As I write this the sights and sounds of the Florida Panhandle’s pristine white beach and emerald waters are punctuated by the thumping of the bombing range of Eglin Air Force base. I was struck by the juxtaposition of this beach, as beautiful and peaceful as any I’ve known, and the thumping reminder of the war-making men, women and machinery just a few miles away.
I have just read Judge Andrew Napolitano’s book, Suicide Pact, in which he makes a masterful case of the dangers inherent in the ceding of legislative and quasi-judicial power and authority to the Presidency. I’ve also been listening to and reading numerous political thinkers and economists who are increasingly concerned about political polarization in the United States: division so strong and uncompromising as to bring ideas to the fore such as ‘soft secession’, ‘nullification,’ and calling on Article V to convene a constitutional convention. What’s going on?
As usual, it’s complicated.
It is astonishing that our accepted premise appears to be something like this: Everything in the past was wonderful and unspoiled by man; our history is a great, bucolic meadow of human existence. Everything in the future will be in ruin, our water yellow, our air gray, our number far greater than what the planet can sustain, our oil depleted, the ice caps melted, our lands diminished by all-consuming oceans, and our lives nothing more than a brackish hell—as if human nature has been transformed by modernity from Rousseau’s noble savage, in which civilization fills Man with unnatural wants and seduces him away from his true nature and original freedom back to an earlier world described by Hobbes as nasty, brutish and short.
We appear to believe this even in the face of the fact that our lives have been continuously improved over thousands of years, our water cleaner, our air purer, our forests expanding – each passing generation has left us significantly healthier, with longer lifespans, in greater comfort, and with superior prospects than its predecessor. In human history, our future has always been better than our past, yet we continue to behave as though the opposite is true.
Prior to our ill-conceived global spasm to control the COVID virus, each day something like 170,000 human beings were being lifted out of abject poverty. But that is never the headline. The way information flows is driven by the commerce that enables it to flow and, increasingly, by the motives and interests of those who control the media and the politicians with whom they have formed intricate bonds.
170,000 lifted out of abject poverty each day is not news to which we would give attention. Tik Tok on the other hand commands millions of hours per day of our precious attention.
The oligarchs –Deus ex corporatio (God as corporation) –that own our news media and our search engines and our tech companies – understand this well. Apple curates ‘news’ on our third screens, which to a growing plurality are now first and only screens, and just like that, reality is what Apple bends it to be. Or Google. Or Netflix. Or CNN. Or Fox. Or Amazon…. It matters little. We are left searching in vain for reliable sources.
Forty years ago, Don Henley was chipping away at the tip of the iceberg when he and Bruce Hornsby wrote the lyrics for his hit song “Dirty Laundry”:
I make my livin’ off the evenin’ news
Just give me somethin’, somethin’ I can use
People love it when you lose
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda’ been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry
We got the bubble-headed bleached-blonde, comes on at five
She can tell you ’bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It’s interesting when people die
Give us dirty laundry
Can we film the operation? Is the head dead yet?
You know, the boys in the newsroom got a running bet
Get the widow on the set!
We need dirty laundry
You don’t really need to find out what’s goin’ on
You don’t really wanna know just how far it’s gone
Just leave well enough alone
Eat your dirty laundry
Dirty little secrets, dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody’s pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry
We can do “The Innuendo”, we can dance and sing
When it’s said and done, we haven’t told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
Even earlier, in 1976, when last we visited an era of “Stagflation,” Peter Finch gave us a dramatization of our national “malaise” pointing to the corporate media as Howard Beale in the movie Network. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
While the entirety of human history informs us otherwise, we go on believing that our future is doomed to be a stinking maelstrom lurching into the depths of hell. That our nation has one foot over a precipice the bottom of which none can see appears to be an irrefutable fact.
But why?
Nothing happens without a driving cause – a reason – and the most common driving reason in history has been wealth and power. Granted, wealth and power have been represented by different tokens throughout history, but the human impulse is the same.
Why is it in the interest of some to sell us the doom and gloom story of that we humans are a blight on nature? That our activity on earth can change the climate? That of the hundreds of ‘greenhouse’ gasses that exist and interact with our atmosphere it is carbon dioxide alone over which we must obsess (even though we are a carbon-based life-form existing in a carbon-based ecosphere)? That we must shut down the commerce and economies of the planet to combat a virus? That it is required that we quarantine the healthy even though such an undertaking is as impossible as a perpetual motion machine. That we must willingly cede our natural rights – our very freedom – based on a pseudo-scientific farce?
I believe that the answer is embodied in the lies of a corrupt, pernicious, and mentally ill maniac named Klaus Schwab.
