by CJ HOPKINS
Well, what do you know, it looks like we’ve got another “CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY” on our hands. Yes, that’s right, folks, THE VERY FABRIC OF DEMOCRACY IS AT STAKE … again! Which means (surprise!) that it’s probably time to declare another STATE OF EMERGENCY and take some sort of EMERGENCY MEASURES to protect humanity from LITERAL FASCISM, or RUSSIA, or CHEAP FAKES, or a VIRUS … or whatever.
I didn’t watch the presidential debate — it took place at 2AM here in Germany — but I watched as much as I could stand the following morning, and I read a few headlines in the corporate press, and … well, it appears that’s it for Biden.
Normally, at this point, I would pen a column full of colorful adjectives and gratuitous adverbials skewering the entire spectacle, but (a) lots of others are doing that — albeit sans the gratuitous adverbials — and (b) I’m still on medical leave, and under doctor’s orders not to do that, i.e., sit at my desk for numerous hours, chain smoking, drinking pots of espresso, and launching my blood pressure into the stratosphere.
So I’m going to post another column from the archives.
Hold on, don’t click away just yet. I do want to say a few things about the debate, and Biden, and Trump, and “democracy.” But first, I want you to look at this photo, which was taken in November of 2019 …
Yes, that is an authentic photograph taken in November of 2019. You can fact-check its authenticity on Snopes or wherever. So, I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t get all worked up about Biden’s debate debacle as if something unwonted and astonishing had occurred.
And, as for Trump, no surprise there, he’s still the same narcissistic ass clown as ever.
What is, however, astonishing, or frustrating, or infuriating — and OK, there goes my blood pressure — is how many people still believe they are living in sovereign nation-states … you know, like “The United States of America,” run by individuals like Biden, or Trump, or whoever the global-capitalist ruling classes install in November.
People are asking, “WHO IS RUNNING THE COUNTRY?” The answer is, the same body of mandarins who have been “running the country” all along … yes, also during the Reign of Trump. Yes, also during the Reign of Obama. Because there is no actual country to “run.”
As Mr. Jensen put it to Howard Beale in Paddy Chayefsky’s classic film Network …
“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! […] Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, and Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.”
I realize it’s hard for a lot of people to accept, but there is no “America.” The United States of America is a province, a territorial subdivision, of the supranational global-capitalist empire. And so is every other “Western” country. This is why nothing ever actually changes, regardless of which “leaders” are “in charge.”
In other words, you are watching a show. A simulation. A simulation of democracy. However, just because it’s a show, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t mean anything. The simulation of democracy is essential to the empire. It is what keeps us at each other’s throats, rather than at the empire’s throat. And it’s the theater that sets the tone of whatever “reality” prevails at the moment … the War on Terror, the War on Terror (Light), the War on Populism, the Pandemic, or whatever.
I’m not entirely sure what new “reality” we are transitioning into, but, whoever the global-capitalist mandarins end up installing in office in November, I have a funny feeling that the coming five months are going to be a soul-crushing, neo-Orwellian spectacle of epic proportions. They can’t allow Trump to take office again; they shot their wad with the Russian-Hitler stuff. It would be déjà vu all over again. I won’t be surprised if they draft Hillary Clinton, you know, just to rub it in everyone’s faces, or cancel the constitution on account of the bird flu, or the “global boiling,” or an “anti-vax-conspiracy-theorist insurrection,” and appoint Obama dictator perpetuo.
Or — and this is the most horrifyingly psychotic neo-Orwellian scenario — they will just stick with Biden, because what could be more soul-crushing than another Biden “victory”? That appears to be where they’re headed at the moment …
Anyway, here’s that piece from the archives. I wrote this in January 2021, i.e., shortly after Biden’s inauguration, which, as you may or may not remember, was staged in a locked-down, military-occupied DC, during a fabricated “state of health emergency,” in the aftermath of a fabricated “insurrection.”
