The New Normal: Ambiguity, Tragedy, Fear and Loathing

By Steven Yates

May 3, 2024

In the 2020s, there’s no shortage of these!

There’s a sense in which this “article” is really three shorter articles in one. So much is happening it is difficult to keep up.

Ambiguity: Scenarios.

Well, we got through April 8 without incident. It was never a given that something bad would happen that day, but Sarah Smith convinced me: it was possible. Her sources were credible. Hence the scenario we drew. Scenarios are possibilities, not predictions or prophesies. Huge difference….

I hope no one thinks we’re out of the woods.

Potentially dangerous people amidst the 10 million plus (does anyone know how many?) who have entered the U.S. illegally since the disastrous Bidenista regime was handed power on January 21, 2021, haven’t gone anywhere.

The New Normal is an ocean of ambiguities … given the number of possible scenarios, events that could happen at any point the rest of this year or the early part of next.

Another and possibly worse virus, with more mRNA “vaxxes” issued without any bona fide testing? A terror attack on U.S. soil (or false flag event posing as one)? A cyberattack? World war, into which the U.S. is drawn, partly because of ongoing explosive conflicts in the Middle East made worse by the Bidenistas’ utter lack of leadership or diplomatic abilities?

Eventual open war with Russia, now that Congress stupidly authorized sending $61 billion more taxpayer dollars to Ukraine?

A relatively sudden financial debacle — Sept.-Oct. 2008 on steroids?

Maybe none of the above. The more difficult it would be for the globalist-leftist axis to contain the fallout, after all, the less likely the scenario.

It’s just as plausible that we’ll approach the November election — tensions probably higher than they are now — with events unfolding absent major disruption because the globalist-leftist axis will have a system in place for stealing the election. This assumes that the Democrat-led lawfare underway in New York City, or one of the other cases, doesn’t make it impossible for Trump to win.

Accomplishing, that is, exactly what they’re accusing Trump and his network of planning.

As I’ve noted previously, though, Trump is antifragile. Attack him, and he gets stronger!

To the globalist-leftist axis, that has to be frustrating!

As I noted last week … too many people see through the lies and are fed up.

Those that aren’t too busy just trying to survive in this economy, of course.

The point is, the globalist-leftist axis will steal the election if they believe they have to, and can get away with it. They’ll have plausible deniability, just like before. Evidence (affidavits testifying to wrongdoing at voting centers, covertly made videos of ballot stuffing, accounts of trucks showing up in wee hours of the morning filled with ballots 100 percent for Democrats, abuses of mail-in voting, etc.) will be memory-holed again, so that there’s “no evidence.”

Point this out and you’ll continue to be labeled a “conspiracy theorist” and an “election denier.”

Further scenario: Joe Biden is re-selected, then dies in office. Kamala Harris is anointed Oval Office occupant. Can’t you already envision the circus that will entail? Representatives of the globalist-leftist oligarchy might come all the way out of the closet, indicating “our” instilled presidency-by-committee since January 2021. Possibly with Barack Obama at its helm, but who knows for sure?

Tragedy: The New Normal Mixes Instability with Insight?

Last week, a man named Maxwell Azzarello, 38, set himself on fire in a designated protest area across from where jury selection was underway in Trump’s first lawfare criminal case.

Obviously, one has to be mentally unstable to do such a thing.

On the other hand, though, if he wanted to make a statement, he couldn’t have chosen a better place. With what was occurring across the street, TV cameras would be everywhere. Some captured the gruesome scene of a man burning alive, flames shooting high into the air. One reporter commented on the odor of burnt flesh.

Fox News wisely put a sketch of Trump inside the courthouse up while reporting what several dozen people witnessed in horror before first responders could put out the fire.

Azzarello died of his injuries several hours later.

He threw pamphlets around before self-immolating. Among them might have been printed copies of his Substack “manifesto” which — like that of the Unibomber published back in 1995 — was not the work of a stupid man.

Possibly it was the work of a broken man.

It was fun (in a black-humored sort of way) seeing pundits initially try to portray Azzarello as MAGA and connect him to the Trump trial, when there was no connection whatsoever beyond his realizing that by doing what he did in that spot, he’d get publicity.

Publicity for what?

For warning of the “apocalyptic fascist world coup” in the works, of course.

The word fascist in this context marks him as a man of the left.

