Steven Yates
Picking up where we left off:
#7. Real conservatism is dead. Given Part 1, this should be a no-brainer. Ronald Reagan would not be electable today. Even he was compromised by neocons. Neo-conservatives, who controlled the Republican Party from the 1980s until 2016, are not conservatives. The oldest (e.g., Irving Kristol) are former Trotskyites who want a powerful central state to support corporations and further the war machine.
If by conservative we mean someone who is actually conserving something — whose moral (not exclusively political) stance is rooted in a transcendent realm of value, and who sees cultural traditions as worth preserving because they pass the test of time and practice — then there are no conservatives in Washington, D.C.,or any other centers of power and influence today.That includes the Trump administration, sadly.
If you believe everything has or should have a price, and that all values reduce to exchange values, you are not a conservative. You might be a Big Business Republican. Not the same thing.
Neither Bush I nor Bush II were conservatives, they were globalists (furthering the goals of the transnational elites — through NAFTA, GATT II and the WTO, DR-CAFTA, the SPP, the TPP, etc., ad nauseam?). Their supposed opponents were also globalists. Obama was a globalist. As is Biden.
Max Boot, deep in bed with the globalist Council on Foreign Relations, is also NOT a conservative even if Yahoo brands him as such. I don’t know what he is.
The point being, I look at the political scene as it might unfold in the 2020s, and there are no conservatives in sight. There may be one or two people who come close, like Steve Scalise. Both Rand Paul and Justin Amash seem closer to fuzzy Libertarianism, which will make them even less electable in the years to come. “Movement conservatism” never accomplished anything anyway.
#8. The real purpose of most technology is to encircle, addict, and enslave you, not free you from toil or make your life more convenient. I began to realize, late in the Aughts (the ‘00’ decade), that the “sovereign consumer” of Libertarians and confused pseudo-conservatives is a myth. The masses follow — well — each other. They are easily led by their noses by emotional appeals in advertising, and easily addicted to screens. Because the screens he/she is glued to have been designed to trigger pleasure centers in the brain, creating and reinforcing literal dopamine addictions.
I walk the streets of my present home city, and nine out of ten people in view are practically walking into each other (or into me) because their eyes are glued to their phones!
How on Earth are consumers “sovereign” when they are so easily led, and when their attention spans are measurable as less than that of a mosquito?????
Now it’s true, a lot of technology has made our lives more convenient. I’d be crazy to deny that, with my Internet-based phone sitting here and my computer able to access our church services, Bible studies, etc., with Skype, Zoom, etc., allowing people on four continents to meet and interact in real time. Sometimes even I’m amazed by it all.
But it’s useful to remember: Big Tech didn’t create all this stuff out of the goodness of their little hearts. Corporations such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are joined at the hip to the CIA and other intel entities — the Deep State, if you prefer. You use their free products. They collect and aggregate information on you as you scroll, like, and click, and sell it to advertisers. The aim of constant info feeds is to keep you titillated and distracted. Hence the constant clickbait ads featuring scantily-clad celebrity wannabes that scream Look At Me, Look At Me, Look At Me!
Big Tech isn’t in the communications business. They’re in the money business. (Just like Big Pharma isn’t in the health business but the money business.)
And the power business. It’s getting worse.
I’ve read several times that Gates’s and Fauci’s real plans are a Covid-19 vaccine with a nanotech microchip in it. I don’t know if this is true or not. Not every such claim is true. I have no hard evidence one way or the other.
But if we think it through, a Covid vaccine won’t need a chip to be a tool of control. All it will need is an accompanying app, downloadable to your phone, that confirms that you now have the official “immunity passport.”
Without which you won’t be able to travel by air, enter government or corporate buildings, or probably work legally in close proximity with others. State and local governments will support this; employers will support it; the masses generally will support it, all out of the fear we noted last week.
Absent the “immunity passport,” you will be effectively shut out of the economy.
In Part 1 I mentioned the war on cash in passing. Cash is bad. Cash can transmit the coronavirus!
The plan is for all transactions to be digital. Digital can be tracked, traced, and made into a permanent record.
But since we mentioned chips, some employers are chipping their employees. The chip goes into their hand, in between their thumb and forefinger. Employees are going along, some enthusiastically. It’s hip to have a chip! They enjoy the conveniences. This is the incentive that lures people into something that can be used to monitor and control them. (A Swedish company has been doing it since 2016.)
At some point, a tipping point will be reached, and chipping will become the wave of the future. Again, if you’re a refusenik you’ll eventually be shut out of the economy and unable to live a normal life.
#9. Justice has been dead for a long time. When I was living in South Carolina I saw two friends have their lives upended by psychopath lawyers and judges in a county family court. I assembled enough evidence to convince myself that these, too, are money-making rackets that put poor and unemployed people in jail and keep them there, in the name of a magic phrase, child support.
