(600 words)
The U.S. elections have come and gone.
Some reflections on the nature of ‘voting’ as civic ritual, and what it means; on the nature of power and legitimacy; on what the Regime is, what it does, the puppet-shows it runs, all through a simple metaphor:
Voting, and elections, under this Regime, are understandable as froth on top of a drink.
Imagine the Regime as a drink. With all its variegated power(s), institutions, influence mechanisms, methods of control, policies, agenda-setting, gatekeeping, discourse-enforcement, favoritisms, grudges, aspirations, and goals. The whole thing: compact the Regime all down, conceptually, so as to reduce it to a drink. A mug full of liquid. Regime subjects all have to drink this drink.
Imagine this Regime drink is one of those elaborately made coffee-shop concoctions, requiring multiple ingredients and multiple moving parts to create. Something more elaborate than the image I included there.
The end-product you are presented with is a warm, steamy drink. It is decorated in such ways to impress the impressable.
If you’re with me, if have just imagined such a drink, you may put in a red-white-and-blue mug for effect, because the Regime coffee-house loves doing things like that anyway.
Now, for what elections are under the Regime. What ‘voting’ is about:
Voting is the froth on top of this drink.
The participators in the civic-ritual of ‘voting’ (voters) get to choose whether the froth on top of the drink comes with a slight flavor-and-color variation between white-chocolate or dark-chocolate. Be advised, the selection does not include strawberry, nor vanilla, nor any other flavor. Those are not available options.
The oddballs out there among the civic-ritual participators here in the Uncle Regime’s Coffeeshop, you can ask the Regime barista for such things (known by the technical term, “throw your vote away”), and the grinning Regime barista there behind the counter will humor you and accept your request, for there’s no need to be rude about it. Meanwhile, the Good People, the loyal civic-ritual participators who select white-chocolate or dark-chocolate flavoring, they determine the way the froth comes out.
The size of the mug and the contents thereof, what the liquid(s) and other ingredients went in to create the drink and where they came from, and really all the characteristics of the drink except the slight flavor and appearance variation of the froth on top — that all stays the same. It is predetermined and non-negotiable.
From taste, to size, to nutritional value, to the origins of the beans or other products used to make the drink, to how sick-to-the-stomach the later consumption may make you, all aspects of this drink are predetermined, except this one around which the civic-ritual (‘voting’) revolves, the froth. The potential changes to the froth layer do not much affect even the taste of the whole drink, much less its nutritional value, size, and anything else.
A lot of people get excited about the froth. The excitement is much like some of the secondary definitions of the term ‘froth’ in English (some from Merriam-Webster: “something resembling froth, as in insubstantial, worthless, or light and airy” talk, ideas, or activities; “to foam at the mouth”; “to throw froth our or up”; “gaily frivolous or light in content or treatment”). An excited child might get excited about which color of sprinkles go on his birthday cake.
Huge numbers of paid and volunteer or semi-volunteer flavoring-propagandists blare things at you, for a while, about how bad the white-chocolate-leaning froth can be for your enjoyment and well-being. When you are forced to imbibe for the next designated period of mandatory drinking from the mug that is the Regime, it’d be a lot better to have a dark-chocolate-flavored frothy foam, and they’ll tell you why at length. Another set of flavoring-propagandists say the opposite. But what’s the difference as to a slight difference in color or taste the froth on top? The drink that is the Regime remains.
______________
Hail To You 
“We elect about 0.02% of the overall number of people who rule us.” — Jeffrey Tucker, 2014
https://fee.org/articles/what-about-the-unelected/
What a frightening reality, though Almighty God is still in charge even so.
Great article.
Ahhaa, glad to see the thoughts – this great analogy – that you put in the PS comments here. I like that you use the terminology “the Regime” too for the Potomac Regime, Mr. Hail. I’ve seen that around on a few sites recently – probably not a random sample though…
See the comment section of Peak Stupidity entry-2437 for a rougher version of the contents of this essay (“Election froth”) and other related discussion.
The Regime – Security State – – Jeffrey Sachs & Whitney Webb
You might want to listen to this one: Ca. 10 min. before the end, Jeffrey Sachs says, that US foreign policy is momentarily run by a handful of people. And that those people don’t pay much attentin to the house nor the senate – if anything at all. Sachs does not make that explicit, but it was clear from the context, that he thinks, that president Biden isn’t but an emissary of this small group that runs things.The words Jeffrey Sachs (!) therefor chose: Security state – as opposed to: A republic.
https://rumble.com/v1oinub-the-brink-of-nuclear-war-with-jeffery-sachs-the-tulsi-gabbard-show.html
Whitney Webb talks about with Glenn Beck about smoething closly related to Sachs’ ideas.
