By Steven Yates
March 20, 2024
Both Trump and Biden have clenched their parties’ nominations. This on the heels of the angriest (not to mention the most deceitful) State of the Union address I’ve ever heard. Dark Brandon was on display, and then some!
Brandon — or his handlers, whoever wrote that ugly speech — began with Hitler comparisons that are now so old and hackneyed that one can only groan at leftists’ inability to come up with anything new. The speech proceeded with a call for more support for Ukraine, under the assumption that a much smaller and backward country could defeat the Russian Army if only “we” funnel more arms and money into Kiev.
Won’t happen. It’s delusional! All it will do is get hundreds of thousands more people on both sides killed: more Ukrainians than Russians. That’s the best case scenario; the worst is that an unpredicted action by some hothead will trigger an uncontrolled escalation, e.g., sending ground troops into what Russia now considers her territory, bringing on a nuclear confrontation. Putin has indicated his readiness for such.
Returning to the SOTU: it contained nothing that would unite Americans. All the official narratives were in evidence, sometimes stated openly, sometimes not. Nothing Biden said indicated sincere interest in what ordinary people are thinking about: inflation, food costs, housing costs, health care costs, the Southern border, wretched schools, the distressing sense of having to answer to unaccountable powers based hundreds of miles away.
Some are upset at the choice between Trump and Biden, seeing both as irredeemably flawed. There may be as many as three other candidates on some ballots, but no intelligent person thinks any “third party” candidate has a chance against the Washington Party.
So much for the idea that the U.S. is a democracy. Not if democracy means answering to We The People. America is a plutocratic oligarchy, and has been since the Federal Reserve was created.
The rest is theater.
Within this theater, each side sees the other an existential threat to “democracy” (or “democratic institutions”).
Conversations across the aisle, attempts to understand philosophical differences, are rare. To the best of my knowledge, only Tucker Carlson and Chris Cuomo have recently attempted it. They had common ground: both were unceremoniously unloaded by corporate employers who, as it turned out, were limiting them (hint: that’s what corporations do).
You might find yourself reconsidering your opinion of one, the other, or both, depending on where you stand. All I can say is, my opinion of Cuomo as a person went up after listening to him in that environment, even if I still disagree with him on many points.
All these media people — all of us — are human beings, after all, with human concerns, and human failings.
Outside the Beltway, of course — outside the province of the Washington Party — warring narratives over philosophies of governance, stated or only implicit, are very real. There has been far less transparency and motivation to communicate across the real divide.
Two Basic Philosophies of Life.
Large numbers of people just want to be left alone, in their communities, so long as they aren’t bothering anyone else. They deeply resent being dictated to, or buffeted about by unanswerable forces they barely comprehend and from which they never benefit.
This describes most of rural America. And rural Europe.
Then there are those who won’t leave them alone, because they believe themselves most fit to rule. They are obsessed with the need to control others — the need to dictate conditions of life to entire populations whom they regard as ciphers.
This describes much of big city America. And big city Europe.
The primary concerns of the former are family, business (almost invariably small business), education for their children, saving for retirement or trying to do so, and varying degrees of community involvement. Their focus is naturally local. Most couldn’t care less what’s going on in big cities hundreds of miles away if it’s not affecting them.
Most believe in God, or a Supreme Being.
The latter want to dominate the world. They are Platonists in a broad sense of having an ideal “Republic” in mind — a designed Utopia with a place for everyone and everyone in his/her place. They believe they have the wisdom and technocratic expertise to accomplish this. Their focus is global. They can’t stand it that there are locally-focused yokels out in the boonies who resist their plans in the name of We The People.
Collectively this second group either disbelieves in God or finds the matter meaningless. But they sure believe in themselves!
What stands out is the asymmetry. The globalists, relatively few in number (maybe 300 to 400 extended families at their core), have known for generations that their goals called for a vast ordering coordinated across continents and oceans, and that this requires enormous financial resources. They’ve done all they can to accumulate those resources, establishing central banks (e.g., the Federal Reserve System), other financial leviathans (e.g., Goldman Sachs), and think tanks such as the Trilateral Commission and the Atlantic Council. And economic controls centered around energy, food, health, and all the infrastructure and supply chains these imply.
