Counter-Currents
1,912 words
Sagte ich doch.
Te lo deje.
I told you so.
Savory words in whatever language you say them in. These days I’ve been indulging myself. With a touch of Schadenfreude, I’ve been tactlessly reminding my friends and acquaintances of their hopeless naiveté. That would be a little over a year ago. They were regarding the coronavirus threat and the “remedies” as temporary annoyances after which “normal” would return unscathed in a few, short months. When I said: “‘The crisis’ is not going to be over for a very long time, maybe never” they looked back at me like I was the village idiot. “Fine,” I thought. “A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.”
A year has gone by, and . . . well? As a neophyte prophet, so far, so good. No cavalry and “back to normal” to our rescue. And, despite the vaccines, the defenestration of Trump, the installation of Hua Guofeng, I mean Joe Biden at Ritalin-assisted warp speed discharging a flood of decrees, we’re already looking at “normal.” And it looks like poor Uncle Bob on a slab at the morgue after his autopsy.
It should not be that hard to understand why the new normal is not going to resemble the old one. Yet obstacles have been in place that make it not so obvious. To get a clear-eyed look at the massive scope of the change requires (a) coming to grips with some realities so ugly that most optimistically inclined, MSM-conditioned Americans are loath to contemplate them, and (b) the recognition of two fundamental features of political power and drawing the implications from it that takes a level of cynical realism and a dose of courage to embrace.
First, the ugly realities. 2020 brought the lockdowns, their economic devastation, the social isolation with its pathologies, and the fear reigned down by the 24-by-7 CNN talking heads shrieking “death is stalking us everywhere.” The routines, habits, customs, and relationships that give the lives of most Americans sustenance and meaning have been permanently ruptured by the maniacs of the ruling class. Millions of people who lived independently now depend on government printing-press money. To use an accurate but ugly word, the government is “beggaring” its people. And as the old saw goes: “Beggars can’t be choosers,” which is the whole point, to be brutally honest about it. One has to be willfully blind not to see the massive shift of power and resources from the many to the few. Do the few who have made the rules to make us, the many, behave during this crisis have any interest or incentives to reverse that trend? Occasionally, a bold, independent source of news reporting gives us an inside glimpse of those in the power set in flaunting disregard of the rules they set for the rest of us. Our organizations, institutions, schools, churches have fallen under the arbitrarily administered supervision of state and local “authorities” with a bewildering, inconsistent array of restrictions — more shifting away of power and stripping away of independence.
Economic independence, freedom to associate, and confidence in the competence of the authorities are not the sorts of things that can overnight be whisked away and then returned intact and undamaged. Not that returning them in any recognizable form is what the bosses are contemplating. They have us, as Rudyard Kipling put it, “by the short hairs.” No reason they would let go other than goodwill and decency. Pause a moment to stop laughing, then continue reading.
We’re told the vaccines are the vehicles of “back to normal.” This brings us to that closer look at political power. With that, we can understand why “back to normal” is a pipe dream.
Two bedrock truths about power should be noted here. First, politicians in power devote themselves, first and foremost, not to the wellbeing of their constituents, but to staying in power. The only way they relinquish their power is by being forced to, which is why we have elections. The problem with our elections is that the politicians themselves have enormous control over the election processes — their financing, the selection process of candidates, the way the media covers them. They keep recycling the old chestnut, “I’ll be different,” and it seems to work. This also seems to be a good argument for scoffing whenever we hear them lauding “our democracy.” As Mark Twain may have once quipped: “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” So painfully true. Pondering the national election cycles confirms what we already know: the outcomes have little to do with the way we get to lead our lives. Rather, elections are an orchestrated distraction from the usual hanky-panky of the oligarchs as they go about their business of “punishing their enemies and rewarding their friends,” as President Obama put it during his stint in office.
You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s novel Toward the Bad I Kept on Turning here.
Consider some of those perched at the top who have devoted decades to staying in power and specifically note how old they are. Review this list and then ask yourself: Should we call this government we live under “a democracy” or a “geriatric oligarchy”? President Joe Biden, 78; Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, 80; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, 70; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 78; House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, 81; Majority House Whip James Clyburn, 80; California Senator Diane Feinstein, 87 and seeking reelection; Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, 87; Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, 86; Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, 86.