County slammers that house these people (sometimes for 90 days, sometimes for six months) are able to avoid being labeled debtors prisons by invoking another phrase of legal-eagle magic, contempt of court, the official charge against someone whose “choice” was child support or that month’s utilities.
The U.S. incarcerates a larger percentage of its population than any other “advanced” nation in the world, including Communist China. This is such common knowledge that I shouldn’t need to supply a link.
The U.S. is also the only nation where prisons are privatized and run for profit. The results are as disastrous as you’d expect, just from thinking through the perverse incentives: more plea bargains for reduced sentences means more prisoners (hence scaring those accused with threats of long sentences to keep them from fighting charges in court even if they are innocent). More prisoners equals more profit; lower quality food equals more profit; nonexistent health care equals more profit.
Neoliberalism at its finest!
Decent legal representation is expensive, of course. The system can wear down and exhaust the resources of an accused person until he/she has been bankrupted and financially ruined.
Just how much justice can you afford???
Meanwhile, the real criminals on Wall Street not just walk free, but obtain more money in a month gaming the financial system than most of us will ever see in our lives.
No Wall Streeters were jailed when their recklessness nearly collapsed the economy in 2008. Indeed, two years later, some were receiving bonuses from corporations like Goldman Sachs. Financial capitalism began to inflate its next bubble, the one that was burst this year.
Will the pitchforks come out when Main Street again fails to come back? Maybe, but I’m not holding my breath.
#10. The New Tribalism is here to stay. Might be good to review #2 before reading this. The 2010s saw racial meltdowns at places like Yale where entitled minority youth have no idea how good they have it.
Identity politics, the New Tribalism, is tearing America apart. The George Floyd death has been made about “systemic racism,”not a psychopath with a badge killing a man who could have been any ethnicity. Identity politics makes everything about race, and this is a recipe for disaster. If every injustice is blamed on “white supremacy” and “systemic racism,” this will eventually tear a racially diverse society apart.
I warned anyone who would listen back in the 1990s what would happen.
Identity politics has upended academia and largely destroyed free speech, belligerent denials not withstanding. Campuses such as Berkeley spend up to $500,000 on security when a conservative speaker comes to campus, and still can’t guarantee the person’s safety.
Some speakers find themselves physically attacked by leftist loons. (Case from last year.)
The New Tribalism dominates areas of social science and the humanities not dealing with conceptual analysis or bland number crunching.
Add “intersectionality”: academese for membership in two or more designated victim groups.
The unpleasant truth: none of this is going anywhere. It may actually get worse.
With its critics retired, or hunkering down at bottom-tier tech schools, taking refuge in “think tanks,” or changed careers long ago, there is almost no one inside academia’s closed universe of crazy to challenge the New Tribalism.
I’d like to think COVID-19 hysteria might have one good result—if due to lack of money from students (well, actually, from the government, having entangled students in debt), a lot of these institutions might be forced to close their doors and send career victims off to work for Uber or deliver food.
The sadder and uglier truth: the worst villains in the identity politics / intersectionality axis, the prominent Ivy League and Cultural Left Coast institutions, have the resources to survive this catastrophe.
It will be Podunksville State College that is forced to close. Behind its silent walls you found a few real instructors who suffered under absurdly low pay working part-time for years and staying because they cared about their students. No more.
#11. The U.S. is in steep decline, and this will not be reversed. No one — not Trump or anyone else — is going to “turn the country around.” The U.S. is past the point of no return, partly because tragic events such as the George Floyd murder are so easily hijacked by political agendas, partly because of larger educational and cultural decay, but mostly because the financialized system has allowed so much borrowing against the future, enabling so much debt of all kinds to pile up.
This (not a virus, and not “systemic racism”) is crashing the system.
Sir John Bagot Glubb wrote of the life cycles of civilizations: periods of pioneering breakout and expansive growth; ages of commerce, affluence, intellect, and finally decline into decadence which precedes collapse.
Ages of decadence are characterized by frivolity, materialism, greed, a weakening of any sense of transcendent values, division and increased hostility, an unhealthy obsession with sex, general depravity—and worsening fiscal irresponsibility as a parasite class gathers not at the bottom but at the top.
Government and corporate media played down the significance of the Fed repo market bailout in August 2019. Hardly anyone noticed. You would have had to know just what to look for, and most did not.
We were on our way to the next meltdown. The coronavirus provided the trigger.
Governments locked down “inessential” businesses, i.e., nearly everything outside government, Big Pharma and drug stores, grocery stores, and banks.
This created dependence and mass compliance.
Brandon Smith predicts compellingly (he has a good track record with this sort of thing) that the economy will be reopened, that infections will rise (or that the masses will be told that the numbers are rising), resulting in a new round of panic and a more severe lockdown. Wash, rinse, repeat. A cycle will be set up and continue until all who would question authority are figuratively beaten into submission, their resources depleted.
