“Thankful” . . . for What, Exactly?

Franck Antoine-Bail, Cutting the Pumpkin, 1910.

3,362 words

In a few days, we Americans are supposed to be “giving thanks.” This normally involves getting together with members of your extended family and feasting. Turkey. Stuffing. Biscuits. Blasphemous, unnameable casseroles that combine foods man was never meant to combine, concealed beneath dubious sauces. With the exception of families that say grace before eating, most American Thanksgiving dinners seldom involve anyone actually discussing what they have to be thankful for. Given that the year is 2020, it may be best that we continue to observe this latter custom.

Just what the hell does anyone have to be thankful for this year? I suppose one thing is that “they” are allowing us to have Thanksgiving at all. The CDC has warned Americans not to travel, not to cook together, and to wear masks (presumably between bites). Mayors and governors around the country have imposed arbitrary limits on the number of people who may attend your Thanksgiving dinner. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has urged New Yorkers to cancel Thanksgiving and to “stay away” from family members. But so far, he has made canceling Thanksgiving voluntary. New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s arbitrary limit on Thanksgiving gatherings is five persons. This is the same figure endorsed by President-Elect Presumptive Joe Biden, with a maximum of ten but then only “socially distanced, wearing masks.” However, Grisham has stated that such rules are impossible to enforce.

But whence comes such defeatism? That’s not the Left I know! And, of course, there is still time for these asshats to cancel Thanksgiving altogether. We can easily imagine the likes of Cuomo, or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or California Governor Gavin Newsom (more on him in a moment) announcing at the very last minute, “I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry, but there are too many cases. Just too many. We must cancel Thanksgiving. Those found to be violating the prohibition on Thanksgiving will be arrested. Neighbors are encouraged to call authorities if they suspect a violation is taking place next door . . .”

Virginia Wesleyan University just expelled a member of the women’s basketball team after she hosted an early Thanksgiving gathering for teammates at her home. The thirteen team members who attended the dinner were suspended from on-campus housing by the university, which claims that the event violated its guidelines on “social distancing.” Of course, the chances of these young, in-shape college athletes even getting a runny nose from COVID are about like their chances of being struck by lightning. Could they transmit it to their eighty-year-old great-grandparents, or their eighty-year-old English prof? Absolutely. But the answer to this is to isolate those most vulnerable and let the rest of us get on with our lives.

This sensible suggestion is definitely not what our leaders want to hear. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio just closed all the city’s schools again — even though children appear to be largely immune to the virus (as of today, only 138 people under the age of 18 have died of COVID in the entire US, and I would wager my life savings that every single one of them had a serious pre-existing condition). Now de Blasio is saying it’s only a matter of days or weeks before he is “forced” to close gyms and restaurants again. Because lockdowns worked so well the first time.

I think we’ve all figured out at this point that these people are taking a perverse pleasure in using their arbitrary power to make the rest of us miserable.

O’Brien paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”

Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.

“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.” [1]

You can buy Jef Costello’s The Importance of James Bond here

The Whitmers, Newsoms, Cuomos, and Faucis of this world remind me of Britain’s notorious “hanging judge,” Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard. According to his clerk, Goddard had the habit of ejaculating when passing a death sentence, “so that a fresh pair of trousers had to be brought to court on those occasions.” And there were many such occasions, just as you might imagine. Sensing that Britain would one day abolish the death penalty (as did occur in 1965), thus depriving him of such an exquisite pleasure, Goddard launched a campaign in 1953 to bring back flogging. He failed, and it is just as well: flogging would have been a poor substitute.

I can just hear de Blasio screeching, “Isolate the most vulnerable?! Let everyone else get on with their lives?! But that would deprive me of the pleasure of ejaculating in my pants every time I put a restaurant or a bar or a gym out of business.”

That our overlords are not actually worried about COVID, and do not believe their own bullshit or follow their own rules is now readily apparent to everyone. A few months ago, there was Nancy Pelosi getting her hair done in a California salon — something other Californians were forbidden to do. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot did the same thing, claiming that she has to look her best, given that she’s in the public eye. Hard to sympathize here: if you’ve got the Innsmouth Look like this woman does, a haircut is not going to make much of a difference.

