Tucker Carlson a small taste and official Washington was incensed at this gesture toward transparency. He was forced to fink on the rest of his promises and blow up his Speakership.

Of course, all of this is possible because House elections have no impact on ninety percent of the House members. Only about forty seats are ever in doubt, so the only risk for the other four hundred members is falling out of favor with their party leaders, which means falling out of favor with permanent Washington. Make the donors angry and you get a sex scandal, an N-word scandal or something similar, along with a well-financed primary challenger.

This is what happened to Steve King from Iowa. He was solid on immigration, so the party had him knocked off. Kevin McCarthy colluded with the New York Times to post a fake story claiming that King used the N-word on a call. Immediately, McCarthy stripped King of his committee assignments and sponsored a primary challenger. By the time the truth came out about the call, it was too late for Steve King. Every Republican voting against Jordan has that story on their desk right now.

Of course, there are other issues working against Jordan. He has been skeptical of the Ukraine project. Far too many people in Washington are getting rich off that racket to tolerate skepticism. The reason the neocons have been able to push this project this far is they bolted it too the money laundering machine that is foreign aid. The money goes out to some foreign country and much of it returns in the form of consulting contracts, defense contracts and lobbying deals.

The biggest problem is the oldest problem. Like the ruling elites during revolutionary France and Russia, the ruling elite of the American empire are convinced the state exists solely to guard their interests against the Dirt People. Therefore, any concession, no matter how trivial or symbolic, is a threat to the system. In the hive mind that is official Washington, Jim Jordan leads to Donald Trump which leads to angry mobs erecting a gallows on the Capitol lawn.

History, however, suggests the opposite. Through the nineties, the economic elite got almost everything they wanted, by giving the hoi polloi a few crumbs now and again to perpetuate the myth of American democracy. Then the crumbs were replaced with rat poison, as the ruling class turned increasingly hostile and paranoid. Like the peasants in prior revolutionary eras, the best explanation we have for the behavior of our rulers is they hate us and want us dead.

All of this is a glimpse of what lies ahead in 2024. The people unwilling to budge on the Speaker issue are not going to budge on the Trump issue. The road to ruin for this ruling elite is the same road as that of prior elites. They are becoming increasingly ossified and stubborn. They miss every opportunity to lower the temperature because even small concessions are viewed through the lens of contempt for the people over whom they rule. The end of this road is the gallows.

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Mercenary Rule

Posted on October 17, 2023 by thezman

In the novel Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein described a world ruled by a military elite called the Terran Federation. Only veterans of the military enjoyed full citizenship, including the right to vote. Those who did not perform military service retained their rights of free speech and assembly, but they could not vote or hold office. As is true of every system there were some exceptions here and there, but important government jobs were reserved for federal service veterans.

This idea of earning citizenship through military service has always had some popularity on the Right, for no other reason that it would seem to exclude the sorts of people who are living arguments against democracy. It seems unlikely that you will get too many people like Ocasio-Cortez in public office if she must first do a tour in the military, rather than just wink at customers as a barmaid. Even if she passed that threshold, military veterans are too serious to vote for someone like her.

Rule by warrior elite has an appeal because it conjures images of the Middle Ages in which a ruling elite arose from the warrior class. A world governed by an honor code just sounds better to right-wing people. It also brings to my Spartan society, which proved to be superior to Athenian democracy in the Peloponnesian War. A society rule by male warriors just feels like it would be better. At the minimum, it would avoid the problems that come with the feminization of society.

There is a less fantastic appeal to this concept. In the novel, this system arose in the aftermath of the collapse of 20th century Western democracy. That system proved itself unable to combat crime and juvenile delinquency. Interestingly, Heinlein also imagined a future in which the West teams with Russian against China. Another reason for the new system of military governance was due to the inability of fully democratic systems to confront the authoritarianism of China.

Another way of looking at this setup is in the larger context of the novel in which earth is at war with two alien species. The decisions that must be made in such a war cannot be left to lonely barmaids. They must be made by the people who have skin in the game, which in the case of earth, means the warrior class. Remove the giant bugs trying to destroy earth and a system controlled by those with skin in the game could simply mean a system ruled by property owners and families.

The Heinlein idea sounds good until you look around at present day America. Some of the worst people in public life are veterans. The obvious example is Lindsey Graham, who is arguably the wort human in the Senate. The reason we can say this is his mentor John McCain is now in Hell. When Graham joins him, there will be other veterans ready to fill the role. Richard Blumenthal and Joni Ernst will be the early favorites, but we will no doubt be spoiled for choice.

By the time Lucifer calls Graham home, Dan Crenshaw and Brian Mast may have parlayed their military service and general awfulness into the Senate. Crenshaw is the veteran’s version of Ocasio-Cortez. Mast has used his service and wartime injury to make himself Israel’s main representative in Congress. They have many other representatives in the imperial congress, but only Brian Mast wears the uniform of the Israeli military to work every day.

While the Heinlein model sounds good in theory, in practice it is probably better to ban veterans from public office. There certainly have been some veterans in Washington politics who have done good work for their constituents, but the terrible ones have done far more damage. The fact that veterans are so easily turned into weapons by the neocons suggests the military selects for the sorts of people who will gladly become a mercenary for whoever can write the biggest check.

This may be the result of the volunteer military. Despite all the patriotic blather, the American military is composed of mercenaries. They structure their pay to attract the types of people they need. The military does not restrict itself to citizens, as military service is one way to win citizenship. Due to the lack of white men joining the ranks, the military is now looking to recruit foreigners. The fact is the relationship between the institution and the soldier is purely transactional.

Another reason for the terrible veterans rising up in the political ranks is the nature of all democratic systems. Voting bestows authority on the people doing the voting. Win the crowd and you are right, morally, and factually. Of course, the best way to win the crowd is by convincing them you are a virtuous person. If the people assume you are a good person, they are going to give you the benefit of the doubt, which means you will win those 50-50 debates against someone without your reputation.

