The Department of Justice has recently announced that the new great devil for the Empire is the drug cartels, operating just over the border. Empires need an enemy and to his credit, Trump is unwilling to pick enemies from the other side of the globe. Instead, he prefers more practical enemies, ones that cause real Americans real trouble in the real country. The drug cartels are not a threat to “our democracy” or a threat to freedom around the world. They sell drugs and murder Americans right here in America.
That’s a welcome change, given that Trump has often flirted with neocon lunacy regarding Iran and Syria. The ruling class and their media organs will never admit it, but one main reason for Trump is that white people grew tied of fighting wars for a ruling class that despises them. The fact that the Trump administration seems to be serious about the problems south of the border suggests they either get that or simply know how to read polling. Mexican drugs and crime are a serious concern for normal white people.
The curious thing is why it has to be cast as some sort of great crusade. Mexico is a poor country, relative to America. It’s not Africa, but it is it not Canada either. One reason the cartels are a problem is the Mexican government is unable to assert its control over all of its territory. The Federal Police is riddled with corruption, as the drug cartels are able to buy them off or threaten them off. The government is always worried about the loyalty of the army, so deploying them against the cartels is a complicated proposition.
One of the interesting results of this is we have a very good understanding of who runs the cartels, where they operate and where they manufacture product. Every once in a while, the Mexican government asks for help nabbing a drug lord and we are able to direct them to the right place at the right time. We’re able to do this using old school signal intelligence. Unlike the Middle East, we are not deploying and army of drones to monitor what’s happening on the ground. If we wanted, we could own the air space tomorrow.
The proof of this is that we can locate a trouble maker in Yemen and hit them with a missile, without having anyone on the ground in Yemen. We’ve been perfecting drone warfare in both Yemen and Afghanistan for almost two decades now. Presumably, conducting drone warfare in our backyard, with lots of human resources on the ground to augment the drone surveillance, would be much more effective. If we wanted, we could unleash unlimited drone warfare on the cartels to devastating effect.
Of course, the politics of fighting Mexican cartels are even better than running a drone war over the horizon. The support for droning savages in Afghanistan and Yemen is non-existent, so the ruling class no longer discusses it. Their effort to make the murder of the Saudi journalist a big deal is a good example of how little Americans now care about what is happening with these people. A barbaric theocracy murdered one of their people inside the borders of a neighboring barbaric theocracy. Also, water is still wet.
In contrast, imagine Trump announcing that the opioid problem has reached such a crisis that he is ordering the military to conduct operations over the border in order to defend the country against these cartels. Throw in a secondary announcement that he has ordered the arrest and deportation of the Sackler family and Trump’s approval rating soars. The Left would cry out in pain as they strike out at Trump over it, but as we are seeing, this is becoming an ineffective tactic, as people embrace more realistic politics.
This brings us back to where we started. Fixing the problems with Mexico is such an obvious winner politically, but no one talks about it. Trump won the White House on his promise to build a border wall, among other things, but no one in the political class has much interest in the problems with the border. You don’t have to be a conspiracy buff to think that maybe this is not just serendipity. It is not just the politicians, who ignore the issue. The so-called conservative media has always worked hard to ignore it.
It is one of those issues, which reveal the deep loathing of typical white people that has become normalized in the American ruling class. When the ruling class thinks about the heroin problem, they think, “Well, they deserve it.” They don’t think of middle-class parents finding their kid dead in her bed from a fentanyl overdose. They think of snaggle-toothed hillbillies living in shacks, with a few Confederate flags hanging on the walls. For our rulers, there are good whites and bad whites and we are all bad whites.
That’s why these bread and butter issues no longer resonate with the political class. Few of them have any acquaintance with real work. They popped out of prep school into a nice college, then grad school and then a position in the managerial class. The normal people in their family are soon transformed into props for their fictional origin story about how they were discriminated against, victimized or made to feel sad in some way. Theirs is a world of highly choreographed gestures designed to display their piety and fidelity to the class.
For the ruling elite, we are the dirty natives over whom they reluctantly rule. This colonial mentality has become a part of ruling class culture. It’s why they remain baffled by the popularity of Trump’s economic agenda. It’s not that they oppose it. It’s that they don’t understand why anyone would care about coal miners in West Virginia or steamfitters in Ohio. It’s why they never think about addressing the Mexican cartel problem or the human trafficking at the border. These are not their problems and therefore none of their concern.
This is the result of foreign rule. America is the first purely cultural empire, so it is no surprise that we are the first people to be ruled by native born foreigners. The iron rule of foreign domination is that it ends poorly for the rulers. People prefer to be ruled by their own kind. Maybe what we are seeing with Trump is another first. The peaceful transition from foreign rule to local rule, with the foreigners going native. It seems unlikely, but Trump winning the White House was unlikely. Maybe this strange age will come to a strange end.