On Monday, without comment, the Supreme Court ended the last of the 2020 election cases, rejecting Trump v. Wisconsin Election Commission in a one-line order. It was a quiet ending to a tumultuous election season, but like a football game with a contentious call at the end, the debate over who really won will likely go on much longer.

The courts have always served as a pressure-relief valve on our internal disagreements. From the battle with an unscrupulous car dealer to a nasty divorce that requires discernment over how to split everything from the antique Corvette to the kids, wise judges can help to bring peace and healing. Surely, for a nation reeling after a tempestuous presidential election filled with strange occurrences, the courts were needed to bring us together.

We needed the steady hand of impartial jurists. Most of all, the losing side needed to know that a fair shake was given, and that justice prevailed, even if it wasn’t the outcome they wanted. That did not happen after Nov. 3. Despite a stack of cases that worked their way through the legal system, we remain bitterly divided.

A Rasmussen survey last month found that 61 percent of Republicans say Joe Biden did not win the election fairly. That number hasn’t changed much since early January, when 69 percent of GOP voters voiced the same concern. That 34 percent of all voters and 36 percent of independents agree with them is a strong signal that something went terribly amiss in the maelstrom of election cases.

The election is over. There has been an inauguration. So why did ABC’s George Stephanopoulos feel the need to berate a U.S. senator and his audience with the demand, “Can’t you just say the words: This election was not stolen?” Why must he shout, “There were 86 challenges filed by President Trump and his allies in court. All were dismissed!”

Perhaps, the answer lies in the details of those cases, as much in how they were adjudicated as in the final rulings.

Taking Stock of the 2020 Election Case List

Let’s start with some clarity: The list of more than 80 cases includes both the same cases that were appealed through various courts and many that had no direct tie to the president’s legal team or the Republican Party. In reality, there were 28 unique cases filed across the six contested states by President Trump or others on his behalf.

Twelve were filed in Pennsylvania, six in Georgia, and two or three in each of the other states. Of course, there was also the lawsuit filed by the state of Texas against the state of Pennsylvania that had the potential to change the outcome. So let’s call it 29.

To be sure, that is still a lot of cases. Yet to understand why there is still widespread unease with the election, would it not be better to stop demanding conformity and instead dig deeper to see what the courts told us in those cases, and what they did not? A review of them shows that, contrary to a common narrative, few were ever considered on the merits.

Death by Technicalities

First of all, we can recognize that many of the cases produced no useful information relative to election integrity. We learned nothing from a lawsuit dismissed by a state judge in Georgia (Boland v. Raffensperger) on the basis that the plaintiff had sued an “improper party” rather than hearing the merits of why the ballot rejection rate allegedly dropped from 1.53 percent in 2018 to 0.15 percent in the 2020 general election.

Also, did 20,000 people vote who do not live in the state, when Georgia’s electoral votes were allotted by an approximately 12,000 margin to Biden? We never learned the answers to those questions nor even examined the evidence, because Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was not a candidate for office nor the election superintendent who conducted the election, and therefore per state law, was not liable.

Similarly, a Trump lawsuit in Michigan (Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Benson) alleging state law was violated by the failure to allow access by observers, and seeking to stop counting, was ruled moot since it was not filed until 4:00 p.m. on Nov. 4, after votes were counted. The judge simultaneously relieved the secretary of state of responsibility for any wrongdoing because she had issued guidance requiring admission of credentialed challengers.

So we are left with the memory of the videos of vote counters clapping as Republican observers were evicted and of covers being placed over windows. The judge on this case also said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson bore no legal responsibility for video monitoring of drop boxes nor of making video from such surveillance available, despite a recently passed law requiring surveillance of all drop boxes installed after Oct. 1.

A lawsuit in Pennsylvania, Metcalfe v. Wolf, claimed “approximately 144,000 to 288,000 completed mail-in and/or absentee ballots” in Pennsylvania may have been illegal based on testimony from a U.S. Postal Service contractor. The contractor said he was hired to haul a truck of what he believed to be this many completed mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. The complaint also alleged there was “evidence” of ballots that were backdated at a postal facility in Erie.

The judge tossed it since the state’s Election Code required their request to be filed within 20 days of the alleged violation, which was Nov. 23. They filed Dec. 4. We’ll never know if that truck brought in pallets of completed ballots—an amount sufficient to overturn the state’s Electoral College vote.

In Wisconsin, the Trump v. Evers suit alleged that violations of state election law had occurred in Milwaukee and Dane Counties as municipal clerks issued absentee ballots without the required written application, that they illegally completed missing info on ballots, that absentee ballots were wrongly cast by voters claiming “Indefinite Confinement” status (and for which no ID was provided), and that Madison’s “Democracy in the Park” event violated election laws.

A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to hear the lawsuit, sidestepping a decision on the merits of the claims and instead ruling the case must first wind its way through lower courts—an effective death sentence given the timing.

Absurdities: When ‘Shall’ Doesn’t Mean Shall

At times, judges resorted to Clintonian wordsmithing to relieve a word of its recognized meaning. A state Supreme Court judge in Pennsylvania was tasked with reviewing the eligibility of 2,349 mail-in ballots that were purportedly defective according to the state Election Code (Ziccarelli v. Allegheny County Board of Elections).

In the court’s decision, he noted “We agree with the Campaign’s observation that…the General Assembly set forth the requirements for how a qualified elector may cast a valid absentee or mail-in ballot … We further agree that these sections of the Election Code specifically provide that each voter ‘shall (emphasis added) fill out, date, and sign’ the declaration on the outside envelope. We do not agree with the Campaign’s contention, however, that because the General Assembly used the word ‘shall’ in this context, it is of necessity that the directive is a mandatory one …”

Indeed. Why even write laws? Perhaps the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would feel differently if their rulings were subjected to such an open interpretation.

A federal lawsuit in the same state (Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Boockvar) included a claim that some Democrat counties implemented a “notice and cure” policy, allowing defective ballots to be fixed and counted, while Republican counties did not, thereby creating an equal protection issue.

The judge found that two individual plaintiffs had indeed been harmed by the denial of their votes, but that they lacked standing since the defendant (Democrat) counties “had nothing to do with the denial of Individual Plaintiff’s ability to vote” as their “ballots were rejected by Lancaster and Fayette [Republican] Counties, neither of which is a party to this case.”

So the judge effectively created a legal “Catch 22” in which one must show direct harm from an unrelated party in order to prevail. Logically, under this standard, no equal protection claim could ever be substantiated.

In a Nov. 5 filing (Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Philadelphia County Board of Elections), Republicans alleged that the Philadelphia County Board was “intentionally refusing to allow any representatives and poll watchers for President Trump and the Republican Party … [and] continuing to count ballots, without any observation” by Republican poll watchers. The Commonwealth Court agreed on appeal that observers be allowed within six feet of vote counting while complying with COVID-19 protocols.

However, the state Supreme Court reversed that ruling, finding that the Election Code allows the board to make rules “for protecting its workers’ safety from COVID-19 and physical assault,” and that the only requirement is that “one authorized representative of each candidate in an election and one representative from each political party shall be permitted to remain in the room”— not necessarily within close-enough range to observe vote-counting (emphasis original in court decision). So what is the point of an observer who cannot observe anything?

In the case of Ward v. Jackson et al. in Arizona, an issue over election observers was ruled as “untimely” since “the observation procedures for the November general election were materially the same as for the August primary election, and any objection to them should have been brought at a time when any legal deficiencies could have been cured.” Lacking in that statement was an explanation as to why any Republican observers would have been needed in a Democrat-only party primary.

Judicial Blindness: See No Evil

In the same lawsuit (Ward v. Jackson et al.) the judge also rejected a claim of improper signature verification after allowing a review of 100 sample ballots. Plaintiff and defense experts found 6 and 11 percent of signatures, respectively, to be “inconclusive.”

On the same page of his opinion, the judge noted that out of the total 1.9 million mail-in ballots, only approximately 20,000 had been identified as having a signature issue, or 1 percent. There was no explanation as to why poll workers found six times fewer issues with signatures. The math would suggest either a bias to accept, despite signature issues, or that the sample examined was statistically invalid.

Further mystifying, he wrote that “there is no evidence that the manner in which signatures were reviewed was designed to benefit one candidate or another.” But surely fraud can easily benefit the offender alone, even with use of a uniform vote-count procedure. Fill out 1,000 ballots consisting of 500 for Trump and 500 for Biden, then mix in 100 more that are fraudulent for Biden and count them using any method. Who wins? It’s not a hard possibility to imagine, but the judge ignored it.

He also concluded “the evidence does not show illegal votes”—in a state in which an estimated 419,000 illegally present foreign citizens reside, and which went to Biden by a margin of just more than 10,000 votes out of a total of more than 3.2 million.

Importantly, the judge noted at the outset that “the Plaintiff in an election contest has a high burden of proof and the actions of election officials are presumed to be free from fraud and misconduct.” It’s a fair statement of the law. It’s also an indication of the difficulty in prevailing, even when issues exist. Every case across the nation was evaluated under a similar high hurdle, with the status quo treated as sacrosanct.

Too Early and Too Late

Republicans also often found themselves in an impossible “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation on the timing of challenges to election laws.

In Georgia Republican Party, Inc. et al. v. Raffensperger et al, candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue sued prior to their U.S. Senate run-offs, alleging harm would occur from unconstitutional election procedures. Their counsel noted (on appeal) that the court “dismissed the case for lack of standing, reasoning that ‘the Supreme Court instructs that a theory of future injury is too speculative to satisfy the well-established requirement that threatened injury must be certainly impending.’” Filed too early.

In the same state, a federal judge dismissed Sidney Powell’s lawsuit (Pearson v. Kemp), in part citing that it was filed too late—it should have been filed before the election. As another example, in Trump v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, a judge dismissed the president’s suit saying it involved “issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred.”

Together, it demonstrated the hurdle that many election cases faced—denied before the election as “speculative,” or afterward as too late.

The Clock Ran Out: January 6

Several lawsuits were resolved not by a weighing of merits, but as a practical consequence of the electoral vote on Jan. 6 that certified Biden as the winner of the presidency.

Trump had filed suit on Dec. 4 in Georgia (Trump v. Raffensperger) alleging violations of state election law and the inclusion of specific ineligible votes: 66,247 underage votes, 2,423 persons not registered, 15,700 who had changed address, 1,043 who illegally listed a P.O. box address as their address, 8,718 who died prior to their votes being cast, 92 absentee ballots counted prior to the date those voters requested a ballot, 217 ballots shown as applied for and sent out and received on the same day, and 2,560 votes from felons with uncompleted sentences. These were significant numbers in an election that was decided by fewer than 12,000 votes.

The suit had also noted that 305,701 had applied for an absentee ballot more than 180 days prior to election, thereby violating state law.

The suit had also noted that 305,701 had applied for an absentee ballot more than 180 days prior to election, thereby violating state law. Importantly, it also took issue with the secretary of state’s Consent Decree with Democrats, which allowed signature matching on envelopes and applications, but not versus registration rolls. And it cited the low 0.34 percent rejection rate of mail-in ballots, a tenth of the rate of prior elections, despite a six-fold increase in number of such ballots cast.

The suit was withdrawn on Jan. 7, with none of the issues resolved, the day after Congress met and the matter was rendered moot.

Another Georgia suit (Still v. Raffensperger) alleged that Coffee County Board had been unable to replicate electronic recount results, and that the error was sufficient to put the outcome of that county in doubt, with a potentially similar issue in others across the state. It noted that Raffensperger had forced an arbitrary Dec. 4 deadline to certify the results despite the county’s letter of the same date saying the results “should not be used.”

The legal battle continued, and the state’s counsel eventually demanded in a Jan. 3 letter that all lawsuits against Kemp, Raffensperger, and the State Elections Board be dropped in order to “cooperatively share information.” Otherwise, they would remain in a “litigation posture”—quite a telling comment. Why was cooperation ever resisted?

Trump’s counsel accepted the offer of dismissal to get information they had requested, but it came as the timeframe to use it ended on Jan. 6. The suit was withdrawn on Jan. 7.

The Supreme Court Punted

The nation’s highest court showed some early inclination for involvement in the brewing election issues, such as Justice Samuel Alito’s order to separate certain late ballots in Pennsylvania in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar. Yet it soon took a different tone. A petition to expedite a hearing was denied and later the court refused the case.

In December, the court rejected a key lawsuit filed by the state of Texas (Texas v. Pennsylvania), and joined by 18 other state attorneys general, alleging that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin violated the U.S. Constitution by changing election procedures through non-legislative means. The justices ruled that Texas lacked standing under Article III of the Constitution to challenge the results of the election held by another state.

The court could have held these claims up to the objective light of justice, and either exposed it all as painfully true or wildly false, but it didn’t.

In Kelly v. Pennsylvania, Rep. Mike Kelly claimed that the recently enacted Act 77 to expand mail-in balloting violated the state constitution, as amended in 1967, that “allowed for absentee ballots to be cast in the four (4) exclusive circumstances authorized under Article VII, Section 14.”

He also noted that “the legislature first recognized their constitutional constraints and the need to amend the constitution in order to enact mail-in voting, sought to amend the constitution to lawfully allow for the legislation they intended to pass, and subsequently abandoned their efforts to comply with the constitution and instead enacted Act 77 irrespective of their actual knowledge that they lacked the legal authority to do so unless and until the proposed constitutional amendment was ratified by approval of a majority of the electors …”

A Commonwealth Court judge agreed on Nov. 25 and ordered that any action to certify the election be stopped, pending an evidentiary hearing two days later. However, on Nov. 28, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania reversed that decision, saying the “Petitioners sought to invalidate the ballots of the millions of Pennsylvania voters who utilized the mail-in voting procedures established by Act 77 and count only those ballots that Petitioners deem to be ‘legal votes.’”

Yes, that is exactly what the plaintiffs sought—the counting of only legal votes. But again, like many other courts, this one relied on a philosophy that excluding any ballots would disenfranchise voters. So they set aside the state constitution for their own preference.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to expedite an appeal on this case when it would have mattered, then recently refused to hear it at all, a decision Justice Clarence Thomas called “inexplicable” in his dissent.

The Supreme Court also refused to hear any of Sidney Powell’s cases—in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan—and in doing so, deprived Americans of the chance to hear evidence for and against very serious claims that electronic voting machines could be manipulated. Of all of the allegations, perhaps none more so instilled fear into voters as the possibility that our votes could be tampered with and changed, thwarting democracy itself.

Did the machines really show decimal totals for votes rather than integers? Were they designed to flip votes, and in such a way that no audit could trace it? Were these machines connected to the internet on election night, and did data show that foreign actors accessed it? Voters will never know. The court could have held these claims up to the objective light of justice, and either exposed it all as painfully true or wildly false, but it didn’t.

When most needed, the court that once took the time to render a decision on whether a tomato is a fruit or vegetable chose to punt on each of the key presidential election cases. American voters are worse off for it as confidence in elections erodes.

Lessons Learned

President Trump always had a very uphill climb to prevail. This wasn’t a one-state battle as in the George W. Bush versus Al Gore contest. Trump was effectively required to play six-dimensional chess, in six states, all in the span of a few months.

Trump was effectively required to play six-dimensional chess, in six states, all in the span of a few months.

As Andy McCarthy noted, “a brutally tight time frame took effect [upon contesting the election], imposed by state and federal deadlines. It is a drastic departure from the normal litigation pace of investigation, legal research, and the formulation of cognizable claims.” Indeed, it was a nearly impossible task. It was even harder when Trump’s attorneys were influenced and threatened.

In the end, should we be surprised that voters retain a strong sense of skepticism over the outcome of the presidential election? That a man who largely campaigned from his basement, who exhibited signs of age-related mental decline, could handily defeat a vigorous incumbent who drew immense crowds is naturally hard to believe.

The election of 2020, which included more than 155 million votes, was decided by approximately 300,000 votes in six states, or 0.2 percent of the electorate, all of which came by an unnatural flip of results late on election night. Despite judges’ repeated hand-wringing that any court action would disenfranchise millions of voters, the reality is that millions of others may have been disenfranchised, and they instinctively suspect so.

The one thing many voters seem to have learned through the legal chaos is that it’s easier to commit election violations than to stop them. So the electorate remains divided—even after “86 election cases.”

Among the final acts of Donald J. Trump’s time in office was to approve a last-minute flurry of presidential pardons. On the list are many of his disgraced cronies, including Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone. But there was no mercy, evidently, for whistleblowers like Edward Snowden or Reality Winner, nor for Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange.

Yet even as Trump’s team was preparing a clemency list of dozens of people, the president was overseeing a record number of federal executions. Trump has made executing people a priority during his final few months in office, overseeing more federal execution than any other president. Indeed, there have been more federal executions in the past six months than in the previous 56 years.

“How ironic that Donald Trump could show clemency and mercy in his final days, whilst also being the country’s most prolific executioner President in more than a century,” wrote lawyer and anti-war campaigner Aamer Anwar.

Breaking with traditional protocol, the Trump administration has rushed to oversee 13 executions by lethal injection since July. There had previously been no federal executions since 2003. Among the 13 was Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to be put to death by the federal government since 1953. Human rights groups, and even the United Nations, condemned the execution, arguing that Montgomery was clearly psychotic and in no state to stand trial, let alone be executed.

A get out of jail free card

While Trump has rushed to execute death row inmates, he also made a point of granting clemency to his political associates. Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist and advisor on his 2016 presidential campaign, is a particularly contentious recipient of clemency, as he is yet to stand trial, let alone be convicted. He is accused of fraud stemming from a case where prosecutors allege he swindled Trump supporters out of millions of dollars intended for the construction of a privately funded wall on the Mexican border. In 2019, Bannon joked on a YouTube live stream about “[taking] all that money from Build The Wall.” The campaign, which Bannon ran, had raised over $25 million. A White House statement noted that “Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement,” when explaining the president’s decision.

Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was found guilty in 2018 of eight financial crimes, including filing false tax returns attempting to hide tens of millions of dollars he received lobbying for Ukrainian politicians. Stone, the 45th president’s longtime friend, was convicted of lying to Congress and trying to impede the government’s investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were reportedly key figures in drawing up the list of figures to pardon. It is perhaps not surprising that Kushner’s family and friends also feature prominently on the list. Jared’s newly-pardoned father Charles was convicted in 2005 for preparing false tax returns, witness retaliation, and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission. He pleaded guilty and served two years in prison. After he found out his brother-in-law was cooperating with federal authorities investigating, Charles also hired a prostitute to lure him to a New Jersey motel room where he filmed their encounter, sending it to the man’s wife (and Charles’ sister). Jared’s friend Ken Kurson, charged with cyberstalking and harassing a woman by sending her threatening emails and phone calls and sending messages to her coworkers claiming she was having an affair with her boss, was also pardoned.

And while Trump was keen to punish civilian murderers like Montgomery, throughout his tenure, he has gone out of his way to show sympathy to killers in uniform. In December, he pardoned four Blackwater mercenaries convicted for the Nisour Square Massacre — the murder of 17 Iraqi civilians, including children as young as 9 years old. In 2019, he also freed Lt. Michael Behenna, who had stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, blindfolded, and handcuffed him, drove him out into the desert and shot him in the back of the head. Behenna said he felt “no remorse” and “would do it again,” as he was acting in “self-defense.”