John McCain leveraged this reality by waving around the flag with one of his damaged arms, while reminding everyone he was a prisoner of war. His initial foray into politics came soon after he returned home. He commissioned a long article in a big foot magazine about his deeds as a POW. His physical injuries won him sympathy and his tales of heroism won him respect. Who was going to challenge John Wayne McCain, especially when it came to military matters?

Another reason military service should be a disqualifier is that it is the worst possible training for democratic politics. In theory, politicians in a democratic system are in office to represent their constituents. Maybe those constituents are determined by geography or by ideology, but they are always real people. Those real people are living in the real world living normal lives. The ideal representative is one who has lived as his constituents and alongside his constituents.

Outside of congressional districts that have a large military base, life in the military is alien to civilian life. The military trains you to be a useful cog in a vast bureaucratic machine in which none of the cogs get to make many choices. The choices that do arise come with a well-defined list of options. Most important, the military comes with a floor as long as you do the minimum. Real life does not come with a floor. You can do all the right things and still get dealt a bad hand by reality.

Of course, all of this is an argument against democracy. It is a system that selects for the worst sorts of people. These are people who seek to use any means necessary to win over the crowd in order to profit themselves. Whether it is Ocasio-Cortez shaking her boobs in front of the camera of Crenshaw waving the bloody shirt around, the point is always the same. Democracy rewards the politicians who are adept at turning your virtues into a vice so they can exploit them.

Manna From Heaven

Posted on October 12, 2023 by thezman

One of the many problems with most conspiracy theories is they contain a central contradiction on which the theory depends. Usually, it is of the type where the villain is both omnisciently genius and incredibly stupid. The “deep state”, for example, is able to know every thought and action of every person, but they have been outwitted by the collection of aluminum foil hat guys. The central villains of most conspiracy theories are the same people who built the Death Star in Star Wars.

Another big problem with conspiracy theories is they confuse opportunism with skillful planning, as we see with the fighting in the Levant. The internet is full of theories about how Mossad or the IDF or Netanyahu deliberately let Hamas stage that raid so they could use the ensuing crisis to advance their agenda. The real goal was to clear out Gaza or maybe instigate a wider war in the region. Like 9/11, this attack was a five-cushion bank shot by the deep state.

In reality, the most likely answer for how this started is stupidity. Israel politics have been a mess for a long time now due to demographics. The Mizrahi Jews, sometimes called Oriental Jews, are those who never left the region. They are growing in number and pollical power. As a group grows in power, it tends to come at the expense of another group, or it is perceived as such. In Israel, the group threatened by the Mizrahi are the Ashkenazi, who dominate the ruling elite.

One result of this growing internal conflict is the Jewish state is not working as well as people have come to expect. The reputation of the Jewish security apparatus was made in the wars with the Arabs but also in support of the neocon wars against the Arabs during the Bush years. As is always the case, success brings complacency and that is how they got the Hamas raid. The Israelis were caught letting their guard down and the result was the Hamas raid.

That does not mean they are letting a crisis go to waste. The Dresden-like assault being waged on Gaza is one example. It is unnecessary and gratuitous, but it does sure up support in Washington, where the neocons are desperate for a win. The site of blown-up buildings and dead Palestinians not only gives people like Ben Shapiro some cheap thrills, but it also gives him a reason to whip his white audience into a frenzy of support for the war machine and its neocon operators.

It is also good for the Washington establishment. It feels like old times in the imperial capital and that is just what the doctor ordered. The rebels in the House GOP caucus have been silenced because we are at war now and no one has time for their complaints about corruption and Republican perfidy. The result is the compliant Kevin McCarthy will be replaced by the equally compliant Steve Scalise as Speaker, rather than the more independent Jim Jordan.

It is also giving Washington an excuse to cut Ukraine loose. All of a sudden no one is taking those calls from Zelensky. In between sobbing fits, White House spokesbot John Kirby made clear that Israel is now the priority. He said that “we are coming to the end of the rope on Ukraine funding” which is very bad news for Ukraine. That was a signal to regime media to wrap up their “coverage” of the war and put the whole thing on ignore and instead focus on this new war in the Levant.

This is also a golden opportunity for the Pentagon. The imperial war machine was not built to fight a land war against a peer. This has been rather embarrassing for them over the last year in the Ukraine war. From a public relations perspective, Ukraine has been terrible for the Pentagon. Now, they can switch back to their preferred role of bombing lightly armed militias. This has the added benefit of getting the flag waving yahoos excited for the war machine again.

The biggest winner in this could be the neocons who have been searching for a way to get invited back into the Republican Party. As everyone knows, a neocon cannot enter your house uninvited, so they have been searching for a way to get the Republicans to throw out the welcome mat for them. This is proving to be just the ticket, as every presidential candidate is now in a race to the sea in an effort to be the most bellicose with regards to killing Muslims.

This has the added benefit of letting them use their version of no enemies to the right, which they successfully used in the Bush years. You see, this new threat to America in the Levant is too important to risk dissent. That means Donald Trump and his criticisms of the party have to go so the more serious people like Nikki Haley can lead the party against Joe Biden and his Iranian deal makers. The fact that team Biden is run by the Kagan cult, just like Nikki Haley, will be ignored.

Of course, what will follow is new limits on speech online. The usual suspects are demanding that the social media platforms ban anyone questioning the official narrative on the war. Anyone doubting the crazy stories, for example, will be smeared as an apologist for Hamas. Maybe even an antisemite. In an ideological society, the bogeyman is always a reason to crush dissent and the regime now has a fresh new and familiar bogeyman, so the results are predictable.

That is the thing about ideological societies. The ruling elite can always take advantage of a crisis because it exists to manage crisis. Whether it is in containing counter-revolutionary forces or the inevitable crisis that arises from the irrationality of the ideology, the first task of a ruling class in an ideological society is to use every crisis as a means to advance the interest of the regime. Once Hamas parachuted into Israel, the regime had a crisis and they never let a crisis go to waste.

