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Sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader:
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How Did American Capitalism Mutate Into American Corporatism?
The de facto state actors.
ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS
By Jeffrey A. Tucker
In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them.
I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.
The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn’t care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They would usher in a new age of people power.
Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob..
Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. They are advertisers but also massive purchasers of the main product too.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. We do not know how much Google has received from the US government, but it is surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal government hands out in contracts.
Microsoft also has a large share of government contracts. In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.
Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is government itself. As a result, the old laughing stock line about backwards tech at government agencies is no more. Today government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too.
It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.
The same situation of course exists for pharmaceutical companies. This relationship dates even further back in time and is even tighter to the point that there is no real distinction between the interests of the FDA/CDC and large pharmaceutical companies. They are one and the same.
In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called “high fructose corn syrup,” why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.
In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.
What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.
This used to go by the name “crony capitalism” which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.
The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system –have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream. We hardly know anymore for whom to cheer or boo in the great struggles of our time.
That’s how mixed up everything has become. We’ve clearly traveled a long way from the 1990s!
Some might observe that this has been a problem far back in time. Starting with the Spanish-American War, we’ve seen a merger of public and private as involving the munitions industry.
This is true. Many Gilded Age fortunes were wholly legitimate and market-based enterprises but others were gathered from the nascent military-industrial complex that began to mature in the Great War and involved a vast range of industries from industry to transportation to communications.
Of course in 1913, we saw the advent of a particularly egregious public-private partnership with the Federal Reserve, in which private banks merged into a unified front and agreed to service US government debt obligations in exchange for bailout guarantees. This monetary corporatism continues to vex us to this day, as does the military industrial complex.
How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends, and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes.
In other words, this is no longer just about private companies providing the bullets and bombs for both sides in a foreign war and obtaining the rebuilding contracts after. The military-industrial complex has come home, expanded to everything, and invaded every aspect of our lives.
It has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities.
In short, this corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism.
It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays, and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare.
This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious government contract.
How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.
And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organization than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker, and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.
We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.
This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes, and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets.
I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
Coming to terms with this intellectually is the major challenge of our times. Dealing with it juridically and politically seems like a much more daunting task, to say the least. The problem is complicated by the drive to purge serious dissent at all levels of society. How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once.
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When Islamist Terrorism disrupts tranquility, morality is the first matter that suffers because weak kneed politicians cave, seek a scapegoat and that scapegoat is always the victim of the terror.
When Hamas attacked and raped Israel, Israel became the object of hatred because it allowed anti-Semites to rise from the gutter and openly become the trash they have always been.
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More vitriol from a Communist.
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Bernie Sanders Speaks Out on Netanyahu and US in Gaza
(RightWing.org) – Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has slammed Israel’s prime minister over the ongoing war in Gaza. Sanders, who has called on the US to cut arms shipments to Israel, called Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “extremist” and said it needs to step aside to end the war. He also hinted that the US is “complicit” in civilian casualties in Gaza.
On March 10, Sanders appeared on CBS’s “Face The Nation” and discussed the Israel-Hamas war with host Margaret Brennan. The far-left senator, who has been criticizing US support to Israel for months, blasted the government for its history of military aid, condemned plans to send the Jewish state another $10 billion, and said there’s no point asking Netanyahu to end the war if we’re going to send him weapons anyway.
Brennan then asked if it was possible to have a ceasefire with Hamas, a group dedicated to destroying the Jewish state. Sanders compared the Iran-backed terrorist organization with Netanyahu’s government, “which is dedicated to destroying Hamas,” as if the two goals are equally evil. He then said there can’t be peace as long as Hamas runs Gaza and Netanyahu runs Israel.
Although the Biden administration has continued to send arms to Israel, President Biden is increasingly hostile to Netanyahu and his ruling Likud party. The Israeli government is now claiming Biden is trying to push the prime minister out of office — and it isn’t happy.