In contrast, there was no clemency granted for prominent whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden or Reality Winner, nor for publisher Julian Assange, who, despite being an Australian living in Europe, remains incarcerated at the behest of Washington. While there had been a large public campaign in his name, privately, Republican lawmakers were lobbying Trump not to entertain the idea of pardoning them. As CNN reported: “Trump decided against it because he did not want to anger Senate Republicans who will soon determine whether he’s convicted during his Senate trial.

A deadly legacy

The United States is one of the very few Western countries that still practice capital punishment. In 2019, only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt executed more of its citizens than the U.S. Incoming president Joe Biden ran on a platform advocating the abolishment of the federal death penalty and giving states financial incentives to do the same.

The final few months of each president’s rule presents them with an opportunity to frame how they wish to be remembered. Obama commuted the sentences of over 1,500 people, including whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who leaked the Iraq War Logs to Assange. Trump, by contrast, has pardoned far fewer people and used his power to save many of his political associates and disgraced members of the American war machine. All the while, he has personally overseen a dramatic spate of federal executions. If he did not want to be remembered as a corrupt individual with a penchant for violence, this was not the way to go about his final days.

Blue’s embrace of the woke cultural revolution may turn out to be its Achilles’ heel. It runs contrary to the historic norms of human cultures.

Predictions for the year ahead must be so ephemeral that they become pointless. The ‘unknown unknowns’ are too many; the situation, too dynamic. Yet, it is possible to take some key variables, which are all too easily taken for granted, and to look them more directly ‘in the eye’. Why do that, if ‘to look’ is uncomfortable? The answer, the ancients, told us is, that without that piercing ‘look’ of consciousness, our unspoken anxieties evolve through our unconscious, into psychosis – or physical sickness. Our bubble boundaries requires firstly rupture.

Let us then start with the U.S. at this point of fundamental inflection: Biden’s Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan speaking in recent days, exuded confidence that Biden’s chumminess with lawmakers ‘across the aisle’ in the Congress will help push through his China policies: “He (Biden) knows his mind on China and he is going to carry forward a strategy that is not based on politics, not based on being pushed around by domestic constituencies (sic – interesting comment). Sullivan described it as a “clear-eyed strategy, a strategy that recognises that China is a serious strategic competitor to the U.S. – that acts in ways that are at odds with our interests in many ways including trade.” Yet, at the same time, “it is also a strategy that recognises that we will work with China, when it is in our interests to do so”.

What is there to complain about in such ‘a normal, rational statement’? Nothing per se – except that it presumes a return to the old bi-partisan politics, in which Red and Blue lawmakers attend the same Washington cocktails, and assumes a shared desire to engage together in the ‘business’ of Washington.

Patricia Murphy of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who has been covering the senatorial runoff in Georgia, noted that: “Republicans just don’t trust the election … Not one Republican voter, Murphy has spoken to since Election Day, believes that President-elect Biden won. “Not one, not a person”, she said. “And many of them don’t even think he’ll be inaugurated on January 20”.

Murphy’s statement speaks forcefully to two American realities: One is rooted in a deep distrust of the élites, and of a soiled status quo; the ‘other’ reality views Murphy’s interlocutors as not only in denial, but views them with contempt.

We have today almost unlimited web access: Yet, its sheer overload seems to cause us to ‘dig in’, rather than ‘open up’. Anyone who wants it, can find a whole universe of alternative viewpoints online, but very few do. Paradoxically, the Information age has made us less willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. We cleave to the like-minded. We want to hear from the like-minded and have them as our friends.

And since it is so much easier to confirm our perspective and biases – and disdain others’ – the notion of politics by argument or consensus, is almost entirely lost. We can, and do, live in our segregated digital worlds, even when physically, those ‘others’ may indeed be our next door neighbour. This has meant for the architects of the Trump campaign that his campaign – and politics more generally – must be about mobilisation – rather than persuasion. Politics, in other words is now Post-persuasion; post-‘factual’.

The ‘insurrection’ at the Capitol Building – for those who may have witnessed revolutionary mobs elsewhere – was comparatively inoffensive (one unarmed, former U.S. Air Force vet protestor, was shot dead by the police through a closed door). Clearly, this assault on the Hill was never intended as a real ‘coup’; it was rather Trump manoeuvring to keep his base energised and mobilised – and with him firmly in control of the Party. Nonetheless, it has been PR disaster, leaving many of his supporters bewildered. If the aim were to expose details of fraud as part of the confirmation hearing, it failed.

If it were a coup at all, it was one aimed by Trump at the GOP ‘old guard’, such as Romney, (who was taunted as a traitor, by fellow passengers during his flight to Washington). It is the country-club GOP élite who are struggling to ‘take-back’ the Party from the Trumpistas. Will they succeed, in the light of what has happened? The Deep State has closed ranks irrevocably against Trump. Are his nine (cats’) lives now expended?

Though Trump be at the forefront of what happened on 6 January, it is not just about him (as the MSM insist). Rather, the U.S. today is skirmishing its way towards an existential fight: This is a battle over the nature and direction of change itself; Over where society and its constitutional order are going; and how the legitimacy of republican rule, in its essence, is to be defined. “Simply, America’s longstanding political equipoise (from c. 1876) has completely broken down. Continuity and change, for better or worse, is now locked in a classic death match. How will it be resolved? How will it end?”.

Not trusting in the election, in U.S. democracy, therefore flags a profound change in politics taking hold in America and in Europe. The Georgia loss, perhaps, is less crucial now: Elements of the GOP are preparing for radical opposition (to save the Republic, which they see as courting complete loss). The objecting members of Congress knew that they could never succeed in obtaining supporting majorities in both houses of congress for their objections. Their aim rather, seemed to be to establish a baseline (evidence of fraud) for future activist opposition to the results of the 2020 election. Along this baseline they will insist that Biden/Harris are not legitimately elected, and are usurpers against whom any means of resistance is justified. They hoped to inherit Trump’s base, and to ‘ride its wave’. Is there a vacancy now? That is a question for 2021.

The next question for 2021 then, concerns that old adage: ‘Beware not to win too much’. It can be a mistake to corner your adversaries to having nothing to lose. The Blue state has ousted Trump; and Blue has taken everything across ‘the board’, and are ready to implement the ‘Re-set’ – the ultimate subjugation of Red by main force, achieved by the preponderance of wealth, ruling institutional leverage, and military power. A social ‘woke’ revolution, as well as a political transformation. The full outcome would likely reconstitute the constitutional order, in ways unrecognizable to most Americans today.

But will Red America succumb from exhaustion, or lack of leadership; or, on the other hand, might it find the energy to revitalise ‘their’ Republic? We shall see – a big question whose ramifications might make the EU élites particularly nervous. Of course Blue now possesses force majeure. But there is another old adage: ‘No passionate, partisan assessment has any value, save to inflame’ – and Big Tech and the MSM’s censorship and accompanying humiliation of Trump may turn him a martyr, and make the spirit of defiance all the stronger.

Despite the GOP Old Guard attempted ‘counter-revolution’ (talking 25th Amendment action), the divisions between the two Americas are now so great that it can only mean ultimately a de-coupling of the ‘across the aisle’ chumminess (even if this has to be postponed until the 2022 congressional election round). Is Jake Sullivan’s optimism that Biden’s chums across the aisle will allow him to push through his China policies unscathed – especially as Biden is viewed as deeply blemished in respect to China? Might 2021 rather underline the new era of civil conflict, rather than a return to old civilities – and hence to new, ‘take no prisoners’ politics?

The priority issues for all western leaders surely will be Covid; the concomitant push-back from small and medium sized businessmen against lockdown, and dealing with the noxious ‘them-and-us’ effects of a ‘free money’ economic paradigm. Foreign policy – other than China and Russia (on which there exists the one, and almost only, U.S. bi-partisan consensus) – may garner lesser attention.

And here are the inter-related shibboleths that may require a little more critical re-thinking for 2021: America and the EU – understandably – desperately want their economies to snap-back into recovery: “Biden’s blue wave almost guarantees it”, the Telegraph’s economics editor Evans Pritchard exalts – “as Fiscal stimulus meets monetary jet fuel already tanked in the system – just as America comes out of the pandemic”.

It may seem a tad curmudgeonly even to question such panglossian hopes. The vaccines have been sold as ‘the hope’ for normal; but the notion that the vaccines are about to propel the U.S. tout suite into jet-fuelled nirvana, seems premature. The WHO says that it is yet to be determined whether the vaccines actually stop infection (as opposed to merely mitigating its more severe symptoms).

It is yet to be discovered whether the vaccines are effective, at all, against the new strains of the Covid virus (such as the UK and South African mutations); and it is uncertain how many Americans will even accept to be vaccinated. It seems rather, to boil-down to a race between accelerating infections, and dawdling vaccine manufacture and distribution – with a final outcome to this race still uncertain. That outcome, whatever it is, will have political consequences – for the EU in particular in the year ahead.

There is too, a fragile and peripatetic frontier (in both America and Europe), between the notions that Covid lockdowns are a deliberate élite ploy to concentrate the economy in the hands of a few oligarchs – and, on the other hand, a conviction that the infection is a grave risk, requiring a high degree of public discipline. Where this ‘frontier’ flows; on which side of the median it comes to rest during this year; as well as the success (or lack of it) in rolling out effective and safe vaccines, will constitute a key political event – maybe even an existential one for some governments and institutions.

It is hard to see growth simply springing forth out of further massive increases in government debt – Biden’s ‘jet-fuel’. Since 2008, debt has suffocated growth, seeded a crop of zombie companies, and stimulated mainly a runaway asset appreciation. And it is hard to see such growth coming from an economy that is centralising around huge monopolistic behemoths, who stifle innovation, whilst small businesses are massacred. The question is about real growth, or are we looking at just another just another puff of liquidity pointed towards ‘make-believe’ growth? Polls (Forbes) suggest that 48% of American small businesses, risk closing for good.

Of course centralisation of economic activity around big business represents the central plank to the Great tech Re-set. The latter is promoted as an unstoppable, supply-side ‘miracle’ which will transform productivity, and growth. Yet, this thesis seems is not supported by history: “For a quarter of a century, post WW2”, the Chicago Booth Review notes, the value of production of every worker hour rose 2.7 percent per year. Then there was a slowdown for 20 years, from 1974 to 1994, when productivity growth fell to 1.5 percent per year. This was a period that included the rise of the personal computer and the integration of new technologies in a number of industries – and, as is the case today, people wonder why it was that productivity growth slowed down”. Robert Solow famously said, “I see computers everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.”

“Eventually, we did see the computers in the productivity statistics. Around the mid-1990s, productivity accelerated again, up to about 3 percent per year. It stayed there for a decade, before slowing again. It hasn’t yet picked up. So the 1.2 percent average annual productivity growth we’ve been experiencing since the mid-2000s is less than half of what it was in the decade prior, and is slower even than the 20-year slowdown from 1974 to 1994.

“Despite what seem like incredibly rapid changes in technology, we don’t see technologically-driven growth in the data – and in fact we see the opposite pattern. Since economic growth requires productivity growth: If we don’t figure out why this is happening, and how to fix it, we won’t get sustained increases in GDP per capita”.

Blue has swept the board. Yet, the year is new-born: Blue’s embrace of the woke cultural revolution may turn out to be its Achilles’ heel. It runs contrary to the historic norms of human relations and cultures. The danger of the liberal-style Re-set for Francis Fukuyama, would be that it cannot assuage the Homeric heroic ideal of Thymos – the greater passions which drive man to seek glory and renown. Fukuyama observes that “Thy­mos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice”. With all our material and political wants satisfied, the human soul will search out deeper, older drives, a need for recognition and glory like that which drove Achilles, foreknowing, to his death on to the battlefield of Troy.

“Those who remain dissatisfied, will always have the potential to restart history”, Fukuyama observes.

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Jake Angeli, high priest of the growing cult of Emperor Donald Trump, dressed as the horned God Cernunnos. The deification of Emperor Trump in Washington, yesterday, didn't go so well, but we are moving along a path that the Romans already followed during the decline of their empire, including the deification of emperors, starting with Caligula. So, comparing Roman history to our current conditions may tell us something about the future.

I already speculated on what kind of Roman Emperor Donald Trump could have been and I concluded that he might have been the equivalent of Hadrian. The comparison turned out to be not very appropriate. Clearly, Trump was no Hadrian (a successful emperor, by all means). But, after four years, and after the recent events in Washington, I think Trump may be seen as a reasonably good equivalent of Caligula, or Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who also reigned for 4 years, from 37 to 41 AD.

Caligula was the prototypical mad emperor -- you probably heard that he nominated his horse consul. And he was not just mad, he was said to be a cruel, homicidal psychopath, and a sexual pervert to boot. In addition, he tried to present himself as a living god and pretended to be worshipped. He even claimed to have waged a war against the Sea God Poseidon, and having won it!

But, really, we know little about Caligula's reign, and most of it from people who had plenty of reasons to slander his memory, including our old friend Lucius Annaeus Seneca (he of the "Seneca Effect") who was a contemporary of Caligula and who seriously risked being killed by him. The Romans knew and practiced the same rules of propaganda we use today. And one typical way to slander an emperor was to accuse him to be a sexual pervert.

But it really doesn't matter so much if Caligula really was so bad as we are told he was. The point is that there is a certain logic in his actions. In Rome, just as in almost every ancient empire in history, Emperors were far from being warmongers. And that was for perfectly good reasons: imagine you are the emperor: you are the richest person in the world, you can have everything you want, you may order people to do whatever you want to do, and if they refuse you can have them killed. You can even force people to worship you like a God and many will do that without any need of forcing them. Then, why should you risk all that for the mere pleasure of slaughtering a bunch of bad-smelling barbarians?

That put emperors in a quandary: their power was based on military might, but the soldiers needed to be paid. And in order to pay them, military adventures needed to be undertaken. But military adventures, then as now, are risky and you never know who will win a war unless you fight it. This problem was the reason why many Roman emperors didn't end their careers in their death bed. Either they were reckless and then defeated, or too prudent, and they were killed by their own troops. The latter was the destiny of Caligula, who refused to engage in the invasion of Britannia. No invasion meant no booty and no bonus for the troops. And the troops were not happy. In the end, Caligula was killed by officers of the Praetorian Guard, a military corps that was supposed to protect him.

At this point, I think you can see how Trump's rule can be seen as similar to that of Caligula. Of course, Trump never made senator a horse, but he surely had stormy relations with the US congress -- as you saw in the recent events in Washington. As for considering himself a God, well, Trump may not have gone as far as Caligula, but surely he tended to aggrandize himself more than a little! The apparition of Trump's follower, Jake Angeli, dressed as the horned God Cernunnos, even gave a certain theological meaning to the occupation of the Capitol building in 2021.

The main point in the similarity, then, is that both Caligula and Trump did their best to avoid major wars and succeeded, at least in part. Trump had to compromise with the military, providing huge financing for the military apparatus. We don't know if Caligula did the same, but his fake campaign against Britannia may have been an attempt to appease the military without risking a real invasion. Whatever the case, Caligula was eliminated and replaced with an older and more pliant Emperor, Claudius.

Something similar occurred with Donald Trump, replaced by an older and more pliant emperor because he clearly showed that he did not plan any major military campaigns. Unlike Caligula, and luckily for him, Trump was not physically eliminated (so far). But the trend is clear: The Washingtonian Emperors are desperately trying to acquire more and more powers in order to try to control an increasingly divided society. "Deification" - turning the leader into a God - may be a good strategy in this sense and it is likely that we'll see more and more US presidents using it in the future

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This being how things stand, can we use the Trump-Caligula analogy to conceive future scenarios? The future is always difficult to predict, but it is also a lot of fun to try. So, let's tell first the story of the Roman Empire after the death of Caligula, then we'll see to create a narrative for what the modern Global Empire after the removal of Donald Trump.

Caligula's successor, Claudius, was a relatively weak emperor who couldn't oppose the military adventure in Britannia that nearly brought the Roman Empire to its doom. Initially, the invasion was successful but, later on, the Romans seriously risked losing everything when Queen Boudicca led a revolt against them in 60 AD, nearly succeeding in throwing back the invaders into the sea. Eventually, the Romans managed to quell the revolt, but it was a close call.

The problem was not so much Britannia, but the fact that the Empire had seriously overstretched itself. While Boudicca's army scoured Britain, torturing and killing Roman citizens, on the opposite side of the Empire, in Palestine, a revolt was brewing. It exploded with tremendous fury in 66 AD and, this time, the Romans failed to quell it immediately. It took nearly eight years of hard fighting to reestablish the Roman domain in the region. During this period, the survival of the Empire itself was at serious risk.

We may imagine that if the Romans hadn't needed to garrison Britain, they could have had more resources to defeat the Jewish insurrection. As it was, instead, the effort of having to control two unruly regions at the same time and at the two opposite extremes of the Roman dominion led to financial problems and to turmoil all over the Empire. Emperor Nero lost control of his generals and was forced to kill himself. For a year, four different generals fought each other for the imperial throne. Eventually, Vespasian, a general who had fought both in Britain and in Palestine, restored order in 69 AD. But the situation remained difficult. One indication of the financial problems of the time is that in modern Romance languages, urinals are named after Vespasian, probably because for the first time he placed a tax on their use.

In time, the Roman state managed to recover a certain balance and the deep state scored a major victory when they placed a career soldier at the top, Trajan (53-117). Trajan may have seen himself as the successor of Alexander the Great and he maintained his promise to expand the Empire. In 101 AD, he engaged in a successful military campaign against Dacia (more or less modern Romania). Then, in 113 AD he embarked in an ambitious campaign destined to get rid once for all of the competitor Parthian Empire, in the East. It was nothing less than an attempt of world domination.

At the beginning, Trajan obtained some major victories, but he was not Alexander the Great. The Romans conquered the region that we call Iraq today, but further advances were simply unthinkable and the Romans had overstretched their domains to an extremely dangerous level. In order to finance his campaigns, Trajan had devaluated the Roman currency and a new civil war could have shattered the Empire. Fortunately for the Romans, Trajan died before he could truly wreck the Empire's finances. His successor, Hadrian, stopped the wars of conquest and reorganized the Empire within militarily sustainable borders. Of course, the Roman empire was doomed anyway, but at least Hadrian avoided that it would collapse already during the 2nd century AD:

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Now, let's start from these ancient events to create a scenario for our times. Joe Biden is clearly no Trajan, but he has something in common with the weak and old Claudius. As such, Biden may well fail to stop the military from engaging the US Empire in one or more risky military adventures, for instance attacking Iran, or maybe Syria.

The military strength of the US is so large that it is hard to think that this kind of relatively minor campaigns could be unsuccessful, but they would seriously weaken the Empire and generate internal frictions. The attack on the Capitol building already gave us a taste of what the results could look like.

After Biden will be gone, it may be possible to see the Global Empire in the hands an aggressive military leader. Such a leader might decide to do what Trajan did. She might engage in an all-out effort to destroy the rival empire, the Parthians for the Romans, the Chinese for the current Global Empire. (why did I say "she"? You know that!)