This was the moment when the New Normal Reich was officially ushered into being, with a “field of flags,” a full-blown Nazi light-show, and the whole nine yards. Not to put too fine a point on it, they rolled out the soldiers and the urban-assault vehicles and installed a muttering, finger-sucking, global-capitalist puppet in office. They did not hide this. They publicized it. They wanted us to know that “democracy” was over, that the “populist” rebellion was over, and that they were installing a human stalk of celery in the White House, and there was nothing that we could do about it.
The message could not possibly have been clearer.
That’s All Folks!
January 24, 2021
As they used to say at the end of all those wacky Looney Tunes cartoons, that’s all folks! The show is over. Literal Russian-Asset Hitler, the Latest Greatest Threat to Western Democracy, the Monster of Mar-a-Lago, Trumpzilla, Trumpenstein, the Ayatollah of Orange Shinola, has finally been humiliated and given the bum-rush out of Washington by the heroic forces of the GloboCap “Resistance,” with a little help from the US military. The whole thing went exactly to script.
Well … OK, not quite exactly to script. Despite four years of dire warnings by the corporate media, the Intelligence Community, Hollywood celebrities, the Democratic Party, faux anti-fascists, fake-Left pundits, and pretty much every utterly deluded, Trump-obsessed liberal with an Internet connection, there was no Hitlerian “Reichstag Fire,” no Boogaloo, no Civil War II, no coup, no white-supremacist uprising. Nothing. The man simply got on a chopper and was flown away to his Florida resort.
I know, you’re probably thinking … “Wow, how embarrassing for the GloboCap ‘Resistance,’ being exposed as a bunch of utterly shameless, neo-Goebbelsian propagandists, and liars, and hysterical idiots, and such!”
And, in any other version of reality, you’d have a point … but not in this one.
No, in this reality, “Democracy Has Prevailed!” Yes, it was touch and go there for a while, as there was no guarantee that the Intelligence Community, the military-industrial complex, Western governments, the corporate media, supranational corporations, Internet oligarchs, and virtually every other component of the global-capitalist empire could keep one former game show host with no real political power whatsoever from taking over the entire world.
Still, Trump’s failure to go full-Hitler, or even half-Hitler, was somewhat awkward. I mean, you can’t whip millions of people into a four-year frenzy of fear and hatred of a clearly powerless ass-clown president, and portray him as a Russian Intelligence asset, and the Son of Hitler, and all the rest of it, and then just drop the act cold and laugh in their faces. That would leave them feeling like total morons who had just spent the last four years of their lives being lied to and emotionally manipulated, or like members of a cult, or something.
Fortunately, for GloboCap, this was not a major problem. All they had to do was produce a cheap simulation of “Trump going full-Hitler.” It didn’t even have to be convincing. They just needed a semi-dramatic event to plug into the official narrative, something they could call “an attempted coup,” “an insurrection,” “an attack,” and so on, and which millions of credulous liberals could hysterically shriek about on the Internet.
The “Storming of the Capitol” did the trick.
They held a dress rehearsal in Berlin last August, and then gave the real performance in the Capitol Building (this time it was for all the money, so they went ahead and got a couple people killed). It wasn’t very hard to pull off. All they actually had to do, in both Berlin and DC, was allow a small fringe group of angry protesters to gain access to the building, film it, and then pump out the “attempted coup” narrative. It made no difference whatsoever that the “domestic terrorists” (in both Berlin and Washington) were a completely unorganized, unarmed mob that posed absolutely zero threat of “staging a coup” and “overthrowing the government.” It also made not the slightest difference that Trump didn’t actually “incite” the mob (yes, I put myself through the agony of reading every word of his speech, which was the usual word salad from start to finish). We’re talking propaganda here, not reality.