Glenn Beck about this interview: “This is the most important interview I ever made in my fourty years as a journalist” (!).
How Elites Will Create a New Class of Slaves | Whitney Webb | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 162 – YouTube
Young Whitney Webb is very much on top of her subject (government corruption).
This is the Glenn Beck interview with Whitney Webb:
See below for a reply on my impressions on Glenn Beck and Whitney Webb.
See below for a reply on “the National-Security State.”
Thanks, Mr. Hail,
Voting provides a veneer of legitimacy to an otherwise illegitimate system. I foresee no circumstance that would restore my faith in the religion of multi-party politics or the sanctity of the electoral process.
☮
I see you used the word “restore” there (“no circumstance…would restore my faith in the religion of multi-party politics”), which implies you once believed in it and now do not. Around when and why did you lose ‘faith’ in it?
Greetings, Mr. Hail,
I lost faith in the electoral process after the “election” of George W. Bush. More specifically, after the 2000 election fiasco I downloaded and tinkered with three different versions of Diebold’s GEMS (Global Election Management Systems) software. I quickly determined that GEMS is easily hackable, in several different ways. It’s almost like GEMS was designed to fraudulently manipulate election results. As long as electronic voting machines and election software remain so insecure I will never trust the integrity of election results.
Click to access diebold.pdf
Later, I lost faith in democracy itself for a variety of reasons. The process ensures that who ever wins an election in America (even at the local level) is going to be a big “government” statist and someone who most likely suffers some sort of sociopathy. Also, without a literacy test or IQ test to keep morons from voting democracy is just mob rule by retards. Without a process to make sure candidates and unelected “government” workers aren’t psychopaths the institution will remain rotten to the core. After I was assaulted by a cop over what was essentially a simple paperwork error and then had a bunch of money extorted out of me for their error (I actually think they did it on purpose just to raise revenue and that this was standard operating procedure for these people) I lost all faith in the criminals masquerading as “government”. I truly believe that “government” as it is today is mostly made up of evil people who do evil things (on purpose) that harm all of us. It is an institution that should not exist in it’s current form. We all would be better off without this increasingly parasitic class of people masquerading as “government” lording over us.
In the years since I came to these realizations I have only seen things related to “government” get worse. I want nothing to do with “government”. I see it as nothing more than an illegal protection racket with the power to destroy innocent people. I don’t do business with criminals and thieves. I boycott the system as much as I can because to do business with the criminals masquerading as “government” would make me an accomplice to their crimes.
☮
Thanks, Adam Smith, for leaving this excellent detailed comment.
Martin Kulldorff tweets out:
Lockdown-critical Governors could improve their margins of victory –
Most blue and red states had lockdowns. Governors taking a lighter approach increased their margins of victory:
@KristiNoem SD 27% vs 3%
@RonDeSantisFL 19% vs 0.4%
@KimReynoldsIA 18% vs 3%
@PolisForCO 18% vs 11%
@BrianKempGA 7% vs 1%
It was an anti-lockdown wave.
The comparison in part is unfair because it is against 2018, the Trump Derangement Election.
Reports from Michigan say the entire campaign was about abortion. No one much brought up the illegal and immoral Lockdown policy by the governor. It came up briefly during a debate. The governor claimed she saved lives through lockdowns, then everyone moved on. It was a conspiracy of silence.
Yes, that’s all good to see, Dieter, but what about the proPanic Totalitarian Governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Kathy Hochul of New York? The former was re-elected, and the latter was elected for the first time.
I especially remember some absurd speech by Kathy Hochul when she first took over. How do these hysterical women get away with this? Is it the women’s vote? Is it forgiveness, already, or do that many people agree with what went on in these 2 States.
Regarding Michigan during the PanicFest, see “Michigan v Sweden in Corona Challenge” from way back in early May of ’20.
Mod. – here’s the cold-mode answer to your question: That others were successful too does not disprove that those who did not favour hard lockdown messures were indeed sucessful too.
Put a bit differently: Kulldorff did not try to make sense of all aspects of the election. – He is a cool northern dude. A bit slow, a bit (well: very much so!) restricted – but with a not super big, but nevertheless: with a valuable point he makes in the end – all in all; I’d hold, we should appreciate such efforts even though they are full of holes.