Could a warlike Empress succeed in bringing the US Empire to global dominance? Unlikely. Just like Trajan nearly wrecked the Roman finances in his attempt, our Empress may well wreck the Western economy -- or the whole world's economy -- forever, with the additional result of wrecking the whole ecosystem as well. But history seems to reason in its own terms that was unavoidable from the beginning. For one thing, in our times things seem to happen much faster than in Roman times and the fall of Washington to a Barbarian army doesn't seem to be so unthinkable as it was just a few days ago.

China, Russia and Iran are the top three existential “threats” to the U.S., according to the National Security Strategy. Three features distinguish the top three. They are all sovereign powers. They are under varying degrees of sanctions. And they are the top three nodes of the 21st century’s most important, evolving geopolitical process: Eurasia integration.

What do the three sovereigns see when they examine the dystopia that took over Exceptionalistan?

They see, once again, three – discombobulated – nodes in conflict: the post-historic Pacific and Atlantic coasts; the South – a sort of expanded Dixieland; and the Midwest – what would be the American heartland.

The hyper-modern Pacific-Atlantic nodes congregate high-tech and finance, profit from Pentagon techno-breakthroughs and benefit from the “America rules the waves” ethos that guarantees the global primacy of the U.S. dollar.

The rest of America is largely considered by the Pacific-Atlantic as just a collection of flyover states: the South – which regards itself as the real, authentic America; and the Midwest, largely disciplined and quite practical-minded, squeezed ideologically between the littoral powerhouses and the South.

Superstructure, tough, is key: no matter what happens, whatever the fractures, this remains an Empire, where only a tiny elite, a de facto plutocratic oligarchy, rules.

It would be too schematic, even though essentially correct, to assert that in the presidential election, invisible campaigner Joe Biden represented the Pacific-Atlantic nodes, and Trump represented the whole South. Assuming the election was not fraudulent – and that remains a big “if” – the Midwest eventually swung based on three issues.

1. Trump, as much as he relied on a sanctions juggernaut, could not bring back manufacturing jobs home. 2. He could not reduce the military footprint across the Greater Middle East. 3. And, before Covid-19, he could not bring down immigration.

Everything that lies ahead points to the irreconcilable – pitting the absolute majority that voted Dem in the Atlantic-Pacific nodes versus the South and a deeply divided Midwest. As much as Biden-Harris is bound to isolate the South even more, their prospects of “pacifying” the Midwest are less than zero.

Whose ground control?

Beyond the raucous altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the key factual points.

1. A series of rules in mostly swing states were changed, through courts, bypassing state legislatures, without transparence, before the election, paving the way to facilitate fraud schemes.
2. Biden was de facto coronated by AP, Google and Twitter even before the final, official result, and weeks before the electoral college vote this past Monday.
3. Every serious, professional audit to determine whether all received and tabulated votes were valid was de facto squashed.

In any Global South latitude where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style, this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.

On the recent Supreme Court ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”

Dangers abound. On the propaganda front, for instance, far right nationalists are absolutely convinced that U.S. media can be brought to heel only by occupying the six main offices of the top conglomerates, plus Facebook, Google and Twitter: then you’d have full control of the U.S. propaganda mill.

Another Deep State source, now retired, adds that, “the U.S. Army does not want to intervene as their soldiers may not obey orders.

Many of these far right nationalists were officers in the armed forces. They know where the nuclear missiles and bombers are. There are many in sympathy with them as the U.S. falls apart in lockdowns.”

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings simply will not be made to vanish from public scrutiny. He’s under four different federal investigations. The recent subpoena amounts to a very serious case pointing to a putative crime family. It’s been conveniently forgotten that Joe Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations

that he forced Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin to be fired exactly when he was investigating corruption by Burisma’s founder.

Of course, a massive army of shills will always invoke another army of omniscient and oh so impartial “fact checkers” to hammer the same message: “This is Trump’s version. Courts have said clearly all the evidence is baseless.”

District Attorney William Barr is now out of the picture (see his letter of resignation). Barr is a notorious Daddy Bush asset since the old days – and that means classic Deep State. Barr knew about all federal investigations on Hunter Biden dating back to 2018, covering potential money laundering and bribery.

And still, as the Wall Street Journal delightfully put it, he “worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign”.

A devastating report (Dems: a Republican attack report) has shown how the Biden family was connected to a vast financial network with multiple foreign ramifications.

Then there’s Barr not even daring to say there was enough reason for the Department of Justice to engage in a far-reaching investigation into voting fraud, finally putting to rest all “baseless” conspiracy theories.

Move on. Nothing to see here. Even if an evidence pile-up featured, among other instances, ballot stuffing, backdated ballots, statistical improbabilities, electronic machine tampering, software back doors, affidavits from poll workers, not to mention the by now legendary stopping the vote in the dead of night, with subsequent, huge batches of votes miraculously switching from Trump to Biden.

Once again an omniscient army of oh so impartial “fact checkers” will say everything is baseless.

A perverse blowback

A perverse form of blowback is already in effect as informed global citizens may now see, crystal clear, the astonishing depth and reach of Deep State power – the ultimate decider of what happens next in Dystopia Central.

Both options are dire.

1. The election stands, even if considered fraudulent by nearly half of U.S. public opinion. To quote that peerless existentialist, The Dude, there’s no rug tying the room together anymore.
2. Was the election to be somehow overturned before January 20, the Deep State would go Shock and Awe to finish the job.

In either case, The Deplorables will become The Ungovernables.

It gets worse. A possible implosion of the union – with internal convulsions leading to a paroxysm of violence – may even be coupled with an external explosion, as in a miscalculated imperial adventure.

For the Three Sovereigns – Russia, China and Iran – as well as the overwhelming majority of the Global South, the conclusion is inescapable: if the current, sorry spectacle is the best Western liberal “democracy” has to offer, it definitely does not need any enemies or “threats”.

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As I write, the presidential election is still not resolved, with dramatic events potentially unfolding in the first days of the New Year. I’m not convinced that Mr. Trump is in as weak a position as the news media has made him out to be in these post-election months of political fog and noise. The January 6 meet-up of the Senate and House to confirm the electoral college votes may yet propel matters into a constitutional Lost World of political monsterdom. The tension is building. This week’s public demonstration by one Jovan Hutton Pulitzer of the easy real-time hackability of Dominion Voting Systems sure threw the Georgia lawmakers for a loop, and that demo may send reverberations into next Wednesday’s DC showdown.

There may be some other eleventh-hour surprises coming from the Trump side of the playing field. As I averred Monday, we still haven’t heard anything from DNI Ratcliffe, and you can be sure he’s sitting on something, perhaps something explosive, say, evidence of CIA meddling in the election. There have been ominous hints of something screwy in Langley for weeks. The Defense Dept., under Secretary Miller, took over all the CIA’s field operational functions before Christmas — “No more black ops for you!” That was a big deal. There were rumors of CIA Director Gina Haspel being in some manner detained, deposed and…talking of dark deeds. She was, after all, the CIA’s London station-chief during the time that some of the worst RussiaGate shenanigans took place there involving the international men-of-mystery, Stefan Halper, Josepf Mifsud, and Christopher Steele. Mr. Ratcliffe seemed to be fighting with the CIA in the weeks following the election over their slow-walking documents he had demanded.

What else does Mr. Trump know about this rumored inter-agency feud? Or a number of other fraught matters surrounding the election, and also questions concerning the harassment he suffered from the four-year rolling coup run by his Deep State antagonists (many of them CIA). What does he know of China’s infiltration into our national affairs, of which the Biden Family’s business deals with CCP-connected companies is only one piece? Or of China’s relationship with Dominion systems — China is rumored to have acquired a 75-percent interest in the company as recently as October.

In any case, the president cut short his holiday break in Florida before New Years Eve to fly back to Washington. The company line is that he wants to exhaust all the prescribed legal procedures to contest the November 3 vote tally. And if none of it avails to correct the outcome, he might move on to… something else. If even the so-far publicly revealed evidence of the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes overseas is true — and the emails and corporate memoranda from Hunter’s laptop seem genuine — then it would be Mr. Trump’s duty to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president. And outside the constitutionally-mandated process in the national legislature, that would leave him some sort of other emergency executive action.

Mr. Trump has called for a gigantic assembly of his supporters on January 6 in Washington. He didn’t call them there to watch him get humiliated. Something is up. You can feel it in the air. I’ll give it a fair chance that Donald Trump is the one with his hand on the bible come January 20. One caveat to all that: 2021 is going to be very rough sledding, with many discomforts, traumas, and things left behind for America. Whoever occupies the Oval Office is going to be buried in trouble. In theory, I would have preferred to see a Democrat left holding that awful bag, if only as payback for all their bad faith and dirty fighting of the past four years. But Mr. Trump is apparently willing to shoulder that burden, and, in such an existential emergency, he’s likely to be a better leader than the corrupt and feckless Ol’ White Joe.

Okay, I’m going to just come right out and splatter a bunch of individual forecast predictions up-front in this lead chapter, and if you’re interested, you can continue on to the finer points and arguments below. I’m grateful for all of you interested readers coming here twice a week, and for those of you who keep this outfit afloat with your Patreon support. A healthy, sane, purposeful, and upright 2021 to you!

A Bill of Particulars for 2021

• The election is re-adjudicated, fraud subtracted from the tally, and President Trump is declared the winner.
• The mail-in vote for the Georgia Senate seat runoff is disqualified as systematic fraud is revealed. Stacy Abrams is indicted for organizing the fraud.
• A number of political celebrities, DC swamp rats, K-Street hustlers, media figures, and tech company executives are arrested and charged with serious crimes around election fraud.
• The CIA is purged and reduced to a strictly analytical role for advising the executive.
• The FBI is likewise purged; Director Wray is charged with obstruction of Justice.
• Following the reversal of the news media’s election narrative (and the actual election results), Black Lives Matter and Antifa are loosed upon a number of cities and wreak considerable destruction, but eventually get their asses kicked by federal troops. City mayors who allowed the havoc to proceed are arrested, charged with abetting insurrection, and removed from office pending trial.
• Nancy Pelosi replaced as Speaker of the House. Mitch McConnell replaced as Majority Leader.
• US Attorney John Durham brings charges against lawyers involved in the Mueller Investigation, including Andrew Weissmann, Aaron Zebly, Brandon Van Grack and Jeanie Rhee. Mr. Mueller is named as an unindicted co-conspirator due to mental incompetence.
• A special Prosecutor is named to investigate the Biden family business operations; indictments follow late 2021.
• Stock market enters long, deep asset value deflation through first and second quarters and bottom-bounces the rest of the year. S & P falls to 550 range; DJI under 10,000; Nasdaq under 3000.
• The dollar DXY index falls under 80 by 2nd quarter, 60 at year end.
• US GDP down by 40-percent year end 2021.
• US oil production (minus natural gas liquids) down by 40-percent, year-end 2021.
• Banking system thrown into disarray due to non-payment of rents and mortgages. Federal government intervenes with direct renter relief payments. Home owners in default are allowed to remain in their houses on provisional basis (which is never reconciled).
• Bubonic plague outbreak among homeless of Los Angeles as rats proliferate in their encampments.
• Pension funds collapse as broken chain of rent-and-mortgage payments destroy Real Estate Investment Trusts.
• Federal government forced to organize massive food giveaway programs.
• Millions enrolled in make-work projects a la the New Deal (some of them of value).
• New York City forced to curtail subway service to bare minimum as money runs out.
• California Governor Gavin Newsom recalled out of office.
• George Soros and several directors of Soros-funded NGOs charged with racketeering and election campaign finance crimes.
• General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford are back seeking bankruptcy protection. This time, their assets are sold and reorganized into smaller companies. No bailouts.
• Covid virus fades from the scene by 3rd quarter, but economic carnage remains. Huge amount of restaurant equipment sold for dimes on the dollar.
• Bitcoin “Hodlers” becoming Bitcoin “Sodlers” as cryptos tank.
• “Woke” hysteria evaporates as Americans struggle with desperate reality-based problems of everyday life.
• Collapse of higher education begins in earnest as college loan racket implodes. Scores of colleges and even some universities shutter; others shrink drastically in desperate effort to carry on.
• Hollywood celebrities apologize en masse for past “Woke” behavior, beg forgiveness from cancel victims and fans. Nevertheless, collapse of the movie industry continues as, post-Covid, Americans desperately seek the company of other people instead of canned entertainments, which they have grown sick of.
• Professional sports collapse as business model fails. Impoverished Americans start-up low-cost, local baseball and football leagues.
• Twitter and Faceback become public utilities.

The Covid Crisis and Economic Meltdown

I won’t have a whole lot to say about the Covid-19 virus that others have probably analyzed better elsewhere, so I’ll make it short. In the fog of pandemic, it’s hard to know who or what to believe. The outbreak in early 2020 induced similar official responses and social changes in many other nations, raising the question: did the whole world get played? If so, it was quite a stunt. Was it intended as a cover to enable the much blabbed-about “Great Reset?” More on that below.

One big mystery is how, in China, the disease seemed mostly contained within Wuhan and its Hubei province, and how rapidly that country got over it compared to so many other places around the world where the illness lingered and got a second wind in the fall. All that said, it’s apparent that, in America, the virus was gamed opportunistically by the Resistance and its news media handmaidens, first to make Mr. Trump look as bad as possible, then to promote the mail-in ballot scheme that led to a fraud-riddled election.

Much of the confusion about the disease itself — ventilators or not… masks or no masks… hydroxychloroquine or not… lockdowns or not — ended up damaging the authority of the medical and scientific experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Surgeon General Adams, the NIH and the FDA, and is still not settled to many people’s satisfaction. And, as if we didn’t already have a big enough problem with failing institutional authority, that scientific failure added to our already acute cultural corrosion. I’m suspicious of the statistics regarding true case numbers and the official spinning of Covid-19 deaths actually from other causes, as well as the tests that produced so many false conclusions. It seems pretty obvious in these tense weeks post-election that The New York Times, CNN, and other media have worked to ramp up the Covid hysteria to distract the public from emerging news about the contested election.

What’s quite clear about the whole Covid-19 episode to date is how badly the states’ government response harmed the small businesses of America that make up at least 40 percent of the economy. According to Bloomberg News, more than 110,000 restaurants shut down, 17 percent of them permanently out-of-business, surely with more to come with the winter lockdowns. More than three million employees lost their jobs in that industry alone. Data from the University of California Santa Cruz indicates that nearly 317,000 small businesses closed between February and September, 60 percent for good.

The nation’s economic affairs were in considerable disorder before the Covid-19 virus threw things into more desperate disarray. Decades of off-shoring industry decimated the working class. In much of Flyover Country, the working class has been reduced to a demoralized idle-and-addicted class with a strikingly high suicide rate, especially for men. The situation only improved marginally under President Trump, who, after all, was bucking practically all of corporate America, which liked the benefits of off-shoring just fine.

I believe that working class will return to laboring, and not in the giant American factories of the kind we had in the 1960s, but because the government social safety nets will be running out of financial mojo in the coming decade. So, they will have no choice but to labor — at the same time that many automated activities we’ve enjoyed will not be running much longer. A lot of that automation has been applied, for instance, in agriculture, where one person could plow or harvest hundreds of acres a day riding in the air-conditioned cab of a multi-million-dollar rig guided by GPS, allowing the driver to watch movies while he “worked.” Well, that agri-business model is about to fail. The scale is all wrong and the capital requirements are too exorbitant. Bottom line: many idle working-class folk have a future in agricultural work. They don’t know it yet. Expect, also, more opportunities as household servants as American society becomes more distinctly hierarchical, and in more fine-grained strata than merely the rich and the poor. Far from being an evil outcome, consider how important to human psychology it is to have a place in this world, both in terms of purpose and a physical place to call home. And, anyway, how wonderful is the former working-class’s current plight as drug-addled, often homeless, and suicidal? Would you want things to stay that way, or can you imagine new social arrangements to meet new economic realities?

The consolidation of commerce into a few giant companies such as Walmart, Target, Amazon had reached a deadly and tragic pitch before Covid-19, destroying all lesser organisms in the business ecosystem, and thousands of local Main Streets in the process. With the Covid lockdowns, the big boxes were somehow exempted from closure. Though they seem to be triumphing for the moment, these giant national chain merchandising outfits are in their sunset phase headed for twilight. As I’ll surely state again in this forecast, the macro-trend is for downscaling and re-localizing in everything, all activities. The chain-stores and big boxes depend on systems and arrangements that won’t persist, for instance, the long supply lines from the factories of Asia. The end of mass motoring will also prove problematical for commerce at the giant scale smeared all over suburban landscapes. And, of course, Amazon’s business model of home delivery for absolutely anything and everything, was perfectly suited to the Covid-19 crisis — though in the longer term its model will prove fatally flawed, since it depends on trucking every single item to its customers, and the reason will become evident further down.

The catastrophic failure of so much small business in America through 2020 will provide the seeds for a rebirth of small businesses when the giants fall. A lot of equipment will be available at dimes on the dollar. Rents will be cheap. Enterprising people will have to be careful about where they decide to set up for new businesses: better Main Street than out on some empty strip-mall. Consolidation will be working in a different way — not to make companies bigger, but to bring many small businesses closer together in places people can get to without a car (what used to be known as a business district or downtown or Main Street). America is not going to need nearly as much shopping infrastructure as we had before 2020, and also not nearly as many restaurants. But we’re going to need some of these things and done in a new way. I can also imagine new businesses that would have been unthinkable a year ago. At some point when Covid-19 exits the scene, people will want to get together with other people very badly. Think about opening a dance hall or a nightclub with live music, even a life performance theater.

The American economy had already entered a zone of dangerous structural fragility before Covid-19 stepped onstage. As Tim Morgan and Gail Tverberg argue so well in their respective blogs, the economy is an energy system that, in the advanced techno-industrial form, depends absolutely on fossil fuels, which have become a problem the past two decades, leading to the present inflection point bringing on de-growth, the onset of a long emergency, and what others call a fourth turning. Same things, really. We’ve entered a state of contraction, and it’s in the nature of large economic organisms to move from contraction to collapse fairly quickly, because the complex interconnections in their systems ramify and amplify each other’s failures. The virus has made it all worse, and faster.

Oil

Hardly anyone paid any attention to the oil story this year with all the frightful distractions of Covid-19, the economic havoc of lockdowns, and the janky election. The oil story is probably more important than any other single factor in the current situation, and is largely responsible for America’s economic mess. Everything in the USA runs on oil and our business model for doing that is broken. De-growth changes everything.

From 2000 to 2008, we were on a downward slide with our conventional oil supply — the kind of oil where you just drill a pipe into the ground and the oil flows out, or, at worst, gets sucked out by a pump-jack — all-in-all, a simple procedure. In 2008, total US oil production was under 5-million barrels-a-day, down from the old production peak of just under 10-milliion b/d in 1970. And of course, our consumption kept going up to about 20-million b/d by 2008. So, we were importing most of our oil then.

