New Normal Digest, #1
New Normal Digest, #1
An aggregate of provocative articles by others on the Web. Each Friday!
Why New Normal?
Because those who were paying attention 2020-2022 figured out (if they hadn’t already) that:
(1) the idea that there’s a globalist-minded ruling class of sociopaths whose personal psychologies are dominated by a need to control populations is not a “conspiracy theory” but a fact of history;
(2) this ruling class, which operates through leviathan corporations and “think tanks” as well as governments, is both able and willing to shut down as much of the world as they need to in order to block the rise of opposing forces based on those populations wanting to be left alone; that
(3) they can use scare tactics and be assured of having the majority of those in any population in their corner; finally,
(4) given that there is still plenty of opposition out here, and that demonizing this opposition in controlled mass media hasn’t made it go away, the ruling class might try something like this again, possibly with a worse or more dangerous virus, a worse or more dangerous program of injections; or possibly just by directing their minions in “think tanks” and in governments to foment a world war.
Any of these things could go down at any time!
Hence: welcome to the New Normal!
If we look at the situation with Ukraine and with Israel first versus Hamas and now versus Hezbollah, backed by Iran (backed by Russia), the ruling class seems to be setting the stage for something. Among the things we can be sure of: they do not want a second Trump presidency!!
Now no sensible person thinks Trump is the equivalent of the Second Coming. But he can’t be controlled. For a global ruling class of sociopathic control freaks, that’s a problem!
Why a New Normal Digest?
The reasons for that are more personal.
The one social media platform where I’ve been active is Facebook. But Facebook’s reputation for censorship now precedes it. I’ve had posts removed apace (four in the last month), one of them linking to a recent article on here.
A “request for a review” met with no response.
So I’m done.
You can’t really fight billionaire-owned Big Tech leviathans. You can only get away from them. And struggle to find your own visibility.
So what I was doing over there, I’ll do here. Aggregating a few of what seem to me the best articles and commentary by others that have been done over the past week. Except for brief introductions, I’m not the star of the show. Some of those others, as I’ll note, also fled to Substack having had bad experiences on social media or independent sites “nuked” by forces unknown.
Future New Normal Digest posts will contain items like this, which may cover a news item that came up that week, it may be a review of a book I’ve just read that strikes me as particularly useful to you, my readers, it may be a personal observation of mine that I also hope will be useful.
No Tucker Carlson. Not that I have anything against Tucker; I linked to his videos a lot of times on Facebook. But Sasha Stone has him covered, and I’d subscribe to her Substack where you’ll get all the Tucker you can absorb.
Let me know in the comments how this effort goes.
Okay, here we go…..
Is There Hope for the U.S.?
Jeff Thomas asks, “Is There Hope for the U.S.?”
Liberty in the U.S. is disappearing, being destroyed by the seamless militarized corporatocracy some call the Deep State.
The population has already divided into two groups, one very large and the other (so far) relatively small. There are those who deny what is happening, go about their business as if nothing has changed, and will go down with the ship as did the majority of Roman citizens; versus those who prep and declare themselves “locked and loaded if they come for me.”
This second group, argues Thomas compellingly, is likely to get themselves killed if and when the SWAT teams arrive.
A third group, educated and conscious of what is happening, continues trying to work within what “the system” provides. So far they are coming up empty, although at the moment I’d support MAGA Republicans over either Establishment Republicans (Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney types; also the Bushies) and nearly all Democrats. This despite Trump’s faults.
The problem: “the system” is now designed to thwart all efforts to return to freedom.
A fourth group, also quite small, exits the stage. Its members separate. Some go elsewhere, such as Chile or Uruguay or New Zealand, countries not at war with anyone who tend to mind their own business. Others stay on U.S. soil but separate to the greatest degree possible, moving onto rural lands and farming them, while staying online in order to educate any interested others in how to follow their lead.
In any event, here’s the link to Jeff Thomas’s article. https://internationalman.com/articles/is-there-hope-for-the-us/
Heroes and Villains … and the Dangerous Brainlessness of John Kerry.
Next up is James Howard Kunstler, who over the years has become one of my favorite writers on the Web … capable of surveying the passing show and expressing his thoughts about what he sees with a clarity, brevity, and wit that I can only dream about.