The average age for U.S. Senators is 62, which coincidentally and ironically is the age American voters can begin taking Social Security retirement benefits. We, the ruled over, retire at an appropriate age: they, the rulers, refuse and continue to punish us while they pretend to care. I forgot to mention Maxine Waters: that circus-tent-performing harridan is 82. In a sane universe, she’d be the star attraction in the dementia unit at Crazy Horse Retirement Village.
At advanced ages far beyond which most Americans move into retirement, this antique leadership menagerie with so many obvious signs of senescence and decrepitude maintains its jealous, tenacious grasp on power. Because? Because they can’t help themselves; just like dogs scratch fleas and return to their vomit, it’s what they do. “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” Only death or complete collapse into senility will rid us of these wheeler-dealers in their dotage.
The second bedrock truth about power is: no politician, no matter how honest, upright and benevolent, will ever say: “Vote for me; I will do less. I want less power.” It’s axiomatic: Politicians are in the business of accumulating power. Whatever power they get they keep and work overtime to augment it. Ask yourself: are there fewer laws, rules, regulations, restrictions, today than there were ten or twenty years ago? Do you think in ten years there will be fewer? Will all of these laws and regulations improve the quality of your life?
This truth is what should convince you that the new “normal” is going to be very different than the old one. The lockdowns were a test case to see how sellable “public health” is as a cover to replace the rule of law by executive decree — more power. It was astonishingly easy. By mid-2020, another antique, the 80-year-old career bureaucrat Anthony Fauci, slithered out of anonymity and stepped into his new assignment as de facto national dictator with a supporting cast of governors, mayors, and local officials thrilled beyond their wildest dreams at the sudden, broad scope of their “bossing people around” powers. The dictator-chick of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, who goes by “Governor,” released page upon page of ukases that had the coherence and consistency you’d find in a conversation with inmates in an insane asylum. “Jet skis, motorboats or other comparable watercraft are prohibited, while canoes, sailboats and kayaks are allowed.” “Prohibited” and “allowed” — a schoolmarm drunk with power. My most indelible memory of 2020 is driving north on an empty Interstate 75 with the huge signs above the overpasses flashing “Stay Home.”
Fauci’s 2019 salary, by the way, was reported by Forbes at $417,608 in 2019, making him the highest-paid federal employee for that year, more even than his boss Donald Trump at $400,000. Fauci and the edict-crazed junior overlords collected their paychecks while small business collapsed and service people and blue-collar workers filed for employment and prepared for the government handouts.
The lessons that the oligarchs took away from 2020 were important and far-ranging. First, they saw how easy it was for them to make Americans behave as pod-people, masked-up and fearful, scurrying about in public, then retreating, as ordered, to the safety of their nests, like rodents hoping not to disturb the slumber of Mr. Covid Cat.
About the prophylactic effectiveness of the masking and social distancing, I profess ignorance. Beyond the contagion concerns, what I can say is that the level of moralizing and propagandizing relating to these practices arouse the suspicion that the masks, particularly, were intended to become visible evidence of probity, badges of moral certification, the absence of which would identify a public health menace or “enemy of the state” and bring down the shaming ritual and even punishment. Big journalism, big business, and the government propaganda organs joined together in perfect alignment with wartime patriotic slogans with Orwellian gems like “Coming together while standing apart.”
It has the same logical consistency as “War is Peace.”
The worst long-term implications of the success of the 2020 power grab are: (a) The oligarchs suddenly have a lot more power than they did a short time ago, (b) they are not about to relinquish any of it without being forced to, and (c) they have a precedent to use it now whenever they care to lock down the economy and curtail the freedoms of everyday social interaction that until a year ago were taken for granted. Rahm Emmanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, is today widely quoted with this: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” The coronavirus crises were a grand opportunity that the ruling class jumped on and, as we can see, did all sorts of things it never did before. Much of what they have done will not be undone.