Whither Rufo-ism

Posted on October 10, 2023 by thezman

Since the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump swung through the walls of conservatism almost a decade ago, there has been a desperate attempt to either rebuild the wall or fill the void left by the old conservatism. The Never Trump project was mostly an effort to chase the barbarians out of the city so the good people can rebuild the wall and restart the old politics. For the most part, this project has failed as the massive hole in the wall remains.

A good recent example of this is this post by neoconservative writer Mathew Continetti in Commentary Magazine. He claims that the populists supporting nationalist policies and candidates are actually Marxists. This has become a popular theme with the East Coast Straussians, of which the neocons are a part. It is a hilariously insane line of thought, owing to the steep decline in the human capital we see everywhere in politics, but especially in the neoconservative subculture.

On the other hand, the project to recreate the old dynamic of Left and Right, has quietly plodded along with a new generation looking to create a New Right. Many are just the hucksters we have come to expect in this age. These are the people who live on social media and front-run whatever is happening at the moment. Others are rejects from the old conservative rackets hoping for a fresh start. These are the buzzards that arrive at the end of every movement.

Then you have the more professional and perhaps sincere players who operated on the fringes of conservatism but now see a chance to spread their wings. The Claremont crowd, for example, is working hard to create a New Right based on the primitive notion of natural right, supplemented by appeals to the classical liberalism of the Framers along with large dollops of Lincolnism. Claremont subscribes to the apocryphal version of the founding and Lincoln promoted by Harry Jaffa.

It is from this world that we get Chris Rufu, the guy best known for waging jihad against critical race theory in the schools. He also has waged campaigns against the sexual exploitation of children in the schools. He worked in support of the Florida bill to ban child pornography in grammar schools. He now has a book out titled, America’s Cultural Revolution, which describes the New Left and how it gained power. Paul Gottfried reviewed it here and Charles Haywood here.

Most of what Rufo describes in his book has been kicking around dissident circles for the last decade, mostly due to it kicking around paleo circles for decades. Contrary to the claims of conservatism, the New Left was never an economic or purely political movement, but a cultural and spiritual movement. With the collapse of 20th century conservatism and the cultural revolution of the last decade, this reality has become clear to everyone except libertarians.

Rufo is not without his critics. In fact, Rufo-ism is a very modern political phenomenon in that it is as much about its critics as its content. Thanks to the cultural revolution and the internet, we now live in a purely Schmitt-ian world, as in the German philosopher Carl Schmitt. Politics is only about friends and enemies, so Rufo-ism is becoming one of those points of the friend-enemy distinction. In a follow up post, Paul Gottfried talks about some of Rufo’s critics.

One of the interesting things about the critics of Rufo, as well as his supporters, is the dog that never barks. That dog is race. This is odd, given the material at the heart of his current project. Critical Race Theory is about race. Then there is the fact that Rufo spent much of his early time on this protect lecturing white people that the real victims of CRT were black kids. He put most of his effort into shooting down the idea that CRT is antiwhite, on the grounds that the term is “racist.”

This is an important part of Rufo-ism and the milieu that spawned it. These are people who are opposed to any discussion of race. It is not that they oppose the New Left’s view on race but that they embrace the New Left’s view on race more completely and sincerely than the Left embraces it. Rufo does think race is a social construct and it must be eliminated from all discourse. This New Right imagined by Rufo, Claremont and others is not just colorblind, but colorless.

It is tempting to assume this is just the old conservative two-step. They embrace the moral claims of the people they oppose but they have a different and more lucrative proposal for how to achieve them. Of course, there is the constant fear of being called “racist” which has haunted conservatism since the Old Left declared discrimination the greatest sin and diversity the greatest good. In other words, it is tempting to think Rufo’s act is an effort to avoid the R-word.

This is a reasonable suspicion, but it does not appear to be the case with Rufo nor the other popular figures from Claremont. Rufo married outside of his race and has mixed-race children, so unlike his New Left critics, who live like White Nationalists, Rufo’s “lived experience” comports with his stated views on race. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in this subculture. Further, the Claremont view of politics leaves no room for race or even natural inequality.

There is another reason for the aversion to race. Rufo is a science-denier. He rejects biology as we know it. He worked for the Discovery Institute, which peddles crackpot theories like intelligent design. Of course, the Claremont people largely reject the last two thousand years of scientific progress. They instead embrace the Straussian belief that nature comes with a secret code book on how humans should act. If you say Aristotle’s name enough times, the secret is revealed.

The starting place for the New Right is the assumption that humans are infinitely malleable in terms of character. What you are as a person is determined by the society into which you are born. If you get the moral code of society right and enforce that morality through the institutions, you end up with virtuous citizens. Since virtue in their view is a life lived to the benefit of the polis, there can be no place for things like race, because that undermines their idea of virtue.

If this sounds a bit like Marxism, it should, because this is the basic assumption of Marx and most radical thinkers. Once you assume that morality is an objective truth that lies outside of collective agreement, it means there can be only one truly moral way to organize human society. The goal of politics, therefore, is to discover it and then ruthlessly enforce it. Instead of historical materialism as the moral authority, the New Right embraces their interpretation of classical philosophy.

Putting aside the underlying philosophical reason for their embrace of colorless politics, it sounds a lot like the colorblind politics of the old conservatism. In the 1980’s conservatives were sure America was ready to move beyond race. Everyone had the same opportunity and society would finally escape the long shadow of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Race would still exist. It simply would not matter in our behavior as citizens and as a society.

The New Right is more reactionary, but the idea is the same. Instead of the optimism of the 1980’s, they are informed by the pessimism of the present. While they agree that discrimination is the worst sin, they see the antiracists as bad as the racists they claim to oppose. The New Right wants to use any means necessary to remove any discussion of race and biological reality from the public square, mostly because they see it as a tool of the people they claim to oppose.