After the election, Lightfoot was out partying, maskless, on the streets of her city, celebrating the apparent Biden victory. When challenged about this, she responded, “There are times when we actually do need to have a relief and come together, and I felt like that was one of those times. That crowd was gathered whether I was there or not.” As we have repeatedly seen, COVID simply takes the day off when maskless Democrats congregate. It is a strange, inscrutable virus, this China bug. Andrew Cuomo has also been repeatedly spotted maskless, despite telling the rest of us that if we don’t mask up we are guilty of murder. Here he is out and about maskless, big as you please, with what we assume is a dog on the end of that leash (though it might as well be his constituents):

Bill de Blasio, Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein — they’ve all gotten in on the act. (You can find a nice summary of liberal COVID hypocrisy here.) But the pièce de résistance came from Monsieur le Gouverneur Newsom and his petite soirée at the French Laundry in Yountville, California. Newsom gathered with a dozen other people at this restaurant, one of the most expensive in the country, to celebrate the birthday of a megadonor. When it was pointed out later that this had violated the governor’s own COVID regulations, Newsom’s people lied and said that the dinner had been held “outdoors,” with plenty of distancing. Then a photo was released (snapped by another French Laundry patron) showing Newsom and company dining indoors, maskless, and sitting so close they were literally rubbing elbows. Newsom scrambled to apologize, stating “I made a bad mistake. I should have stood up and . . . drove back to my house.” But this only made matters worse. As Tucker Carlson pointed out, are we supposed to believe that Newsom got to the restaurant and was surprised to see how many people turned out . . . for a party he himself had arranged?

Friends, we are now officially at the “let them eat cake” point. But it is not just that our masters arrogantly defy the rules under which the rest of us suffer, while dining in style on white truffles and caviar (at a minimum of $1,200 per person, sans alcohol and gratuity). It is also that they are exploiting the COVID crisis for political ends that go way beyond the recent election. I was warning readers about this way back in April, before anyone ever heard the words “Great Reset.” Now “The Great Reset” is trending all over the place. Those who rule us are openly speaking of COVID as an “opportunity.” Quoth Justin Trudeau: “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change.”

After video of Trudeau saying just this went viral, the Canadian PM actually responded by insisting that the Great Reset is a “conspiracy theory.” But as James Delingpole has pointed out, the Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory because its proponents speak about it openly. They are not hiding anything, and the expression “Great Reset” is their own language. The central player in the whole thing is the World Economic Forum, led by one Klaus Schwab, who everyone on the right is now likening, plausibly, to Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

What exactly is the Great Reset? The best place to start reading about it is an opinion piece published by the WEF itself, which describes what the world of 2030 could be like if we all followed the orders of Herr Schwab. I can’t resist quoting some of the choicer bits:

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city — or should I say, “our city.” I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes. . . .  Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much. . . . It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. . . . In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

So, basically, we will own nothing and have no privacy. (I am suddenly reminded of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s vision of such a future.) But all the stuff that we get to use but not own has to be owned by somebody, right? Of course: it’ll be owned by people much more important than you. And your access to all of this is not unconditional. Be careful what you say or do, who you hang out with, or what you post on social media, or you could lose access to all these things on which you are totally dependent, but do not own yourself. That’s where “social credit” comes in. And, yes, the whole thing is being coupled elsewhere with sinister talk about “racial justice” and curbing “hate speech.” The author of this piece about 2030, speaking as a dweller in the brave new world of the future, sheds crocodile tears over those “left behind”:

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kinds of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

This is like something out of dystopian fiction. But you haven’t seen anything yet:

Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me. All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth.

This essay caused so much alarm, the author added the following statement to both the beginning and the end of the piece:

Author’s note: Some people have read this blog as my utopia or dream of the future. It is not. It is a scenario showing where we could be heading — for better and for worse. I wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development. When we are dealing with the future, it is not enough to work with reports. We should start discussions in many new ways. This is the intention with this piece.

But we’re not buying it, since those in the orbit of Herr Schwab have advocated exactly the scenario this piece describes. And these are not a bunch of fringe kooks, by the way. Kooks, yes, but not fringe kooks. The WEF is not an outlier. Among those who have signed onto the Great Reset are the aforementioned Trudeau, Joe Biden (“build back better” is one of the Reset’s slogans), Boris Johnson, the Prince of Wales, and former Secretary of State John Kerry, to name just a few. Just recently, Kerry participated in a round table at the WEF, stating that the Great Reset was necessary to combat “populism”: “The notion of reset is more important than ever. . . . I personally believe . . . that we are at the dawn of an extremely exciting time. . . . I think Europe needs to look at this with Brexit and the rise of national populism.”

All of this material is publicly available, much of it on the WEF’s own site. The WEF also posts videos to YouTube. These videos have attracted thousands of negative comments, and, encouragingly, nothing but negative comments. Such as these:

“I don’t remember voting for these people to become god.”

“Welcome to George Orwell’s 1984. Absolutely terrifying.”

“This just sounds like slavery with extra steps.”

“Globalists are the virus.”

“‘People will demand more security.’ Don’t fall for this, the security he offers is the security of a prison!”