That created terrible problems for our balance-of-payments in international trade, but we fudged that by pretending for decades that deficits don’t matter, as Veep Dick Cheney famously put it. The result, via the recondite and pernicious operations of financialization — that is, replacing a production economy with one based on the sheer manipulation of money and its derivatives — was the 2008-9 Great Financial Crisis. The GFC was presaged in the summer of 2008 by the price of a barrel of oil reaching just under $150 — which badly strained what remained of real productive industry. The dynamic in play induced political authorities to quit regulating wild misconduct in finance and banking, as they attempted to replace productive industry with money games. These malfeasances played out most vividly in real estate and the “innovative” securitized mortgage bonds that were gamed to a fare-the-well by the banks. The abstruse crimes have been chronicled widely elsewhere (e.g., my 2012 book Too Much Magic). But consider, also, that all the mortgage fraud of the early 2000s was based on the last gasp of the suburban expansion, and understand that suburbia was entirely at the mercy of mass motoring, which depended on affordable oil.

So, oil shot up to just under $150, the economy wobbled, the banks and the automobile companies had to be bailed out and central bank interventions became normalized, including zero interest Federal Reserve policy, a desperate legerdemain to keep up the appearance of a sound economic-financial gestalt. And that led to the “shale oil miracle.”

It was more a stunt than a miracle, really. First, you had this suite of techniques that could be employed to goose the last bit of oil from otherwise unproductive source rock. These included computerized horizontal drilling and the injection of fluids plus chemicals to fracture the impermeable rock and release the oil. This was “fracking.” It was not new but had not been scaled up into a major activity while the easier pickings were good. It was way different from the old simple method of drilling a pipe in the ground and letting it flow out of permeable rock. The old simple method cost about a half million dollars (in current dollars) per well to drill and start the oil flowing. Shale oil, with all its complications, cost between $6-12 million per well. The old 1960s conventional oil wells produced thousands of barrels a day for decades. The new shale wells produced maybe 100-odd barrels a day for the first year and they were done after four years. The depletion rate was horrendous.

Shale oil was made possible by the Federal Reserve’s ultra-low-interest, easy lending policies. They made a lot of cheap capital available, and hundreds of billions migrated to the new shale oil plays in expectation that they would produce excellent steady revenues. Big institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies especially were looking for reliable revenue with bond interest rates so low due to Fed policy. They thought they’d be swimming in shale oil company dividends and revenue streams from loans to shale drillers that paid better than US treasury bonds. One thing for sure, they thought: America wasn’t going to stop needing lots of oil. So, shale oil seemed like a sure thing. Except that after a few years, it turned out that nobody was making any money producing shale oil.

It just cost so damn much to get that stuff out of the ground. And the depletion rate was so savage that you had to drill and re-drill incessantly. And what was worse, the economy had evolved to the stage where there was no sweet spot for oil prices. Oil over $75 destroyed the business model for productive industrial activities that relied on cheap oil; while oil under $75 destroyed oil companies because they couldn’t make a profit at the well head. The melodrama played out over ten years through several rounds of Fed Quantitative Easing (money creation from nowhere) and relentless run-ups of government deficits. The oil companies themselves were caught in a “Red Queen syndrome” (ref.: Alice Through the Looking Glass) in which they were producing as much and as fast as they could just to keep up their cash flow to make loan repayments, without generating any profits — and quite a few companies couldn’t even keep up with their loan repayments, so shale was a total bust for them and they went bankrupt. It all came to a head in early 2020.

Just before the Covid-19 virus hit, shale oil production stood at over 9 million barrels a day, with another roughly 4 million from conventional oil, offshore oil, and natural gas liquids, for a grand total of nearly 13 million barrels a day in US oil production, a new record! That was 3 million b/d higher than the previous peak of 1970, at just under 10 million b/d. Quite a feat! Added to that was just under 5 million b/d in natural gas liquids. Daily US consumption was around 20 million b/d heading into 2020. It fell briefly during the initial Covid panic to around 15 million b/d and bounced back a little to around 18 million b/d in the fall of 2020. So, production appeared to be basically equal to our consumption.

However, the quality of the oil skewed the equation of “oil independence.” Shale oil tended to be ultra-light oil, composed mostly of gasoline-grade distillates. Fine, America uses a lot of gasoline because we drive everywhere and incessantly so. The trouble is, shale oil contains little of the crucial heavier distillates: diesel fuel, which the trucking industry and heavy machinery depends on, aviation fuel (basically kerosene), and bunker fuel, a heavy oil fuel for home heating and ships’ engines. Neither did those nearly 5 million barrels a day of natural gas liquids, which were really only used for cutting heavy oil, which was mostly what the USA did not produce and was not well-equipped to refine. The bottom line was that the US had to swap a lot of gasoline to other countries to get heavier distillates to keep the economy going. It worked, but it was awkward and involved a tremendous amount of transport. So, America’s oil situation coming out of 2019 was superficially stabile but fragile.

But entering 2020, shale oil production was in collapse. The lack of profitability finally caught up with the industry. Investors finally noticed that the shale oil producers couldn’t make money. At one flukey point in the Covid-19 spring of 2020, the oil markets became so disordered by collapsing demand that oil on the futures market cratered to a surreal negative-$40 a barrel. It soon corrected to the positive-$30-40 range, which was not nearly enough for the shale oil business to turn a profit. Consequently, the companies could not get new financing to continue their “Red Queen” operations, and without new financing they could not keep up cash flow… and they crapped out. Thirty-six producers filed for bankruptcy in 2020, including Chesapeake, Oasis, Lonestar, Ultra, Whiting, and Chaparral. Oil field service companies that are subcontracted to perform the drilling and fracking have also gone bust.

Shale oil production fell by roughly 2.7 million b/d from March to May 2020, recovered a little at mid-year and stumbled again with the winter wave of the virus. Oil analyst Steve St. Angelo predicts that total US oil production (shale and everything else) will fall to between 9.5 and 10 million b/d in 2021, which would put us back to 1970 levels when the nation’s population was just 205 million (compared to 330+ million today). So, that’s a lot less oil-per-capita, to view it from another angle. Independent oil analyst Art Berman is predicting a more severe production crash by midyear 2021 to roughly half what it was at year-end 2019. Nafeez Ahmed, Director Institute for Policy Research & Development, is simply calling this the end of the oil age. Ahmed says it “will begin over the next 30 years, and continue through to the next century.”

I believe it will go down much quicker than that because falling production is so destructive to the business model of industrial society that it will induce gross economic, social, and political disorder. All that disorder will generate self-reinforcing feedback loops making a return to previous levels of comfort, convenience, prosperity, and order much less likely. The net effect will be a much lower standard-of-living among formerly “advanced” nations, and also falling populations. We’re just experiencing the beginning of that process with the destruction of America’s middle-class. It is the essence of the long emergency. We just can’t tell right now how far down these dynamics will drive us, and how fast. 2021 is likely to manifest intense disorder in the USA as people reel from the loss of small businesses, economic conditions deteriorate further, and political grievance gets amped up by institutional failure to resolve, or even address, our many problems and quandaries.

As for transitioning into a “sustainable economy” powered by “renewables” such as solar and wind power, that just ain’t going to happen — unless you’re talking about oxen and firewood, and a human population about ten percent of what the planet currently carries. All our fantasies about a high-tech utopia driven by wind and sun depend on a fossil fuel economy to produce the hardware for it and then the replacement parts for the hardware, ad infinitum. It’s not worth going into it further here, but if you want to see more elaborate arguments, they’re in my recent book Living in the Long Emergency (BenBella Books, 2020).

The So-called Great Reset

Life in the USA, and other “advanced” nations will reset, but not in the way that most people blabbering about “the Great Reset” think or say it will.

Surely, there are groups, gangs, claques, and covens of people in the world who have some consensual agreement about how things might work, and how they would run them to their benefit, in their hypothetical ideal disposition of things. For instance, the so-called “Davos Crowd.” What are they? A convocation of bankers, market movers, politicians, business moguls, tech entrepreneurs, Hollywood catamites, black ops runners, and PR errand boys who have plenty of financial and political mojo in their own realms, but not enough collectively to carry out the kind of global coup that comprises the standard paranoid Great Reset fantasy. That they meet-up in an ultra-luxurious setting out of a James Bond movie every year stokes terrific fascination, envy, anger, and paranoia that they are capable of anything beyond a festival of ass-kissing, mutual self-congratulation, and status-jockeying, which are the actual activities at the Davos meet-up.

For another thing, in the USA, at least, there are too many pissed-off people with small arms, hardened by years of proffered bad faith and dishonesty from the political/media/higher-ed complex, to just bend over and take it up the back-door from a gang of seditious, would-be aristo-totalitarians with lèse-majesté dreams of nostalgie-de-la-boue Marxist redemption. If you have any doubt about how disruptive angry people with small arms and lots of ammo might be to condescending elites, just review the events in the Middle East the past twenty years and imagine those dynamics transferred to Kansas.

What does the “reset” fantasy supposedly include? A “new world order,” a phantasm of a unified world government, which is preposterous because the macro-trend at this moment of history worldwide is the opposite of consolidation and centralization of power, but rather breakup, downscaling, and re-localization. Why? As you saw in the Econ chapter, because the scale, pitch, and range of all our activities must be reduced to survive in the post-industrial conditions of resource and capital scarcity. And it will happen whether we like it or not and despite anybody’s objections.

What else is in the Reset grab-bag? Supposedly a single world currency, also absurd for reasons already stated — unless you are talking about gold and silver, which may eventually become the universally-accepted medium of exchange (and store of value, index of price) if the post-industrial contraction is severe and destructive enough. But fuggeddabowt “digital currencies,” especially in the USA because too many people are “un-banked,” or otherwise depend on cash-money in the informal “gray” economy of just-getting-by (and there will be a lot more of these types as the middle-class gets pounded further down into the mud), plus a large cohort of digitally-capable people just plain ornery about being herded into an IRS surveillance cul-de-sac — and the whole lot of them will fight like hell to prevent government-sponsored crypto-dollars from replacing what used to be considered money. And, if, in the unlikely event that rebellion fails, it’s back to gold and silver by default — and that might literally mean by default.

Now, I grant you that there are fer sure problems with all the major currencies, especially the USA dollar, and they are all liable to become worthless eventually for all the usual and traditional reasons. The US dollar is especially vulnerable since its status as the world’s “reserve” currency — a reliable medium of exchange in global trade — is no longer consistent with the true financial condition of our country, which is morbidly obese with debt that will never be repaid — a terminal case. There will eventually be some kind of default, either the straightforward way, by declaring nonpayment to bond-holders and creditors outright, or by sneakily engineering a hyper-inflation of the money supply to destroy the value of the dollar. If either of those events plays out, the nation will be thrust into serious social and political disorder, blame will get cast, people will get hurt, and it will be a while before the finer points of the social contract get pasted back together — such as any agreement to introduce a “new dollar” of some kind to replace the ruined old one. By then, the old USA may not still be standing intact, and it would be up to states or regions to address the money issue.

I don’t believe it will be settled as a new digital money for reasons outlined above, but also because digital money is utterly dependent on the Internet, which, in turn, is utterly dependent on a reliable electric grid, and both systems are susceptible to going down in the kind of socio-political convulsion that would attend financial collapse. Not only would transactions become impossible, but records of money ownership — “wallets,” or files — could be permanently lost, wiping out fortunes. This obviously includes Bitcoin and things like it. Blockchain is only as strong as the chain, and without the Internet there’s no chain at all. So, again, gold and silver must enter the picture, perhaps backing a paper currency, perhaps circulating as coin.

In the meantime of such a crisis, very little of daily life would come out the other end looking the way it used to in the years prior to 2020. We’ll see a Great Reset, all right, but not some totalitarian gruel dished out to the plebes from the Davos steam-table or any other elite catering service. It will be an emergent, self-organizing phenomenon, from the ground up, in which everyday people will have to improvise new systems at the local level for getting food, arranging for shelter, and creating business activities around their most fundamental needs: food production, transport, trade, manufacturing, energy supplies, medical care, cleaning, building, et cetera.

I’ve been saying for a while that this might amount to “going medieval.” Could be better, could be worse. Well, there it is. There’s your Great Reset for you. Stand by and prepare to scramble.

The Abyss Stares Back

The federal eviction moratorium passed by Congress with the spring 2020 onset of Covid-19 will expire at the end of January as things stand now, placing 30-million renters at risk of losing their dwellings. Another 28-million house-holders have been placed in a mortgage moratorium. What happens a month from now? Well, for one thing, don’t overlook the brutal fact that these moratoria don’t excuse anybody from having to pay all the back rent and back mortgage installments that were suspended for the year. The federal government just can’t keep rolling that forward forever because it thunders through the banking system. If landlords don’t get paid, they cannot pay their mortgages — and most rental real estate is mortgaged to allow for a coherent cash-flow, tax payment, and business model. Neither can the landlords pay their taxes to the municipalities (states and US government). The cities are especially harmed by collapsing tax revenue because they can’t keep with infrastructure repair, can’t cover pensions, or schools, the vicious cycle of urban decay.

How are people who have lost businesses and livelihoods going to come up with the money to make up these back payments. They probably will not. So far, there is no national discussion of that problem, but we’re seeing the first signs of an emotional response in rent rebellions under the banner “cancel rent.” This quandary points to the likelihood of a campaign for the federal government to bail out renters and homeowners, and/or a campaign for the program that made its debut in the 2020 Democratic primaries, “universal basic income” (UBI). Either one of those has a fair chance of happening as America’s economic collapse proceeds and politicians panic.

These programs won’t work. As soon as they are bailed out for their old debts, the renters and home “owners” will start racking up new back-payments if they have not done enough to generate a regular income, or simply can’t because the economy is so broken. And then what? Another bail out in six months? All the money creation to fuel that wheel of futility will only hasten the inflationary depreciation of the dollar as ever more money is created from thin air to make these bail-outs and hand-outs. The kind of UBI that was bandied about in the 2020 primaries, especially by candidate Andrew Yang, amounted to $1000-a-month. Most renters probably could not cover their monthly rents out of that, not to mention all the other costs of living. So then what? $5000-a-month? If you’re going to give away large sums of money for nothing, why not just make every impoverished American a millionaire? (And then watch the price of a Dunkin’ donut go up to $150.)

A parallel crisis has also ripened in commercial real estate as companies adjust to their employees working from home and try to get out of their leases – or just bail if their leases are up for renewal. The office building may not be altogether a thing of the past, but it won’t be like it was before 2020, and the problem is most acute in a place like New York or Chicago where midtown is chockablock with megastructures that went from being assets to liabilities virtually overnight. We have no idea what will become of them, but I doubt they will be retrofitted into apartments for two reasons: 1) the cost would be out-of-this-world, and 2) the apartment tower is just an accessory to the office tower, and if the office towers are obsolete, so are the apartment towers.

This leads to what I have been saying since I wrote Too Much Magic: our cities are going to contract substantially; the process is going to painful; and there will be battles over who gets to inhabit the districts that, for one reason or another, retain value — waterfronts, older small-scale, low-rise neighborhoods. Covid-19 plus riots-and-looting have prompted people-of-means to resettle hastily in the suburbs. But this trend is a head-fake. Facing the oil problems that we do, the suburbs will quickly follow the cities into disutility and dysfunction. The people who moved there the past year will discover that they made a major mistake, especially if they bought a house.

The more permanent shift will be to America’s small cities and small towns, places scaled to the energy and capital resource realities coming down on us, including the need to live closer to where your food is grown.

This snowballing national existential fiasco certainly suggests the need to reorganize the American economy and the choices are pretty stark. The Democratic Party and the whole left-leaning side of the transect is inclined to attempt centralized control of economic activity in a way that strongly resembles the gigantic national experiments of the 20th century that went by the name of socialism. I mean… what else can you call it? It doesn’t really exist anymore in practice, not even in China, which is now merely totalitarian racketeering state. The 20th century was a moment in history when everything really was growing in scale, and with it came a wish for controlling all that by national governments. It was tried in many places and everywhere it was tried it ended in tyranny, hardship, and mass murder

Things have changed. They have reversed. Things are contracting. So, the other choice we have is to go with that flow, scale down the things we do and the terrain we occupy and the range of things we think we can control. That will ultimately be the only choice, of course, since the urge for a new statist socialism is against the current impulse of history, and therefore against nature. It will fail and then we will have to get with the program that the zeitgeist actually offers.

Wokesterism

Sometimes societies just lose their shit and go crazy and that is kind of what happened to America in 2020. The distress had been building for years, especially since the GFC of 2008-9 when the middle-class began dissolving in earnest. Now, their grown children discern that the future is going to be very unlike the recent past, and that their programmed hopes and dreams do not jibe with what that future actually requires of them: rigor, realism, earnestness, and rectitude. It’s too much for them. It’s too painful. And they’re not ready for it. They retreat into fantasy, cynicism, and ambiguity. So instead of virtue, we got virtue-signaling and, in adults who ought to know better, the kind of bratty behavior you’d expect from 13-year-old girls.

The ground for this was prepared by a society that opted to turn most of its important institutionalized activities into rackets, most particularly, higher education, which entered a late-stage metastasizing expansion fed by government guaranteed loan racketeering. The loan racket allowed the universities and colleges to jack up their tuition extravagantly, which prompted them to regard their debt-burdened, overpaying students as customers, which evolved into just plain pandering to their every wish.

Already in place, as a legacy of the 1960s, was a faculty of crusaders and activists in revolt against the bourgeois indignities of their own comfortable lives, making common cause with all other imagined “victims of oppression” as a form of careerist theater. They concocted curricula of bullshit disciplines for various victim-identity cohorts to monetize their grievance obsessions, and it all worked splendidly until Covid-19 ripped through the campuses and started blowing up the whole business model. And now college enrollments are headed down an estimated 20 percent for 2021, and an awful lot of the not-so-well-endowed schools will be going out of business, with even better-endowed schools soon to follow.

Another thing happened in parallel to the grievance hysterias on campus. The half-century-long civil rights campaign that went up a dead-end with all the family-destroying social services policies of the late 20thcentury, became such a manifestly embarrassing failure with an ever-growing hostile and dangerous underclass, that, in abject shame and disappointment, all of white liberaldom had to come up with an excuse for that failure, which finally fluoresced as Critical Race Theory with its hobgoblin-in-chief, systemic racism.

Hence: Black Lives Matter, based on the fantasy that white policemen were engaged in a genocide against people of color. Really, what you had with Trayvon Martin of Sanford, FLA, Michael Brown of Ferguson, MO, Tamir Rice, of Cleveland OH, and a long line of insta-martyrs, was a series of extremely ambiguous incidents at best, and, at worst, episodes of teens with poor impulse control acting out in ways very likely to get them into big trouble. And then, finally, with the maddening Covid-19 upon the land, and temperatures rising around Memorial Day, came George Floyd, middle-aged ex-con (home invasion, armed robbery, etc.), sometime porn star, hustler, a drug abuser who was “turning his life around” in Minneapolis, suddenly trapped under the knee of officer Derek Chauvin….

Black Lives Matter can be simply understood as a well-funded hustle, and by “hustle” I mean a program for dishonestly extracting goods from others, a crude “street” variation of a racket. BLM also features a patina of moral fakery, namely its supposed “Marxist” credo — an attempt to appear intelligent and political where it is actually merely criminal. In reality, it’s just a destructive force, a vehicle for punishing its perceived enemies, especially the police who are supposedly (but not in reality) perpetrating racist genocide. This gets to the heart of the Wokesterism more generally in all its aspects from Critical Race Theory to cancel culture to the #Me Too game. Its animating purpose is coercion, the wish to push other people around, to find excuses to punish them, and to do it for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching them squirm, suffer, lose their livelihoods, and perish. That’s it. The rest is sheer bullshit.