They’ve known from the start that a controlled population is best had by controlling the information reaching that population. Hence controlling schools and mass media. Accomplished over 100 years ago.
What’s stood in their way, consistently, is the demand for freedom on the part of a relatively few voices among those commoners outside the globalist clubs: demands from We The People, that is, to control our businesses and lives; and to raise our children in accordance with traditions passed down to us from time immemorable because these traditions worked: these provided the ethos and cultural “glue” that holds communities together and assures stability and continuity.
All systems, left to themselves, gravitate towards stability or equilibrium. Family and community systems are no exception. Disruption happens but is not the norm.
Sadly, few of We The People have ever recognized, much less understood, the globalist impulse — and why we’ve experienced so many disruptions since the 1970s.
That’s not unexpected. Sociopaths are somewhat mysterious to non-sociopaths. We The People have always had a few in our midst. Healthy communities can marginalize and if necessary expel such people.
But this won’t work against the superior organization and command of resources of sociopathic globalists.
Globalists/Leftists: Very Well Organized! Conservatives: Not So Much.
What’s clear today is that the Bidenistas have most of the billionaire class behind them. They have outfits like George Soros’s Open Society Foundation funding their campaigns and supporting New York leftists trying to destroy Trump’s real estate business.
I don’t know of anything similar on the right. The Kochs (for example) are neocons, not real conservatives. Neocons are as much about domination as leftists; where they differ is that neocons are more fascinated by war. A single neocon, Victoria Nuland, stood behind the coup in Ukraine ten years ago which put that country on collision course with Russia.
We The People don’t want war. We don’t vote for war. We know we don’t benefit from it. Many of us have been dragged into supporting wars through fake patriotism and fomented fear. We are justifiably afraid that instead of accomplishing any real goals, it will bring our children home in boxes with flags draped around them. (This.)
But wars keep happening. Why? Because the sociopath minority profits from the war machine. When populations are left devastated by war, this minority’s wealth and power increases.
Globalism has advanced on multiple wars that didn’t need to happen, often driven by false flag events and false narratives that drove nations apart. The financial titans were bankrolling both sides!
These people are very well organized! Their underlings — like Barack Change-You-Can-Believe-In Obama, Sleepy Joe, and Kackling Kamala — do as they’re told.
Conservatives are not especially well organized. We probably spend more time squabbling amongst ourselves than we do struggling against the left. All too many Christian conservatives have retreated to their basements to wait for the Rapture!
What was said about Libertarians — before they became totally irrelevant — is just as true of conservatives: organizing them is like trying to herd cats.
Most conservatives cannot articulate what they want to conserve. (I know. I’ve asked.)
Not that there’s much in contemporary culture to conserve.
Philosophically, though, many conservatives are completely at sea. They might say something about free enterprise, or the Constitution. Or traditional family values. Often, though, in practice their political-economic philosophy boils down to, “What’s good for Big Business is good for the country.”
That’s simply untrue!
Most conservative (and conservative Christian) organizations, moreover, as I noted last week, are closed clubs.
Hence the majority of conservative intellectuals I know about write on Substack or similar platforms. Or got out of the game years ago and learned to code or design apps.
Then those in conservative organizations wonder why the left (which tends to support its people) has been cleaning their clocks for over three decades now. Globalism, of course, has been active much, much longer, with many of its spokesmen telling readers openly about their plans for the world.
Globalists Have Been Explicit About Their Plans.
One of their plans for the U.S., once they had the controls over the economy the Federal Reserve System afforded them, as well as control over public schools and mass media, was holding elections as theatrical performances every four years between carefully vetted candidates of “two parties,” essentially alike at their uppermost echelons. (Remember how both the first George Bush and Bill Clinton supported NAFTA in 1992, and how both “movement” conservatives and liberal Democrats got behind the second George Bush’s disastrous Iraq War in the early 2000s?)
What’s stated openly is by definition not a “conspiracy theory.”
Carroll Quigley, in Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World In Our Time (1966):
The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method….
[E]ither party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies (pp. 1,247-48).