Another cold northern dude once put that this way: The world is erverything that is the case (note that this sentence is usually read out loud with the accent on the words “what is the case” – but I’d for the time being prefer if it would be said with the exclamation mark behind “everything” in this case here).
Another one of this brainy (as opposed to – deedy****, hehe) northern guys once said that the class of problems that can’t be solved is much greater than is usually assumed.
****I’ll check if this qualifies as a member of my collection of non-googleable words
(“non-googleable” being maybe one of those rather rare birds too).
Reblogged this on Calculus of Decay .
RE: “The National-Security State”
The use of the phrase “The ______ State” comes from 20th-century academia.
As I see it, “The ____ State” gives a neutral name to an otherwise-unnamed phenomenon. It can refer to an ideological force with influence on the whole, even guiding influence, on how a regime sees itself and its role. The proliferation of new coinages of “___ State” variations was ‘regime analysis’ by academics.
Others such “states” include: “the Administrative State,” “the Developmental State,” “the Managerial State,” “the Therapeutic State.”
“Administrative State,” Managerial State,” “Therapeutic State,” and “National-Security State” are each conceptual-frames useful for understanding the ‘Regime’ in the USA of the early 21st century.
To speak of “the Security State” (often “the National-Security State”) does not imply that the “state” (government, society, culture) is totally devoted to military affairs in some caricatured North-Korean-style way. What it means is that Big Military, and the circles of interests associated with it, are an important ideological bloc exerting major influence. This “National-Security State” is a convenient way of saying so without risking sound polemical or offensive. The full ‘Regime’ is a balance of these layers of “____ States” underneath it, the mix changing slowly over time (or potentially not so slowly).
RE: Glenn Beck interviews Whitney Webb (as posted by Dieter Kief above).
On Whitney Webb:
I must admit, I have not been overly impressed with Whitney Webb’s writing, though I have not followed it closely. I am willing to change my mind.
She partly sought out a niche market in the conspiracy world, which can be a lucrative place to be because it draws attention. People love sensationalistic stories. I could be wrong but I think she came from the conspiracy world first and then ‘discovered’ the anti-Zionist world, and discovered it more-or-less “from the Left.”
She spent a long time in Chile, where the CIA orchestrated a full-on coup in the 1970s. Such time spent can influence one’s worldview.
Whitney Webb is also openly critical of a certain ethnopolitical group which exists in diaspora and has a powerful state in the Mideast. She is critical of the actions and influences of that state. This puts her in more serious trouble than the conspiracies.
.
On Glenn Beck:
I have not taken Glenn Beck seriously in many years. In another lifetime, Glenn Beck must have traveled around selling snake oil cures.
Sometime about 2008 or 2009 or 2010, Glenn Beck began aggressively pushing civic-worship of “MLK” (Martin Luther King) and claiming MLK was a true conservative and the greatest American hero of the late 20th century. At some point he cried on live tv related to his King cult. Then there was his worship of Israel, a life-project of his he has done for years. American Patriotism for Glenn Beck had become MLK+Israel. He was given the gold-medal equivalent in their Righteous Gentile awards by AIPAC and ADL and whoever gives those awards.
The spectacle of Glenn Beck, as I remember it, was embarrassing and ridiculous, even buffoonish. I could not take such a man seriously. But he did have a considerable following from his years on TV and radio (I think), and his maneuvers to partake in worship of Regime-approved things (aforementioned) ensured a level of immunity.
I have never followed Glenn Beck; one of the last things I remember hearing of Glenn Beck: he was involved with sponsoring Afghanistan migrants and arranged rescue flights for them.
But, if Glen Beck in 2022 is promoting Whitney Webb, an anti-Zionist, he may have gone in a new direction… From the description of the interview, it sounds like he is more interested in a World Economic Forum conspiracy than the bold criticisms of Israel and Israelis. He partially centered his brand of American-nationalism around Israel. It’s hard to see how he gets around that or repudiates that.
Mr. Hail wrote:
In another lifetime, Glenn Beck must have traveled around selling snake oil cures /// …but he did have a considerable following
Glenn Beck made the best video about the .m.o.s.t ..i.m.p.o.r.t.a.n.t. .g.r.a.p.h. in the world/population growth – and about the impossibilty to solve that problem via immigration to the US – ca. six or so years ago.
I do think that this video by Glenn Beck is one of the dearest journalistic (= / and/ or: mass-pedagogical) achievements of the last thirty years. So: I’d contradict him here a bit with regard to the interview and what he there says about his own work…
(Mr. Hail – what you say above might (I’m serious: I say might here, because I don’t really know) – might hint at the fact that you underestimate snake oil salesmen****.