In a statement released to Israeli media by an unknown “senior official,” possibly Netanyahu himself, the country insisted it isn’t “a protectorate of the US” and the prime minister is elected by “Israeli citizens, and not anyone else.”
While Netanyahu’s popularity has collapsed after many blamed the October 7 massacre on his complacency, if Israelis believe the US is trying to change their government they’re likely to rally around the prime minister. Sanders’s latest comments aren’t going to help.
Copyright 2024, RightWing.org
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I applaud BIBI for giving the world the finger it so richly deserves!
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Dear Dick,
Israel’s war cabinet reportedly approved plans for an extensive operation in Rafah to root out the remaining Hamas battalions and leadership. The cabinet’s plans include a large-scale evacuation of civilians from the city.
"We need to make sure that 1.4 million people, or at least a significant amount of the 1.4 million, will move…to humanitarian islands that we will create with the international community," said the IDF military spokesman.
While the timing for the operation has not been announced, Israel has been steadfast in its commitment to finishing the job of driving Hamas from power in Gaza and ensuring the terror group cannot fulfill its promise to repeat October 7.
As the war has progressed in Gaza, Hamas leadership and operatives have rushed into – and beneath – Rafah, using innocent Palestinians as human shields to protect themselves and their weapons. Hamas is willfully putting countless Palestinians as risk for its own survival.
Reports: Hamas Demanding 1,000 Prisoners Released
Hamas has reportedly finally responded to the U.S.-brokered framework to pause fighting for six weeks in exchange for some hostages to be released and a surge of aid. The terror group has failed to respond for weeks to the deal. Israel has already agreed to it.
Reuters reports that Hamas’ demands for the deal include up to 1,000 prisoners to be released from Israeli jails, including 100 who are serving life sentences. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office characterized Hamas’ counter-offer as, "ridiculous demands," but also agreed to send Israeli officials to Cairo to continue negotiations.
The proposed framework would include the release of women, children, the elderly, and ill hostages.
Ramadan in Jerusalem
Israeli police and security officials are helping facilitate a peaceful Ramadan in Jerusalem and around the country despite efforts by Hamas to foment violence.
More than 80,000 worshippers prayed today at al-Aqsa Mosque on the first Friday of the month-long holiday.
Click here to read an AIPAC memo about Ramadan.
Meanwhile, two Israeli Arabs — Yosef Alzayadni and Hamza Alzayadni — are still being held captive by Hamas in Gaza.
Hamas Number 3 Likely Killed
Intelligence reports indicate that Hamas’ number 3 leader in the Gaza Strip, was likely successfully killed in a targeted strike carried out by the IDF last weekend. Known as the "shadow man," Marwan Issa was the principal deputy to the military commander – Mohammed Deif.
If successful, Issa would be the most prominent Hamas leader killed by Israel since October 7.
80% More Food into Gaza than Pre-October 7
Israel continues to expand the flow of aid and resources into Gaza. Yesterday, more than 240 aid trucks were transferred into Gaza and 80% more food trucks are entering Gaza than before October 7.
Israel also said that up to 44 trucks could be inspected per hour at the available crossings. "The problem isn’t opening more crossings, the problem is distributing the aid to the people in Gaza," said Colonel Elad Goren. "The international organizations do not have the capacity and have yet to take real steps to improve on distribution of aid across Gaza."
Prior to yesterday's convoy of 31 humanitarian aid trucks containing food and supplies into Gaza, armed Palestinians opened fire while Gazan civilians were awaiting the arrival of the aid convoy. According to the IDF, as aid trucks entered, the Palestinian gunmen continued shooting as the crowd of Gazans began looting the trucks. Additionally, a number of Gazan civilians were run over by the trucks.
Despite what the media is reporting, the IDF did not open fire at the aid convoy.
Yesterday also marked the first day that aid entered Gaza by land, sea, and air.
"While the IDF continues its humanitarian effort to supply food and humanitarian aid to the civilians of the Gaza Strip, Hamas terrorists continue to harm Gazan civilians who are seeking food – and Hamas is blaming Israel for it," the IDF said in a statement.