“It’s sadistic Globalists like this that want you disarmed, defenseless, and most of all. . . . . DEPENDENT.”

“These maniacs must be stopped.”

You can buy Jef Costello’s Heidegger in Chicago here

Now, despite the considerable alarm that has been raised over the Great Reset, the WEF is not walking back any of this, or even choosing to keep some of it under wraps from now on. They’re not at all worried that their schemes will be thwarted, because they believe (correctly) that they can depend upon the establishment to go along with much of it. They also believe (again, correctly) that they can depend upon the controlled media to “debunk” accurate accounts of the Great Reset, and to ban individuals who spread “conspiracy theories” about it from social media.

But should we actually be worried about the Great Reset? One of my best friends has poo-pooed the whole thing, saying of those like Schwab “these people are crazy; they’ll never get what they want.” He was particularly inclined to say this after Schwab came out saying that what he calls “the fourth industrial revolution” will “lead to a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity,” involving “implantable microchips that can read your thoughts.”

However, as nutty as all this is, it is being pushed by extremely influential people. Will they succeed in creating their utopia? Of course not, but they can cause an extraordinary amount of damage just by trying. Isn’t this what we have seen from the Left throughout its entire history? And now the Left has fused with the multi-nationals in an alliance so godawful, so sinister that “satanic” is the first word that comes to mind when I try to describe it. I don’t think I’ve used that word since I was nineteen, wearing a Baphomet ring, and chanting the Enochian Keys in my parents’ basement.

As that guy said earlier, “These maniacs must be stopped.”

So, I repeat the question: just what do we have to be thankful for? COVID hysteria and lockdowns; a rigged election; an odious ruling class we don’t seem able to rid ourselves of; an economy in the toilet; a media almost wholly devoted to Leftist propagandizing; censorship; the Great Reset. And I’ve said nothing so far about blacks and their enablers essentially demanding that the law not be enforced against them, and that whites be disarmed and sacrificed. Oh, yes, and then there’s “the great replacement.” How could I forget that? I saved the worst for last.

And yet, I am thankful. I won’t mention the little things I’m thankful for, like the Carnivore Diet, or the pretty decent home gym I’ve built over the last eight months. Instead, I will pick one thing only to share with you: I am thankful that people are finally waking up.

This is a daring claim: I know full well that I risk ridicule by saying this. It is fashionable among those in our set to be pessimistic about the prospects of people (meaning, of course, white people) awakening. Partly, this is the result of years of false predictions about some event or other that will now, definitely, absolutely cause people to “wake up.” But from the fact that those predictions were wrong, it does not follow that people (meaning, white people) will, in fact, never wake up. Circumstances change. Circumstances are changing. Very rapidly. But let’s add some nuance to this: “waking up” is not either/or; it is a process of becoming more wakeful. Is this happening? Absolutely.

I believe that we see signs of this everywhere. In fact, we see signs of our own influence — the influence of the Dissident Right — everywhere. We are succeeding, slowly but surely, in shifting the Overton Window. This is why the Left has been so keen to denounce us “deplorables”; to ban us, deplatform us, and dox us. If we were having no effect, they would mostly leave us alone. Individuals like Greg Johnson and Jared Taylor are targeted so relentlessly because they are reasonable and persuasive.

And their message is getting around. I recently had the opportunity to chat with a group of young, college-age conservatives. Folks, these were not the Young Republicans I was involved with back when I went to school. These kids were profoundly red-pilled. They had been to this website, and to Amren, and to VDare. They knew about the Great Replacement, and had lots to say about the Great Reset.

There is hope.

A recent Rasmussen poll reveals that 47% (of “all voters,” not just Republicans) believe it’s likely that Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure a Biden win (50% disagree). It’s hard to overstate the significance of the fact that almost half of those surveyed believe that the election was rigged. As I have argued elsewhere, this election is going to red-pill the 70 million Americans who voted for Trump. (How? In what ways? Read my analysis.) Thus, even if Trump winds up losing this election (as seems likely), there is a great deal of hope. Indeed, his loss, I have argued, would be better for us than a win. See also my take on why civil war is inevitable (a good thing, in my book). Oh, and on the subject of the Overton Window, look at this too.

So, on Thanksgiving Day, enjoy defying the ruling class with your maskless, crowded family dinner. And as you try to figure out what’s in that casserole your Aunt Margot made, give a silent thanks — for, as I never tire of saying, Adjustment Day is coming.

If you want to support Counter-Currents, please send us a donation by going to our Entropy page and selecting “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every weekend on DLive.

Don’t forget to sign up for the twice-monthly email Counter-Currents Newsletter for exclusive content, offers, and news.

Notes

[1] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 279.