***** see -David Guterson’s novel Our Lady of the Forest and see: the late great Jim Kakoknis’ awesomely insightful and well written Florida crime novel Treasure Coast, which tackles the undisputable (!) qualities of (some, of course) of the snake oil peddlers (see also: theater /people as actors…
Re: Glenn Becks interview: Ivor Cummins tweeted the link to it – with the best slogan for it I came across so far: You’ll be glued to the screen while watching this!
Re: Whitney Webb and your remarks on Chile/ The CIA/NSA etc.: Yep.
– see also the latest travels of head of CIA William Burns to – – – Brasil – to look after the election process. – And the US attempts to install -voting machines there…(that have a connetion to Israel, if I remember that stuff really right – I don’t remember who wrote (or spoke) about this stuff in great detail lately – (Glenn Greenwald?)
Re. Jeffrey Sachs: The majority of the five or so persons that run the US government does feel rather close to Israel if I understood his hints right.
Re Jeffrey Sachs: In the comment section of Ron Unz’ long article praising Jeffrey Sachs I asked the question I have also asked in the comment section of the article written by Jeffrey Sachs himself that Ron Unz ran with regard to Ukraine: Why on earth does Sachs – who talks now almost 100% like John Mearsheimer, not mention him?
(Is it that John Mearsheimer made this point explicit. That the US risks to make a huge mistake ((even huger (sorry, couldn’t resist) than the ones that have been made already, because it is mentally to tightly bound to – Israel? – John Mearsheimer blurbed Gilad Aztmon’s Israel-critical book too… – Ah, nobody did answer my question… – so: I ask it here again: – not least in case that my ideas would be wrong… or somehow not quite spot-on….
PS
The wordplay in my mind while I was leaving morpheus’ arms today:
All the world’s a riddle / And we’re caught in the middle // (= center stage…)
Another thing about Whitney Webb: she gets promoted and praised a lot more than she would be if she were a male writing and saying exactly the same things.
The world she chose to enter, Conspiracies, is a typical subculture dominated by males. Find me the most influential one-hundred books written in the genre of Conspiracies. I expect almost all would be written by males. The same goes for her Anti-Zionism theme.
If you read the Youtube comments praising W Webb, a huge number (around half) directly mention her femaleness and her being relatively young (b.1989), as if young-femaleness is an obvious primary virtue of a researcher-writer. Almost all other comments include code-words that signal the same or similar, using words and phrases of praise no white-male would likely get. The top-dog setting the stage for this treatment is Glenn Beck himself, I think. This seems an instinctual reaction by people, although not often applied exactly in these circumstances, it can be flexed to fit.
It is a form of “female privilege” in action, which is dangerous specifically for how it lowers defenses. Elizabeth Holmes, the fake-CEO mega-scammer to be sentences to prison next week, benefitted from the same wave of overly-good-will.
It does seem Whitney Webb knows her “stuff” on the Epstein conspiracy world. But I do wonder: what in Whitney Webb’s work on the Maxwell–Epstein matter is original to her rather than resummarized by her. Journalists had been writing about the matter of Robert Maxwell and associates going back to the 1980s!
See below for thoughts on Jeffrey Sachs and his motivations:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2022/11/10/election-froth/#comment-50081
Long after I’d gotten rid of the idiot plate, around ’09, I go over to this one clubhouse about a mile away for an hour each evening to watch Glenn Beck bang out the story of America’s internal enemies on his rotatable chalk board on CNN. It was enjoyable. I did learn about people at high levels who were destroying America.
At that point, the not-so-educated Mr. Beck was uncovering and learning real American history on the spot (in a Ron Unz sort of way) and displaying the connections to the modern political scene on the chalkboard. He was very Libertarian, or at least, Constitutionalist, in his views then.
Well, I had a life and also Glenn Beck moved to some other network – The Blaze or something – so I didn’t hear much about him until a few years later regarding something about him giving out Teddy Bears to those unfortunate children who’d been trafficked to the US southern border. There was no mention of sending them back to be re-united with their families. That was enough Glenn Beck for my lifetime.
Back when I did follow him and he came to town once, I even had him sign a copy of a book. It wasn’t his book, as I didn’t have it and really didn’t want to spend the money. He signed my copy of the famous book Stick and Rudder by Wolfgang Langewiesche and looked a bit miffed about it too…
I wrote this all up 5 1/2 years ago, when the memory was fresher, in “Remember Glenn Beck with his Overton Window?”