Continue to follow AIPAC on social media for the latest updates.
Sincerely,
Alisha Tischler
AIPAC Southeast Regional Director
+++The west’s abandonment of the Jews
Human rights culture has mainstreamed Hamas lies
By MELANIE PHILLIPS
The Palestinian lynching of Israeli soldiers 2000 and the Artists4 Ceasefire pin
With every day that passes, it becomes ever clearer that western civilisation is no longer civilised.
Israel’s war of defence against a genocidal enemy is an inflection point in the seismic battle between civilisation and barbarism. The west is failing that test.
This was illustrated at the Oscars. Numerous Hollywood stars sported red pins supposedly backing a ceasefire in Gaza. The pin depicts the palm of an orangey-red hand on a red background with a black heart in the middle.
For some Israel supporters, this image channelled the infamous picture taken in 2000, when a Palestinian terrorist involved in the savage lynching of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah triumphantly displayed his two bloody palms to the frenzied mob.
The group that distributed the pin, Artists4Ceasefire, claims that the hand image “conveys the beautiful community of people from all backgrounds that have come together in support of centring our shared humanity” and that the heart is an “invitation for us to lead with our hearts”.
This asinine froth does not convince. The palm of a hand does not denote community; hand symbols are usually white, a heart is usually red and a red hand signifies a bloody one.
A black heart, meanwhile, commonly denotes evil. And the 2000 lynching involved ripping the heart out of one of the Israeli corpses and holding it exultantly in a Palestinian hand.
Conversely, the image could have been reflecting the symbol used in countless anti-Israel demonstrations to signify that Israel has blood on its hands: a symbol that grotesquely paints the Israelis fighting to defend themselves against genocide as wanton killers of the innocent.
The Oscars ceremony also featured an attempt to transform Israeli suffering into Israeli oppression by Jonathan Glazer, director of the much-lauded Holocaust movie “The Zone of Interest”.
Standing with his two backers, Glazer said, “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” The victims of the October 7 pogrom and the inhabitants of Gaza, he said, were “all the victims of this dehumanisation”.
His ignorance was staggering. Apart from no land being illegally “occupied” by Israel, the cause of the conflict is the century-old attempt by the Palestinian Arabs to eradicate the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel and then the Jewish state. And to accuse Israel of dehumanisation, when it’s going to greater lengths than any other army in the world to minimise civilian casualties, was simply malevolent.
Far worse, though, was Glazer’s abuse of Judaism and the Holocaust to claim that Israel had hijacked both. He implied that Israelis were like Nazis and that their behaviour went against Jewish principles.
This to describe a war caused by the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust and Israel’s attempt to ensure that a second Holocaust does not happen again.
The obscenity of Glazer’s comments can scarcely be exaggerated. The belief that demonising Israeli Jews somehow represents Jewish values is, however, a pathology that has twisted the minds of many liberal American Jews. It is being fed by a venomously distorted presentation of Israelis as child-killers in Gaza that’s being ruthlessly pumped out by western media.
This accusation, of course, channels a paranoid antisemitic trope. It’s also based on Hamas propaganda claims that are patently untrue.
In a notable article in Tablet, Abraham Wyner, professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania, has used basic statistical analysis to suggest that the Hamas casualty figures of 30,000 dead Gazans, of whom 70 per cent are said to be women and children, are fake because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real.
Other problems with these figures are that they include as children the many teenagers who are committing Hamas atrocities, as well as the civilians killed by thousands of rockets falling short into Gaza.
Why, though, do so many believe these patent untruths propagated by Hamas? One reason is that the false premises of “intersectional” identity politics automatically turn Israelis into “oppressors” and the Palestinians into their “victims”. This doesn’t explain, however, why so many subscribe to the demonstrably ludicrous belief that Israel is committing “genocide.”