Here is a bit from Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
While Schwab had declared to see excessively high management salaries as “no longer socially acceptable”,[24] his own annual salary of about one million Swiss Francs (about $1.1M) has been repeatedly addressed by the media. The Swiss radio and television corporation SRF reflected this salary level in the context of ongoing public contributions to the WEF and the fact that the Forum does not pay any federal taxes.[25] Moreover, the former Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung journalist Jürgen Dunsch criticized that financial reports of the World Economic Forum (WEF) institution headed by Klaus Schwab were not very transparent since neither income nor expenditures were broken down.[26]
Capture of democratic structures and institutions
Schwab as publisher of the WEF’s 2010 “Global Redesign” report postulates that a globalized world is best managed by a coalition of multinational corporations, governments (including through the UN system) and select civil society organizations (CSOs).[27] It argues that governments no longer are “the overwhelmingly dominant actors on the world stage” and that “the time has come for a new stakeholder paradigm of international governance”. The WEF’s vision includes a “public-private” UN, in which certain specialized agencies would operate under joint State and non-State governance systems.[28]
According to the Transnational Institute (TNI), the Forum is hence planning to replace a recognised democratic model with a model where a self-selected group of “stakeholders” make decisions on behalf of the people.[29] The think tank summarises that we are increasingly entering a world where gatherings such as Davos are “a silent global coup d’etat” to capture governance.[30]
And there you have it all in one neat package: Libido Dominandi. The will to power; the desire to dominate, the lust for government.
It was Schwab’s organization, The World Economic Forum, colloquially known as Davos, that coined the phrase “Build Back Better” to describe its “Global Redesign “or “The Great Reset.” Biden’s reckless $3.5 Trillion spending bill is named the Build Back Better Act – H.R. 5367. I suppose they thought we wouldn’t notice.
This is pure and plain totalitarian fascism driven by a global oligarchy built on greed and the lust to dominate. So here we have a German professor, a self-described student of Henry Kissinger (God help us all), who has never managed anything in the private sector, who has spent a lifetime in theory (think Karl Marx scribbling away in elite London libraries) that nonetheless has been appointed to numerous public company boards, been awarded honors and big honorariums, and is now toiling away with some 700 employees and thousands more starry-eyed local “influencers” displaying enough hubris to confound any imagination. Klaus Schwab is going to reorder and reset the entire world. And so far, it looks like we are going to go along.
Do not make the mistake to discount Davos as some fringe organization. Some 50 heads of state attended the last gathering. Countless high level corporate executives pay large sums to be members of the World Economic Forum and then incur even larger expenses to attend the event. It is said to be the largest gathering of corporate jets on the planet in any given year. The theme for Davos 2021 is “Great Reset” to help chart the global recovery plan for after the coronavirus pandemic. Search ‘Davos 2021 agenda,’ also called the “Davos Manifesto” (you can’t make this up!) and be prepared to be horrified.
There are three types of capitalism, according to Schwab, illustrating the typical Leftist tendency to usurp words in order to make them meaningless: Shareholder capitalism (traditional capitalism), state capitalism (as practiced in China and “Stakeholder or Progressive Capitalism (as proposed at Davos), which is nothing more than warmed over fascistic socialism.
The essential ideas from which America was hewn are now routinely cast aside as if they were unimportant trifles of history. A tiny but strident number shriek of the injustice of it all, of the oppression suffered by this group and that group, insist that biology is a social construct, that mathematics is a racist ploy, that meritocracy is fundamentally racist, that we must have equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, that it all must be torn asunder because, you know, racism, sexism, bigotry, the evil and oppressive patriarchy and, of course, Donald Trump.
We abandon our Judeo-Christian values at our great peril. Giving everything over to the strident minority, toppling our statues (and our statutes) as stand-ins for our very history, shunting aside due process, treating the rights of free association, religious liberty, and even liberty itself as diaphanous concepts rather than rights inherent in our very humanity, and offering nothing but the specter of totalitarianism, moral relativism, and nihilism to fill the void is suicide on a national scale.
Why do we allow it? Well, conveniently, we have been relentlessly pounded by messaging from every direction and medium that tells us that the world is in dire condition, that we have that one collective foot poised over the precipice, that we are doomed. And somehow, we believe it. We cannot be torn away from binge watching Netflix and Amazon Prime, our attention is diverted, no, lured by countless bright, shiny things… reality TV (reality if you ignore the fact that there is a camera crew present to film it all), Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… the dopamine hit from real achievement being recognized by others is replaced by hundreds of mini dopamine hits created by ‘likes’ and ‘re-tweets’ and ‘followers’. Hitler had followers. Goebbels used “influencers”. We know that these apps and sites are bad for us, and for our children, yet what do we do in the face of the destruction? Turn back to the screen.
The how is driven by the why.