Notes on Glenn Beck’s media career and erratic political driftings
If you are sure that you remember Glenn Beck on -CNN-, specifically, it must be a memory of the 2006-2008 period.
He quit CNN during the Hillary-Obama race of 2008 to join Fox News.
It’s funny to image someone like Glenn Beck was once on CNN, but so was the hardline immigration-restrictionist and MAGA-backers Lou Dobbs. I think Pat Buchanan also regularly used to appear on CNN. No one like Glenn Beck would have been hired on CNN at all in the 2010s. Even by the late 2000s it was looking unlikely.
I don’t know fully how to explain it, but Glenn Beck’s tether to reality frayed or snapped sometime during his Fox News years. He started with his personal crusade of full-on MLK-Zionist-Migrant Civic Nationalism by that time, including a long-running obsession with bashing Palestinians, and he had somehow slid into some status as populist right-wing talker even though half of what he said was suspect and he offered no program of revival, as his program became to serve up weakly reheated leftovers of Regime ideology.
Maybe he always was all the above, I never much followed his career, but for me Glenn Beck’s erratic behavior and bizarre political driftings are pegged to “circa 2010.” That’s also about the time AIPAC and/or the ADL awarded Glenn Beck the coveted Righteous Gentile Award, poetically enough [?].
The timing is important, in part, for Glenn Beck’s relation to the Tea Party movement of the late 2000s, which broke through in 2010, and which he tried to cash in on (naturally). The man is a skilled showman and kept a good portion of the audience he had built up in radio and tv.
Yes, since it was definitely ’09 (I can remember what else I was doing at the time), that must have been on Fox News, Mr. Hail. Thanks for the correction.
I do remember Lou Dobbs talking about the immigration invasion on CNN way back, and even then I was surprised that that network let him keep talking. It didn’t last. As I recall, he cucked out for a while himself, but from what you wrote, he must have recovered.
I agree with your take on Glenn Beck. Even during his Fox News time, when he was very good about pointing out the infiltration of Communists and the like into the US Gov’t – past and present at that time – his religious beliefs had him mistakenly worshipping the Commie philanderer bullsh_ter Martin Luther King. I gave him a break on all that, but when he was down at the border supporting illegal invaders, I’d had enough of him… forever.
What you describe as “this one clubhouse about a mile away,” depending what kind of place it is, it may have been surprising if the TV had been set to CNN instead of Fox.
The area I spend most of my time, when restaurants/bars have TVs not set to sports, they are usually set to CNN. There is one fast-food place, entirely run by Hispanics, that for some reason has TVs in it and one is usually set to Fox, which has long puzzled me.
Correction: Glenn Beck was a big figure throughout the entire Hillary-Obama political season (late 2007 to mid-2008). He went to Fox News in Oct 2008, when Regime-guy John McCain was in process of deliberately losing the election to Barack Obama (according to Lawrence Auster’s view at the time).
Throughout G Beck’s years as a tv host, he still retained the image of populist-Right AM talk-radio guy. There is a persona that comes along with that, and it came to overwhelm the actual person; Who is Glenn Beck? What does he want? Something similar might be said of Rush Limbaugh, whom Glenn Beck idolized.
Glenn Beck is a figure of interest to history because of his association with the circa-2010 Tea Party. I don’t know how to interpret his early-2020s interest in the Jeffrey Epstein espionage network.
Zionist fundraising
I re-opened the Glenn Beck — Whitney Webb interview video discussed above. This ad came up:
A man who looks and sounds like a used-car salesman comes on screen and says: “It’s well known that when GOD gathered the Jews back to Israel [in the 20th century], evangelical Christians played a tremendous part…” He talks about how they heroically saved some scrolls from Poland, a miracle of the Holocaust, safely transported to Israel. You can predict the rest — send your money to help the Jews now, your patriotic duty as a Christian. “God is going to BLESS the world again, through Israel, to the ends of the Earth,” he says, with your cash support (and your taxpayer-funded government and military’s geopolitical support). “Rise up with us!”