From a dissident perspective, this New Right seems doomed to failure because reality is undefeated, but that view suffers from a flawed view of success. The New Left, like the Old Left and it antecedents since the Mayflower needs a dancing partner, one that shares its ultimate goal. That means something will rise up to take that spot now that the old Buckley-style conservatism is caput. Rufo-ism is a good bet to be what fills that void on the New Left’s dance card.

Trouble In The Levant

Posted on October 9, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the classic historical drama, Doctor Zhivago, a post about demographic reality and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

A good rule when trying to understand anything in the Middle East is to first assume that nothing is as it appears on the surface. This is the land of endless intrigue and a land nearly devoid of candor. Another good rule is to assume all interested parties are lying, even those outside the region. This is especially true of anything concerning Israel, which is usually at the center of intrigue. Naturally, that is the place to start when analyzing the recent fighting in the Levant.

For those living off-grid until this morning, the Arab militia group Hamas launched a series of daring raids into Israel from the Gaza strip. They overran Israeli border posts, blinded radar systems, and attacked IDF garrisons. Once inside Israeli, they attacked some sort of outdoor rave that was going on at the time, killing hundreds of people and taking many of them as prisoners. Israel is now promising to genocide the Arab population in the Gaza strip in retaliation.

The first question to ask is how was it possible for such a large, complex operation to happen in a walled ethno-state like Israel? The IDF is a fully modern, high-tech military that is supposed to be the best in the word at defending against insurgents, yet they were caught unawares by Hamas. Further, Mossad exists to monitor these populations for exactly these sorts of threats. Somehow, poorly armed militants were able to organize this without being detected.

Adding to the intrigue is this story in the Wall Street Journal claiming inside information on how this was planned. Since we know regime media does no independent reporting, it means the story was recited to them by the regime. Is it plausible that Washington knew about this while Israel knew nothing? How likely is it that Washington knew about this and did not relay warnings to Israel? Maybe the story is a fake planted by the neocons to paint Iran as the villain.

Regardless, this attack could not come at a better time for the Israeli government, which has been in crisis for a year. Not so long ago there were large protests over constitutional reforms pushed by the Netanyahu government. Some thought civil war was possible, due to the scale of unrest. Those protests reflect a larger demographic problem within Israel. The old liberal ruling class stopped having children, while the ultra-orthodox continue to breed like rabbits.

A full-scale mobilization and war on the Palestinians is just the thing to suppress dissent and whip up support for the state. After all, this is the reason that Washington has been on a war footing since 1945. All of the parties in Israel will now have no choice but to fall in behind the Netanyahu government, at least until the emergency is over and the hostages are returned or killed by the IDF. The early results suggest the plan is to annihilate Gaza and drive off the remaining population.

There is another benefit. For decades Israel has been trying to get the United States to attack Iran and topple the Iranian regime. This was the neocon plan in the Bush years, but the debacle in Iraq forced them to table the idea. Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran, so a slaughter in Gaza could provoke Iran, which in turn would give Washington an excuse to attack them. The bodies were not cold and Lindsey Graham was out reading this exact script to the media.

Israel and the neocons are not the only people dancing on rooftops over what they are calling Israel’s 9/11. The Saudis are probably taking a sigh of relief. Washington has been pressuring the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel, something they would like to avoid as it would complicate their relationship with Iran. Both countries are now in BRICS and slowly working through their longstanding issues. Of course, China and Russia are promising both sides support in this effort.

The Saudis have not made it this long by luck. They understand that the world is changing, and they know their role in this new world will change with it, but they are not going to get ahead of things either. They probably want to see how things develop with Russia and China before alienating Washington. If they can remain on good terms with all sides for now, they have more cards to play. This new flare up in Arab-Israeli tensions give them an excuse to slow-play Washington.

Then we have Iran, which is going to get the blame from Israel and the neocons for instigating this attack. Whether Iran did or did not greenlight the attack is debatable, but they have real power in this game. They have also cultivated strong relations with Russia and China, who would love to play a bigger role in the region. This new war gives Iran a reason to invite both counties into the process of finding a solution to the conflict, thus strengthening Iran.

That is another angle to this that does not get mentioned. Washington has been slowly pushed out of regional politics, outside of Israel and the garrisons in Syria. With the massive drain on the American war machine in Ukraine, is Washington capable of launching a war against Iran? Can Israel sustain their war without new supplies from Washington, which may be low on weapons too? In 2006 Israel actually ran out of certain munitions fighting Hezbollah.

In other words, Iran may be calculating that this is now the time to reset the game board in order to setup new negotiations. Imagine a scenario in which both China and Russia are pushing for a regional peace conference, but Washington and Israel are pushing for war with Iran, but neither has the means to do it. Just as every other Western empire has exhausted itself in the Middle East, Iran may be thinking the Global American Empire has exhausted itself and is ready to leave.

This brings up another angle. The Russians are the big winner in this for the simple reason that the West now has to choose between Israel and Ukraine. Washington had to requisition 80% of Israel’s reserve munitions for Ukraine. They scoured the empire for weapons and ammunition. Facing a second front, they will have to choose and everyone on planet earth knows who will win that one. A hot war in the Levant is going to make for a very cold winter in Ukraine.

This may not be the worst thing for Washington. Ukraine is a loser that will only end poorly, so putting that war on the ignore list and focusing attention on this new front in the Middle East could be a blessing in disguise. Right now, the volunteer army of Ukraine experts are rebranding as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran experts, so the Ukraine war can be quickly forgotten. The power of regime media is the power to ignore, so if they ignore Ukraine, everyone ignores Ukraine.

One interesting sidenote to all of this is the conservative zombies chanting about how weakness in Ukraine has led to aggression against Israel. They have no idea why they are saying this, but they are not entirely wrong. The failure in the proxy war with Russia has exposed the rot in the American system. Decades of looting and grifting have left the empire unable to follow through on its threats. As a result, the world is becoming less afraid of Washington’s bluster and bullying.