The “new normal” will be a relaxing and contracting of “the grip,” a rolling wave of the bosses doing things they “could not do before” — lockdowns, restrictions, and economic redistribution that favors their friends and punishes their enemies. As I have argued previously: all the conditions for a public health dictatorship are in place: a massive propaganda government and mass media campaign focusing on an “emergency” crisis that justifies “extraordinary powers”; demonization of skeptics; a massive shift of resources and power; and the promise of a panacea to make the crisis disappear.
This the “new normal.” It is here and firmly established. It is called “a public health dictatorship.”
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23 comments
2021 does have some good news, as those mommy-says-you-can’t-play-outside signs are no longer MUTCD-compliant, which might be an amusing way to waste a DOT bureaucrat’s time if you’re feeling uniquely bored during a government workday.
In regards to the sept-and-octa-generian nature of our oligarchic overlords, I suspect that this has as much to do with the voting public as it does with the managerial class and their power grabs. I DO NOT downplay the nepotism that exists among them, nor the gluttonous thirst for more power…however, I have learned over the last 5-10 years as millennials have come of age and assumed positions of power, that a scary percentage of people under the age of 40 would be deemed clinically insane by standards of only a few decades ago. AOC is insanely popular among the far left (I even suspect begrudgingly so with an alarming number of right wing dissidents as well). Therefore, for the vast majority of us who are north of 40, especially the still sizable Boomer age group, the relative sanity of the “old f%#£ers” has kept us from embracing the up-and-comers.
That is definitely going to change in future elections. I will no longer be voting, as many of us on the right have vowed, and there will be an avalanche of crazy millennial leftists grabbing the power vacuum left by the dying boomers. I Can only hope that the dissident movements that we have been building will eventually allow for an alternative to the Republicans through which to establish power once the loony millennial leftists have derailed everything.
I first heard the word “Gerentocracy” in the early 80’s used to describe the elderly leadership of the Soviet Politburo. But now, looking back, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and even Suslov all look like spring chickens compared to the fossils that now make up American political leadership, and even when Brezhnev was at his doddering worst, he could never be characterized as a semi-vegetable, as can Joe Biden.
Great article!!
I have read many articles about Covid including many from LewRockwell.com. All of the LewRockwell.com articles are good, but yours is the best.
These geriatric politicians are a good representation of Whites in general — old and feeble.
When Kipling coined “by the short hairs” he was referring to the hairs of the neck.
The more popular British variant today is “Got him by the short and curlies”, which clearly refers to the pubic hairs. A rare example of vulgar usage being an improvement on Rudyard’s original.
General Honore threatening to run Josh Hawley out of DC is a good example of the senile oligarchy.
GenX really has to melt down the bones of these nags for glue.
For a while longer we can point out that, unless you belong to a privileged racial or economic class, the days of a simple thing like going to your child’s high school game – or any public event – are over. In a few more years, even the truly naive will understand that “normal” equals complete powerlessness in most areas of life.
As the following article points out, the government keeps crying wolf for a CCP bioweapon psyop. No one buys it anymore. Two more weeks and we’ll open up again . . . LOL
https://www.culturecritique.com/environment-health/crying-wolf-in-the-china-virus-twilight-zone/?logout=1
Direct link:
https://www.culturecritique.com/environment-health/crying-wolf-in-the-china-virus-twilight-zone/
Thanks for this, it was a fascinating read.
Great essay, thanks. …
“My most indelible memory of 2020 is driving north on an empty Interstate 75 with huge signs above the overpasses flashing “Stay Home”.
Tears of laughter were streaming, though I had no idea of the size and importance of I-75, since I’ve rarely had the opportunity to visit the East Coast or Mid-West (other than fly-over — mea culpa), so I nearly choked laughing when I looked on a map and found it stretches from Tampa, FL, clear to Sault St. Marie in Michigan at the Canadian border! Good grief! I wonder how far that flashing message accompanied the deserted road.
Here I had been thinking, these many years, that Route 50 in Nevada, from Reno to Ely, was “The Loneliest Road in America” — as it advertises itself — and I’d love to know if they too wasted taxpayers’ money stringing the same signs along that deserted desert road as well. Anyway, you sure made my day with that observation.