I’ve never seen an ad like this on Youtube. Such ads are common on some tv channels.
the Allegers of Fraud
In response to an article by Dr Kevin MacDonald, “A Depressing Election,” people are saying things much like I have said here: the elections are not legitimate. The elections are not what they seem to be and offer no real difference no matter the outcome, as they are just run by the Regime which will do what it wants anyway.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2022/11/12/a-depressing-election/
https://www.unz.com/article/a-depressing-election/#comments
But many commenters go in the wrong direction, mentioning fraud as the reason the elections are illegitimate. They mean vote rigging in particular places and elections. There doesn’t need to be any “Dominion”-style fraud or vote-rigging to make the whole system of the Regime’s “election puppet-shows” illegitimate in the terms in which they are presented.
To put it another way, the system is rigged even if there are zero cases of fake votes in the system. The whole thing is a Regime stage-managed affair, massaged here and there as needed, but the key of the critique does NOT depend on the existence or non-existence of mass-fraud.
Well said, Mr. Hail,
the Regime’s “election puppet-shows”
the system is rigged even if there are zero cases of fake votes in the system. The whole thing is a Regime stage-managed affair, massaged here and there as needed, but the key of the critique does NOT depend on the existence or non-existence of mass-fraud.
I should have included something like this in my response above.
Thanks! ☮
The Sachs Question
Jeffrey Sachs says:
“We don’t hear the truth about a lot of things these days because we are a ‘Security State,’ where everything is confidential, everything is hidden from the public, all these decisions that we’re talking about — the life-and-death decisions about the planet — are being made by a handful of people. That’s the real situation of America’s political system. That is not the ‘democracy’ we talk about…”
(in interview with Tulsi Gabbard, Oct. 18, 2022, 53:30).
This was the line Dieter Kief heard that reminded him much of the theme of my own post-election remarks.
I had forgotten that this same Jeffrey Sachs has made a name for himself as a pro-China elite voice. His promotion of the theory of ‘Covid’ as a U.S. bioweapon (the Ron Unz pet-theory) fits with that.
It’s hard to understand what his angle is. He seems a lot like Ron Unz in many ways, except that he embedded himself deep in academia whereas Ron Unz drifted in and out of the ‘Tech’ industry. It is easy enough to image Ron Unz himself being a professor in this system. Both men are of elite Jewish backgrounds and end up with critical views of their host society in many ways (fair and unfair), and both are pro-China.
Why would Jeffrey Sachs not mention John Mearsheimer? The Israel matter is a low-hanging fruit but I’m not sure it’s the best one (Mearsheimer, who is a German-Lutheran by ethnocultural origin, had a Jewish co-author on the anti-Israel book of 2006). I think a stronger explanation may be that Mearsheimer is also anti-China, or at least NOT pro-China, as Sachs is. Mearsheimer can be understood to be arguing: “Don’t fight Russia over some stupid reason, because China is out there and clearly a much bigger threat.” This makes Jeffrey Sachs, who is pro-China, uncomfortable enough to decline to mention Mearsheimer.
A danger of having elite-diasporic peoples in one’s society is that they can flip allegiances rather easily. Another case of a U.S. elite who has turned pro-China is the former neoconservative intellectual David Goldman. It seems Mr. Goldman now has an unofficial policy of never writing a column without praising China at least once. And Ron Unz is sort of a renegade intellectual drifter who fits the same mold. I also rather see Anatoly Karlin like this (who retired from writing and now only tweets), insofar as Karlin spent many formative years in California as a foreign-elite himself.
Mr. Hail wrote:
1) “I don’t know fully how to explain it, but Glenn Beck’s tether to reality frayed or snapped sometime during his Fox News years.”
2) “It does seem Whitney Webb knows her “stuff” on the Epstein conspiracy world.”
The voter fraud /rigged system aspect of US politics is getting more and more obvious. You read in the most surprising places for example – as a recent detection even! – that Pfizer waited with the announcement of the vaccine until after the 2020 elections (Steve Sailer wrote that right away,of course). The Covid story made more people wonder, what is up manipulation-wise in the US. Elon Musk is warmly welcomed by many for that reason too, I’d hold. And then there is the costly war in Ukraine, stucturally neighboring doom (structurally meaning: Quite obviously – ).
It is creepy and uncomfortable to see the big and powerful US system in a mode that has a public side that is in large parts theater (Joe Biden) – and real politics that are in large parts withdrawn from large parts of the public (Jeffrey Sachs).
The system’s inbuild strength is the interaction of a very wide ranging public sphere with the elite in power. Elite alone (cut off from all kinds of contradictions/proposals/ideas of the public) .p.l.u.s. wokism has a tendency to increase the risk for dysfunctionalities (it lowers the rationality level at least of the outcomes of the societal discourse).