He’s on Substack because his own site mysteriously went down a few weeks back and has stayed down. Cyberattack? It’s very possible!
He begins with an account of how “inconvenient” First Amendment grounded free speech is for control freaks like John Kerry. The problem is, control freaks now abound: in the Asylum on the Potomac, in the Big Tech leviathans, in “think tanks” like the World Economic Forum (almost certainly one of the architects of what was done to us actually beginning in the Wuhan lab late in the last decade), the Atlantic Council (the “intellectual” wing of NATO), etc.
Speaking generally here, Kunstler muses on how the Democrat Party, the party of the original civil rights movement, the Kennedys, the antiwar movement, suspicious of corporations, etc., morphed into what it is today: virulently antiwhite and antimale, virulently elitist and in charge of large corporations, very much pro-war, and conceivably on the verge of an arrangement by which its denizens could perpetuate their power indefinitely.
Expect this, if Kamala Harris wins the election now just a little over a month away, however she wins it (in an actual “free and fair” election or stolen like the last one probably was). This will continue the presidency-by-committee we’ve had since January 21, 2021.
In any event, you can read Kunstler’s piece here:
Globalists claim Europe is “Too White, Too Western”….
Third up is Paul Craig Roberts, another of my favorite online writers whose devotion to calling the shots as he sees them has cost him dearly … his last publication in any mainstream periodical was the critique of “free trade” ideology published in the New York Times at the start of 2004.
His site, too, experienced some unplanned “down time” recently although it was restored and seems to be working fine now. (But for how long….?)
If you have your own platform, you can write what you please … but there are still hackers, cyberattackers, other bullies out there.
Many of us concluded, eons ago, that the EU was a mistake, that it had precedents that were also mistakes made out of fear, that it was a mistake for the national elites of various European nations to hand over their economic fortunes in particular to a group of superelite control freaks based in Brussels who didn’t care about them, would dominate their economies to the greatest extent possible, and support politicians such as France’s Macron who would open all their borders so that unassimilable Muslims could flood in and colonize their cities. Now, Europe is speeding towards ruin, and Roberts is one of the voices decrying the “great replacement” that is happening there.
Roberts then turns his attention to the U.S. and asks the obvious question: why do so many white American voters continue to support leftist politicians, most of them Democrats, whose long-term goal is to destroy them and their entire heritage?
Here’s the link: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/09/30/globalists-claim-europe-is-too-white-too-western/
On Ukraine….
Paul Craig Roberts also has this, up today, charting the now-mostly-memory-holed early history of what led up to Putin’s invasion in February, 2022, and to the current very dangerous situation in which NATO is ready to fire missiles deep into Russia…. The primary villains in this story should be the neocons (neoconservatives), but so far are not. (By the way, neoconservatives are not conservatives. Not in any sense beyond their co-opting a word. The two worldviews are light years apart.)
The Plan for Feudalism 2.0
Or technofeudalism, my preferred term. Doug Casey discusses how the globalist ruling class is trying to bring about a new feudalism. Doubtless among those the ruling class bankrolls are court historians who know that original feudalism was a stable political economy for centuries!
Capitalism, however else understood, freed a portion of the population to begin to build a financially independent middle class and a political economy that was ripe for gradual decentralization.
Financial independence is dangerous to the control freak mind! Those the latter considers lowly peasants might start to think.
Their inventions had already delivered rising convenience and prosperity: arguably the strongest and healthiest economy in the world by the early 1960s.
Those Who Push People Around can’t have that.
Did they see this coming? Maybe. Or maybe not, because control freaks just can’t help being control freaks.
Hence their long-term hijacking of the political economy of modernity with central banks, other banking leviathans; their bankrolling of dictators and wars while pretending to favor “democracy,” and their likely willingness to kill people who won’t fall under their sway, or possibly just undertake random genocide!
Because they can!
Doug Casey makes a lot of good points, although he’s a tad weak on solutions since too many people can no longer afford to join those groups mentioned above that would solve the problem by going elsewhere. Link:
Things Always Get Better. Or Do They?