That is the subtext to all of this. The fossils from the Reagan-Bush Museum are not wrong when they say Israel is the only Western outpost in the Middle East. It is just that the West is in decline and that means these outposts will be abandoned or overrun as part of the process of decline. If Israel is to survive it means becoming something other than an outpost of the West. If the West is to survive, it means abandoning these outposts and setting about the task of renewal.

Numbers

Posted on October 5, 2023 by thezman

If you were a young person in the 1980’s and caught up in the swelling conservative movement, you needed to know the numbers. Conservatism, to a great degree, was about making rational arguments which meant starting with the numbers. Things like the budget deficit, economic growth, crime rates and inflation were a common part of the conservative counter to progressive claims. At its most basic, conservatism was rational while liberalism was emotional.

For a while it seemed like the conservatives had carried the day on this issue as the public discourse slowly mirrored conservative discourse. When public figures talked about politics and social issues, it was about the numbers. The media would make a day of covering the latest speech by the Fed chair. Alan Greenspan became a rock star who gave speeches to huge crowds. Every politician made sure to have the Congressional Budget Office bless his latest idea.

Through the Bush years, economists took the place of the court astrologer, providing empirical authority to every normative claim. This reached its peak in the first Obama term when they said that every dollar spent by the government created more than a dollar of economic activity. A line of people with impressive sounding credentials provided the math of this claim. This was the argument in favor of the massive spending program unleashed by the Obama administration.

It was not just politics that got the numbers treatment. After every Super Bowl, the media would spend a day or two crunching the numbers to prove that you were the only weirdo who did not set aside the day to watch the big game. Television ratings were a mainstay of media coverage. The stock market became the central measure of social happiness, with cable channels dedicated to telling us the numbers and what the numbers meant for your happiness.

Today, no one discusses the numbers. Someone arguing for a policy on the grounds that it is good the economy sounds like someone arguing for free silver. In fact, it is the primary criticism of Conservative Inc. They do not care about crossdressers chasing your son around the playground or the tidal wave of brown people pouring over the border into your neighborhood. They care about the carried interest deduction and locking in tax cuts that few experienced or remember.

What is the current projected federal deficit? Without googling it, few people would know, and most people would not bother to do it. The same is true of the total federal debt, which used to be a headline topic. How much does the Federal government owe and to whom do they owe it? Washington is embroiled in a huge drama right now set off by the Federal budget debate and no one bothers mentioning that about forty percent of what they spent is borrowed.

One reason no one talks about the economic numbers is they have become inconceivable large, so they have no impact. People can grasp a million and they can sort of grasp a billion. Being a millionaire would be nice and being a billionaire would be awesome, but trillionaire? It is probably better than billionaire, but what is bigger than anything you can imagine? The thirty-plus trillion federal debt is a meaningless number because it is outside of what most people can imagine.

There is a bigger issue that applies to all the numbers. Decades of lying about the numbers have made all of them suspect. The totally fake economic data pumped out in the Obama years sunk the credibility of the court wizards. When those people with impressive credentials put on their serious faces and said that taking money from you and giving some of it to your neighbor would grow the economy, even the most innumerate started to question the math.

It is not just the big stuff where lying has undermined the trust in the numbers that used to be the guideposts of society. Television ratings are obviously bogus or not as meaningful as claimed. If the people making the content cared about ratings, they would not have smeared their feces all over popular content. Ad makers would not have replaced most of the white people with nonwhites. They certainly would not have every white woman paired with a black guy.

Probably the most egregious offender of the numbers are the tech companies, who clearly fake all of their numbers. How many users are really on Twitter? No one knows but we know the official number is a lie. We can clearly see that the follower counts and impressions are fake. Before buying Twitter, Elon Musk made the rather obvious claim that the site was riddled with bots and fake accounts. Once the deal closed, he stopped talking about the bots and fake accounts.

There is more to the general fakery than the unreliability of the numbers. It is that it reflects a collapse in trust. When the government claims inflation is under control, but you keep seeing your expenses climb, you are reminded by the numbers that the people in charge cannot be trusted. When some new personality bursts on the scene claiming to have a huge audience, but no one you know heard of the guy until last week, you cannot help but wonder if it is a lie.

The numbers of life are not supposed to tell us what we ought to do, but to be a measure of what we are doing. If we cannot trust the numbers or the people issuing the numbers, then we cannot know what they are doing. We have no way of judging what is being told to us or if it is on the level. The only logical response is to assume the numbers are fake and the people issuing them are lying. A society with unreliable numbers is a society run by unreliable people.

Of course, this is most clear in politics. The most important numbers are the votes counted on election night. The logic of democracy is that everyone gets their say, then everyone votes and the side with the most votes wins. Along the way polling tells us how the various arguments and people are doing. If all of these numbers are fake, then what is the point? If the numbers at the soap box and the ballot box cannot be trusted, you are left with the numbers in the cartridge box.

Since the end of the Cold War, American society has travelled along an arc that started with a trust in the numbers and the people behind them to a place where no sane person trusts the numbers or the people behind them. That is probably why it feels like this pirate ship of a society called America is sailing into dangerous waters. Odds are just numbers, and the odds say that in a world without reliable numbers, the most likely outcome is the ship eventually sinks.

No Enemies On The Right

Posted on October 4, 2023 by thezman

Charles Haywood of Worthy House has a post up explaining and defending his concept of “No Enemies On The Right”, which he originally formulated as “No Enemies To The Right” last December. He used that original phrase when discussing the jihad led by Rod Dreher against a schoolteacher who was accused of heresy. Dreher was doing his Christian piety act to both attack someone who could not defend himself and to curry favor with the people he pretends to oppose.

Dreher panicked when Haywood used the phrase “No Enemies To The Right” because it would be very bad for business if people embraced it. Like everyone in for-hire conservative politics, Dreher exists to attack people to his right. That is his reason to exist and why rich people fund his operations. What we insist on calling the Right in America is primarily a policing operation. They impose the morality of the Left on the rabble that the Right is charged with keeping at bay.