China is interesting in that it is getting things done on a huge scale. Ironically enough, it is a clearly elite-run top-down society – without wokism and societal regression in this hindsight at all.
It’s rather ironic, that the Chinese dysfunction and the Western dysfunctionalities have for many people become a thing during (the blog Peak Stupidity) / and or because of Covid – the looming questions in the Covid-background focus this theme with regard to both countries: The – secret! – US-Chinese science cooperation, that might have created this Covid problem. The digital surveillance-cooperation between China and the US, that shaped both countries’ ways of dealing with Covid.
Add to that the specific US problems of an at times at least highly dysfunctional elite, that seems to clearly run the show and the obviously weak European answer to this phenomenon and you see, why Whitney Webb hits a nerve now in shining light on some of the darker avenues remarkable chunks of this elite did indeed stroll down.
So – Ukraine and Covid as examples (=illustrations) of the scary consequences of the Chinese and the US elitism combined make it more plausible to look closer at the wagon loads of things that just don’t add up. Here, Jeffrey Sachs and John mearsheimer and – – – Joe Rogan and ron Unz and GelnnBeck and Whitney Webb (and yours truly) share a lot of highly vibrant common ground.
And folks like Joe Rogan get lots of the Covid and surveillance stuff from simply looking at it and asking questions: Jeffrey Epstein had access to large parts of the US elite and he knew what they did. So Joe Rogan (and whitney Webb) ask:
What forces are behind the obviously incomplete ways in which the US judicial system is taking and has been taking care of all of this. Rogan put the Gishlaine Maxwell case this way: A convicted hustler with no named customers at all! Or Jeffrey Epstein committing suicide and all the questions that arose there. Btw. – the system did not work too well here, because the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein does have all these holes in it and produces so many obvious reasons for doubts & contradictions. The same with the covid story. And the now obvious cooperation between the once libertrian Silicon (Silly-Conmen-) Valley and the NSA and the CiA etc. Add to that the FBI dysfunctionalities that became obvious during the voting-scam activities and – you have even more reason for the sudden success of Whitney Webb.
Plus: She is razor sharp and impressively focused (she knows her song well, before she starts singin’ (The Bard).
The big news strategically(or: communication-wise) is that Glenn Beck and Whitney Webb bridge the gap between the old left and the old (traditonal) right/the conservatives.
They detect just how much postmodernism has made this distinction weak (this is also the point of Jordan B. Peterson and Dave Rubin (both ex leftists that understood that postmodernism was the step into Flip-City Crazy Utopia Wokeism/ Critical Race Theory land)).
In the everlasting (and unavoidable) battle between Utopia and reality (between the gnostics and the men of the Church, the hippies and the squares, utopian and reformist leftists, blank slaters and – öh – lineage-realists*****).
*****the genes as a factor in our social lives also mark a dividing line between Utopian thinkers (blank-slaters) here and critical materialists/conservatives there.
Because conservatism is always looking at (= ideally .r.o.o.t.e.d. in) the way things simply are and the utopian leftists are neglecting here a material cornerstone of our existence (genes are a very material thing – small, ok, but something, real, substantiated, and powerful nonetheless. So: Here is common ground for the enlightenment leftist who just follows science as Steven Pinker does, for example, and traditional conservatives, because (as Steve Sailer points out with lots of convincing examples and details) conservatives never had a hard time to understand the ways of mother nature. (Charles Darwin, who spent his time preferably in the countryside, being maybe Steve Sailer’s most shining example here.)
Bottom line: – The most prosperous and surprising thing is that Glenn Beck and Whitney Webb and – Covid-enlightening Ivor Cummins who praises the two: Obviously and rightfullly so – do detect some quite fruitful common ground here.
Next up: Whitney Webb talking to Joe Rogan? – And/or Amazon banning her books?
(Ivor Cummins is – as is Joe Rogan, also not on board with the climate panickers lately, and both are pro free speech and strictly against wokism and clearly think that Joe Biden is more of a reality-TV figure than a real world president…(Jeffrey Sachs’ handful of people deciding over US politics does not include Joe Biden)).
Thanks to Heimdall for useful feedback and corrections.
Curt Doolittle on the 2022 U.S. election:
“I feel like the ‘straws that break the camel’s back’ of governmental legitimacy [have piled up so much that] even legitimacy of the country as a whole is pretty much…broken.”
“There is a set of choices now. Rather than a Left-versus-Right battle, can we make it a Left-and-Right battle against the government? It seems to me that that‘s the right answer: Federal devolution provides both sides what they want.” (Nov. 10, 2022).
