Tea at Trianon: Will 2024 Be 1984?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, October 3, 2022

Will 2024 Be 1984?

From Zero Hedge:

The infamous DOJ letter on schools was sent out a month before the gubernatorial election in Virginia, where the National School Board Association, not to mention much of the D.C. establishment, is based. Much as Garland’s DOJ operatives feared, the school protests helped elect Gov. Glenn Younkin and nearly toppled New Jersey’s Democrat governor in the bargain.
The Mar-a-Lago raid was carefully timed around the DOJ’s day policy of avoiding politically sensitive moves 90 days before an election. The real election it has its eye on is in 2024.
And, if it has its way, 2024 will be the new 1984.
The Steele dossier, the Mueller investigation, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and everything before and after are part of the larger Spygate continuum which is marked by the use of national security tools to suppress the political opposition especially before and during elections. The claims of national security, whether they involve the Russians or classified documents, are just a tactic that allow Democrat officials to wield virtually unlimited investigative powers cloaked in secrecy.
Beyond the details of these investigations, which turn as hollow as Steele or Mueller on closer examination, is the larger construct of a crisis that is described as a “threat to democracy”.
The “threat to democracy” is shorthand for a threat to Democrats. The source of that threat are conservatives and Republicans. The vectors of that threat can be described as coming from Russia, school board parents, electoral activism or “disinformation” on the internet. The common denominator is that political activities which are inherently “democratic”, speech, protest and electioneering, are defined as a national security “threat to democracy”.
The net of this crisis extends from individuals posting on social media to political candidates and institutions. Meeting the “threat to democracy” requires the government to monitor social media and for social media companies to censor unapproved speech, for candidates who believe the wrong things to be barred from office, for the IRS to investigate conservative non-profits, for companies to be pressured into pulling donations to conservative candidates and for the military to be prepared to intervene once again in the event of another grave “threat to democracy”.
The threat to democracy or rather the republic here is coming from the Democrats.
The Spygate targeting of Trump is only one strand of a number of threads drawing together to criminalize opposition to leftist agendas. Cancel culture had already contrived to economically punish speech. The next step was criminal investigations of people who non-violently stood up to Black Lives Matter race rioters or drove over BLM’s racial supremacist slogan on streets.
The underlying rationale was that racism was a public health crisis and another threat to democracy. Individuals were components of the crisis. Those who would not take a knee and admit their privilege were perpetuating the crisis and posed a threat to the nation at large.
The same collectivist machinery is being ramped up to enforce global warming dogma by using financial institutions, insurance companies, SEC regulations, real estate codes and countless other financial minutiae to extra-legislatively impose the Green New Deal, punishing companies and individuals until they conform. Dot com monopolies are already censoring those who don’t.
Once again the argument is that all human life on the planet is endangered. Anyone who doesn’t toe the line is a threat to the race. And must either conform or be silenced.
Race and the environment are not the real issues here, no more than Russia or classified documents are with Spygate. Manufactured crises are used to justify totalitarian fascist abuses of power. The details of any individual crisis or allegation matter much less than the tactics used to suppress dissent in the face of this latest imminent emergency. Every crisis is met with a centralized response weaving together federal authority, corporate complicity, national media outlets, cultural elites and all the commanding heights of power in the United States of America.
As FBI raids blend into congressional investigations, National Security Council aides, political campaigns, opposition research labs and media outlets appear to speak with one voice because they operate as arms of the same machine. Likewise, school board leaders, DOJ officials, media outlets and publishing giants start functioning as components of a single political entity.
Because they are just different ways of describing members of the Left.
In true Orwellian fashion, the “threat to democracy”, like most leftist slogans, should be interpreted to mean the opposite of what it appears to. It’s democracy that is a threat to a political system that is undemocratic and built around undemocratic institutions.
The threat to democracy manifests itself when conservative candidates win elections and is most pronounced in the least democratic institutions, government bureaucracies, national media outlets, elite universities and the upper ranks of corporations. This increasingly integrated ruling class springs into action when it’s unable to rig an election and warns of a “threat to democracy”. The worse it loses, the more urgent the crisis and the more ruthless the method of dealing with it. Having lost one election and fearing losses in 2022 and 2024, it’s getting more ruthless.
The solutions to all the crises come down to the components of the machine, the administrative state, corporate leaders, technocratic monopolies, educational bosses, activist front groups and many others urgently grabbing more power to cope with the threat of losing elections.
The Mar-a-Lago raid is a warning that the machine is rapidly preparing to fight off the “threat of democracy” to the 2022 and 2024 elections by once again weaponizing national security, censoring “misinformation”, and stamping out the political opposition. It will do whatever it takes to win, not because it needs to win elections to pursue its agenda, but because winning elections is a convenient cover to explain the amount of power it wields.
Democracy is not just in its name, but its facade. When it loses the facade, people start to notice that elections don’t seem to change very much. And that things still run the same way.
America is in a bad and dangerous place. But it will be in an even worse one by 2024. (Read more.)