By Steven Yates
September 8, 2023
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” —Frank Zappa
[Author’s note: in light of more recent events and discussion in a rapidly changing environment, this is an update of my most recent Substack.]
Scenarios are tricky. The reasonableness of a scenario — which is not a prediction exactly, just a description of a possible outcome — depends on conditions being met. If they aren’t, the scenario isn’t possible and loses its point.
As I’ve noted, two forces in America are on collision course — those being the “liberal pseudo-democratic” ruling class, exemplified by the Democrat Party in its current form — versus the “populist” forces that coalesced around Donald Trump back in 2015-16, routed worthless “movement conservatism” from control over the Republican Party, and continue to see Trump as leading spokesman.
The former have vastly superior resources, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t absolutely terrified of the latter. Trump’s ability to command those media he uses is vastly superior to anything the former possess. The former are therefore pulling out all the stops to shut Trump down, figuring that what he represents will fall apart without him. This assumption is very dubious.
January 6 might turn out to have been a skirmish compared to what’s coming … at least in some presently imaginable scenarios.
The Centrality of the Insurrection Official Narrative of January 6.
I cannot underestimate how central the insurrection official narrative has become. This narrative maintains that what happened on January 6, 2021, was really an insurrection and that Trump fomented it. Numerous efforts are now underway to keep Trump off next year’s ballots on 14th Amendment grounds. The 14th Amendment, Section 3 of which contains the infamous “insurrection clause” dating to 1868 and aimed at former Confederates, doesn’t even specify that the one accused of insurrection need be convicted of the offense. It simply says, “shall not have engaged in insurrection,” which leaves the matter muddled, just in case some believe it was an insurrection but others do not.
The people invoking the insurrection clause following the narrative are either Democrats (e.g., Tim Caine, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate 2016) or Establishment Republicans, i.e., GOP ante-2015-16: remaining “movement conservatives.”
If several states are able to keep Trump off their ballots, then what?! is the obvious question.
I don’t know what! We’re in uncharted waters, boys and girls!
Obviously, Trump’s first gambit will be to sue, probably going straight to the Supreme Court. I also don’t know what the Court would do. The Supremes would have to take a decisive stand. This is not something they’ve done consistently. For years they assumed that Roe v Wade was solid precedent. Then, last year, they overturned Roe. For years they held onto affirmative action. Then, more recently, they overturned that.
I happen to favor those recent decisions. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, the Supreme Court has been erratic and ideologically driven for decades, so who knows how they would handle something as fundamental as this?
Never before has the leading candidate of a major political party been targeted by the opposing party as Trump has (and all the judges indicting him are Democrats; most of the media denouncing him are controlled by Democrats).
I have little trouble imagining Trump declaring that any such decision against him is illegitimate, because the entire governmental structure since January 21, 2021 is illegitimate. That follows from the idea that Election 2020 really was stolen, and that January 6 was therefore not an “insurrection” but a last-ditch effort to reverse the theft. It was surely not an attempt to overthrow the government (that’s the definition of insurrection).
This would precipitate an unprecedented Constitutional crisis, and the narrative war could easily turn hot at that point.
The End of the Illusion of Democracy.
Equally dangerous scenarios are possible. Tucker Carlson recently suggested that an assassination attempt against Trump could become a live option. He outlined the deadly progression in a recent interview he gave with Adam Carolla:
“Begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, now you go to indictment, and none of them work! I mean what’s next? You know, graph it out man! We’re speeding toward assassination, obviously. No one will say that, but I don’t know how you can’t reach that conclusion!”
This assumes the indictments will fail, of course. There’s 91 of them (so far). None are slam-dunks, corporate media propaganda notwithstanding. Most of them involve reaching, some relying on legal precedents not invoked in eons.
An assassination attempt is almost certainly a last resort. I don’t expect to see it tried unless there’s an actual attempt to keep him off the ballot that meets with resistance, or he gets the GOP nod and has the same (or a better) chance of winning as he had in 2016. The liberal pseudo-democrat (i.e., globalist plutocrat) ruling class is not stupid. They doubtless understand just how dangerous an assassination attempt would be. With everyone and his brother having smartphones, setting up patsies like they did in the 1960s would be far harder to do.
If they actually murdered Trump, moreover, the reaction could well make what happened on January 6 look like a cafeteria food fight by comparison.
Tens of millions of people voted for Trump in 2020. They are ready to do so in 2024.
Not that “our” Establishment couldn’t gain control, since its resources include weaponry and much better organization, but as I concluded last time, there would be a lot of breakage. Including skulls and bones (not the Yale sort!).
I’m reasonably sure the Department of Homeland Security still has those millions of hollow-point bullets, purchased well over a decade ago, as if foreseeing this eventuality, when a large swath of the American public rejected dominant narratives. Those atop that division of the U.S. war machine are fully capable of turning their arsenal against any group that revolts openly. What is Posse Comitatus but “ink on a page”?!