Now, for a really challenging read, if only because of its length and its elegance. I don’t know who Aurelian is, but his material merits being read despite the fact that reading and absorbing it calls for an attention span longer than that of a mosquito (to say the least!). He’s clearly British, if that matters. He’s also a “Substacker.”
The claim that “things always get better and better” is tempting because there are, or were, entire generations for which this was true.
My parents’ generation (the “GIs,” if you will) went from an era of Model-T Fords to Saturn V rockets and beyond. Many of their parents had to wash clothes by hand. There were still plenty of remote places in the country that did not yet have electricity.
When we Boomers were kids, a rocket taking off was a big deal. Then it became more and more a regular occurrence. We grew up not knowing what computers were. The only computers then in existence took up entire rooms that had to be kept temperature controlled.
Then miniaturization happened, we got the desktop computer and myriad terminals that started appearing in schools and libraries, leading eventually to the publicly-accessible Internet. Now we have online systems like Skype and Zoom where people can meet and have real time conversations even though they’re thousands of miles apart, on different continents!
So what’s wrong with the idea that “things always get better and better”?
Well, we can note that there has always been an undercurrent of unease with “progress.” In manifested itself in one form as early as the 1930s, with Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World which gave voice to the fear that modernity would result in a society based entirely on elite rule with mass behavior totally conditioned.
Or consider the first of what I think of as technology gone awry science fiction films, the early 1930s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, about an artificially-created human who only wants to be normal, can’t have normality because of his appearance, and turns on his creator and on the world generally.
In the 1940s, this unease manifested itself economically with Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1947). Schumpeter proposed that in “democracies” voters would legislate themselves into socialism when they found capitalism less and less satisfying to their highest aspirations (who, after all, woke up as a teenager telling himself he could wait to grow up and become an insurance salesman or clerk in a department store—the necessary fate of many adults in capitalist civilization).
In the 1950s, we saw the unease of the Beats, the precursors of the Hippies of the 1960s who “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.” There were serious warnings about what many products of technological civilization were doing to the environment since, as ecologist Barry Commoner would put it, “everything must go somewhere.”
There were, of course, strongly optimistic strains in the science fiction subgenre through these decades which imagined our future colonizing space and perhaps contacting (or being contacted by) advanced extraterrestrials: Star Trek as a television series and 2001: A Space Odyssey are perhaps the paradigmatic cases of this.
These, though, found themselves competing with various technology gone awry scenarios and dystopias by the 1980s and 1990s: think of the Terminator and The Matrix films. The motif of blundering scientists/technologists monkeying with the natural order and unleashing something they can’t control has underwritten a great deal of recent science fiction: think also of Jurassic Park (1993).
Among the most popular science fiction epics of the post-2000 era has been The Hunger Games, which is as dystopian as it gets.
How do we sum this up? As far as the mainstream goes, it is arguable that from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s, things indeed “got better and better” for most ordinary people (not necessarily for everyone).
Then, we lost our sense of direction.
By the 2000s, and more recently, we’ve begun slipping backward culturally, economically, educationally, and even scientifically (despite obvious advances in some areas like our capacity to discover, say, exoplanets, something that won’t put a single item of food on any table).
Aurelian is more a man of the left—an old left, a very old left—than he is of the right (I’m assuming for the purposes of discussion that those categories are meaningful because we all associate them with something). His left actually helped ordinary people improve their lives, using government where government could be used. The right was easily labeled as negative and reactionary.
He blames the rise of neoliberalism (the economic ideology associated with F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman) for a lot of this. In a sense, he says, neoliberalism is a Christian heresy: for God and His omnipotence, it substitutes The Market and assumes The Market will sort everything out in the right way.
He doesn’t talk so much about financialization, which began when Nixon killed the gold standard and our currency began to lose its purchasing power. What was Nixon thinking? Probably, given the political situation at the time in which the U.S. federal government was expanding its reach in every area, he saw his choice as between a massive tax increase and the far more radical step of ending the Bretton Woods system which had tied the value of the dollar to gold. The former would have been politically suicidal. So he chose the latter, and opened the floodgates to the printing of the money that was needed and long-term consequences be damned (had Lord Keynes not said that “in the long run, we are all dead”?).
Aurelian offers suggests that parallel, in some respects, that drawn by the late philosopher Richard Rorty (whose contribution to the conversation I’ve discussed here).