For decades, the Palestinians have accused Israelis of being “Nazis” and committing “genocide” to obscure the fact that their own Holocaust denial runs in tandem with their declared intention to kill every Jew.
This “genocide” smear has been taken up by the Palestinians’ western supporters largely through the influence of human rights culture.
In total contradiction to its foundational ideals, this culture has turned into a vehicle for singling out certain human rights for extinction: the rights of the Jewish people to live in their own ancestral homeland.
In the 1970s, radical idealists who were disillusioned after the discrediting of European socialism alighted upon “human rights” as another universalising creed promising to bring about utopia.
As the ultimate particularist culture, Judaism is in the way of all universalising creeds; and so Israel, the particularist Jewish state, had to be dumped. The stage was set for the demonisation of Israel tied to the increasing dominance of international human rights doctrine.
A living example of this is Samantha Power, head of the US Agency for International Development and the Obama administration’s US ambassador to the UN.
A noted expert on genocide, Power has long said the United States bears a unique responsibility to prevent mass atrocities.
It was therefore an irony that, earlier this year, Power was attacked by current and former USAID employees for belonging to an administration providing military support to Israel in the war against Hamas. Although she told these officials it was “very important that what happened on October 7 never happen again,” she failed to push back against their claim that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Given her history, this perhaps wasn’t surprising. In 2002, she was asked as a “thought experiment” what she would advise the US president to do about the Israel-Palestinian problem “if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving towards genocide”.
In response to this already disturbingly loaded question, Power said that something should be put “on the line” to help the situation. This might mean “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import… It does require external intervention”.
Power wasn’t talking about preventing the Palestinians from committing genocide against the Jews of Israel. She was talking about invading Israel to prevent an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians.
She was suggesting that Israel might commit atrocities against people who themselves make Israel the victim of precisely such atrocities: the vile smear being used against Israel today.
She also suggested that the only people who might be alienated if the US invaded Israel for this purpose would be American Jews, who she said exercised tremendous political and financial power over America.
The anti-Semitism of this remark aside, the thinking here was that Jews can’t be allowed to get in the way of the human rights doctrine that state power is always used to make victims and never to protect people from becoming victims in the first place.
Israel is fighting a desperate battle for its survival. Its people are in a state of ever-deepening trauma, grief and anxiety. Some of their families and friends are still hostages in Gaza meeting unthinkable fates. The death toll among their conscripted children and grandchildren fighting to defend their country is steadily ticking upwards.
They understand that genocidal savages intend to continue their attacks until they have destroyed the Jewish homeland and slaughtered every Jew.
In this truly desperate situation, what’s even worse is that the so-called “civilised” west — which also wants the Jews removed from its headspace and its conscience — is accusing them of the crime of which they are the present and intended victims.
That is an unspeakable abandonment of the Jewish people, and to the west a source of ineradicable shame.
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2024: The Stand of the Based Americans
For the first time in more than twenty years, the ruling elite’s stranglehold on the nation’s power structures threatens to collapse. Simultaneously, ambitious mandarins in big tech, high finance, big law, and the administrative bureaucracy vie for supremacy in the face of a power vacuum that grows with Biden’s deteriorating mental faculties. Meanwhile, millions of ordinary Americans seek a common political principle around which to organize a coherent defense of their way of life. 2024 is shaping up to be the year in which the existing balance of power between these two groups is consolidated or upended. 2024 will be the year that the new based Americans finally join the battle against the established ruling elite and its regime mandarins.
The Ruling Elite and Its Regime
Though Ross Perot is a distant memory, his 1992 third-party presidential candidacy catalyzed the ruling elite into self-awareness. Surprised by his 19% of the vote, the ruling elite took notice of itself as an independent political force and realized it had to act to maintain its power. Quickly it consolidated control of the major party systems. Simultaneously, it developed a cadre of loyal, mandarin-like sycophants within the administrative state, most legacy media institutions, big law firms, and virtually all of high finance. Later, it welcomed big tech into its mandarin classes. Today, this organizational structure, together with a lowly class of prole-like enforcers and useful idiots, is “the regime.”