Globalists haven’t always been able to maintain this consistently. Every so often We The People found a champion. Quigley’s ensuing discussion attacks the “extremist” Barry Goldwater’s takeover of the Republican Party in 1964.
The controlled media of the day destroyed his candidacy with fomented fears of nuclear Armageddon. Watch the infamous “daisy” attack ad.
See how this worked, even then?
Today’s equivalents bemoan the rise of Donald Trump, which followed the collapse of such narratives as we have to fight them over there or we’ll be fighting them over here, globalization will make us all prosperous and diversity is our strength.
That was in 2016, which began a new chapter in American political-economic history.
The globalist-leftist alliance struck back, and in 2020 we got both Covid and the Bidenistas.
And the New Normal.
Now with the same candidates having clenched nominations, it begins…. Or continues….
I’ve been working with the idea that 2024 is going to be a pivotal year — in many respects. The narrative war is coming to a head, its focal point being this election — which, like its two predecessors, overturned the state of affairs Quigley described so approvingly back in the 1960s.
We have two candidates representing very different philosophies of governance.
One is favored by those who want to be left alone. The other is favored by those who won’t leave them alone.
As I’ve noted, this struggle has parallels in Europe in farmers’ protests, and elsewhere. It’s invariably the same: common people compelled by declining fortunes to stand against unaccountable and arrogant power elites.
I’ve expressed strong doubts that Trump will be allowed to win. I hope I’m wrong. But part of me is convinced that all a Trump win in November will accomplish is to buy time against the better organized, focused, financed, and hence more powerful forces of the globalist-leftist alliance — unless we can organize and promote more parallel institutions in both education and mass media, recovering the intellectual foundations and the independence and the resilience it will take to continue resisting this alliance.
We should remember the words of one of its earlier exponents who was quite open about what he believed was to come: one-time Fabian socialist H.G. Wells. In The New World Order (1940) he wrote that
even when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to estimate its promise we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people (p. 129).
Revisiting the Threat Posed by Digital Currencies.
For example, just two days ago as I pen these final paragraphs I perused an article on Reuters about the advances of “digital currencies,” i.e., CBDCs, in Europe, in China, among BRICS nations* and elsewhere. The author was bemoaning how America had fallen behind the curve:
A total of 134 countries representing 98% of the global economy are now exploring digital versions of their currencies, with over half in advanced development, pilot or launch stages, a closely-followed study on Thursday showed. The research, by the U.S.-based Atlantic Council think tank highlighted that all G20 countries with the exception of Argentina are now in one of those far-along phases although, notably, the United States is falling increasingly behind.
The author projected the full advent of CBDCs during the period 2026-27. I’ve written elsewhere about the prospects of CBDCs as part of a developing total-surveillance-and-control scheme, or to use the military term, full spectrum dominance.
Trump has said he would oppose a “digital dollar,” but he has to be elected first. Trump 1.0 greatly underestimated what he was up against and is paying the price (along with part of his family). We can count on leftists continue the lawfare, everything they can do to stop a better prepared Trump 2.0. Even if he gets back into the White House, though, that won’t stop the globalists from working around him, through the Federal Reserve, the financial leviathans, and NGOs, to start instituting it by stealth or through a catastrophic event such as this whether the date is next month or later in the year.
Even Trump 2.0 will be gone after 2028, though. He’ll be 82. Eventually he will be gone. Who will then lead the “malcontents”? I have no idea. None of his kids strike me as “ready for prime time” and few if any younger conservative voices seem to have the charisma now necessary to gain the large scale following Trump has amassed. I can see the “MAGA” movement fragmenting and disintegrating if he cannot retake the White House.
As things presently stand, all the globalists have to do is wait us out, because in a few years a good many if not most of us will be gone.
*The fact that BRICs nations are so far along in cooperating with this agenda belies those who claim that the economic-financial bloc represented by Brazil, Russia, etc., are truly independent of Western globalism. Indeed, if Brazil was actually a sovereign state, Jair Bolsonaro would probably still be its president.
© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and eventually unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he gradually turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself, finally abandoning American academia and moving to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.
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Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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