Rorty argued in Achieving Our Country (1998) that during twentieth century history there were two lefts. The first tried to advance the interests of working people against capitalist owners, and enjoyed some successes with legal safety nets and other protections for workers.
The second left, however, which took over academia, promoted feminism, homosexuality, and other primarily cultural/behavioral phenomena. While beginning with the perfectly sensible idea (1960s) that a woman should be paid the same amount for the same amount of work, it then went crackers over abortion (1970s). Then it went crackers of sexuality more broadly until it basically set out to obliterate the idea in favor of “gender,” which being a “social construct,” indicated that modernity had ended and we’d entered postmodernity. (I know that’s a trendy-sounding way of putting it, but sometimes there’s nothing wrong with “trendy” if it gets the point across).
Unfortunately, this second left (as Rorty observes) threw the working class to the wolves. There’s no nicer way of putting it. This is because it was too white, too male, too Christian or at least traditional and committed to limited-government thinking, and therefore standing in opposition to most of what the second left wanted.
Rorty hoped for a rapprochement between the two. He gained some notoriety back around 2016 for having actually predicted the rise of a Trumpian figure, to whom those who believed themselves to have been thrown to the wolves would turn, if the two could not get on the same page.
This kind of thing was ripe for exploitation by the power elites, the global ruling class, Those Who Push People Around, call them what you will, who saw second-left trends as useful in disrupting “traditional” cultural patterns and commitments (e.g., to free speech) that stood in the way of their ability to dominate the world. Just as they had seen “free trade” as useful in disrupting the financial independence of the U.S. middle class, and now see unlimited migration as useful in disrupting their cities and towns because, yes, “open borders and free migration is good for the economy.”
Bringing us to the 2020s and the New Normal, where the great political-economic class of our time is between these elites and Those Who Want To Be Left Alone, “populists” who have become organized in Europe (where they just won a major victory in Austria, as Aurelian notes at one point) as well as in the U.S. where they’ve oriented around the Trump-Vance presidential ticket.
And when there is a large consensus that things are not “getting better and better” (except, perhaps, for billionaires).
With a growing consensus about another feature of the New Normal: that we’re surrounded by lies, that politicians in particular do not even attempt to tell us the truth anymore, whether about the economy or about anything else. Small wonder that post-truth has become one of the adjectives used to characterize our times.
To Establishment publications like The Guardian who pretend not to be Establishment, “populist” movements such as those now winning elections in Europe are Far Right, or Extreme Right (note how such publications wouldn’t be caught dead using phrases like Far Left, or Extreme Left). Guess what? Those involved don’t care how the mouthpieces of an unaccountable and hostile ruling elite labels them. If they get the chance, they’ll vote against their political puppets (in the U.S. they refused to elect Hillary Clinton after she dismissed large numbers of voters Who Want To Be Left Alone as “a basket of deplorables”).
Aurelian thinks that a genuine Left (he capitalizes it) is redeemable. I don’t know; there’s a lot of hurdles such a Left would have to cross, for there are a lot of issues Aurelian never broaches. He never broaches, for example, what I sometimes call the Real Great Replacement: in which the worldview of Christendom that stood back of traditional Western cultures was replaced not just by the worldly focus and methods we associate with terms like modernity but with a materialism that asserts, dogmatically, that there can be no other rational focus because nothing exists except this spatio-temporal world.
But no essay, not even one as long and involved as this one, can canvas every relevant topic. I’ll quote him to end this:
Demonizing the concerns of ordinary people as being “extreme Right” cannot work in the longer term, and will simply increase populist feeling to the point where it comes unmanageable. I have said before, and I repeat, that those who make populism of the Left impossible will make populism of the Right inevitable. I doubt one in a thousand of those currently finding the “extreme Right” under every stone have any idea what that would mean.
Read Aurelian’s essay here:
The End.
Enough provocations for one Friday. Again, this replaces what I was doing scattershot on Facebook. So how did this excursion go? Was it useful, or at least interesting? Above, I invited comments. If this is useful and/or interesting, let me know. If this wasn’t useful at all, or at all interesting, I need to know that, too. Thank you in advance, and for being subscribers.