As Sasha Stone notes on her Substack, he was a former Democrat. Possibly pushed over the edge by circumstances of the New Normal.

His “manifesto” is a disjointed potpourri of names (Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, Michael Dukakis, Rob Lowe, the Simpsons, others), ideas (Ponzi schemes), and condemnations (e.g., of cryptocurrency, as “an economic doomsday device …”).

All in support of the not-entirely-crazy idea that

[o]ur government is conning us completely. That Bill Clinton was secretly on (former CIA Director) George H.W. Bush’s side, and that the Democrat v. Republican division has been entirely manufactured ever since….

For what it is worth: both Clinton and Bush-the-Elder supported NAFTA. For example.

We get to the new century, though, and the “manifesto” goes sideways:

…. Clinton is with Bush; Gore is with Bush; Trump is with Hillary, and so on.

Huh? He seemed to say (one of his many protest signs) that Trump and Biden are working together … which is nuts!

But again, and on the other hand, this is the document’s climax:

The public’s distrust of the government is at an all-time high, but so is the belief that we are helpless to do anything about it.

And with all this, a sharp rise in apocalyptic messaging: climate change will kill us all; COVID will kill us all; vaccines will kill us all; AI will kill us all — no matter the bubbles we ascribe to, we’re bombarded with existential crises with no solutions. We’ve seen a surge in apocalyptic film, literature, and video games that tell us there is no way out of our poor circumstances but total societal breakdown….

This is our rotten farce: For our entire lives, we have been flooded with media designed to slowly steer us into a world where the American Dream was dead, where the public was fully divided against itself, where everybody believed we were powerless to do anything about our worsening circumstances. It is all so they can organize an unprecedented, apocalyptic rug pull on the entire populace as they pivot to fascism, which is perhaps best understood as kleptocracy at the barrel of a gun….

Why on earth would our elites do this? There are many reasons, but the simplest is because capitalism is unsustainable, and they knew it: climate change and resource extraction would catch up eventually. So, they never intended to sustain it. They knew all along that they would gobble up all the wealth they could, and then yank the rug out from under us so they could pivot to a hellish fascist dystopia.

You may agree with parts of this and disagree with other parts of it; but one thing is clear: the man was no dummy!

The rest of his “manifesto” consists of illustrations of events supposedly paving the way for the present/future dystopia by desensitizing the public to violence (e.g., Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), greed (Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko telling us that “greed … is good”), and corruption (Chinatown’s defeatist ending).

There’s just enough truth here to warrant our attention.

Fear and Loathing: that the American Dream really is dead, the power elites have killed it, and most of us will end up in a hellish dystopia.

Last weekend, a couple of days after Azzarello self-immolated, I came across this. The title is worth iterating: “The American People Are Petrified.” The author is Douglas MacKinnon, writer and political communications consultant with a career going back to the Reagan era.

Perhaps the fact that so many people are now in survival mode explains the irrational and self-destructive behavior that sometimes bursts forth. MacKinnon:

Tens of millions no longer recognize the country they were raised in as they fear for their personal safety, their economic security, and the future well-being of their children. Day by day, these Americans are becoming convinced that their nation and their world is on the verge of collapse.

This is not a partisan belief. This is not ideologically driven. This is not based on race, religion or sexual orientation. This is about tens of millions of poor, disenfranchised, working-class and middle-class Americans from every single demographic and community who feel lost, confused, alone and stressed about what the next day will bring.

They are scared. But more than anything else, they feel betrayed.

These are Americans who play by the rules, pay their taxes and respect authority. Every single day they keep their compact with our nation. And every single day they feel cast aside or ignored by the system they have supported their entire lives.

They now look out their windows at a nation that has been purposefully divided by political elites, activists and anarchists looking to consolidate power, increase their control over the masses, cash in, or (usually) all three.

Minus the disjointedness and the predictions of apocalyptic fascist coups, is the tenor here so very different from portions of Max Azzarello’s “manifesto”?

A point I’ve made, and which MacKinnon reinforces throughout his piece: America is now a two-tiered society. Not just America. So is every advanced, industrialized nation in the West. We can debate how long it’s been such, and how it got that way. But the fact of two-tieredness is undeniable. It is also incompatible with either genuine capitalism or democracy. It is more aligned with technofeudalism and plutocratic oligarchy.

What are the consequences of two-tieredness?