In the new year, the ongoing economic carnage will be so severe that the nation may not have time for the finer points of Woke theory and philosophy, or the patience to hear tedious explications of identitarian complaints. Women will have to stop pretending to be an alt version of men, and begin conceiving of some plausible role for themselves as a complementary division of the human race in a new and harsh struggle to thrive. Woke cries of “racist, racist, racist” will no longer be greeted with supplication, apologies, and cosseting. Claims of special victimhood will be laughed out of the public meetings. For the first time in decades in the USA, everyone will have to pull his-or-her own weight, and shut the fuck up about it. Hard times will shake America out of its squishy fantasies and concentrate millions of minds on looking after their basic needs without mommy-hugs, participation trophies, or affirmative action line-jumping.

Antifa, a Woke auxiliary with a really bad attitude, spent most of the Covid-19 year as a social space for youth meet-ups as all the usual social venues — campuses, bars, coffee shops, parties, concerts, etc — all got locked-down. In Seattle, WA, Portland, OR, Minneapolis, MN, Philly, PA, and NYC, NY, where feckless politicians forced police to stand down, or crippled them with sanctions against the use of force, or just fired a bunch of them wholesale, Antifa rioters discovered that it was especially fun to play adult versions of capture-the-flag or ring-a-leevio on warm summer nights with the cops. They got to wear groovy street-fighting outfits and wield umbrellas against gas attacks, and the hormonal young men showboated acts of derring-do with fireworks, skateboards, baseball bats, and, more than once, alas, firearms. If they happened to get rounded up by the police, the local DA’s let them go and many returned to the fun riots time after time, all summer long.

A lot of property got damaged, statues of famous Americans got pulled down, spray-painted, peed-on, busted up, decapitated. Businesses having a hard enough time staying afloat under the Covid lockdowns, had their storefronts smashed, equipment and merchandise looted. Fifty years from now, wrinkled old Antifas will recall how romantic it was. In 2021, the public will lose patience with any further Antifa antics in the streets. They will just get their little umbrellas shredded and their asses kicked, and they’ll go weee-weee-weee back to whatever the equivalent of a crash-pad is nowadays, or to mommy’s basement. We’ll also learn a thing or two about who was funding Antifa in 2020, paying for their airplane tickets to stage their fun riots in city after city, and make sure they were well-supplied with pallets of bricks, Roman candles, and bear spray. Many of today’s Antifas will be tomorrow’s agricultural laborers. Having spent their youth rioting, drugging, playing with their gender presentation and their phones, they won’t be qualified for anything else.

Chinese Fire Drills with Russian Dressing

Donald Trump attempted to put the schnitz on the established order of things between the US and China, which had steadily turned against our own national interest. For a couple of decades, they sent us cheap manufactured goods and we sent them US treasury bond paper. China liked that arrangement well enough, but it really wasn’t working out so well for us. Having given away our manufacturing sector to them, and everybody else in East Asia, our working class no longer had decent-paying jobs and were increasingly strapped to buy all that cheap stuff made in China, even at low, low Walmart prices. So, Mr. Trump made a stink about it and slapped tariffs on Chinese goods, and they have lately been dumping US treasury paper instead of loading up on it as before. They still hold over a trillion dollars’ worth, and they can’t dump a whole bunch of it at once without destroying its value. And we still buy a lot of stuff from China, though the relationship is now very fraught.

Some say we’re at war with China, that it’s a new kind of war, an information and infiltration war. Just what and who does China own in the USA? The American people are starting to find out. Gawd knows what else our unreliable Intel Community knows. Perhaps China owns our CIA now. Perhaps that’s why Mr. Trump has been so busy stripping away the CIA’s various perqs and capacities. We’ve learned for sure that they bought and paid for the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, through a series of lucrative business deals made by his son, Hunter, with a subsidiary of China’s own Intel Agency. Nobody seems to care about that at the moment — but maybe they will care more as we approach his hypothetical inauguration.

It’s pretty clear that China put a bid on Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA), a majority member of the House Intel Committee. They sent a little fortune cookie named Fang Fang over to California some years ago when Mr. Swalwell was a member of the Dublin, CA, city council, and she hung with him for years, bundling campaign money and helping him rise into a congressional seat. He was rumored to be playing hide-the-winter-melon with her, for years. Was he owned? Nobody seems to care for now. Perhaps that will change.

And, of course, we learned some time ago that Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) had a Chinese (national) chauffeur and go-fer for twenty freakin’ years — including her years as chair of the Senate Intel Committee. He vamoosed to China when his identity as a spy was revealed. Nobody cares. That’s what a sloppy-ass country we’ve become.

China, apparently, has thousands upon thousands of carefully placed agents throughout America, especially in big academic research centers and American tech companies and even the news media. Reports say that a Chinese company purchased a 75-percent interest in Dominion Voting Systems for $400-million from Staple Street Capital in October 2020 in a shadowy deal run through the Swiss Bank UBS. It has been demonstrated that Dominion voting machines used in the recent national US elections, were connected to the Internet, though, by law, they are not allowed to be connected. Weird, a little bit. Connected to whom? So far, nobody seems to care.

Oh, and there was China’s Lunar New Year gift to America almost a year ago: Covid-19.

Thanks, China. What do we actually know about how that went down? Apparently, they are busy as I write destroying virus samples in the Wuhan lab.

Will this so far informational and economic war between China and the US heat up and become a different kind of war? I don’t think there’s much in it for China to go that route. Anyway, they’ve got their hands full waiting to see if their bought-and-paid-for errand boy, Mr. Biden, actually becomes president and also perhaps waiting to see exactly how the USA falls apart in the coming year. They will lose a lot of customers for patio furniture and sundry other stuff, but then they won’t have to worry about us monitoring all their activity elsewhere around the world, where, let’s face it, they have a lot going on. The main thing is, China is nearly as fragile as we are, only in different ways. They don’t have whole lot of oil reserves, and they’re burning almost 13-million barrels a day, of which they produce close to 5-million and import the rest. Not a great situation, and not appreciably better than our own. Their banking system is at least as janky as ours, probably worse, since their banks only have to answer to the CCP and they can paper-over any financial sucking chest wound. A global depression could create serious unemployment problems for them, and hence political pressure on and within the CCP. For 2021. If, by some chance, Donald Trump ends up back in the White House, things could go a bit more non-linear.

Reports emerged only days ago that President Xi Jinping will be undergoing brain surgery for a worsening aneurysm. They imply a power struggle in the CCP to ensue in the event that the surgery doesn’t turn out well. I can’t confirm these rumors, but there it is… just sayin’….

Russia appears best positioned to sit out the economic disorders of the West and the discontents of China. Russia has already been through a traumatic economic and political collapse and emerged much lightened, streamlined, and viable. Due to punitive US sanctions, she has had to develop an import-replacement economy, supplying more of her own needs. She has about twice the proven oil reserves as the USA and less than half our population. She has been steadily acquiring gold reserves and has been making noises about establishing a gold-backed currency — which would be a real novelty in a world of fiat junk money. She has a well-educated and relatively homogenous population of capable people who have recovered psychologically from the 75-year-long political mind-fuck of communism. She has an arsenal of world-beating hypersonic nuclear weapons. She has rational and intelligent political leadership. And Russia just passed a law stating that anyone who brings false #MeToo accusations against another citizen faces five years in prison. One looks on in awe!

Europe

Achhhhh. Fugeddabowdit. No oil. No mojo. Buried in debt. Failing social safety nets. Over a million hostile Muslim immigrants looking to burn the joint down. In 2021, the EU will break down and states will scramble desperately to shore up their economies. They will not succeed. Disorders follow and governments will fall. Angela Merkel waves goodby to das volk. Boris Johnson faces a no confidence vote in parliament. Macron survives and gets very tough, but France grows poor and bitter. Everybody starts saying nice things about Victor Orban.

There’s the whole shootin’ match. Forgive me for leaving out only about ten thousand other topics and issues, including climate change, about which I will only say: believe it or not, we’ve got more urgent things to worry about. Happy New Year everybody!

Trump at the Rubicon

How the Insurrection Act and Militia Act Empower Trump to Cast the Die

In the closing days of 50 BC, the Roman Senate declared that Julius Caesar’s term as a provincial governor was finished. Roman law afforded its magistrates immunity to prosecution, but this immunity would end with Caesar’s term. As the leader of the populares faction, Caesar had many enemies among the elite optimates, and as soon as he left office, these enemies planned to bury him in litigation. Caesar knew he would lose everything: property, liberty, even his life.

Caesar decided it was better to fight for victory than accept certain defeat. In January 49 BC, he crossed the Rubicon River with his army, in violation of sacred Roman law, and begin a civil war. “Alea iacta est,” said Caesar: The die is cast.

In the closing days of 2020 AD, the American media has declared that Donald Trump’s term as president is finished. As the leader of the deplorables faction, Trump has many enemies among the elite irates, and as soon as he leaves office, these enemies plan to bury him in litigation. Bill Pascrell, the Chairman of the House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Oversight, has officially called for the prosecution of President Trump for “government crimes” following his term in office. In his thirst for vengeance, Pascrell has made it clear there will be no Nixonian escape by pardon:

Donald Trump, along with his worst enablers, must be tried for their crimes against our nation and Constitution. Any further abuse of the sacred pardon power to shield criminals would itself be obstruction of justice, and any self-pardons would be illegal.

Like Caesar, Trump now must fight for victory or lose everything. Come January 2021, will Donald Trump decide to cast the die and cross the Rubicon? He might.

The same people who warned us that Trump is worse than Hitler will now scoff: “Donald Trump is no Caesar!” That’s true. Trump is in a much better position than Caesar was.

Unlike Caesar, Trump can cross the Rubicon legally. He need violate no sacred law. He has all of the legal power he needs to act and win. Congress has given it to him. All he needs to do is invoke the Insurrection Act.

Invoking the Insurrection Act

During the 2020 summer protests and riots, commentators on both the Left and Right argued about whether Trump would use the so-called Insurrection Act against the crowds. Strangely, no one seems to be considering the fact that Trump could use it now.

The history of the Insurrection Act dates back all the way to 1797, and the legislative record is so long and tortured that it’s woeful to contemplate. Suffice to say that in the 21st century, the Insurrection Act has been pleasantly re-titled “The Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act” and codified in four sections of the US Code:

• 10 USC § 251 Federal Aid for State Governments

• 10 USC § 252 Use of Militia and Armed Forces to Enforce Federal Authority

• 10 USC § 253 Interference with State and Federal Law

• 10 USC § 254 Proclamation to Disperse

Of the four provisions, the most recent and the most powerful is 10 USC § 253, which was written in 2006. This is the one that liberal pundits always forget to mention when they blab about Posse Comitatus and governors. It reads:

The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it-

1. so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or

2. opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.

That’s powerful language! Consider:

• The authority is vested solely in the President. He does not need the invitation of state governors to intervene, nor does he need the approval of the Supreme Court. Older provisions of the Insurrection Act required either a governor or a judicial proceeding to authorize its use, but these limits were purposefully removed by Congress in § 253.

• There is no time limit on the President’s activities. Older versions of the Insurrection Act limited the use of force to brief periods of time and then required legislative approval. Those limits, too, are also gone.

• The President is allowed to use any means that he (and again, he needs no one else) considers necessary. This includes using the armed forces (which enables him to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act) and using the militia (which we’ll discuss in more detail below).

• The President’s ability to use force isn’t restricted to actual rebellion or insurgency. He can act against merely unlawful combinations and conspiracies. To be clear: If the President decides that a conspiracy has deprived people of a right and believes that authorities fail or refuse to protect the right, he can send in the troops.

In blunt terms, Congress has given the power to President Trump to proclaim:

“I, President Trump, have determined that a conspiracy has deprived 70 million Americans of their right to vote and that the other authorities are refusing to protect this right. I therefore order the suppression of this conspiracy by any means necessary.”

And with that, Trump will cross the Rubicon.

Horror and Denial: He Shouldn’t! He Wouldn’t!

If you are of libertarian leanings, you are likely to feel horror: “Why on Earth did a free republic vest so much power into one man?”

You should feel horror. The Romans required a Senate vote to appoint a Dictator with emergency powers, and that Dictator served a strict six-month term limit. In America, we’ve given the President the right to decide when he should become a Dictator and for how long he can retain his emergency powers.

This was certainly unwise; but it is done. “Game over, man.” The power has been given. The power can be used. And it probably will be used if the Democrats continue on their foolish campaign to seek vengeance on Trump.

If you are in the grip of normalcy bias, you are likely to be in denial: “Trump wouldn’t dare! The US Armed Forces would remove him from office! The troops wouldn’t respond to his call!”

Pompey said the same about the Roman legions. He was wrong. He was so wrong, in fact, that his decapitated head ended up in a stylish gift box presented to Caesar as a present when he landed in Egypt. Don’t be Pompey.

Now, I don’t expect beheadings (just helicopters) but I do expect that the US Armed Forces would obey Trump’s orders. Although he is not popular with the Pentagon, Trump remains popular with actual soldiers, especially with white middle-class men who make up a disproportionate number of the infantry, armor, pilots, special forces, and other combat arms. (His support among law enforcement personnel is even higher. The men with guns love Trump.)

But let’s assume the Armed Forces are paralyzed, split, or neutral. If so, Trump still has millions of troops available: The militia.

Calling Up the Militia

The militia is defined by 10 U.S. Code § 246:

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and… under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are—

• (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and

• (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

This is, again, an incredibly powerful piece of legislation. Put into plain English, and ignoring a few minor exemptions (postal workers, etc), Trump commands an unorganized militia consisting of every able-bodied man between the ages of 17 and 45. The men don’t need to be in the National Guard. They don’t need to be veterans. They don’t need to be anything except 17 to 45 and able-bodied.

Remember that 10 USC § 253 grants the President the power to use the militia to take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress conspiracy. The militia is statutorily defined to include the unorganized militia.

Therefore, when you combine 10 USC § 253 with 10 USC § 246, the President can call on every able-bodied male age 17 to 45 to take any means he deems necessary to suppress the conspiracy to deny Americans their voting rights.

How many men is that? With 328M Americans, 50% of them male, and 40% of them between 18 and 45, that’s 65M militia members.

Organizing the Unorganized

When Trump calls up the unorganized militia, how does it get organized? What Federal statutes, regulations, and case law govern what happens next? The answer… Well, there isn’t one.

“The Citizen-Soldier under Federal and State Law”, a lengthy law review article published in 94 W. Va. L. Rev (1992), reviewed all of the available statutes, regulations, and case law relating to the use of citizen-soldiers. Turns out, there’s not much about the unorganized militia. In fact, in the entirety of the 20th century, there has only been one case:

In 1946 Virginia Governor William Mumford Tuck issued a call to the state's unorganized militia to come to the aid of the state and to quell a labor dispute.

Let’s quickly look at what happened. According to the Encyclopedia Virginia, the crisis began when the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union announced that its members would strike against the Virginia Electric and Power Company unless its demands were met by a deadline of April 1, 1946.

At the time, “Virginia law divided its militia into four classes: the National Guard, the Virginia Defense Force, the naval militia, and the unorganized militia. This latter unit hypothetically consisted of all able-bodied males between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five who could be summoned by the governor if needed.” (Virginia law thus mirrored 10 U.S. Code § 246.)

Two days before the strike deadline, Governor Tuck “unilaterally decreed that all IBEW employees were summarily drafted into the unorganized militia and ordered, on pain of court-martial, to continue at their jobs.” Shortly thereafter, the dispute was resolved and questions as to the constitutionality of Tuck's actions were left unresolved. However, the next month, US President Harry S. Truman “used a similar tactic in threatening to draft into the U.S. Army railway workers whose union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, was calling for a nationwide strike; as in the VEPCO affair, the two sides reached a settlement at the eleventh hour.”

So in the only recorded instance in the last 100 years, an unorganized militia was called up, drafted, and ordered to perform particular duties on pain of court-martial, unilaterally by a governor, without any other legislative action, new statute, or court order. And rather than condemn the governor, the US President thought this idea was so awesome he used it himself the next month on the federal militia.

With no apparent limits whatsoever, the Insurrection Act combined with the Militia Act isn’t just a blank check; it’s a blank check book. Apparently our government can call on its citizens to do whatever it wants! I would protest this, but I’m currently on lockdown.

The Balance of Forces

Let’s return to our earlier assumption that Trump has invoked the Insurrection Act and then used it to call up the militia. Let’s continue to assume that the US Armed Forces are either paralyzed with indecision, split in their loyalties, or opting to stay neutral, and just look at the militia. So who is going to fight?

Now, no matter what the law says, not every eligible militia man would respond to Trump’s call. But it seems likely there’d be a large number who did respond, and an even larger number of noncombatant supporters. Right now, 70% of Republicans don’t think the election was free and fair. If Trump calls on the unorganized militia to save the Republic from voter fraud, a militia will come.

So too would an anti-militia or resistance. In fact, lots of people who are willing to fight are fighting on the streets already. It seems likely that if Trump crosses the Rubicon, he will trigger a civil war, just like Caesar triggered a civil war.

When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he had only one legion against the might of Rome. What would Trump and his opponents be able to muster?

Let’s assess the balance of forces. Trump’ voters consisted of 58% of 98M white men; 55% of 98M white women; 36% of 30M Hispanic men, 28% of 30M Hispanic women, 20% of 22M black men, and 9% of 22M black women.

Meanwhile, the demographics of gun ownership in the US are as follows: 48% of white men own a gun, while only 24% of white women own a gun, 24% of non white men, and 16% of non-white women.

Assuming that women largely don’t fight (which is the historical norm), the balance of forces looks like this:

• 98 million white men x 58% Trump voters x 48% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 11 million white gun-owning Trump militia

• 36 million Hispanic men x 30% Trump voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 1 million Hispanic gun-owning Trump militia

• 22 million black men x 20% Trump voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 0.4 million black gun-owning Trump militia

• 98 million white men x 42% Biden voters x 48% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 8 million white gun-owning anti-Trump resisters

• 36 million Hispanic men x 70% Biden voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 2.4 million Hispanic gun-owning anti-Trump resisters

• 22 million black men x 80% Biden voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 1.7 million black gun-owning anti-Trump resisters

This basic math suggests 12.4 million potential Trump gun owners and 12.1 million potential anti-Trump gun owners.

However, it’s likely the odds would stack more favorably to Trump. Although only 39% of Americans are Republicans, gun owners are actually 64% Republican. In other words, those who own guns are disproportionately Republican by a factor of 1.64! If we replace the percentage of Trump voters with the percentage of Republican gun-owners, then the balance of forces changes to 17.6M pro-Trump and 6.9M anti-Trump.

3% of Americans fought in the Continental Army during the Revolution. If 3% respond to the call for the militia, that would mean between 450,000 to 700,000 militia and 210,000 to 450,000 resisters. To put that in context, there’s only 60,000 soldiers in the Infantry Branch of the US Army.