By the way, I’m thinking of making a mask announcing “Caution: Stay Away! I Might be a White Nationalist!”
“Te lo dije,” I think. Not “Te lo deje.”
“Te lo dije,” I think. Not “Te lo deje.”
You’re a pedantic poop, I think. Not a very good one.
Good to see this article posted here. I often think CC is missing the priorities.
The biggest issues are: lockdowns and coerced/mandatory vaccines.
There is no future for white people (or any other ethnic group) if the poison assault on our health is not stopped.
Your article left me with the impression that in your opinion, since we are never going to return to normal, then the triumph of globalism over White nationalism is a fait accompli.
If this is the case, why do you bother writing? Why don’t you just commit suicide?
Brexit, Trump, and a plethora of other populist/nationalist near-triumphs were achieved NOT by people listening to the mainstream media, but by people going to alternative ‘heretical’ media and then spreading such ideas and views to normal people in bars, cafes, over garden fences and during other such social interactions. Despite the brainwashing, liberalist lunacy cannot stand up to hearing common sense truisms spoken by a down-to-earth local person you have known and respected for years. Far too many people were waking up to the what the liberal globalists were up to, and in terms of a tipping point we were almost there. The Jewish supremacists never tell us what their ideal world, Marxist-liberal-globalist, what they are working towards, will look like – understandably so, as decent people would be appalled at the prospect. Nevertheless, enough people were waking up to the truth to make things nigh impossible for them. White genocide is not popular among most white people. So the-powers-that-be have decided that not only have they to shut down the alternative media, but they have to stop us socializing too. It’s time for tyranny. They have to finish off the destruction of our communities that has been ongoing for so many decades, and do it quickly, before they can complete their white genocide agenda. For that they needed a big lie. Tony Blair showed how it could be done with his Iraq WMD hoax. A WMD virus is the perfect excuse for the new tyranny. We are in the end game now, and the enemy of white civilization is making a dash to the finish line. We have to do some serious thinking. Let’s see if we can trip him up.
It’s certainly possible.
Although, in seclusion though many people got their villages back and had time to fix property and rethink what they like and what they want.
I do think the disease has been weaponized but I also understand that Boris is a racist and HBD red pilled guy. Covid19 may have reversed the In flow of Blacks to the UK. Certainly everyone knows that the disease has raged through Birmingham London which are multiracial cesspits. If done right a biosecure regime could be a close thing to an ethnostate.
The point is that the WMDs in Iraq were a hoax to make us go along with destroying Iraq in the same way that this WMD covid virus is also a hoax in that it is making us go along with permanently destroying our rights, freedoms, economies and societies. The powers-that-be are using this hoax pandemic to crush us. If the bubonic plague hits the white world (31 deaths in the Congo last week) we might have a genuinely deadly pandemic on our hands which would be a different matter altogether, but don’t expect our secret rulers to slow up their white genocide liberal lunacy agenda even then – they will only stop this agenda when we make them stop it. And we do THAT by taking back control of our own nations.
All around lockdowned London banners are springing up saying “ Welcome to the UK! ukhk.org “ There are 5 million Hong Kong Chinese eligible to settle here and and boats full of “refugees” from the EU land daily on English beaches – all this during a supposedly deadly pandemic.
Yes, if somebody has invested so many efforts, and knowledge, and money in the creating of Covid-19, he certainly assured, that this virus would not work only one or two years or that it would be “defeated” with a little piece of cloth on the nose. And of course, nobody will refuse of such wonderful means of social control.
Geriatric rulers are surely not good, but the older people generally are more sane and not so brainwashed as the younger. Maybe in America it is different, but in (Western) Europa the men and women 60, 70, at least 50 years old are more “normal” in their political attitudes and are less afraid to speak openly, than the younger (till 40-45 years, I think). The younger are totally brainwashed, almost totally Leftists, Tolerasts, Progressives and Democrazies, Feminists and LGBT-fans. They are “Refugees-welcome”-mad, they hate the heritage of their nations and their race, they are convinced Globalists. The best working force, consumers, and cannon food for Globalist forces. The older are not so stupid.
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