Over the last year, Haywood has defended his original argument, refining it as necessary, in response to criticism. Haywood has no interest in becoming the Emily Post of right-wing politics, but his continuing work on this concept is producing something like a rulebook of right-wing etiquette. His ten-point outline for what he means by “No Enemies On The Right” should be viewed as a useful guide for discourse between the various groups in dissident politics.

The slogan “No Enemies On The Right” is not new to Haywood. Those around way back in the alt-right days, which feels like a lifetime ago now, will recall this was a slogan with some of the more popular figures in that space. In fact, it was the motivation for organizing the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. The idea was to both bring everyone together but also break the pattern of the Left pitting one group against the other to enforce their moral code.

Amusingly, before the alt-right used the term, it was a popular way for the neocons to stamp out dissent during the Bush presidency. They argued in the runup to the 2004 election that their war plans were too important to let the many lies of the Bush administration divide the Right. Their basic argument was “Sure, Bush is Lyndon Johnson, but the Democrats are worse, so you have to hold your nose and vote for the guy who is the opposite of what we promised.”

Of course, like everything political on the Right, this concept has been lifted from the Left, which coined the term “No Enemies to the Left” during the French Revolution for the same reason Haywood is promoting his version today. Opposing the King and the aristocracy was too important to let petty squabbles drive the many opponents of the regime into the ghetto of endless quarreling. Overthrow the system first then everyone can argue about what comes next.

There is an obvious appeal in this age. The one thing everyone outside the political class can agree upon is the system now only works to serve the interest of the people at the upper reaches of the system. There is a zero-sum game mindset in the ruling class where they assume what is good for them is bad for the people, so what is bad for the people must be good for them. The result is a system run by people who hate the people over whom they rule.

The logical answer is to hate them back. Since the people have numbers, the only way to use this advantage is to unite enough people under an opposition banner that has as its singular goal the removal of the ruling class. This is why this idea terrifies the house slaves of Conservative Inc. They know exactly what this means, which is the toppling of the people who keep them in the lifestyle they think they deserve. From the point of view of people like Rod Dreher, it is Only Enemies On The Right.

There is another advantage to this mode of thought. It forces clarity on the politics of dissent that helps flush out the poseurs and profiteers. Those committed to the larger project will refuse to condemn anyone on their side for crimes against the regime or regime orthodoxy. At most they remain silent. The poseurs and profiteers are always quick to point their bony finger at someone and condemn him for violating the morality of the opposition, like you see with Rod Dreher.

There is one major flaw with the “No Enemies On The Right” concept. It makes it difficult to police the ranks for lunatics and crackpots. Populist politics has always struggled with the weirdo problem precisely because it is unwilling to criticize anyone willing to join the fight against the Left. You can chant “No Enemies On The Right!” until you are blue in the face, but you must have some way to filter out the lunatics or you end up being defined by them.

There is also the problem of what constitutes the Right. The drug addled Antifa marchers oppose the system, but they are not of the Right. Jimmy Dore, the old school progressive comic, opposes the regime, but he is a socialist. The Grey Zone people oppose the America military machine, but they are communists. There has to be something more than opposition to the Left or you end up putting a leash around your neck and handing the other end to people you hate.

This leads to the third problem, which Haywood addresses in his seventh item in his list of “Tenets of NEOTR.” Disagreement is vital for any opposition to the regime as this is the only way to improve the opposition. Ideas need to be debated and that often results in hurt feelings, which leads to public disputes. Chanting “No Enemies On The Right” in these times will just alienate the people in the dispute. There needs to be a way to argue but in a way that keeps the focus on the enemy.

Finally, there is no escaping the fact that this is not a new idea and prior efforts at practicing it have failed. There is a reason it has failed. The main reason is the people chanting it were never really serious about it. Instead, they tended to use it as a shield to ward off criticism. This is how we got to Charlottesville. The way forward with this concept must be to go back and address the past failure. That means more discussion about “No Enemies On The Right” with the aim of getting it right.

The Bleep Show Goes On

Posted on September 28, 2023 by thezman

The regime held another audition last night for the role of token opposition candidate in the presidential election tentatively scheduled for next year. This time they held the audition at the Reagan library, which was appropriate given that all of the actors sounded like exhibits from the 1980’s museum. They even used some clips of Reagan as prompts so the performers could spit out their favorite lines. It gave the whole thing the desired retro feel.

Fox News produced the event, as they did the prior event, but this time they used the B-team to put on the show. In the first event they treated it like one of the phony talent shows that are a staple of broadcast television. They had a drone flying around the auditorium and they introduced the performers like a wrestling show. It was vulgar and crude, but appropriate given the reality of things. The whole thing is just another chapter in an ongoing big lie.

Perhaps having been too obvious the first time, they were more subdued this time, running a standard debate style show. They also used their B-team actors to play at moderating the thing. They had a chirpy little blond woman who was disorganized and flustered the entire night. They had some old guy who must have missed his flight to Heathrow at LAX, so they made him a moderator. The third wheel was a Spanish woman with a spray on tan that was starting to peel.

Most of the night was the performers saying the prepared and rehearsed zingers while everyone else talked over them. It was clear that everyone was instructed to talk over Ramaswamy so that is what they did, often just mouthing what appeared to be gibberish, or vamping as they say in the business. The result was a cacophony of voices while the chirpy little blond hopped up and down in her seat trying to get the performers to stop talking over one another.

Why anyone thinks people will sit through this is a mystery. They could easily solve this problem with the use of shock collars. If a performer talks over another performer, he gets enough voltage to disable him for a few minutes. Maybe employ trap doors under their feet as a sort of timeout. If the performer keeps breaking the rules, the door opens, and he falls into a garbage pit. He then has to climb the stairs back to the stage, covered in garbage, and retake his spot.