Of the militia who do respond, those on Trump’s side will be much better trained. As noted earlier, the military’s combat arms are disproportionately white, with the infantry being 79% white and only 9% black. Since the United States has now been at war for 20 years, there are millions of combat veterans, and the vast majority of those who fought as infantry are likely to be on Trump’s side. Likewise, the vast majority of LEO veterans seem likely to fight on Trump’s side, if they chose a side.

The Oathkeepers, a hundred-thousand-strong organization made up of military and law enforcement veterans and personnel, has already stated that it will refuse to recognize a Biden presidency. “We’ll be very much like the founding fathers. We’ll end up nullifying and resisting,” said founder Stewart Rhodes.

The founding fathers resisted, of course, with guns.

This Is Not a Drill

Meanwhile, those in the grip of normalcy bias still think that the ‘nuclear option’ is for Trump to ask the state legislatures to appoint some electors to the college. Using legislative ballots isn’t the nuclear option. It’s barely a grenade. The nuclear option is Insurrection Act and the Militia.

Left-wing media is a parade of ostriches marching heads down in the sand. “Trump will lose in a landslide!” Wrong. “Trump has already lost!” Wrong. “There is no evidence of fraud!” Wrong. “Civil War could never happen!” Wrong. Maybe it won’t happen. The future is unpredictable. But it really, really could happen.

If I had told you last November that in the next 12 months the US would endure the worst pandemic since Spanish Flu, AND the worst depression since the Great Depression, AND the worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War, AND the worst civil unrest since the summer of 1968, AND an unprecedented nation-wide lockdowns that led to the end of sports, bars, restaurants, movies, in-class attendance at school, and commuting to work, AND that it would culminate in the World Economic Forum announcing a Great Reset to the global economy to lock in this new normal, would you have believed me? No, you’d have laughed me off as a tinfoil nutjob. Yet here we are.

To repeat a statistic from earlier: 70% of Republicans think that the most recent election is illegitimate. In a functioning democracy, if 70% of the second-largest political party in the country thinks an election has been stolen, the elites come together to cooperate to investigate and restore legitimacy in the eyes of the voters.

In the US, that’s not happening. Instead, an enormous machine, consisting of tech oligopolies, liberal media, watchdog groups, and partisan activists, is doing everything it can to silence and suppress the dissenters. Simultaneously, this same machine is making enemy lists and actively declaring that when it wins, it will be taking vengeance, against Trump, against everyone who helped him, and against everyone who voted for him.

This is not a drill. This is where we are. If Trump is standing on the banks of the Rubicon, it’s because the leftist machine has purposefully widened the Rubicon River until it reaches his feet.

Clear-headed left-wingers — if there are any left — need to step in and deescalate the threats against Trump and his supporters, and listen to 70 million Americans clamoring for fair and fraud-free voting. There is still time.

Otherwise, as another great military leader put it, “when on death ground, you must fight.”

Update (1230AM 11/20/20): This afternoon, Trump’s legal team made serious allegations of election fraud in the Presidential election and indicated their intent to pursue these allegations in as many as 10 states. In response, Democrat thought leaders have declared the litigation efforts to be an attempted coup, begun a #sedition hashtag on Twitter, and written op-eds demanding felony charges against the entire legal team for treason — a legal team led by one of the nation’s most respected prosecutors and mayors in history! Taking the position that litigating before the Supreme Court is sedition is a perfect example of purposefully widening the Rubicon River until it reaches Trump’s feet.

“Yeah, like [in] a church. Church of the Good Hustler.”

– Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Hustler

At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House, Nora, the aggrieved wife, leaves her husband’s house and all the illusions that sustained its marriage of lies. She chooses freedom over fantasy. She will no longer be played with like a doll but will try to become a free woman – a singular one. “There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself,” she tells her husband Torvald, a man completely incapable of understanding the social programming that has made him society’s slave.

When Nora closes the doll’s house door behind her, the sound is like a hammer blow of freedom. For anyone who has seen the play, even when knowing the outcome in advance, that sound is profound. It keeps echoing. It interrogates one’s conscience.

The echo asks: Do you live inside America’s doll house where a vast tapestry of lies, bad faith, and cheap grace keep you caged in comfort, as you repeat the habits that have been drilled into you?

In this doll’s house of propaganda into which America has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.

Americans who voted for either Trump or Biden in the 2020 election are like Torvald clones. They refuse to open that door so they might close it behind them. They live in the doll’s house – all 146+ million of them. Like Torvald, they are comforted. They are programmed and propagandized, embracing the illusion that the electoral system is not structured and controlled to make sure no significant change can occur, no matter who is president. It is a sad reality promoted as democracy.

They will prattle on and give all sorts of reasons why they voted, and for whom, and how if you don’t vote you have no right to bitch, and how it’s this sacred right to vote that makes democracy great, blah blah blah. It’s all sheer nonsense. For the U.S.A. is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy run by the wealthy for the wealthy.

This is not a big secret. Everybody knows this is true; knows the electoral system is sheer show business with the presidential extravaganza drawing the big money from corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, credit card companies, lawyers, business and hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley honchos, think tanks, Wall Street gamblers, millionaires, billionaires, et. al. Biden and Trump spent over 3 billion dollars on the election. They are owned by the money people.

Both are old men with long, shameful histories. A quick inquiry will show how the rich have profited immensely from their tenures in office. There is not one hint that they could change and have a miraculous conversion while in future office, like JFK. Neither has the guts or the intelligence. They are nowhere men who fear the fate that John Kennedy faced squarely when he turned against the CIA and the war machine. They join the craven company of Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. They all got the message that was sent from the streets of Dallas in 1963: You don’t want to die, do you?

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, its vast intelligence apparatus, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious.

It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why.

All the while, the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful. It is now essentially an electronic prison that is being “Built Back Better.” The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population through their corporate mass-media stenographers. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other.

Only those backed by the wealthy power brokers get elected in the U.S.A. Then when elected, it’s payback time. Palms are greased. Everybody knows this is true. It’s called corruption. So why would anyone, who opposes a corrupt political oligarchy, vote, unless they were casting a vote of conscience for a doomed third-party candidate?

Leonard Cohen told it true with “Everybody Knows”:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

And yet everybody who voted for the two men backed by the super-rich owners of the country knew what they were doing, unless they live under a rock and come out every four years to vote. Perhaps they were out buying stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey, so they can give thanks for the farce (stuffing: Latin: farcire ).

They have their reasons. Now the Biden people celebrate, just as Trump’s supporters did in 2016. I can hear fireworks going off as I write here in a town where 90% + voted for Biden and hate Trump with a passion more intense than what they ever could work up for a spurned lover or spouse. This is mass psychosis. It’s almost funny.

At least we have gotten rid of Trump, they say. No one can be worse. They think this is logic. Like Torvald, they cannot begin to understand why anyone would want to leave the doll’s house, how anyone could refuse to play a game in which the dice are loaded. They will deny they are in the doll’s house while knowing the dice are loaded and still roll the die, not caring that their choice – whether it’s Tweedledee or Tweedledum – will result in the death and impoverishment of so many, that being the end result of oligarchic rule at home and imperialism abroad.

Orwell called this Doublethink:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

And while in Nineteen Eighty-Four Doublethink is learned by all the Party members “and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox,” today in the U.S.A., it has been mastered even by the so-called unintelligent.

To live in the U.S.A. is to live in the Church of the Good Hustler.

People often ask: What can we do to make the country better? What is your alternative?

A child could answer that one: Don’t vote if you know that both contenders are backed by the super-rich elites, what some call the Deep State. Which of course they are. Everybody knows.

The so-called left and right argue constantly about whom to support. It’s a pseudo-debate constructed to allow people to think their vote counts; that the game isn’t rigged. It’s hammered into kids’ heads from an early age. Be grateful, give thanks that you live in a democracy where voting is allowed and your choice is as important as a billionaire’s such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Charles Koch. In the voting booth we are all equal.

Myths die hard. This one never does:

“Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.”

— Donald Trump, January 20, 2017.

“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal.”

— Joe Biden, November 7, 2020.

“Above all else, the time has come for us to renew our faith in ourselves and in America. In recent years, that faith has been challenged.”

— Richard Nixon, January 20, 1973.

Your voice – our faith – it’s time to unite and heal.

Ask the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Afghanis, the Libyans, the Palestinians, et al. They sing a different tune, one not heard In the Church of the Good Hustler.

After campaigning hard for the losing presidential candidate in 1972, I nearly choked when I heard Richard Nixon’s inaugural address in January 1973. Clinging to the American myth the previous year, I had campaigned for a genuine anti-war Democrat, Senator George McGovern. The war against Vietnam was still raging and Nixon, who had been first elected in 1968 as a “peace candidate,” succeeding the previous “peace candidate” Lyndon Baines Johnson, was nevertheless overwhelmingly elected, despite Watergate allegations appearing in the months preceding the election. Nixon won forty-nine states to McGovern’s one – Massachusetts, where I lived. It was a landslide. I felt sick, woke up, got up, and left the doll’s house.

“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” wrote the French sociologist Jacques Ellul in 1965 in Propaganda:

It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness…. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths.

In a country where loneliness is widespread, the will to believe and the power of positive thinking are far more powerful than the will to truth. Unlike Nora, who knew that when she left the doll’s house she was choosing the loneliness of the solitary soul, Americans prefer myths that induce them to act out of habit so they can lose themselves in the group.

This is so despite the fact that In the Church of the Good Hustler, when you play the game, you lose. We are all Americans and your vote counts and George Washington never told a lie.

Serbian President Aleksander Vucic checks out the agreed minutes of their meeting when US President Trump suddenly announces Serbia's commitment to moving its embassy to Jerusalem in July.

As one Russian commentator said, Vucic finds he has been had in all holes. Now see how the North American public sees the same event

The demonstrations are no longer directed against racism, but against the symbols of the country’s history. The National Guard has been deployed to protect monuments. Here on June 2nd, 2020, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C..

Protests across the West against racism in the United States are masking the evolution of the conflict there. It has evolved from a questioning of the remnants of black slavery to a conflict that could challenge the integrity of the country.

Last week I pointed out that the United States should have disbanded after the break-up of the Soviet Union to which it was attached. However, the imperialist project (the "Endless War") led by George W. Bush had made it possible to revive the country after the attacks of September 11, 2001. I also pointed out that in recent decades, the population had moved around a great deal in order to regroup by cultural affinity [1]. Inter-racial marriages were again becoming rare. I concluded that the integrity of the country would be threatened when non-black minorities entered the challenge [2].

This is precisely what we are witnessing today. The conflict is no longer between blacks and whites, since whites have become the majority in some anti-racist demonstrations, Hispanics and Asians have joined the processions, and the Democratic Party is now involved.

Since Bill Clinton’s term in office, the Democratic Party has identified with the process of financial globalization; a position that the Republican Party belatedly supported, without ever fully adopting it. Donald Trump represents a third path: that of the "American dream", i.e. entrepreneurship as opposed to finance. He got elected by declaring America First! which did not refer to the pro-Nazi isolationist movement of the 1930s as claimed, but to the relocation of jobs as later verified. He was certainly supported by the Republican Party, but remains a "Jacksonian" and not a "conservative" at all.

As historian Kevin Phillips - Richard Nixon’s electoral adviser - has shown, Anglo-Saxon culture gave rise to three successive civil wars [3] :
the first English Civil War, known as the "Great Rebellion" (which pitted Lord Cromwell against Charles I 1642-1651);
the second English Civil War or "War of Independence from the United States" (1775-1783);
and the Third Anglo-Saxon Civil War or "Civil War" in the United States (1861-1865).

What we are witnessing today could lead to the fourth. This seems to be the view of former Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis, who recently told The Atlantic that he was concerned about President Trump’s divisive rather than unifying policies.

Let us go back to the history of the United States to see where the sides are. Populist President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) vetoed the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) established by Alexander Hamilton, one of the fathers of the Constitution, who favoured federalism because he was violently opposed to democracy. Just as Jackson’s disciple, Donald Trump, is today in opposition to the Fed.

Twenty years after Jackson, came the "Civil War" to which today’s protesters all refer. According to them, it pitted a slave South against a humanist North. The movement that began with a racist news item (the lynching of black George Flyod by a white policeman from Minneapolis) continues today with the destruction of statues of southern generals, including Robert Lee. Actions of this type had already taken place in 2017 [4], but this time they are gaining momentum and governors from the Democratic Party are participating.

The Democratic Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, announced the removal of a famous statue of General Lee at the request of white protesters. It is no longer a question of fighting racism, but of destroying the symbols of the country’s unity.

However, this narrative does not correspond at all to reality: at the beginning of the Civil War, both sides were slavers, and at the end, both sides were anti-slavers. The end of slavery owes nothing to the abolitionists and everything to the need for both sides to enlist new soldiers.

The Civil War pitted a rich, Catholic, agricultural South against a Protestant, industrial North aspiring to make a fortune. It crystallized around the issue of customs duties which the South believed should be set by the federal states, but which the North intended to abolish between the federal states and have the federal government determine.

Therefore, in debunking the Southern symbols, the current demonstrators are not attacking the remnants of slavery, but denouncing the Southern vision of the Union. It was particularly unfair to attack General Lee, who had put an end to the Civil War by refusing to pursue it with guerrilla warfare from the mountains and by choosing national unity. In any case, these degradations effectively pave the way for a fourth Anglo-Saxon civil war.

Today the notions of South and North no longer correspond to geographical realities: it would rather be Dallas against New York and Los Angeles.

It is not possible to choose the aspects of a country’s history that one considers good and to destroy those that one considers bad without calling into question everything that has been built on it.

In referring to Richard Nixon’s 1968 election slogan, "Law and Order," President Donald Trump is not trying to preach racist hatred as many commentators claim, but is returning to the thinking of the author of that slogan, Kevin Philipps (quoted above). He still intends to make Andrew Jackson’s thought triumph over Finance by relying on Southern culture and not to cause the disintegration of his country.

President Donald Trump finds himself in the situation Mikhail Gorbachev experienced at the end of the 1980s: his country’s economy - not finance - has been in sharp decline for decades, but his fellow citizens refuse to acknowledge the consequences [5]. The United States can only survive by setting new goals. Such change is particularly difficult in times of recession.

Paradoxically, Donald Trump is clinging to the "American dream" (i.e., the possibility of making a fortune) when US society is stuck, the middle classes are disappearing, and new immigrants are no longer European. At the same time only its opponents (the Fed, Wall Street and Silicon Valley) are proposing a new model, but at the expense of the masses.

The problem of the USSR was different, but the situation was the same. Gorbachev failed and it was dissolved. It would be surprising if the next US president, whoever he may be, succeeded.

The media continue to tell fairytales about Qassem Soleimani and about Trump's decision to assassinate him and PMU leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Meanwhile the Resistance Axis announced how it will avenge their deaths.

In their descriptions of Qassem Soleimani U.S. media fail to mention that Soleimani and the U.S. fought on the same side. In 2001 Iran supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. It used its good relations with the Hazara Militia and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which both the CIA and Iran had supplied for years, to support the U.S. operation. The Wikipedia entry for the 2001 uprising in Herat lists U.S. General Tommy Franks and General Qassem Soleimani as allied commanders.

The collaboration ended in 2002 after George W. Bush named Iran as a member of his "Axis of Evil".

In 2015 the U.S. and Iran again collaborated. This time to defeat ISIS in Iraq. During the battle to liberate Tikrit the U.S. air force flew in support of General Soleimani's ground forces. Newsweek reported at that time:

While western nations, including the U.S., were slow to react to ISIS's march across northern Iraq, Soleimani was quick to play a more public role in Tehran's efforts to tackle the terror group. For example, the commander was seen in pictures with militiamen in the northern Iraqi town of Amerli when it was recaptured from ISIS last September.
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Top U.S. general Martin Dempsey has said that the involvement of Iran in the fight against ISIS in Iraq could be a positive step, as long as the situation does not descend into sectarianism, because of fears surrounding how Shia militias may treat the remaining Sunni population of Tikrit if it is recaptured. The military chief also claimed that almost two thirds of the 30,000 offensive were Iranian-backed militiamen, meaning that without Iranian assistance and Soleimani's guidance, the offensive on Tikrit may not have been possible.

It is deplorable that U.S. media and politicians blame Soleimani for U.S. casualties during the invasion of Iraq. Shia groups caused only 17% of all U.S. casualties and fought, like the Sadr Brigades, without support from Iran. There are also revived claims that Iran provided the Iraqi resistance with Explosive Formed Penetrators used in roadside bombs. But that claim had been proven to be was false more than 12 years ago. The "EFP from Iran" story was part of a U.S. PSYOPS campaign to explain away the real reason why it was losing the war. There were dozens of reports which proved that the EFPs were manufactured in Iraq and there never was any evidence that Iran delivered weapons or anything else to the Iraqi resistance:

Britain, whose forces have had responsibility for security in southeastern Iraq since the war began, has found nothing to support the Americans' contention that Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq, several senior military officials said.

"I have not myself seen any evidence -- and I don't think any evidence exists -- of government-supported or instigated" armed support on Iran's part in Iraq, British Defense Secretary Des Browne said in an interview in Baghdad in late August.

Iran is not responsible for the U.S. casualties in Iraq. George W. Bush is. What made Soleimani "bad" in the eyes of the U.S. was his support for the resistance against the Zionist occupation of Palestine. It was Israel that wanted him 'removed'. The media explanations for Trump's decision fail to explain that point.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump picked the 'wrong' item from a list of possible courses of action that the military had presented him. That sounded like bullshit invented to take blame away from Trump and to put it onto the military.

The Washington Post reports today that the idea to kill Soleimani came from Secretary of State Pompeo:

Pompeo first spoke with Trump about killing Soleimani months ago, said a senior U.S. official, but neither the president nor Pentagon officials were willing to countenance such an operation.
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[This time o]ne significant factor was the “lockstep” coordination for the operation between Pompeo and Esper, both graduates in the same class at the U.S. Military Academy, who deliberated ahead of the briefing with Trump, senior U.S. officials said. Pence also endorsed the decision, but he did not attend the meeting in Florida.

It is possible that the report is correct but it sounds more like an arranged story to blame Pompeo for the bad consequences Trump's decision will have.

During his election campaign Trump did not even know (vid) who Soleimani was. Someone indoctrinated him. The idea to assassinate Soleimani came most likely from Netanyahoo and must have been planted into Trump's head quite a while ago. Israel could have killed Soleimani several times while he was openly traveling in Syria. It shied away from doing that as it (rightly) feared the consequences. Now the U.S. will have to endure them.

The consequences continue to pile up.

The decision by the Iraqi government and parliament to kick all foreign troops out of the country leaves some flexibility in the timeline. The U.S. and other military are in Iraq under simple agreements that were exchanged between the Iraqi Foreign Ministry and the other sides. The ministry can fulfill the parliament decision by simply writing letters that declare that the agreements end next week. It could also choose to wait until the end of the year. But Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi has publicly declared that he can no longer guarantee the security of foreign troops on Iraqi ground. That makes the issue urgent and it is likely that the troops will leave rather soon.

Trump did not like the idea and threatened Iraq with sanctions:

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, the U.S. president said: “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”

“We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it,” Trump said.