One is a “justice” system that plays favorites. Elite-favored “in” groups (e.g., Black Lives Matter, Antifa) can go on rampages causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in major cities, including in one case cordoning off several city blocks and claiming them as their own (Seattle). This continued for weeks, back in 2020.

Those who stood up to these groups found the legal system pursuing them.

“Outs” such as the Jan-6ers, few of whom were violent, are then condemned as “insurrectionists” and given sometimes very long prison sentences for something that lasted a few hours of one day and did not overturn a single vehicle or burn down a single building.

You’re supposed to look the other way at this double standard. Otherwise, again, you’re a “conspiracy nut” (or a “white supremacist”).

Awakened (not woke) common people see through this, increasingly.

If enough are motivated to forget “expert” punditry and just pay attention to what their eyes and ears tell them, comparing notes with others doing the same thing, eventually they’re going to react.

If “the experts” tell them the economy is “booming” but they see nothing in their lives or around them except struggle, decay, decrepitude, corruption, who are they going to believe?

If “the experts” insist that violent crime is falling when they know good and well that they’re talking their lives in their hands walking down a city street at night, are they going to believe?

Or are they going to conclude that “the experts” have ulterior motives? Or, at the most charitable, that they are living in a bubble of what MacKinnon calls “privilege, luxury, and protection floating aimlessly above working class, poor and continually disenfranchised Americans”?

Two-tieredness, otherwise known as massive economic inequality, combined with a sense both that the top tier is cheating and that “the experts” are protecting that top tier, will destabilize any country sooner or later.

Today’s elites definitely have a “let them eat cake” mindset regarding a peasantry they consider beneath them. Remember Hillary’s “baskets of deplorables” remark that probably cost her the 2016 election?

The peasantry is serving them food and expensive drinks in the plush restaurants they frequent, cleaning their McMansions, servicing the infrastructure that keeps the lights on and the water moving through their gated communities, and so on.

Many of these people are working two and sometimes three low-paying jobs and still living from check to check. It’s well known that most don’t have $1,000 for an emergency.

Yes, some have made bad financial decisions, or not tried to save, e.g., 10 percent of their incomes up front — if that’s possible. But there’s a reason there’s no financial education in any public school. Elites and “experts” don’t want a population that is financially literate! They profit from mass financial ignorance! Keeping the rabble permanently cash-strapped is, after all, very effective at keeping them in line!

Bidenista-era inflation, moreover, is making their lives harder. It erases the value of savings. The elites who control corporate media wonder why Joe Biden’s ratings are so abysmal when the only viable alternative is Donald Trump, and why almost no one believes in “Bidenomics.”

No, they’re likely to believe that this administration is more corrupt than its predecessor ever thought of being.

It is a shame that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been effectively demonized as an “anti-vaxxer.” He’s been on target from the start of his independent campaign with his claim that the biggest threat to freedom (“democracy,” if you prefer) in the West is the seamless integration of leviathan government, predatory corporations, and the preference of both for a technocratic, top-down managerial state.

The problem for power elites is that more and more people are figuring this out.

The latter then go from fear to loathing. I don’t think the elites realize just how much they are loathed.

Some common people, sadly, are acting in either self-destructive or societally destructive ways — because they are trapped, divided amongst themselves, frustrated, and have no idea how to proceed.

If they are increasingly enraged, it is because they grew up on stories of the American Dream: which has become, for them, a living nightmare of struggling to make enough devalued money to keep the lights on, the rent or mortgage paid, food on the table, etc., all at once — without going into unrepayable debt (some do just this!)

Are we approaching a Storming of the Bastille moment in America?

Or possibly in Europe? (I keep reading how “far right” political parties are on the rise across the Atlantic.)

Possibly at a global level?

It’s a dangerous question. There are a lot of elections this year, and a lot of possibilities for massive realignment. A lot can happen between now and November just in the U.S. I very much doubt that the globalist-leftist cabal has played every card in its hand. There are almost surely cards we can’t yet see!

Final scenario: should Trump escape the lawfare being applied by the weaponized “justice” system, and should he by some chance win in the Electoral College (but lose the popular vote again), this cabal will send its well-financed minions into the streets, and if real Americans aren’t ready, what you experienced back in 2020 is just a taste of what’s to come.

© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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A slightly different version of this article is also available on Steven Yates’s Navigating the New Normal (Substack). Subscribe to Navigating the New Normal to receive access to exclusive content.

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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 unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved 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.

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His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

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