For the five consecutive presidential elections from 1996 through 2012, the ruling elite used the regime to become rich and powerful, almost entirely at the expense of ordinary Americans and the nation’s interests. But, in the absence of any serious challenge to their power, it became arrogant and increasingly incompetent.
Today, this process has culminated in a Washington D.C. clown show, in which nearly every apparatchik is incompetent in the most clinical sense of the word. Thus we see children holding senior administration positions; mediocrities with literally zero subject-matter experience appointed to cabinet level positions; caricatures of Darth Vader in positions of extreme sensitivity despite catastrophic failures; spineless shills routinely embarrassing the nation in international affairs; and milquetoasts who decide whether to enforce the nation’s laws based solely on regime-approved criteria.
Their self-congratulatory “the grown-ups are back in charge” mantra notwithstanding, the regime is not blind to its own widespread incompetence. But it also knows that it has no quick solution. There is no standby legion of elite technocrats to which it can turn for technical competence. The “scientific government” of John Dewey and the mid twentieth century progressives is a distant memory. This leaves the regime with no choice but to lie … about everything. Thus, in a weird way, the regime’s growing mastery of political propaganda is a consequence of its technical incompetence
The Based Americans
Standing against the ruling elite and its regime are a widening circle of based Americans. Say what you will about Donald Trump, he deserves credit for at least one thing: His 2016 presidential victory pulled the wool from the eyes of many benighted Americans. For the first time, millions came to perceive, however dimly, the growing incompetence of the regime.
Today, the nascent political awakenings of 2016 have begun to sink roots. It is slowly accreting a litany of unlikely allies into an increasingly coherent political force. From homeschoolers to homesteaders, Bitcoin enthusiasts to cattle ranchers, evangelical Christians to Hasidim, secular jews mugged by reality to second-generation Hispanics, wilderness survivalists to moms for liberty, and neo-Nietzschean GigaChads to walkaway homosexuals, plus thousands of other vital human beings, first millions then tens of millions, and perhaps more than one hundred million Americans, have now awakened to the grave threat posed by the regime. Politics make strange bedfellows, and all that.
If in 2016 Trump’s supporters knew something was up, if not quite what, today this ground swell of based Americans has also realized that the regime is a threat to their liberty and property; that its unifying purpose is to subjugate them; that it uses propaganda systematically to conceal its unbelievable incompetence from them; and that it is both incredibly dangerous and grossly incompetent.
It is that combination–the awareness of the regime’s desire to subjugate, its power to do so, and its gross incompetence–that resonates with Americans more effectively than any specific political agenda. We Americans are freedom-loving and action-oriented people, deriving our wealth and success from a combination of fierce independence, self-reliance, know-how, expertise, craftsmanship, tacit knowledge, experience, and technique. As such, we are highly attuned both to threats to our liberty and to professional incompetence. We know that plumbers who can’t fix pipes aren’t plumbers. Electricians who can’t wire a house aren’t electricians. Pilots who can’t fly aren’t pilots. And tyrants who can’t do anything else will work to subjugate us.
Based Americans now see that instead of preparing for and winning wars, DOD is laser-focused on sexual perversions. As a result, the regime hasn’t started a war worth fighting in at least 33 years, and hasn’t won any of those that it did. This will go on until we get our asses kicked.
Based Americans also see that instead of working to enhance the nation’s geopolitical posture, the CIA and State Department go out of their way to hire mental defects with diagnosed psychological disorders only to blunder catastrophically in conducting foreign policy by toppling stable and predictable foreign regimes, while propping up unstable and unreliable ones. This will continue until the CCP steals the last vestiges of our intellectual property, infiltrates every federal agency, and has accumulated sufficient blackmail on all our politicians.
We understand that the regime lawlessly permits the migration of tens of millions of third-world aliens into our heartland. Instead of using its abundant power and resources to stop this culturally adulterating flood, DHS spends money to encourage, welcome, and subsidize it, erasing American culture in the process. This will continue until no American classroom teaches about Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, but every classroom teaches about Salvador Allende. In Spanish.