The president added that “If there’s any hostility, that they do anything we think is inappropriate, we are going to put sanctions on Iraq, very big sanctions on Iraq.”

There are also some 2,900 Twitter bots who try to let the parliament decision look illegitimate by tweeting "I am Iraqi and parliament doesn't represent me". It is not known if these are Saudi or U.S. bots but their behavior is inauthentic.

There is nothing Trump can do to keep the troops in Iraq. If the Iraqi government does not tell them to leave the Popular Militia Forces will attack the U.S. bases and evict the U.S. military by force. When the U.S. assassinated Soleimani and PMU leader al-Muhandis it made that step inevitable.

Yesterday Iran took a decision to exceed the number of centrifuges that are allowed to run under the JCPOA nuclear agreement which the U.S. has left. The decision had been expected and the Soleimani assassination only accelerated it. Iran took the step under §36 of the agreement which allows Iran to exceed the limits if the other sides of the JCPOA do not stick to their commitments. That means that Iran is still within the JCPOA and that the step is reversible. The IAEA will continue to have access to Iran's sites and will continue to report regularly about Iran's civil nuclear program.

The JCPOA co-signers France, the UK and Germany issued a very unhelpful statement today that puts all blame on Iran and does not even mention the U.S. assassinations of Soleimani.

Iran has not announced what kind of operation it will use to avenge the death of its national hero Qassem Soleimani. It will likely be some asymmetrical operation against the U.S. military somewhere around the globe. It will certainly be a big one.

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah, a dear friend of Soleimani, announced yesterday that the Resistance Axis will take its own, separate revenge.

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Here are edited excerpts from Nasrallah's rather long speech (which is worth reading in full):

Today we commemorate Soleimani and al-Muhandis, two great commanders, and their Iraqi and Iranian companions who were martyred in this recent crime. The date of Soleimani's assassination is an inflection point in the history of the region, not just for Iran or Iraq. It is a new beginning.
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Soleimani's assassination isn't an isolated incident. It's the beginning of new American approach to the region. The U.S. carefully weighed what move they could take to reverse all their previous failures. But this wasn't war with Iran. Trump knows war with Iran would be difficult and dangerous. So, what could they do that wouldn't lead to war with Iran? They settled on killing Qassem Soleimani, a central figure in the Resistance Axis.
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Qassem Soleimani was the glue that held the Resistance Axis together, and so they decided to kill him, and to kill him openly, which would also have its psychological impact.
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Our responsibility in the Resistance Axis is divided into three points.

1. Trump's goal was to terrify us all, and subjugate us. The leadership of Resistance will not waver or back down at all. To the contrary, the martyrdom of Soleimani and Muhandis will only drive us forward.
2. Resistance must coordinate and become closer, to strengthen itself and its capabilities, because the region is heading toward a new phase.
3. In terms of response, we have to consider just punishment. In terms of this crime, the one who committed it is known, and must be punished.

Soleimani isn't just an Iranian matter, he is all of the Resistance Axis - Palestine, Lebanon Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and every country which has supporter and lover of Resistance. The umma. This isn't an Iranian issue alone. Iran can also respond as it pleases, but that response doesn't exempt the Resistance Axis from also responding. Iran won't ask you to do anything - to act or not to act. But Resistance Axis forces must decide how to deal with Soleimani's death.

So, if any Resistance Axis faction avenges his death, that their decision, and Iran isn't behind that. Iran won't ask anything. It's up to us how to respond. Do we content ourselves with mourning and eulogizing? We must all head towards just punishment.

What do we mean by just punishment? Some are saying this must be someone of the same level as Qassem Soleimani - like Chairman of Joint Chiefs, head of @CENTCOM, but there is no one on Soleimani or Muhandis' level. Soleimani's shoe is worth more than Trump's head, so there's no one I can point to to say this is the person we can target.

Just punishment therefore means American military presence in the region, U.S. military bases, U.S. military ships, every American officer and soldier in our countries and regions. The U.S. military is the one who killed Soleimani and Muhandis, and they will pay the price. This is the equation.

I want to be very clear, we do not mean American citizens or nationals. There are many Americans in our region. We don't mean to attack them, and it is wrong to harm them. Attacking US civilians anywhere serves Trump's interests.

The American military institution put itself in the midst of battle by carrying out the assassination.

There are those who will say I'm blowing things out of proportion. I'm not. I'm seeing it as it is. We won't accept our region, its holy places, and natural resources to be handed over to the Zionists.

If the resistance axis heads in this direction, the Americans will leave our region, humiliated, defeated, and terrified. The suicide martyrs who forced the US out of the region before remain. If our region's peoples head in this direction - when the coffins of of U.S. soldiers and officers - they arrived vertically, and will return horizontally - Trump and his admin will know they lost the region, and will lose the elections.

The response to the blood of Soleimani and Al-Muhandis must be expulsion of all U.S, forces from the region. When we accomplish this goal, the liberation of Palestine will become imminent. When US forces leave the region, these Zionists will pack their bags and leave, and might not need a battle with Israel.

General Esmail Qaani, Soleimani's replacement as commander of the Quds Brigade, endorsed Nasrallah's proposal:

Going Underground on RT @Underground_RT - 00:14 UTC · Jan 6, 2020

Esmail Qaani, the new leader of Iran's IRGC Quds Force:
"Our promise is to continue the path of martyr Soleimani. Due to the martyrdom of #Soleimani, our promise will be the expulsion of the US from the region in different steps."

These are not empty threats but a military project that will play out over the next years. I would not bet on the U.S. as the winner of that war.

There were millions of Iranians in the streets of Tehran today to mourn Qassem Soleimani. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei shed tears while reciting the funeral prayer (vid). As Ayatollah Khomeini once said: “They call us a nation of tears, but with these tears we overthrew an empire.”

Fereshteh Sadeghi فرشته صادقی @fresh_sadegh - 5:15 UTC · Jan 6, 2020
I was given this poster tonight by 2 young men next to a stand that offered tea and dates to motorists (dates as a sign of mourning in Iran), I want to stick it on my car’s rear window. It reads: A world will avenge you, with hashtag #crushing_response

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There will be hundreds of thousands of volunteers should Iran need them to avenge Soleimani. That is why we predicted that the U.S. will come to regret its evil deed.

And while the situation can be reasonably compared to the build up to the war on Iraq I do not see a war happening. Wars are very risky as the enemy gets a vote. Any war with Iran would likely cost ten thousands of U.S. casualties. Trump is probably not stupid enough to launch such a war and certainly not during an election year.

During his campaign Trump said he wanted the U.S. military out of the Middle East. Iran and its allies will help him to keep that promise.

The day after two US drones fired missiles that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, President Trump gave a press conference where he explained his action by saying: “We took action last night to stop a war. We do not take action to start a war.”

To what war was Trump referring?

In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Trump’s ‘America First’ policy spooked the Israelis because it reeked of isolationism and possible divestment from the Middle East. As everyone (or at least everyone in Israel) ‘knows’, if the US left the Middle East, Israel would soon be ‘overrun by Muslim hordes’ and left with little option but to use its ‘Samson Option‘ and take as many of its Arab ‘enemies’ down with it.

These fears were assuaged, to some extent, by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, turn the sanction screws on Tehran, and move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Of course, these favors to Israel were, to a large extent, purchased in advance by way of a $25 million Trump campaign donation (the largest donor to any campaign in 2016) by Jewish casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. After Trump’s election win, Adelson gave another $5 million to his inauguration, the largest single presidential inaugural donation ever made. According to US politician Newt Gingrich, Adelson’s “central value” is Israel, and given that in 2013 Adelson said that the US “should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran”, I’m inclined to believe Gingrich.

But Israeli pathological fears of abandonment by the goyim are deeply entrenched and impossible to dispel, and no doubt were reawakened by a November 2018 interview that Trump gave to the Washington Post. When Trump was asked about whether sanctions should be imposed on Saudi Arabia for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he responded: [emphasis mine]

“I just feel that it’s very, very important to maintain that relationship [with Riyadh]. It’s very important to have Saudi Arabia as an ally, if we’re going to stay in that part of the world. Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world?**One reason to is Israel. Oil is becoming less and less of a reason, because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don’t have to stay there.”**

The 2003 invasion and destruction of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein was a plot hatched by US/Israeli Neocons to do away, once and for all, with (among other things) Ba’athism, an ideology that sought to unite several Middle Eastern nations under [nominally] secular, socialist pan-Arabism (a serious threat to Israel). While the chaos spread by the US invasion and occupation achieved that goal, it also opened the way for Iran to increase its influence among Iraq’s Shia Muslims – who constitute 65% of that country’s population – and who had been held in check by Saddam, a Sunni Muslim (Iran is 90% Shia). Over the last 10 years, this growing Iranian influence has led to increasingly strident calls from Israel for ‘something to be done’ about Iran.

In the last year we have seen repeated Israeli airstrikes on what are labeled ‘Iranian military targets’ across the Levant, including several Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, multiple coordinated attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf – which, though initially blamed on Iran, did not provoke a war because regional investigations ‘proved inconclusive’ – and what was likely an Israeli false-flag operation targeting major Saudi oil refineries (also tepidly blamed on Iran).

The primary reason for Israel’s increasing anxiety about Iran is the significant progress that Iran has made in forming political and military alliances inside Iraq (a direct result of the Israel-inspired destruction of the country by the US) and across the wider region, and the fact that it is today the only country in the region with the human and military resources (and intent) to pose a threat to the Jewish state’s desire for regional hegemony.

Recently released diplomatic cables dating from 2014-15 detail the extent of Iran’s influence inside the Iraqi government, showing how Iranian intelligence officers have co-opted much of the Iraqi government’s cabinet, infiltrated its military leadership, and even tapped into a network of sources once run by the CIA. In the 4-5 years since then, Iranian influence has only grown and, from an Israeli perspective, reached a ‘red line’ point where Iraq could be used as a staging ground for attacks on Israel.

Given this, and Trump’s talk of there being “less and less reason” for the US to remain in the Middle East combined with the upcoming Iraqi parliament vote to officially demand the removal of US forces from the country, it’s likely that the killing of Soleimani was a negotiated (by Trump) alternative to a relatively imminent, large-scale Israeli attack on Iranian assets in Iraq, and possibly Iran itself. Such an attack would have sparked a real war between Israel and Iran, which would inevitably have drawn in the US. This is, I propose, what Trump meant when he said that “we took action last night to stop a war.”

In this scenario, public statements made by Trump administration officials that killing Soleimani was necessary to stop “significant strikes against Americans” in the region can be understood as necessary lies to cover up the truth: that rather than protecting its own immediate interests, the US government was acting to prevent Israel from doing something dangerously irrational that would threaten the lives of millions in the Middle East and beyond.

What US officials privately told their Iranian counterparts soon after the assassination fits this scenario. Rear-Admiral Ali Fadavi, deputy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, told Iranian state television that “the Americans resorted to diplomatic measures” the very next morning. Fadavi said Washington asked Tehran to respond “in proportion.” They “even said that,**if you want to get revenge, get revenge in proportion to what we did”** which makes the entire situation seem like something of a sordid geopolitical game. This evening, rockets were fired at the US ‘green zone’ in Baghdad. Perhaps that is Tehran’s proportionate response.

Then again, it’s possible that there is more than mere geopolitical pragmatism motivating certain members of the Trump administration…

Stay tuned…z

The drama of the removal of President Donald Trump continues. After the first series "The Russian Affair", the second "The Ukrainian Affair" does not seem better written. Above all, it shows the inability of the Democrats to criticize the president for his policies and could turn against them.

The Democrats in the House have made an impressive showing in the impeachment hearings so far. They have made known that they have several more star witnesses. On their part a few of the Republicans in the House did put the two diplomats off kilter for a few embarrassing minutes when they posed the question whether any of them had personally seen any written Trump missive to the Ukrainian President which could be construed as quid pro quo. Another aspect they repeated frequently was that while the Obama Administration had dithered on providing lethal arms the Donald Trump administration had done so including the supply of Javelin anti tank missiles that the Ukrainians were demanding. From the hearings so far most Democrats would have realized that from what had transpired so far, impeachment was a charge that might not hold water; Rejection by the Republican majority in the Senate becoming a later development, should it come to that. Therefore it appears that the Democrats would generally be satisfied were the proceedings to expose Trump and the manner in which foreign policy was being run during his watch. They hope that it would make a dent in his vote bank. What then are the anomalies that the Democrats would be loath to touch upon and the Republicans to date have failed to highlight? The most glaring ones are summarized in the ensuing paragraphs.

The matter raised by the diplomats who kept returning to it during their deposition related to the informal channels that were working simultaneously. Without saying it in so many words they opined that these undermined the formal channels and by implication were irregular and were being used to further the President’s agenda. It would have been known to such seasoned diplomats that what they term irregular diplomacy and what countries around the world term back channel diplomacy, is fairly common. Heads of state often conduct the same through their National Security Advisers and very often through special representatives in whose discretion they have full confidence to deliver sealed missives directly to the head of state being contacted. There are so many examples of past Presidents of the United States doing the same. The most important one was during the Cuban Missile Crisis when President Kennedy used his brother Robert Kennedy for back channel diplomacy with his Russian counterpart. The back channel diplomacy succeeded. The Russians agreed to withdraw their missiles from Cuba and the world released its breath. The quid pro quo was the withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Several examples can be cited from actions by other countries in the two World Wars and throughout the Cold War. These often avoided more serious outcomes. The practice was followed by the adversaries in the Cold War. After the War years many heads of state and their governments started using these for what has been termed as parallel diplomacy or quiet diplomacy far removed from the media and prying eyes. India and Pakistan have been using the same for decades. It has more often than not dampened situations that could have become explosive.

Clandestine actions by former US presidents to further their agenda have taken place in the past from time to time. Many never came to light while others were revealed or unearthed well after the events. The most questionable and controversial one took place during the Ronald Reagan presidency. It related to what became known as the Iran Contra Affair. It seems to have been directly conducted from the White House under the aegis of the President. In the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran to bring about the release of American hostages held in Lebanon. Money from the Iran weapons-sale was then used to fund the Contras, a group of guerrilla “freedom fighters” opposed to the Marxist government of Nicaragua. Col. Oliver North who met President Reagan on several occasions was chosen to carry out the negotiations. It was also known in Iran as the McFarlane Affair. Oliver North was indicted on sixteen charges in the Iran–Contra affair and found guilty of three—aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress, shredding or altering official documents and accepting a gratuity. His convictions were later overturned on the grounds that his immunized testimony had tainted his trial.

The most glaring omission in the impeachment trial on the part of Nancy Pelosi and the House democrats was not to have discussed the Vice President Biden and his son’s dealings in Ukraine thoroughly prior to commencement of the impeachment hearings, in closed-door discussions if they felt that was necessary. Had they done so many questions that should have been thrashed threadbare might either not have arisen or if they arose they would have done their home work in advance and would have had answers ready. It was not the case. Vice President Biden was heading to become the leading democrat contender to take on Trump in the forthcoming 2020 elections. His chances were considered bright. Due diligence required that the former Vice President’s and his son’s involvement that many today would term questionable be thoroughly gone into by face-to-face interactions. Should doubts have arisen they might have decided to delay the impeachment hearings till all matters had been clarified to their satisfaction.

It is only a matter of time that Republican senators in the House bring it up as the hearings proceed. Or they might decide to turn the tables decisively in the Senate when the time came were the matter to reach the Senate. So far from what is known the Trump quid pro quo was related to the Ukrainian government investigating the Biden father and son’s dealings. In recent weeks, Trump has relentlessly mocked Hunter Biden, to the point that his presidential campaign began selling shirts that say, “Where’s Hunter?” highlighting that the former vice president’s son had been out of the public spotlight for weeks. At a recent political rally, Trump noted that Hunter Biden had been thrown out of the Navy. Hunter Biden was discharged from the Navy Reserve in 2014 after failing a drug test and has struggled with alcohol and drug abuse. He told ABC News that, “like every single person that I’ve ever known, I have fallen and I’ve gotten up.”

The House Democrats should realize that were the hearings to go deeper towards indicting Trump the tables might be turned on them. Were Mr. Biden to become or have become the Democrat presidential nominee sooner or later the people, the media and even representatives on the Capitol Hill would have raised the question as to whether former Vice President’s dealings in Ukraine were questionable or not as these had started directly or by proxy while he was still in government. Further, was the involvement so deep that were he to ascend to the White House the Ukrainian government would be in a position to demand quid pro quo from time to time.

Ukrainegate is the new Russiagate. The 'whistleblower complaint' is the new 'dirty dossier'. The 'former' MI6 spy Christopher Steele wrote the dossier. The current CIA spy Eric Ciaramella wrote the 'complaint':

Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Further, Ciaramella (pronounced char-a-MEL-ah) left his National Security Council posting in the White House’s West Wing in mid-2017 amid concerns about negative leaks to the media. He has since returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

“He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump,” said a former NSC official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Also, Ciaramella huddled for “guidance” with the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, including former colleagues also held over from the Obama era whom Schiff’s office had recently recruited from the NSC. Schiff is the lead prosecutor in the impeachment inquiry.

And Ciaramella worked with a Democratic National Committee operative who dug up dirt on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, inviting her into the White House for meetings, former White House colleagues said. The operative, Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American who supported Hillary Clinton, led an effort to link the Republican campaign to the Russian government. “He knows her. He had her in the White House,” said one former co-worker, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

The whole impeachment show the Democrats launched is a major political mistake.

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The Democrats have chosen the wrong issue, Ukraine, where they themselves have a lot of ballast. The choice of a Trump phonecall with the Ukrainian president as the item to hang the impeachment on is especially dumb. Trump's call was less incriminating than Biden's pressure on the Ukrainian president to help his son's paymaster. It is also a mistake to let the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff run the impeachment process. Schiff already flip-flopped over requesting the 'whistleblower' to testify after it was reported that two members of his staff, who knew Ciaramella from working with him at the Obama National Security Council, had advised him.

The process will create a lot of collateral damage. It will hurt a number people involved in it, but it will not hurt Trump with his electorate. It will not end with impeachment. I believe, like Noam Chomsky, that it will, in the end, even help Trump:

"Is it politically wise? I frankly doubt it. I think it’ll turn out pretty much like the Mueller report, which, that I thought was also a political mistake. What’ll happen is probably the House will impeach, goes to the Senate. The Republican senators are utterly craven. They’re terrified of Trump’s voting base. So they’ll vote to turn down the impeachment request. Trump will come along, say I’m vindicated. Say it was the Deep State and the treacherous Dems trying to overturn the election. Oh, vote for me."

Trump can be beaten by good policies. Instead of offering any the Democrats try to defeat him with theater. But Trump is a much better showman than Schiff or any other Democrat. It almost looks as if they want Trump to win.

Since Donald Trump became president many of his subordinates have tried to subvert his policies. Instead of implementing Trump's idea and preferences they have tried to implement their own. Some have done so because they believed that it is the "right thing to do" while others have ignored Trump's wishes to play their own game.