We’re back to: Get the vaccine!
Total Surveillance is coming!
UN and affiliated websites now speak of Agenda 2030. The Plan is for world government to be instituted that year or possibly before: the intended resolution of the present crisis. With every vestige of Constitutional conservatism gone, the Global Populist Revolt of 2015 – 20 beaten back, especially if Trump should lose to Biden in November, there will be nothing stopping the globalists — the transnational elites — from finishing the project they’ve been working on quasi-publicly for the past century.
I say quasi-publicly because this is not a “conspiracy theory.” Conspiracies by definition are hidden from you. Actual conspirators do not publish books like Tragedy & Hope (Carroll Quigley), Between Two Ages (Zbigniew Brzezinski); articles like “The Hard Road to World Order” (Richard Gardner, in the 1974 Foreign Affairs published by the Council on Foreign Relations); or A Memoir (David Rockefeller Sr.), and many more, telegraphing what they’ve been doing to anyone able to read plain English.
#12. The past 50 years will be remembered as a Golden Age.
First: as many problems as we had 1969 – 2019, the past half-century gave us the Internet, our generation’s potential Gutenberg press which did more to democratize information than any previous medium. Voices shut out of mainstream media suddenly had platforms. If you paid attention you learned what “your” government had been up to (e.g., this classic).
Not all those voices were perfect, mind you. The point is, many could see for themselves how often “the experts” got things wrong, whether the subject was history, political economy, or science or medicine. Or how often ulterior motives trumped truth.
Dominant narratives about, say, globalization, were challenged more than ever before!
This lasted until November 24, 2016. When Trump upset elite favorite Hillary Clinton, a furious counterattack was inevitable. It began in earnest with the infamous Prop Or Not article, the unsourced hit job on alternative reportage published by The Washington Post. That article began the Russiagate hoax and launched Big Tech’s war against conservative voices and alternative media generally (which it called “fake news,” the first use of that meme). This war was fought with algorithms, not bullets, as befits an information age.
Many alternative sites and writers are now struggling to survive! Some have simply disappeared. There are writers who used to publish regularly on NewsWithViews.com who seem to have fallen off the face of the Earth.
As we enter the 2020s, expect a more controlled Internet. Truthtellers routinely disappear from YouTube and Twitter. Facebook has gone from banning posts to banning websites. For example, I tried to post something from The UnzReview and was handed this bit of fluff: This link goes against our community standards.
Yes, there are alternatives to those, but if you post on them you won’t be seen because they get almost no traffic. As the adage goes, there is plenty of free speech in the middle of the desert. None of the alternatives to YouTube (owned by Google) and Facebook have Deep State enhanced deep pockets. We are in a New Gilded Age, and as Big Tech’s power consolidates, expect its platforms to look more and more like CNN or MSNBC—with similar politics.
Second: expect Main Street to continue to circle the economic drain. Unemployment and its effects will be worse than the Great Depression when “normal” does not come back.
The effects will be worse because, as I noted in Part 1, in the 1930s the Westoutside so-called intellectual centers was still basically Christian. Now it is basically materialist. Millions will have nothing spiritual to fall back on.
In some places, suicides are already rivaling Covid-19 deaths (or what we are told are Covid-19 deaths).
Third: the U.S. Treasury Dept. / Federal Reserve axis is addicted to printing money. The level of money printing we are seeing now is utterly unprecedented, and will eventually cause a dollar collapse. This will enable the globalists to transition to a global digital currency and eliminate cash transactions.
A dollar collapse will permanently end U.S. dominance on the world stage. Dmitry Orlov, in a recent interview, discusses how a bankrupt U.S. might simply cease to exist. In a money political economy, those without money cannot exact their will. That includes governments.
In place of America: the rising techno-feudalist world government will serve the global financial and other corporate leviathans owned by globalist elites. They may offer refuge to compliant indigents of the former U.S., even renew conveniences and various forms of Huxleyan soma while slowly eliminating “savages” who refuse to be hip and get that chip.
Expect this by 2030.
I imagine even Russia will be incentivized to join if promised some autonomy.
Honorable Mention, for those who, like Ann Coulter, are disillusioned with Trump:
There is no one else!
I recently asked a fellow who sometimes emails long rants to me against Trump: just how do you think The Donald was able to capture the 2016 nomination?
His command of media was part of it, of course, but not the whole story.
His competitors were jokes.
Then Hillary cut her own arrogant throat with her “baskets of deplorables” remark.
This election cycle has proven to be worse. And should dementia-addled Joe Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee, defeats Trump, it will ensure that the above will fall into place that much more rapidly. My money is on Biden being unable to complete a full term. Who will his VP be? It’s pretty much given that it won’t be a white male. If his VP is a loon like Kamala Harris, expect the U.S. to come unglued well before 2030.
© 2020 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
