As the Signs and Portents Accumulate

This won't end well.

No, not much. A lot of people will be hurt, some may lose their lives. Hundreds have already been hurt as the country prepares for what is to come. Many more will join the target list; the word will come that we must Obey. But even obedience won't be enough to protect those who have been targeted.

I note that when I point out some of these things online -- my main communications outlet these days since I have been unable to get around much -- the response tends to fall into two categories: "So what?" and "What about all the people Obama has targeted or Hillary would have targeted" -- meaning the overseas targets, for the most part, and the false accusation that "Hillary would have started WWIII, so there!"

In other words there is no empathy whatever for those who have really been targeted and will be targeted at home or abroad. That's because according to the tenets of the New Model Social Contract, everyone who is targeted deserves their beat down and then some. If they have been targeted then they've done something or are something to deserve it by definition.

This is little different than the primitive version of White Supremacy that Trump and many of his followers seem to believe made America Great. And they can and will restore that greatness to the wild cheers of the multitude.

I doubt it will go quite that way, but that's what they believe. At this point, as they salivate over the power they will be able to wield, they'll believe almost anything about what they can do to punish the Other.

If the multitude chooses not to cheer, as they indicate through their rejection of Trump and his cronies in office (by votes and through protest actions), they themselves become targets, and repression becomes general. Commands and threats to Sanctuary Cities have already been issued: They MUST obey the identify, round up and deport orders or they will be punished, first with loss of Federal funds, and then who knows? Actually, it's not that hard to guess where it goes from the order to the implementation. This has all been worked out in practice long since. The models exist. The authority exists. The motivation exists now among Trump's followers. We only have a couple of months before the hammer drops.

The first thing the Nazis did to consolidate their power was to forcefully eliminate their political opposition. Socialists and Communists were rounded up, put in camps, some were murdered pour encourager les autres and others were publicly shamed or put on bogus show trials. All this was for the edification of the masses who needed to learn right off the bat that dissent and political opposition would not be tolerated. It worked. Opposition collapsed within weeks or months of the installation of the Nazis to rule over Germany. There was no more public opposition to them because all of the opposition had been suppressed.

Our case won't be the same, partly because Our New Model Rulers are not Nazis. There may be Nazis among their followers, but if there are, they are few and they won't be given the keys to the kingdom. At least not right off.

These New Model Rulers ARE White Supremacists. Let's not fool ourselves about that. It's clear as a bell, and that's one of the main reasons why so many black and brown and other targeted groups are angry and fearful. White Supremacy is not a good thing for most of those who aren't white or don't conform to the standards imposed by "liberated" white folks. That shouldn't be hard to understand, but for some reason I can't fathom, it is inconceivable to those who benefit from White Supremacy that those who don't benefit would have anything to fear. (Ha ha, suckers.)

This Restoration of White Supremacy to its rightful rulership role in the West is supposed to represent the failure of Multiculturalism, diversity, and the social reinvention of the latter half of the 20th century, continuing to the "overwhelming victory" and "mandate" given to the New Model Rulers.

These thumping freaks have no idea. White Supremacy has never not been the ruling class's underlying premise. It's always been there, always at the foundation of ruling class, neo-imperial, neo-colonial practice. It never went away.

What was modified was overt prejudice and discrimination against women and people of color. What changed was not the foundations of rule, but the way it would be implemented and by whom. "Inclusion" meant that selected members of out groups would be included among the ruling cliques, and those included members would be trained and conditioned to believe and act on the tenets of the ruling class. It worked pretty darned well. Nowadays, there's very little difference in the way women and black and brown people who have been included among the ruling clicques approach their responsibilities and the way the white ruling class has always done so.

And yet White Supremacists find that intolerable. Inclusion is simply wrong. It must be stopped and reversed forthwith, and so it will be.

The untermenschen must be returned to their place -- and they will be.

It's been quite stunning to watch the political class and nearly all the mass media obey their New Boss even before he takes the throne. This includes Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, both of whom, along with almost all the Democratic Party hierarchy and the few remaining elected Democrats have pledged their troth and loyalty to the incoming regime. Guys, this is a reason why you lose elections time after time after time.

I can detect a certain sly undertone in Obama's "graciousness" toward Trump and his followers, but I don't know what he's thinking. Probably about whether his bolt-hole is stocked well enough if his protestations of loyalty aren't sufficient to protect him and his kith and kin. As for Mrs. Clinton, it's remarkable to me that she conceded when she did, before it was even confirmed that Mr. Trump would have enough electoral votes for victory in the EC. This was odd and uncalled for at least in my view, but she did it, and here we are.

Even odder to me was that as soon as Trump's victory was declared, all the raving about election rigging and Putin's interference suddenly and completely disappeared as if it had never been the apocalyptic theme of both campaigns. Whut? Was the election rigged? Well, we don't talk about that, we are told to just accept the outcome, because the outcome is what those who were claiming it was rigged want. Was Putin's interference real? Who can say? It was promoted as real, but now... it's a mystery, and we will probably never know. We are told to just let it go.

Bizarre. Truly bizarre. But as they say, this has not been a "normal" election. I'll agree with that.

The fact that the political class and nearly all the mass media have essentially become Trump apologists if not outright supporters is, I think, instructive. The media and the political class are of course looking out for themselves. It's human nature and it's also "just business." Trump and his followers are hypervigilant about disloyalty and they condemn and threaten anyone who gets out of line. The higher their public profile, the more certain the threat and condemnation. Cf: the 'Hamilton' flap and many, many more. This is the way they work, and it will be the way they rule  -- backed up with the force multiplier of the Surveillance State and the more and more authoritarian and randomly violent Police State.

Oh boy.