Of course, the fact that this would be an improvement over what they are doing is an indictment of the system. If the ruling class treated elections seriously and they cared about public’s opinion, these vulgar displays would never happen. The performers, who would be actual candidates with real agency, would refuse to participate. That is not our reality, so we get these vulgar displays. If you were trying to humiliate the voters, you would not do anything different as far as these shows.

There is some value in watching these things. You get a sense of the narrative from which the regime is operating. It is clear they still think Trump gets put in jail, exiled, or bankrupted so he cannot run. They just had a judge steal his company the other day, so that part of the script is still operative. That means the midget wrestling shows they are putting on are for picking the lucky loser of next year’s election show. One of these losers will get the golden ticket at the convention.

Last night it was clear they have soured on Noble Black Guy. Tim Scott got little action and was pushed off to one side. They could be sidelining him to keep him fresh or they could be moving onto another actor. Neocon Nikki got the star treatment most of the night and the regime produced a bunch of fake polls for her. They have been planting stories in regime media claiming that she is the “insurgent” candidate. Imagine calling the consummate insider an insurgent.

You have to respect the neocons. They may be evil, but they never abandon their project, and they always plan ahead. Despite the results in Ukraine, they still dream the dream of thermonuclear war, so they keep reaching their tentacles into the process to promote those who share their dream of extinguishing humanity. Even though they have publicly abandoned the Republican Party, they see an opening to get one of their sock puppets the nomination and they are seizing it.

The trouble for them and the regime is that the people are coming to understand that there are people with the impudence to distort the truth so infamously as to put forth a shriveled hag like Nikki Haley. She and her scaly backers are not the solution to the political and cultural crisis. They are symbols of it. Only in a morally bankrupt system can degenerates like this flourish. If a meteor struck the Reagan Library last night during the show, the world would be a better place.

Sadly, it will not come to that just yet. Instead, it was merely another reminder to Republican voters that their party hates them. All of the actors were handed lines to say mean things about Trump, who is now the face of the party’s voters. The only thing they did not do is take turns spitting on a picture of Trump. The star of this portion was a fat slob they trucked in to repeat Borsht Belt zingers about Trump. The usual suspects still think this stuff is hilarious, which is a topic all its own.

In the end politics is always about the desires of the ruling class. No matter what the people think, the people in charge want what they want. They will never be talked out of being the ruling class. On the other hand, if what they want makes it impossible for society to operate, then we get a new ruling class. At this point, all of the trust is gone so they have to keep Netflix running, sportball playing and the grillers grilling, so no one notices the cracks spreading all around us.

A Haunting In Canada

Posted on September 27, 2023 by thezman

“There is a specter haunting the West, the specter of fascism” could be the opening line to a manifesto from just about any group in the modern West. Three generations after fascism ceased to exist as a real political and intellectual movement, it hangs over the Western mind like a terrifying fog. Every issue in the political debate is there because it relates to fascism in some way. It either defines who is and who is not a fascist, or it is assumed to be a precursor to fascism.

In every political debate, the people we continue to call conservatives are defined by their fear of being called fascists or an equivalent label. Racism, for example, is nothing more than a crude synonym for fascism. The people we call the Left have a deep sack full of terms that essentially mean fascist. If they call you an extreme right-wing extremist, they really mean you are a fascist. Of course, fascist now simply means “outside the moral consensus” as defined by the Left.

It is not just a rhetorical game. Western liberalism is now just a reactionary, but still revolutionary, cause that has evolved around fear of fascism. All of the weird cultural fads are driven mostly by a desire to strike out at the people the culture warriors assume to be fascists. These are the white people who are trying to live normal lives in middle-class suburbs. Woke is not for anything. It is against fascism and all of its manifestations, which can be anything.

Eric Hoffer famously wrote that “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is clear when you look at what has happened to Western liberalism. Long stripped of its Christian moral foundation, it staggers on in opposition to one devil after another. The devil can take many forms but strip away the covering and what lies beneath is always an Austrian painter in the imagination of the Western mind.

This is a purely negative identity. Western liberalism no longer has an internal, independent definition for itself. Those concepts still linger in the past, occasionally referenced by the people we continue to call conservatives, but only as a way of trying to slither out from under the boulder labeled “fascism” that has been hurled at them by the people we call the Left. Both sides agree that everything they do not like is Hitler and Hitler is their forever enemy.

You see it in the recent scandal in Canada where all the best people were seen cheering a guy who turned out to be a former Nazi. Yaroslav Hunka, who is 98, got a standing ovation after House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota called him a hero during a Friday visit by Zelensky. Rota called him a hero because he was told that Hunka fought the Soviets in the war. Since Western liberals now think Putin is Hitler, Russians are Nazis, so Hunka must be a hero.

The haunting of the Western mind by the specter of fascism is right there in that ridiculous performance. Because Putin is Hitler, it means Russia is the new Third Reich, which makes Ukraine the symbol of the West. Zelensky has been transformed into Churchill, but not the drunken degenerate version. He is the lion of the West version who rallied the forces of good against fascism. To the dullards who put the event together, Hunka connected the present to the past.

In reality, Hunka was and remains a Banderan, a follower of Stepan Bandera, who was a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist in the middle of the last century. Bandera collaborated with the Nazis because he hated Russians. Ukrainian nationalism is and remains, like Western liberalism, a negative identity. It is haunted by fascism because they see fascism as the great enemy of Russia, which they hate as much as the Western liberal thinks he hates fascism.

Of course, the question is how did this Ukrainian fascist end up in Canada after the war and remain undetected? He is wanted by Poland for war crimes. It turns out that the West welcomed a lot of these guys after the war. John Demjanjuk was a famous example from the 1980’s. He was the center of a moral panic, mostly over the prospect of running out of real Nazis due to the actuarial tables. All the best people turned up to point their bony fingers at Demjanjuk.