Based Americans stand flummoxed by the regime’s fantastically childish climate agenda that erodes our national strength by prohibiting the search for, and production of, abundant energy. This is to continue until we ordinaries are cold and hungry, weak and frail, and stranded in the duplexes we rent from Blackrock. We won’t own anything and we’ll be miserable.
Based Americans now know that the CDC and the NIH fund gain-of-function research deep in the bowels of our greatest geopolitical rival, knowing that such research will be used to synthesize bio weapons of astonishing horror. Meanwhile the CDC—the Center for Disease Control—lectures us that “gun violence” is a public-health epidemic.
In short, based Americans now understand that transgender, dog-mask wearing generals aren’t warriors and won’t be able to defend us. That boy-faced small-town mayors with traffic circle design experience aren’t logistics experts and can’t unfuck the port of Los Angeles. That noble-prize winning “economists” who think war increases wealth have no idea how to enrich us. That beneficiaries of our racial-spoils system appointed to high positions in elite universities don’t know how to educate us. That medical “experts” who deny biological sex can’t be our children’s pediatricians. That public health officials who think “gun crime” is a health crisis, are not prepared to combat pandemics. That prosecutors who excuse mass violence by regime favored races while wildly overstating the frequency of so-called “hate crimes” will not protect our communities.
But based Americans also understand that all those same incompetent regime elites mean to rule us without our consent. I could go on. For a long time.
It is the confluence of the regime’s desire to subjugate plus its widespread incompetence plus newly based Americans’ awareness of both, that have set the stage for the battle for America. This battle has already commenced and will continue in 2024.
Regime Tactics in 2024
On the one hand, though the regime is incompetent, it is also incredibly dangerous. It is willing to use any tool at its disposal to attack and destroy any threat to its power, including the based Americans who oppose it. With this framework in mind, we can make a few predictions for 2024.
We should expect the regime to continue to gut the nation’s institutions in increasingly merciless ways to sustain its power. The state and federal criminal prosecutions and civil legal assaults on Donald Trump are only the most public examples. But the regime won’t limit its attacks to public figures. In 2024, it will continue to target ordinary people, just as it did with Ricky Vaughan, Enrique Tarrio, Derek Chauvin, and the thousands of January 6th protestors.
Just as the regime used coordinated lawfare to rig the 2020 election, it will devise clever ways to rig it again this year. If, despite their election-rigging efforts, Trump wins the Presidency, expect the regime to try to overturn the results. This isn’t conspiratorial speculation: it’s just their plan in their words. It’s their democracy, after all, and they mean to keep it.
The regime will also accelerate its public-private censorship efforts. It cannot compete in the space of ideas because it doesn’t have any. It has only attitudes and psychological dispositions, usually anger and fear. Since it has no ideas it also has no coherent policy positions to discuss. Since it has nothing to discuss, it risks losing the battle of ideas to anybody willing to defend any position whatsoever. This is intolerable to the regime, and so in 2024 it will vigorously censor any sufficiently public voice on any public or private platform.
At the same time, as election day approaches, it will continue to flood every communication channel with waves of endless regime propaganda. As Biden’s polling figures wax and wane, these lies will swing between the believable and the laughable. Take, for example, the recent circus of regime lackeys publicly applauding Biden’s supposed cognitive acumen on the usual Sunday morning propaganda outlets. This was the regime’s stupefying response to special prosecutor Robert Hur’s report that Biden’s brain was too far gone even for him to stand trial. Expect the regime’s lies to become utterly absurd. And terrifying.
Race is a perennial weapon of the regime, which has mastered the art of conquering by dividing. Since racial problems are more imaginary than real, however, the regime will continue to gin up pretend racial iniquities to sow division and otherwise weaken its opponents. As 2024 progresses, racial grievance-mongering will reach fever pitch.