The so-called “Violent Storming of the Capitol” set the stage for the main event, which was the show of force we have all just witnessed. Someone (I’m not entirely clear who) ordered in the troops, tens of thousands of them, locked down Washington, erected fences, set up road blocks and military check points, and otherwise occupied the government district. It looked like any other US-military post-“regime-change” occupation, because that’s what it was, which was precisely the point. As I have been repeating for … well, for over four years now, it was always going to end this way, with GloboCap making an example of Trump and reminding everyone who is really in charge.
Look, let’s be clear about these last four years, because there are all kinds of crazy theories going around (not to mention the official GloboCap narrative), but what actually happened is pretty simple.
Here’s the whole story, as concise as I can make it.
Back in 2016, the American people, sick to the gills of global capitalism and its increasingly oppressive woke ideology, elected an unauthorized, narcissistic ass-clown to the highest office in the land. They did this for a variety of reasons, but mostly it was just a big “fuck you” to the establishment. It was an act of rebellion against a government which they know is owned by unaccountable, supranational corporations and oligarchs who openly detest them. It was an act of rebellion against a system of government they know they have no influence over, and are not going to have any influence over. It was an act of rebellion against global capitalism, the unopposed, global-hegemonic system which has dominated the world for the last thirty years … whether they realized what they were rebelling against or not.
This act of rebellion happened on the heels of Brexit (another such act of rebellion) and in the context of the rise of assorted “populist” movements all throughout the world. When Trump actually won in 2016, the global capitalist ruling classes realized they had a serious problem … a “populist” rebellion in the heart of the empire.
So they suspended the Global War on Terror and launched the War on Populism.
The ultimate objective of the War on Populism was to neutralize this “populist” rebellion and remind the public who is actually running things. Think of the Trump era as a prison riot. In any maximum security prison, the prisoners know they can’t escape, but they can definitely raise a little hell now and then, which they tend to do when they get really tired of being abused and neglected by the prison guards. Most prison riots run out of steam on their own, but if they go on too long or get too ugly, the penal authorities typically respond by shooting a few prisoners (usually the ringleaders), and reminding the inmates that they are in a prison, and that the owners of the prison have guns, whereas they have shivs made out of spoons and toothbrushes.
This, basically, is what we’ve just experienced. The global capitalist ruling classes have just reminded us who is really in charge, who the US military answers to, and how quickly they can strip away the facade of democracy and the rule of law. They have reminded us of this for the last ten months, by putting us under house arrest, beating and arresting us for not following orders, for not wearing masks, for taking walks without permission, for having the audacity to protest their decrees, for challenging their official propaganda, about the virus, the election results, etc. They are reminding us currently by censoring dissent, and deplatforming anyone they deem a threat to their official narratives and ideology.
In other words, GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except for a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a “field of flags” symbolizing “unity.” They even did the Nazi “Lichtdom” thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a “Mockingjay” brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.
And the lesson isn’t quite over yet … it won’t be over for a while. The “War on Populism” will simply morph into the “New Normal War on Domestic Terror,” which will become one more theater in the “Global War on Terror,” which has been on hiatus, and which will now resume. As I have pointed out repeatedly over the past four years, we appear to be headed toward a dystopian future in which there will essentially be two classes of people: (a) “normals” (i.e., those who conform to global-capitalist ideology and decrees); and (b) the “extremists” (i.e., those who don’t).
It will make no difference whatsoever what type of “extremists” these “extremists” are … religious-fundamentalist extremists, Islamic extremists, Christian extremists, right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists, white-supremacist or Black-nationalist extremists, virus deniers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, anti-maskers, recalcitrant transphobians, anti-transhumanists, pronoun resisters, defiant oppositionalists, or whatever … the names don’t really matter. The point is, conform or be labelled an “extremist,” a “domestic terrorist,” or some other type of “antisocial person” or “social deviant,” or “potential threat to public health.”
I don’t claim to know every detail, but one thing seems abundantly clear. We are not going back to the way things were. GloboCap has been explaining this to us, over and over, for almost a year. They couldn’t have made it any more explicit. When they warned us to get ready because a “New Normal” was coming, they meant it.
And now … well, here it is.