They will have so many tools available for suppression and punishment of what they see as disloyalty, and I don't doubt they will use every one of them and invent more. It's simply their nature.

Bush and Obama used them but modestly compared to what it looks like the Trump regime intends to do.

And I notice that anytime someone openly suggests that suppression of dissent and the detection and punishment of disloyalty will be hallmarks of the Trump regime, there is usually immediate deflection: "What about Obama, what about Clintoon!!!!!" They did it too! Libya! Ukraine! Nazis! Yadda yadda!

Every time. In other words it's not supposed to matter what Trump and his followers have done or will do because Obama and Clintooon!!! Nonsense.

The oddest part of that concept of false reality is the frequently asked question, "Why weren't you protesting in the streets then instead of now?"

Hello? We were. Where were you? Where were they indeed. I think we know. Bunkered down for the most part, waiting and hoping for the Apocalypse.

Has it come? Not yet, no. But the signs and portents aren't very encouraging for those who would rather not endure it, which typically is most people most of the time.

There are plenty of crazies in the world, though, who look forward to the End Times-- for everyone else. Because of course they will survive. God has granted them grace after all.

Jeebus. I don't even want to go there.

It's been pointed out that the Restoration of White Supremacy is now a Thing practically everywhere in the Euro-American orbit. There's no escaping it as one by one, European and American polities "fall" to the White-Rightist resurgence. Well, didn't I warn years and years ago that if the Revolution is to come, it will come from the Right? Not the Left?

At that time, I was saying the Busheviks had perpetrated and got away with a Rightist coup and they were in the process of conducting and consolidating a counter-Revolution against their Leftish enemies, but it turns out that isn't quite what they were doing.

The so-called Left had already been vanquished under Clinton. There essentially weren't any Left enemies in the political realm any more. What the Busheviks were doing was consolidating neoLibCon rule and practice, not against a Left opposition but against any opposition.

They were demonstrating they were prepared to do anything necessary to ensure that this ideology became the permanent operating belief system of the government. They would have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams but for the failure of their wars and the collapse of the economy. Oh. That. Huh. Well.

It's not so much that they were incompetent as that they started off on the wrong foot and their ideology and belief system was so rigid and self-righteous they couldn't change course. They had to follow through with it, gross errors and all, no matter what. This is the bull-headedness of neoLibCons. Reality is simply not a factor in their world view. It seems to me that Mr. Bush, for all his manifest faults and failings woke up to the reality of the situation he and his henchmen had caused much earlier than the rest of them and he tried (and failed) to make a few course corrections.

It was then up to Obama and his team to correct as much of what had gone wrong as they could but without challenging the neoLibCon frame of rule. This he set out to do to the dismay of so many who bought into his con of "Hope and Change." There was very little of either during his reign. For so many of those who had suffered throughout the Endless Recession and for those overseas who were being subjected to random act of Death From Above or the horrors of political coups, civil wars, and "regime change," there was no hope, and only arbitrary change.

Obama's reign was a continuation of Bush's for all practical purposes.

And had Hillary won the prize, her reign would be a continuation of Obama's. In other words, little hope and no change.

Institutional neoLibConism would have gone unchallenged.

This election, however, neoLibConism was challenged and brought to the forefront by Bernie Sanders on the leftish side, and Donald Trump on the other side. Sanders presented a strong argument for the restoration and adaptation of the New Deal for Americans. His argument didn't really persuade me, although I voted for him in the primary. The issue for me was that the New Deal had its own flaws, and it took LBJ's Great Society programs to address some of the failings of the New Deal. And that, unfortunately, had triggered the reactionaries into undoing it all. So here we are.

We can't go back, we have to have a forward vision of what kind of society we want to live in an what kind of nation the United States should  be. Developing and stating that vision has been a perpetual failing of Democrats at least since Johnson, and neither Bernie nor Hillary were able to articulate a forward vision for the future. Bernie presented a good argument for specific reforms, but no vision that I could see. Hillary started off her campaign by saying "No, you can't." And she pretty much stuck with it throughout. Too clever by half.

Trump on the other hand didn't argue or say what couldn't be done. He persuaded (conned) by claiming whatever his listeners wanted or needed done could be done and he was the one to do it. He would take care of whatever they felt they needed or wanted. He was the one.

So his listeners could project almost any unmet need onto him and come to believe that he would take care of it. That's the nature of a con artist, which Trump has shown himself to be at a level that almost matches Mr. Obama's ability to con the masses.

Try as she might, Hillary couldn't do it. And Bernie refused outright to con his listeners.

So here we are.

Where do we go from here? It's conventional wisdom that the protests won't work, they may backfire instead. Perhaps. They're still in their nascent stage and how and whether they continue to grow and spread remains to be seen. It's wrong in my view to dismiss them as irrelevant because that just feeds the fictional beliefs of the other side. We must not comfort the comfortable.

I think it's more than interesting that the Trump followers insist that the protests are an attempt at a Color Revolution, funded by the Arch-Devil George Soros. What nonsense. But if that's their belief, I say take every advantage of it. Fuck with their minds. It should be easy given their inherent paranoia.

It's obvious that the elected Democrats (few as they are) are hopeless collaborators with the New Model Rulers. We're screwed six ways from Sunday if we rely on them for anything. They won't help, nor they stand athwart the barricades. Nope. Not them.

Mass media is totally out of touch, and they won't challenge authority, no matter who wields it or how, if it means their bottom line suffers. Since they are facing signs and portents of coming restrictions on how and what they report, they are unlikely to be any kind of help for the powerless, and they may go from constant propaganda to full-on cheer leading for Himself.

If anything is to be done, it will have to be done outside the system.

Hang on, the times are about to get a lot more interesting.

A little REM to cheer us up?