That gets to the reality of fascism and why it haunts the West. Fascism is impossible to define, in part, because it is the universal bogeyman. Both communists and liberals have spent generations heaping every sin imaginable on fascism. Those sins, of course, are the things these ideological camps fear most about themselves. With communism in the ash heap of history, fascism is now just the warted, gnarled face of Western liberalism’s worst fears about itself.

Another reason fascism is impossible to define is it was never really a standalone ideology, but a reaction to ideology. Fascism would never have existed if not for the apparent failure of liberalism and the very real threat of communism, especially the Bolshevik variety. Fascism was an ad hoc defense against cultural and spiritual genocide by people who saw both Western liberalism and communism in their raw form as they evolved in the 19th century.

This is why modern liberalism looks strikingly like fascism. We live in an age where the lines between the state and capitalism are impossible to see. Corporate America and the apparatus of the state are two heads of the same hydra. The media, the academy and entertainment are the other heads. The body that controls them is managerialism, which looks a lot like fascism. If James Burnham were alive today, he would easily make the connection between the two.

For a long time, people have wondered what would happen when the last real Nazi or alleged victim of the Nazis is no more. In the next decade that whole generation will be gone, leaving no more devils for liberalism to chase. Similarly, people have wondered what comes after liberalism reaches its end point. Both questions seem to have the same answer in that one cannot live without the other. When both are gone, the long nightmare of the West will finally come to an end.

Election Narrative Update

Posted on September 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: If you are looking for a way to do some good within the parameters of the system, then take a look at the Free Expression Foundation. This is what civil liberties groups are supposed to be doing, which is defending the rights of citizens. The organization is run by a stand-up guy who believes in the mission. They have volunteers, but fighting cases in court requires money, so consider a donation.

The next Republican debate is scheduled for this coming Thursday at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley California. According to state media, the same cast of characters is expected to perform at this event, with the exception of Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum, who they forgot to invite. Why this is being held in California is a mystery, as there is no chance a Republican will every win the state. For all anyone knows or cares, there is no Republican Party in California.

Putting that aside, the pre-coverage of this debate shows us that the narrative for the 2024 election is running into serious trouble on the GOP side. The script said that at this point, Trump would be out of the race due to the indictments. The party would have swung behind one of the zombies to stop Ron DeSantis, who would be desperately swimming to the “middle” in order to maintain donor support. Instead, Trump now looms over the whole thing like Godzilla attacking Tokyo.

The main flaw in the narrative was assuming that Trump’s support would collapse after the string of indictments. Because the people behind this stuff are lizard people from an alien planet, they have no way to read public sentiment. They are left to imagine how humans would react under certain conditions. Apparently one of their texts on humans said that humans naturally flee when the bad guys attack their champion for the crime of fighting back against the bad guys.

Regime media is now floating stories like this one in which various toadies wonder why their great plan failed to work. One of the lessons of the Ukraine war is that these sorts of stories appear when the regime finally comes to realize that their current narrative is no longer operational. It is something like the stages of grief. They are now in the acceptance phase of narrative collapse. Next is the bargaining phase where they search for something positive from the situation.

Another problem with the narrative is that Ron DeSantis was not able to play his role as the acceptable alternative to Trump. You may hate Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns, but it does not change the fact that he is the best street fighter the Republican Party has seen since Lee Atwater. He saw right away that DeSantis was a stalking horse, so he unleashed his supporters on him. As a result DeSantis has been dying a death of a thousand cuts.

One part of the narrative has held together. The script called for the great zombie army that is Conservative Inc. to rally to the banner of an approved option. After some fits and starts, they have managed to get this right. The one thing that you can always count on is for conservatives to do what the Left tells them to do. Nikki Haley is now the regime option in the race. She has broken double digits in Iowa, which is probably her high water mark, but that will be enough to make her the favorite.

That is the reason to watch the Thursday debate. Since Neocon Nikki has been anointed as the regime favorite, it means DeSantis has to go after her in order to revive interest in his campaign. Given how poorly he has done to this point, it is a lock that he does not do this and instead attacks Ramaswamy again. For his part, the King Cobra should be ready for Neocon Nikki to use him as a foil. Expect him to arrive wearing garlic as that is how you keep the neocon at bay.

Ramaswamy has turned out to be an enormous problem for the regime as he is a black swan in this story. According to official dogma, it is impossible for a brown person with an elite education to sound like Trump. Not only does Ramaswamy sound like Trump, he makes better arguments than Trump and he is willing to stake out positions that Trump is afraid to take, which are popular with normal people. They do not know what to do with him, so they will fling their poo at him.

Of course, they are falling for one of the classic blunders. The most famous is to never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this; never get involved in a poo flinging contest with an Indian. Ramaswamy has figured out that the race issue is losing its effectiveness with voters. That and it strikes people as ridiculous to call him a white supremacist. This gives him room to be the explicitly pro-white candidate while not being white.

With the narrative collapsing, the question shifts to what is next. The polling shows Trump is locked in as the overwhelming favorite in the early contests. What we know from 2016 is that Trump always does better than the polls, so it is fair to assume he will win handily if nothing changes. The script calls for the removal of Trump from the ballot, for the good of the country, so they can always play that card. Otherwise, they have to craft a new narrative to prevent the apocalypse.

The natural fallback position would be to put a pillow of Biden’s face and find a younger more plausible option for the other side. Gavin Newsom was the obvious choice, but he has removed himself from consideration. Presumably they threatened to charge him with raping people decades ago. That leaves no one. Given Biden’s declining ability to speak in public, we could end up with a general election where Trump campaigns in front of huge rallies and Biden does not campaign at all.

The ultimate fallback position, of course, is a rerun of 2020. This time Biden will top his eighty million votes in Pennsylvania alone. They have gone to a system of automatic voting that lets you avoid the hassle of filling out your ballot. This is a great benefit to the dead, who find this to be a big challenge. All joking aside, the lesson of 2020 is they can rig the election and get away with it, so the ultimate solution to narrative collapse is not who votes but who counts the votes.

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