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December
27
2022

What It’s Really About
James Howard Kunstler

“It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” —FBI Press release in response to the Twitter files.

What’s most appalling about the Twitter revelations of the Intel Community’s years-long strangle-hold on social media is not just the evil fuckery itself of the FBI, CIA, and others colluding to gaslight the US electorate, but the fact that there is no institution in the land that can intervene to adjudicate or discipline these rogue agencies. Nobody expects the FBI’s parent, the Department of Justice, to look into any of this.

Not so many years ago, the force balancing criminal misconduct in the government was the news media, even if the reporters and editors claimed to be on the political Left. Or, shall we say, especially if they were on the Left, because the Left in those days was fervently for free speech. Reporters of that long-ago day (Seymour Hersh, John Sack, and Michael Herr) would be out digging up the true facts of a big event — say, the US Military’s deadly blunders and scams in Vietnam — and editors would plaster screaming headlines about it on the front page: GENERAL SAYS “WE HAD TO DESTROY THE VILLAGE TO SAVE IT!” When the venerable news-spieler Walter Cronkite of CBS began to hint that the war was a fiasco, public opinion across the country shifted decisively against it.

Of course, those crimes and sins were committed against people in distant lands. Now, the administrative weight of the US is rolling over its own citizens, and the Constitution — and the news media is uniformly and enthusiastically in favor of suppressing the news about it. How that happened is one of several cosmic mysteries of our time, along with who exactly runs “Joe Biden,” and how did the many nations of Western Civ adopt in lock-step Covid-19 response policies aimed at harming their own people?

No reporter even of the alt.news division even tried to get inside the head of New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet during the years of RussiaGate. Did he believe all that crap his paper was putting out? Now, you realize, it’s established fact (in the federal court record) that the Steele Dossier and everything spun off of it was a flim-flam confected by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But even at the time, say 2017 to 2019, independent journalists were reporting the truth about it — for example, the FBI’s long-running fraud in the FISA Court — while The New York Times ardently inveighed against any emerging fact-pattern that broke through its wall of propaganda. The Times was showered with awards for that, including the Pulitzer Prize for its completely fallacious RussiaGate coverage.

One easy answer is that The Times and many of its “legacy” cohorts — The WashPo, CBS, NBC, and ABC — have volunteered to be the public relations office of the Democratic Party, covering-up anything and everything the Party does against the public interest. And while that appears to be the case, it still doesn’t explain how these outfits became the enemies of truth itself, and by extension, enemies of reality.

The easy answer to that is the psychological derangement provoked by Donald Trump when he entered politics, and the absolute fugue state of deranged fury that blossomed among the “elite” when Mr. Trump had the temerity to actually win a national election — since he was perceived to be the avatar of all the sub-human boobs dwelling in the Great Darkness between New York and Los Angeles.

But that explanation has an odor of contrivance. Those benighted boobs were the very people who most deserved the Democratic Party’s sympathy, the folks who had toiled in the great factories, now shuttered and off-shored, who volunteered for America’s wars without complaint, who were suffering now in idleness and poverty. The party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman suddenly wanted to crush these “deplorable” people. Huh…?

Could it be that the educated and creatives of the coastal cities, the thinking class, the politically active on the Left, had become so callous and arrogant as to dismiss the suffering “little people” they once worked to protect and defend — or had that just been an act? One thing for sure: the Democratic Party lost this group as core constituents and they had to search elsewhere for a voter base.

Another thing had changed along the way: the Democratic Party became dominated by activist women, who exhibited two outstanding tendencies of behavior: they tended to make decisions on the basis of emotion… their feelings about this-and-that; and they were much more ruthless in political battle than men — their emotions eclipsed age-old principles, such as the ideas of fair play. In short, they resorted almost automatically to dirty fighting.

That is probably at the heart of what is most confounding and vexing about the great political division in America these days. We are under a vile spell of pervasive dirty fighting. Dirty fighters have no respect for reality or for principle; they do whatever they can do to win the fight. Bad faith is the order of the day. Hence, the battle over how elections will be conducted and who gets to vote. You can read about it in Monday’s (Dec 26th) New York Times, an above-the-fold story titled: Democrats, Feeling New Strength, Plan to Go on Offense on Voting Rights. (As long as it stays up.) The story says:

Now it is Democrats, who retained all but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include creating automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote before they turn 18, returning the franchise to felons released from prison and criminalizing election misinformation.”

Note the last three words. The Times boldly announces that opinion about elections should now be subject to criminal prosecution if it deviates from whatever the official story is — as determined by whom? Well, that would be a juridical apparatus controlled by the Democratic Party. Who else might it be? The Times doesn’t venture to say. You can also see that the Party doesn’t believe in any principle that states who or why somebody should be qualified to vote. Sign up people who manage to get a driver’s license, whether they are citizens or not. Sign up the convicted criminals and the children. Dirty fighting = dirty elections.

This is the direction our country has been going in. I can offer only one note of consolation about what looks like a pretty demoralizing predicament: what you’re seeing is the end product of a certain era in the late-stage life of a society. Obviously, it has ended badly. The catch is we are entering a new era of American life, an era of deep economic disorder, especially, that will go very hard on the nation, that will rearrange many of the social categories we take for granted now, that will compel people of all classes to pay attention to reality, to what actually works and who actually knows how to work what works. In that disposition of things, dirty fighting will be recognized for what it is.

Perhaps the biggest part of that unspooling event will be the bankruptcy and the failure of the government in Washington, its consequent loss of legitimacy, and the end of its ability to control and harass the people who live under it. Think I’m kidding? Stand by now and wait for it.

 

 

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

 

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