Libido Dominandi: The will to power; the desire to dominate; the lust for government. Could it be this simple?
As for our own beloved country, we are fast becoming a nation ruled by an oligarchy comprised of a short list of corporate leaders, top ranking bureaucrats and elected officials at the top of the congressional scheme. Money implies power, power enables selective enrichment, and the unwashed, redneck deplorables be damned. Sure, they are the ones clutching at guns and God, but those things can be eroded away. (are being eroded away). I would argue that guns are exactly what is needed in a society without God. We are soon to see that even writing that sentence will be criminalized as constituting ‘violence’.
Vaclav Havel and Alexandre Solzhenitsyn taught us that the powerless have power. When a mass of people (us) have been driven to believe that we face impending doom, are persuaded to believe that everything will be better if we just give up our freedom (to travel, to associate, to worship, to operate a business, to move about without a mask, to choose whether or not to take an experimental ‘vaccine’…) and trust in the official narrative, trust that by tearing apart what has brought us so far and replacing it with Klaus Schwab’s scheme of global governance led by corporate executives in cahoots with governments, weaponized into shadowy agencies bent on surveillance and oversight of our lives like some East bloc Stasi, that life will be (a new) normal again, then, dear reader, a totalitarian state of affairs has arisen.
Havel teaches us that to rail against the leviathan of state plays exactly into their hands. Angelo Codevilla echoed this more recently: “The oligarchy demands complete submission, the locals refuse, each party grants itself greater license in what is permitted to defeat the other and the country spirals toward revolutionary violence.”
Havel shows us that by simply refusing to live as though the great lie were true, it is possible for one person to defeat many without violence. Why? Because the totalitarian system is encased in and built upon countless lies which crack and crumble when faced with the truth. Why were the Soviets so fearful of Solzhenitsyn? Clearly, he had no army, nor weapons. He had the truth, and he did not fear to use it.
Codevilla argued that violent acts were pointless. Nor did he think simply electing a courageous strong man would be enough to counter the oligarchic ruling class.
The answer, he argued, was to start something new. He wrote, “Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst. That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.”
Where from here?
In the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson and Madison set forth the case that our constitution was in fact a compact and I believe that they lead us, together with an understanding of the tenth amendment, toward a better tomorrow.
Nullification is increasingly being asserted at the state level to counter actions of the Federal Government which citizens of those states find noxious. This pathway was blazed by cities such as San Francisco which used it to declare itself to be a ‘Sanctuary City’ and therefor insulated from federal immigration laws. Cities and states where marijuana is now legalized have done the same to thwart federal drug laws.
Federalism can be used to check the libido dominandi of the leviathan in Washington DC. While we are all Americans there is no possibility that we are or ever will be homogeneous. Schwab’s ‘great reset’, with its clever marketing posture of ‘Build Back Better’, can succeed only if we live within the lie that we are homogeneous, each like the other, and thus a single set of absolute rules can apply.
Action at the state and city level must be augmented by acts of personal courage. We are seeing those acts of courage all around us: parents speaking up against school boards who have driven curricula down a gender fluid, critical race theory path; people from all walks of life refusing to be coerced into taking a ‘vaccine’ and being fired from their jobs as a result; career military members refusing to be vaccinated and losing their retirements as a result – these are essential and powerful acts of singular courage. But be prepared, for these acts will be met with a fierce response for the very reason that they are so powerful. Those with courage will be vilified, ridiculed, slandered, and cancelled.
History clearly demonstrates that a totalitarian falls in love with his or her own ideas and doctrine. He (or she) then forces those ideas and doctrines on others. When the resulting reality does not match the promised outcome, when the totalitarian sees his own handiwork, which is full of economic malaise, social unrest, violence, and strife, he finds himself in a terrible quandary.
He either has to admit he was wrong, and suffer the attendant consequences, or separate from reality, lie about everything, and point to those in defiance of his great lie as the reason for the failure.
This is when violent rioting, looting and the burning down of buildings are called peaceful protests.
This is when news organizations that refuse to lie (or lie by omission) are censored and cancelled.
The culture of lies and deceit permeates every facet of society- it must – because everything is connected and intertwined in daily economic life. And still we must – each of us as our own courage will allow – refuse to live within and under the lie.
I think again about that odd juxtaposition – the pristine beach and the thump of a bombing range. I think about the joy that beach has brought to me and our family over the years. I think about the near, clear and present machinery of war. With eyes unclouded by a lie I see the proximity of the violent cleaving of our society and resolve that everything must be done to avert violence. If cleaved we must be, we must be pacific in our approach.
What is a government of the people, for the people and by the people worth to us? To me? Will I be among those willing to Mutually Pledge To Each Other Our Lives, Our Fortunes And Our Sacred Honor?
I will.