Re: Mr. Hail: Don’t continue with the left vs. right battle
and: Jeffrey Sachs being a danger for being too close to China –
Mr. Hail wrote:
“I think a stronger explanation may be that Mearsheimer is also anti-China, or at least NOT pro-China, as Sachs is. Mearsheimer can be understood to be arguing: “Don’t fight Russia over some stupid reason, because China is out there and clearly a much bigger threat.” This makes Jeffrey Sachs, who is pro-China, uncomfortable enough to decline to mention Mearsheimer.”
“A danger of having elite-diasporic peoples in one’s society is that they can flip allegiances rather easily. Another case of a U.S. elite who has turned pro-China is the former neoconservative intellectual David Goldman. It seems Mr. Goldman now has an unofficial policy of never writing a column without praising China at least once. And Ron Unz” (…).
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Whitney Webb and Glenn Beck agree upon the danger that China’s digitized citizen-surveillance-policy etc. represents – to the US citizens too, because she explains in detail how big tech/Silicon Valley are closely cooperating with China in this hindsight.
Including transhumanist endeavors (here is the point at which I’d hold that she and Glenn Beck are going too far. This idea leads her to say that Elon Musk’s free speech engagement (not least with Twitter…) would be a trap: This is a bit over the top – as is her idea that everybody should just quit using the internet. I mean – she says so using the internt: Such glaring contradictions hint at the weak spot often found in young activists/intellectuals: To miss out on the self-reflexive side of their ideas/thoughts.
(In Germany I call that the Baron-of-Münchhausen-problem, because this author did write numerous satires which focus on this weak spot of the young warriors as Ms. Webb clearly is one: And he founnd a great metaphor for those having this sweet spot in their a bit too fiery minds: They act as if they could drag themselves out of a swamp by grabbing themselves at their own hair and then – pull really strongly…).
One more question Mr. Hail: Do you (and Curt Doolittle?) look at Florida as being part of the country as a whole? – Same question different form: Were you glad
about Ron DeSantis’ victory?
“[Whitney Webb says] everybody should just quit using the internet.”
This kind of statement needs nuance. People don’t appreciate how much their lives are controlled by big forces behind the Internet. Dissidents know well enough the outlines of it, most people are not dissidents and have little or no idea.
. The Corona-Panic phenomenon convinced me of the rightness of the basic attitude against The Internet. The often-made observation is that the technological network of fast-Internet, devices, and the way it all works, basically “caused” the Panic, right? In past eras, even probably at technology-circa-2010 levels, no CoronaPanic-like social phenomenon could have happened.
In past eras, sci-fi writers would often come up with ideas, plot-devices, that pictured worlds a little bit like how “The Internet” shapes out world today, to picture a dehumanized or semi-“dystopian” world.
The difficult thing is taking the good and leaving the bad. I don’t have the answers.
Dieter Kief wrote:
Definitely I was, especially by his easy margins of victory. (Curt Doolittle has said he is indifferent on DeSantis.)
I don’t think it has been a secret hat I have supported Ron DeSantis since around summer 2020. The reason, he was one of the few to fight the Panic hard, standing like Odysseus strapped to the ship against the gale-force winds of the Panic and the “sirens” (Panic-pushers) demanding submission. All the rest that he has done, or is capable of doing, is secondary to that.
I’d ask: in what way are the two questions “Do look at Florida as being part of the country as a whole?” and ” Were you glad about Ron DeSantis’ victory?” the same question?
(I apologize for my delayed responses as I was using all spare “writing” time in past days writing the “World Cup 2022 Team-USA racial-national origins” post, which in the end was of enormous length.
“Our elections have reached the level of what [elections] were under the communists.” — Dr Paul Gottfried, in an interview with right-wing podcaster J. F. Cotto, Nov. 16, 2022.
Dieter Kief wrote:
This is from two days ago, from a weekly interview.
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Curt Doolitte: DeSantis is a good governor, and he WOULD make a good president. But I don’t know if he can get elected. I don’t know if any Republican can be elected president anymore.
Dr. B. Werell (interviewer): Not under the current election laws!
Curt Doolittle: So I don’t think it matters who we talk about as “the ‘best’ candidate,” when I’m not sure anyone can get elected.
The tipping-point has passed. The number of single women we are producing who are into the ‘crazy female cult,’ who defect the Left — I don’t think winning elections is possible…given White-women defectors and immigrants. …What I care about is ‘bringing matters to a head‘…”
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