The regime will continue to weaponize the power of various federal agencies. Specifically, it will deploy these agencies’ regulatory, enforcement, and auditing powers to enmesh the regime’s opponents in a labyrinth of frivolous litigation, regulatory infractions, and bogus tax claims, ideally bankrupting them in the process. For the regime, this will have the dual benefit of silencing its outspoken critics while making examples of them to aspiring based Americans.
And, in 2024, the regime will continue to flood the nation with Third World illegal aliens because doing so is essential to the regime’s long-term strategy. It knows that if it wins the battle of 2024, nothing will prevent it from transforming these aliens into its Praetorian enforcers—granting them amnesty in exchange for their arms and their votes. Unlike your countrymen, however, these aliens-turned-praetorians will always vote for the regime but never hesitate to pull the trigger when you or your neighbors stand in the way. The regime is counting on it.
Based Americans in 2024
Unlike any time in modern American history, a sufficient number of Americans have awakened to the true nature of our political regime. Enough now understand that the regime has ruled and means to continue to rule at our expense. We are also, by now, intimately familiar with the tactics described above. In general, we know what to expect, even if we’ll be surprised by the specifics. Such is the way with battle since time immemorial. We also know the stakes.
Though seemingly insignificant, this situational awareness should not be underestimated. For decades, our common decency and ignorance were exploited by a cynical regime. We were used. No longer. Now we know what we’re up against. The ruling elite no longer has the element of subterfuge or surprise. With this, we should expect record voter turnout come November. We might also consider the possibility of tectonic demographic shifts as record numbers of Hispanics and black men turn on their ungrateful regime masters.
There is also the possibility of a few defections from the ruling elite, similar to that from Elon Musk and, possibly, Bill Ackman. The ruling elite understand the scope of the regime’s incompetence. Unlike ordinary Americans, however, some are in a bind. If in 2020, the ruling elite wondered whether Joe Biden had the cognitive stamina to complete his first term, today they have no doubt he cannot complete a second. But, to throw their support behind him would also require that they deploy an incessant stream of propaganda to mask his deteriorating cognition. Though many have no choice but to do exactly that, maintaining that façade for five more years is unappealing if not impossible.
On the other hand, if Biden won’t step down, they can’t get rid of him. Unlike Nancy Reagan who understood that her responsibility as a caring wife and decent person was to protect her husband and his legacy in the face of cognitive decline, Jill Biden seems indifferent to the fact that a growing percentage of Americans see her husband’s condition as sad. He’s becoming pitiable.
Thus we have a bizarre situation in which many in the ruling elite don’t want Biden to win, but also can’t backtrack on the horrible things they’ve said about Trump. They have no choice but to oppose Trump’s candidacy, if only out of fear of retribution by him for the things they’ve already said should he become President. Most members of the ruling elite are caught between the Scylla of Biden’s astonishing incompetence and the Charybdis of their Trump derangement syndrome. Most, but not all.
Some of the ruling elite have, for example, expressed doubt about Biden’s future. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, recently applauded a few of Trump’s first-term accomplishments. These statements would have been unthinkable only nine months ago. As 2024 unfolds, we should expect to see a few members of the ruling elite become traitors to their class and support Trump. Most will do so tepidly, though some will do so enthusiastically. These may play a pivotal role in deciding the outcome of battle.
For decades, the regime ruled with an eye to its interest. It did so at the expense of the great body of yeoman Americans who remained resolutely—perhaps even naively—patriotic, even as our modest wealth was stripped, our proud history debased, our customs gutted, and our God mocked. We were almost completely disempowered. Almost, but not quite. Though we are the underdog, we based Americans will make our stand come what may in 2024. However it turns out, it will be a close run thing.
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TJ Harker is the General Counsel of a Knoxville, Tennessee company. Until recently, he was a federal prosecutor, where he investigated and tried national white-collar fraud and espionage matters for the Department of Justice. He recently launched Amicus Republicae on Substack and occasionally writes for The American Mind.
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