What this would mean, of course, is an end to all pretenses that America is really a democracy. I don’t see how any such pretense could be credibly maintained, no matter how many propagandists at CNN and MSNBC work overtime trying.
Nuclear Armageddon Soon to Be a Live Option?
Tucker Carlson drops another equally dangerous scenario the ruling class is doubtless thinking about: the proxy war with Russia, via Ukraine, turn hotter — via U.S./NATO sending troops onto land claimed by Russia, or into Russia itself. Launching drone strikes on Russian targets would be enough.
Our deep state will be gambling that Putin won’t simply get fed up. It’s not a gamble I’d be willing to make, but then again, I’m not a psychopath whose view of the world is, Either I stay in power, or nuclear Armageddon is a live option!
A More Modest Option: Assassination by Plane Crash!
As we know, an ally of Putin’s who become an arch-nemesis, Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed along with several of his associates in a recent plane crash.
Many had stated that after he turned on the Russian military and began his infamous march toward Moscow back in June, his days were numbered.
Prigozhin embarrassed Putin on the world stage. Bad idea. Very.
Did Putin order Prigozhin’s execution? I have no idea, of course, but it’s not an unreasonable suspicion.
Compare this to the ruling elites in our part of the world. The only reason so many people believe Putin is worse than they are is because “our” narratives say so.
Trump still represents an existential threat to everything they hold dear: global economic and military dominance, in what is the still the world’s largest economy with its most powerful military machine.
This threat held through the covid fiasco, which some of us are convinced was an orchestrated effort intended to shut down global “populism” when mere censorship and public demonizing hadn’t worked, as well as opening doors to a technocratic global state based on total surveillance and population control: the Western ruling elites’ ideal form of government (which I’ve previously called GloboCorp: world government serves global corporate dominance).
The globalist effort is struggling. No informed, sensible person believes the dominant narratives anymore! No one outside the big cities believes “globalization” will make him rich if he just “reinvents himself.”
This is a main reason Trump remains the lead candidate for the GOP nomination next year, despite facing four indictments in four jurisdictions.
Thus we might get to find out if one of Joe Biden’s handlers (unlike Putin, I don’t think Sleepy Joe himself is mentally capable of planning and executing such a thing) will have done to Trump what Putin is accused by many of doing to Prigozhin.
A “lone gunman” would be ridiculously obvious. No one in his right mind would believe it!
Plane crashes have been an effective means by which agents of the ruling class took out nationalistic political opponents. Remember Omar Torrijos of Panama and Jaime Roldós of Ecuador? I was in Panama briefly in 2016. I met Panamanians who assured me: no informed person there thinks Torrijos’s death was an accident. It happened when the plane he was flying in crashed, on July 31, 1981 — just two months after Roldós’s death by the exact same means.
Both leaders had become thorns in the sides of U.S. corporate-governmental elites.
Trump does fly, on a fairly regular basis. I see assassination by plane crash as the last resort of a globalist ruling class doing whatever it has to, to stay in power.
And since the majority of Trump supporters would refuse to believe it was an accident, just as many Panamanians to this day deny that Torrijos’s death was an accident, such a scenario would be taking the chance that the time had finally come to end all pretenses that the U.S. is a democracy and just crack down.
A Stolen Election 2024? Back to the End of the Illusion of Democracy.
But wouldn’t the globalist-leftist alliance just let Trump run and arrange to steal Election 2024? Wouldn’t that be the path of least resistance through this morass?
Yes, it might be. (How election theft probably happens.)
Narrative management on elections has proven somewhat easier, it is true.
But again, the reason Trump is the leading GOP candidate is that no one on the “populist” side of the fence believes the narratives CNN, The Washington Post, etc., are peddling.
And given the response to January 6, the U.S. may never see another election everyone will agree was trustworthy.
I don’t know what will happen. The point of writing scenarios is that there is more than one possibility here, based on what the ruling elites do and also on what Trump does.
The point is, stopping Trump has become the highest priority for the global ruling class, operating through our legal system, electoral system, and corporate media machines trying to program narratives into the “public mind.”
Before this is over, “our” ruling elites may just decide that maintaining the décor of democracy is no longer worth it, that it’s too inconvenient and costs too much for something no one much believes in anyway (except Democrats who will believe anything they’re told on CNN or read in The Washington Post).
They’ll take down the scenery, remove the tables and chairs, pull back the curtains, reveal the brick wall at the back of the theater.
© 2023 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
In 2021 I published my book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory. Here, in three parts, are reasons you should think about reading the book if you’ve interest in the role worldviews play in civilization, and in shaping our lives:
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