This week, Hillary Clinton publicly proposed “formal deprogramming” for MAGA enthusiasts, piling on a repeated President Biden theme of trying to deal with “an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement.”
The nation recently discovered that the FBI has a new “MAGA Extremist” category. All this hard work by government is aimed at “preserving democracy.” Clinton is particularly concerned about the small extremist “tail” wagging the House Republican caucus, and destroying not only decorum, but the institution itself.
It is tempting to be mildly entertained by all of this, but as Tho Bishop noted “Weak regimes are particularly dangerous.” The Western/NATO/Blackrock conversation about Ukraine turned to “next steps” many months ago. Our current weak regime here at home – a group of dominant state beneficiaries looking down the barrel of a financial, societal, and military hegemonic collapse trifecta– is also considering next steps for us.
Beyond hunting down MAGAts, and perhaps loading them on trains for deprogramming somewhere, what else is coming, and what can we learn now that will help?
We can learn from the collapse of the USSR in 1989, a seemingly sudden breakdown of what appeared to be a strong and centralized federal state, that had in actuality lost control of the economy, the culture, and the narrative at least a decade earlier. People and regions itching for independence, and those challenging the narrative, were enemies of the State. At the end of that story, what remained were many of the same political oligarchs, many of them internationalized, in control of most of the former USSR’s economic and natural resources. The poor, invested in and dependent upon socialist promises, stayed poor, and many got poorer.
For several years, the death rate climbed in Russia. Power shifted, but maybe not as radically as we were told. While we celebrate Gorbachev as the leader who made the end of the USSR possible with restructuring and transparency – many Russians saw, and experienced, what happened a little differently.
Today, there is said to be over $40 Trillion dollars in circulation globally – capital firm Blackrock manages $10 trillion of that, and some believe that Vanguard, owns nearly as much. Both companies are invested in real estate, media, defense, and pharmaceuticals. They also invest in modern political narratives that are green, diverse, statist; both partner with the World Economic Forum. This is their club, and it includes most of the politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties. This centralization of control over assets, in state sectors as well as private sectors – effectively merging for decades in the US – reminds us of the evolving centralization seen in large socialist, and Soviet, experiments.
We may be missing the money trail, but it is very focused on us. Non-state entities have a capability that politicians and states only dream of, in terms of a day-to-day capability to get inside our banks, our schools, our media, our spending. They track how we spend our time and resources, to rationally profit from it, but also to shape it for even more profitability. Instead of an Orwellian warning, humanity as farm animal is both non-state – and state – policy.
Not long ago, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius publicly “told” President Biden and Kamal Harris to cease their campaign for re-election. Inside the Beltway, it is understood that Ignatius speaks for the Democrats, and for the CIA – but we can’t stop there – the world of American media is heavily influenced by Blackrock, Vanguard, and Blackrock subsidiary, State Street. The power we credit to our capital city, the shabby throne of Washington, D.C., is not fully derived from an electoral process, not even close.
When we consider what weakness in a regime implies, we return to the Peloponnesian War, and Thucydides’ report that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The current US regime is weak and dysfunctional. It is stoking confused and pointless wars abroad, division and conflict at home. But why? Is the regime, as Hillary Clinton seems to believe, at real risk from the minority of Americans who challenge state authority, question its decisions, and refuse its demands? Or is she, from her perspective, speaking for a larger capital organization – one that sees both the people and the nation’s resources, solely in terms of risk and reward, with human units subject to state “quality control”?
Ronald Reagan, as president, frequently went “directly” to the people, where he was popular, to send a message and to force Congress’s hand on this or that issue. No doubt Trump’s political approach follows that pattern. Is Clinton’s nudge to reprogramming a genuine statist nudge designed to save democracy as she understands it, or is it a message from her sponsors? The fact that we don’t know is troubling.
People living under a government that is institutionally, economically, and irreversibly failing are in danger. Most Americans sense this intuitively. We may need to recognize mainstream politicians as frantic messengers, in nervous service to those who must be paid. Our public politicians fear those who – much like the ownership class in the Soviet Union circa 1980s – have already decided what debt to write down, which investments to consolidate, and how to profit from the coming collapse of government debt, and governments, around the planet. Our first priority may be to recognize that the public enemies called out by our frightened politicians may be nascent heroes, future martyrs, and standard bearers.