A recent example can be found in a Washington Post Ukrainegate story:

Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said.
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The efforts to poison Trump’s views toward Zelensky were anticipated by national security officials at the White House, officials said. But the voices of Putin and Orban took on added significance this year because of the departure or declining influence of those who had sought to blunt the influence of Putin and other authoritarian leaders over Trump.
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American policy has for years been “built around containing malign Russian influence” in Eastern Europe, a U.S. official said. Trump’s apparent susceptibility to the arguments he hears from Putin and Orban is “an example of the president himself under malign influence — being steered by it.”

The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.

Trump's policies look chaotic. But one big reason for that is that some of his staff, like the 'U.S. official' above, are trying to subvert them. They have tried and still try to cage him in on nearly every issue. When Trump then wields his Twitter sword and cuts through the subversion by publicly restating his original policies the look from the outside is indeed chaotic. But it is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his pleasure" are there to implement them.

Instead they have tried (and try) to make their own ones:

White House and State Department officials had sought to block an Orban visit since the start of Trump’s presidency, concerned that it would legitimize a leader often ostracized in Europe. They also worried about Orban’s influence on the U.S. president.

“Basically, everyone agreed — no Orban meeting,” said a former White House official involved in internal discussions. “We were against it because [we] knew there was a good chance that Trump and Orban would bond and get along.”

The effort to keep distance between Trump and Orban began to fray earlier this year with the departures of senior officials and the emergence of new voices around the president. Among the most important was Mulvaney, who became acting chief of staff in January and was seen as sympathetic to Orban’s hard-right views and skepticism of European institutions.

One "senior official" who tried to sabotage the Orban visit was Fiona Hill who until recently served as the Russia analyst at the National Security Council.

One wonders if Ms. Hill ever read her job description. The people in the NSC do not get hired to implement their own policy preferences. The task of the National Security Council is to "advise and assist" the president and to "coordinate" his policies within the administration. That's it.

The same rules apply to the Pentagon and other agencies.

Aaron Stein points out that those aides who disregarding the declared policy of the president are responsible for the current chaotic retreat from Syria:

Trump has been clear about his intentions in Syria. As he told the world in April 2018, after years of fighting foreign wars, in his view it was time for the United States to withdraw from Syria, passing responsibility for the mission to hold territory taken from the Islamic State to regional states. I was listening, and wrote in War on the Rocks that the longer the president’s own staff continued to treat the world’s most powerful man like an infant, the more likely it became that he would simply order a hasty withdrawal. This chaotic U.S. exit from Syria was obviously coming, for anyone paying attention to the opinion of the man who matters most in the United States: the president.
...
For over a year, it was obvious Trump wanted to leave Syria and, as I wrote in April 2018, Trump “has made his preferences for U.S. policy in the Middle East clear” and it was time “for his national security staff to listen to him and to devise a sequential drawdown policy that fits with the spirit of the president’s demands, but takes deliberate and uncomfortable steps to protect U.S. interests.” This did not happen.

Rather than plan and begin to implement a coordinated withdrawal, the president’s appointed envoy for Syria and the Department of Defense worked to ensure Washington could stay, and ignored the reality that Trump would eventually order an American withdrawal. Such delusions have not served the United States and its friends well.

The lack of planning for the option the commander in chief had already decided on led to the current mess. The Pentagon practically sabotaged trump's announced policies by continuing to build up bases in Syria and by falsely telling the Kurds that the U.S. would stay. It should instead have planned and prepared for the announced retreat from the country.

One can clearly see that this current withdrawal was not prepared for, neither politically nor militarily, in any orderly way. Yesterday the Pentagon said it would pull the troops out of Syria but station them nearby in west Iraq. But no one had asked the Iraqi government what it though of that idea. The inevitable outcome is that Iraq now rejects it:

U.S. forces that crossed into Iraq as part of a pull-out from Syria do not have permission to stay and can only be there in transit, the Iraqi military said on Tuesday.
...
The Iraqi military statement contradicted the Pentagon’s announcement that all of the nearly 1,000 troops withdrawing from northern Syria are expected to move to western Iraq to continue the campaign against Islamic State militants and “to help defend Iraq”.

“All U.S. forces that withdrew from Syria received approval to enter the Kurdistan Region so that they may be transported outside Iraq. There is no permission granted for these forces to stay inside Iraq,” the Iraqi military said.

There was also the idea that some 200 soldiers would be left behind in Syria to deny the Syrian government access to its own oil fields in east Syria. Not only would this be obviously illegal but nobody seems to have given a thought on how the logistics for such remote unit could be sustained. The oil fields are geographically large and the 200 strong unit would have to be dispersed into tiny outposts within a hostile country and resupplied over unsecured roads. To defend them from surprise attacks the U.S. would need to put combat air patrols above them for every hour of each day.

One hopes that the Pentagon and State Department recognize that the high political and financial costs of such a deployment are not justified for making a minor political point that will not change the inevitable outcome of the war.

Trump ordered that all U.S. troops leave Syria. An illegal occupation of Syria's oil fields would keep the U.S. in Syria but in an clearly indefensible position. Whoever came up with or supported that idea needs to be fired.

Here is a sign that the Pentagon has finally recognized that its utter lack of planning for the implementation of Trump's decision to leave Syria resulted in a bad outcome. It is now trying to avoid being (again) be caught with its pants down with regards to Afghanistan:

The Pentagon recently began drawing up plans for an abrupt withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in case President Donald Trump surprises military leaders by ordering an immediate drawdown as he did in Syria, three current and former defense officials said.
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Ending wars like the one in Afghanistan was one of Trump's chief campaign promises in 2016, and administration officials have privately expressed concern that as the 2020 election approaches, he'll be more likely to follow through with threats of troop withdrawal, as he did last week in Syria.

Trump has made clear to his advisers that he wants to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the 2020 election, NBC News reported in August.

Trump made his decision in August but the Pentagon is only now reacting to it. That is too slow.

Trump should have been and should be more rigorous with his staff. Those who sabotage his policies need to be fired early and often. It would make his polices look much less chaotic than they currently seem to be.

Donald Trump’s main campaign commitment to end the offensive Rumsfeld/Cebrowski military strategy and replace it with a policy of Jacksonian cooperation is met with strong internal US and external opposition from US allies. More than ever, the President appears alone, absolutely alone, in the face of the transatlantic political class.

It was all a foregone conclusion

As with his predecessor, Barack Obama, everything seemed to be a set up. Upon his election in 2009, Obama was hailed as the "first black president of the United States" and then proved unable to solve the problems of this community, leaving police violence against them to reach new heights. In the early days of his term, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize for his efforts "for a world without nuclear weapons"; a subject he immediately stopped addressing. Although his record is the exact opposite of his campaign promises, he is still popular around the world. It does not matter if jobs are relocated to China, Guantánamo continues, thousands of targeted killings are carried out, or Libya is destroyed.

Conversely, as soon as he was elected and even before the transfer of power in 2017, Donald Trump was presented as a manic-depressive narcissist, a weak and authoritarian personality, a crypto-fascist. As soon as he joined the White House, the press called for his physical murder and the Democratic Party accused him of being a Russian spy. It obtained that an investigation be opened against him and his team with a view to his dismissal. His chief advisor, General Michael Flynn, was forced to resign 24 days after his appointment and then arrested. When Donald Trump lost the mid-term (November 2018) elections to the House of Representatives, he was forced to negotiate with some of his opponents. He reached an agreement with the Pentagon, allowing certain military actions as long as they did not involve the country in a spiral, and in exchange obtained the closure of the Russian investigation. For eight months, he tried to force march to stop the annihilation of the Great Middle East and preparations for the destruction of the Caribbean Basin. He hoped to be able to announce the realization of peace at the United Nations General Assembly. Crash! The same day, the USIP (alter ego of the NED, but for the Department of Defense), submitted its report on Syria, advising to relaunch the war. And, again on the same day, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, announced the opening of impeachment proceedings against him, this time in connection with his fight with the Ukrainian authorities against the corruption of the Clinton clan.

It is therefore unlikely that Donald Trump will be able to carry out his program before the end of his mandate as the election campaign for his possible re-election begins. However, his supporters point out that he is never as good as when he is cornered.

Few media have explained Jacksonism, an ideology that no one has promoted since the Civil War. Almost all of them claimed for two years that Donald Trump was incoherent and unpredictable, before admitting that he acted according to a given worldview.

In any case, he has already managed to repatriate many offshore jobs and put an end to the massive support of the Departments of State and Defense for the jihadist armies, although there are still some ongoing programs.

No matter what Barack Obama and Donald Trump did as presidents, we will only remember how the media presented them on the day of their induction.

The role of the deep state

It is now clear that opposition to Donald Trump is not only constituted by the bulk of the American political class, but also by most foreign leaders of countries allied to the United States. This may seem strange to the latter, who would have everything to gain from its success. But that is not how politics works. One after the other, these leaders became convinced that no one could change US policy. The interest of their states in the face of the powerful USA was therefore not to sink with a Donald Trump isolated in his country, but to remain faithful to the destructive policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

It remains to be seen who among the tens of thousands of civil servants is pulling the strings and why they are opposed to Trump’s project. The "deep state" whose president cannot influence politics may only be a sociological phenomenon as it can represent structured interests. President Trump believed he had neutralized the opposition of the committees responsible for implementing the more or less secret treaties of the United States with its allies. He believed he had negotiated with the alternative government constituted as a preventive measure in the event of a nuclear war. He was obviously wrong.

The lessons of this story

Two lessons can be drawn from this history. First, all historians agree that George W. Bush did not really hold the presidency, but aligned himself with his entourage, first with his vice-president, Dick Cheney, and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. It is also clear that Barack Obama had very little power other than targeted assassinations. It now appears that Donald Trump is not in a position to change US policy. It must be said that, since 11 September 2001, the office of President of the United States has been almost exclusively in the media. And, if the president does not make policy, those who do so in the shadows are not elected.

Secondly, the United States’ allies do not obey the US President, but its deep state. They are the toys of an invisible actor. Only Russia and China are truly independent. Russia is the only one of these three states whose president is democratically elected and who exercises power on behalf of its people. China is a transparent system, but only members of the single party participate in its political life. The United States system is perfectly opaque.

For the past few days, our president — back at work after a busy August spent golfing and rage tweeting — has been making stuff up about Hurricane Dorian, the deadly storm currently battering the Southeast.

Late-night comedians have been roasting Donald Trump for his lies, including Seth Meyers, who aired a segment this week about Trump’s meteorological ignorance.

The segment is supposed to be funny, obviously. But as I watched Trump repeat the exact same phrase about various “Category 5” storms — sounding each time as if he was uttering this phrase for the first time — I felt a familiar sense of dread.

I remembered the same experience in dealing with my late mother, who struggled with cognitive decline for years before her death.

To be clear: nobody knows for sure if our sitting president is experiencing cognitive decline, which is why so many psychiatrists and mental health experts have called for him to be tested.

What I do know is that if you examine the Trump presidency through the lens of cognitive decline, some of its more bewildering aspects start to make a lot more sense.

Observers — particularly those troubled by the cruelty of his regime — tend to view Trump as lazy, incompetent, demagogic and mendacious. But it seems increasingly possible that the president’s behavior is also a function of his desperate attempts to mask serious cognitive struggles.

Anyone who has dealt with a friend or relative in cognitive decline can tell you that the person in question almost never admits to their struggles. Instead, they go to elaborate lengths to hide their impairment.

Maybe the reason our president is reported to spend up to nine hours per day engaged in “unstructured executive time” isn’t just because he’s lazy. Maybe he’s trying to duck parts of the job he can’t handle. Maybe the reason he doesn’t read anything — including briefings — is because he can’t absorb or retain complex concepts.

Maybe the reason his unscripted speech is so often incoherent and littered with vagaries (relying on placeholder words such as “thing” and “they”) is because he cannot summon the specific vocabulary he wants to use.

Maybe the reason Trump seeks out friendly media outlets and rallies is because he can only function in venues that feel safe and familiar, where no one will expose his struggles, where he can ramble and repeat the same slogans and stories and still receive applause.

In her own way, my own mother employed similar forms of subterfuge. She sought out familiar environments, and routines. As she struggled to track conversations, her responses became more confused and confusing. And the more cognitive function she lost, the more irritable and defensive she became.

...

AARON MATÉ: So we’ve just been through this two-year ordeal with Russiagate. It’s in a new phase now with Robert Mueller rejecting the outcome that so many were expecting, that there would be a Trump-Russia conspiracy. Your sense of how this whole thing has gone?

GABOR MATÉ: What’s interesting is that in the aftermath of the Mueller thunderbolt of no proof of collusion, there were articles about how people are disappointed about this finding.

Now, disappointment means that you’re expecting something and you wanted something to happen, and it didn’t happen. So that means that some people wanted Mueller to find evidence of collusion, which means that emotionally they were invested in it. It wasn’t just that they wanted to know the truth. They actually wanted the truth to look a certain way. And wherever we want the truth to look a certain way, there’s some reason that has to do with their own emotional needs and not just with the concern for reality.

And in politics in general, we think that people make decisions on intellectual grounds based on facts and beliefs. Very often, actually, people’s dynamics are driven by emotional forces that they’re not even aware of in themselves. And I, really, as I observed this whole Russiagate phenomenon from the beginning, it really seemed to me that there was a lot of emotionality in it that had little to do with the actual facts of the case.

There is no question that for a lot of people in this country, the election of Trump was a traumatic event. Now, when a trauma reaction happens, which is to say you’re hurt and you’re pained and you’re confused and you’re scared and you’re bewildered, there’s basically two things you can do about it. One is you can own that I’m pained and I’m hurt and I’m bewildered and I’m really scared. And then try and look at what happened to bring me to that situation.

Or you can instead of dealing with those emotions come up with some kind of explanation that makes me feel better about them. So that I’ve got this pain. I’ve got this bewilderment. I’ve got this fear. So what I’m looking at, what does it say about American society that a man like this could even run for office, let alone be elected?

What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?

You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.

So I really believe that really this Russiagate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.

I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.

AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?

GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.

What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak

AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.

GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.

And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.

Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.

...

Given that most people have already taken a position on the topic, it seems a bit late in the day to be pointing this out, but there is now clear evidence to suggest that the ‘Russia hacked our election’ claim is not only entirely false. But the people who made the claim in the first place – members of the US intelligence, political and corporate establishment (as well as other ideologues) – were and are themselves the creators of the only “Russian troll” social media accounts that have actually been shown to have done any ‘hacking’.

A December 19th 2018 NY Times article reveals that a group of “Democratic tech experts” decided to use “similarly deceptive tactics” (as those imputed to Russian trolls) in the Alabama Senate race contested by Roy Moore in December 2017. An internal report on what is called the ‘Alabama effort’, obtained by The Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.” The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. And how was the division sown?

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

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What is clear at this point is that, as soon as Trump was elected president (if not before), a cabal of former and serving intelligence and government operatives, along with some ideologically-possessed dupes like Jonathon Morgan, decided to launch a campaign to undermine Trump’s election win by smearing him as Russia agent (the now infamous Clinton/Steele Dossier) and accusing Russia of ‘subverting American democracy’ directly by both hacking the DNC emails and running a social media disinformation campaign on social media.

Over the two years since Trump’s election, the campaign has been expanded to include efforts to do precisely what the Washington establishment falsely accuses Russian of doing: subverting American democracy. It seems reasonable at this point to suggest that this was the plan all along. After all, increasing control over the thoughts and beliefs of the US population has always been the ‘bread and butter’ of the US ‘deep state’.

At the end of last month, someone working on the ASD’s ‘Alabama project’ leaked a copy of the project’s after-action report. It details that ASD:

• Used a strategy to “radicalize Democrats, suppress persuadable Republicans and faction moderate Republicans”, the operation sought to “move 50,000 votes”. That’s more than double the winning margin of 22,819 votes of Roy Moore’s opponent, Doug Jones.
• Over a 5-month period, the operation used a carefully crafted strategy including deploying non-attributable memes “targeting white, African-American and women voters”
• Targeted 650,000 Alabama voters with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification and targeted advertising.
• Manufactured approximately 45,000 twitter followers, 350,000 retweets, 370,000 tweet favorites, 6,000 FB comments, 10,000 FB reactions, 300,000 Imgur upvotes and 10,000 Reddit upvotes.
• The report concludes: “In spite of its impact in the press and in voting outcomes, not a single story about our activities appeared in the any press outlet, including far-right internet conspiracy sites like infowars and Breitbart, prone to speculation about liberal interference in Republican politics.”

The project’s ‘Strategic Overview‘ states:

Our strategy was anchored on 3 goals:

• Enrage and energize Democrats using targeted messaging to likely voters in left-leaning districts across Alabama. Make sure they believe a victory in Alabama is possible.
• Suppress die-hard Republicans using relentless memes intended to provoke disgust and apathy coupled with targeted promotion of stories claiming a safe Republican victory. Either way, encourage them not to vote.
• Divide or persuade moderate Republicans by tackling Roy Moore’s extremism head on and promoting write-in candidates as principled alternative candidates

The report concludes with this:

Our sustained targeting of these likely voters had enormous effect on R[epublican] turnout in these countries. The R[epublican] depression in these countries was measurably higher compared to the rest of the State.

During the US mid-term elections, voters were asked to pronounce themselves collectively for the renewal of all members of the Federal House of Representatives and one third of the members of the Federal Senate. Besides that, at the local level, they nominated 36 governors with numerous other local responsibilities, and answered 55 referendums.

These elections are considered far less catalysing than the Presidential elections. US politologists take little notice of the voter turnout, since it is possible to participate only in certain elections and not others.

While since the end of the Cold War, the turnout for Presidential elections has been between 51 % and 61 % (with the exception of the vote for Bill Clinton’s second mandate, which interested only a minority of electors), the mid-term elections attract between 36 % and 41 % (with the exception of 2018, which apparently reached 49 %). So, from the point of view of citizen participation, the rules of the game are democratic – however, in practice they are anything but. If there were a quorum [1], the members of Congress elected would be few and far between. Representatives and Senators are usually chosen by less than 20 % of the population.

The researchers who analyse election results with a view to predicting the careers of the candidates do so through the lens of partisan differences. This time, the majority in the House of Representatives will be Democrat, and in the Senate, mostly Republican. This analysis makes it possible to anticipate how much elbow room the President will have when dealing with Congress. But in my opinion, it is of no use whatever in attempting to understand the evolution of US society.

During the Presidential campaign of 2016, an ex-Democrat, Donald Trump, presented himself as a candidate for the Republican Party. He represented a political current which had been absent from the US landscape since the resignation of Richard Nixon – the Jacksonians. A priori, he had no chance of obtaining the Republican investiture. Nonetheless, he eliminated his 17 rival candidates one by one, won the nomination, and then won the election in opposition to the opinion poll favourite, Hillary Clinton.


Andrew Jackson, whose portrait is shown on the 20 dollar bill, is the most controversial President of the United States.
The Jacksonians (from the name of President Andew Jackson, 1829-1837) are the defenders of popular democracy and individual freedom against both political and economic power. On the contrary, the dominant ideology of the time, both for the Democrat and the Republican Parties, was that of the Puritans - moral order and imperialism.

During this campaign, I observed that the powerful ascension of Donald Trump marked the resurgence of a fundamental conflict – on one side the descendants of the « Pilgrim Fathers » (the Puritans who founded the British colonies of America) and on the other, the descendants of the immigrants who fought for the independence of their country [2].