In the last 10 days, we have learned even more about the factional interests trying to control America. Many people probably didn’t think it possible. How much more did we need to know, after they egregiously broke state law on a mass scale in multiple states to try to tamper with the vote? What was really left to learn?
The riot at the Capitol has shown us. It is being used as the pretext for a “crackdown” on civil rights of an unprecedented nature and scope. The revelation is not so much that members of the faction – the hard left that forms the institutional establishment in the West today – would do this. It’s that they have been so prompt and prepared to do it.
They’re not interested at all in what actually happened in the riot. Indeed, they are selectively unwilling to have that question inspected publicly. Their determination is not to get to the bottom of anything, but to rule the narrative at the top of it – in lockstep, with no dispute or skepticism allowed – for the purpose of neutralizing their political opponents.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Some have in fact come out and said that those who disagree with them need to be “deprogrammed” or otherwise reeducated. (This has been a recurring theme, in fact; e.g., here, here, here, here.) Certainly, they are agreed that their political opponents need to be deplatformed in the information sphere.
Yet soberly, it was impossible for the incursion on the U.S. Capitol to be an “insurrection” or “coup.” It was unarmed, chaotic, produced a series of ridiculous photos, some vandalism and idiotic theft, and two pointless deaths, and all this is beside the point anyway: it was an incursion on the legislature, which cannot be the aimpoint of a coup’s target. There are arguments for calling it terrorism (and arguments against, given the actual nature of the event).
But the tools of the state’s armed power are wielded by the executive. That’s where you aim if you want to mount a coup.
The establishment Left is calling it a coup and an insurrection anyway. That’s meant to turn it into a political, national security emergency as opposed to a large-scale criminal incident (the latter of which it most certainly is, like the violent riots that were mounted in D.C. after the Trump inauguration in 2017).
The Left is doing that because its members don’t want to judge the event soberly, with all the facts gathered and agreed on. They want to use it as a narrative point to justify acting precipitately and urgently. They’ve made clear that their target – the target for curtailing civil rights and making us as unequal before the law as possible – is the demographic defined as “Trump voters.”
So now we know how they will comport themselves: as Bolsheviks. They’re bent on factional attack, vilification of political opponents, and destruction.
I know. You don’t need to tell me: you already saw through them. I know that. So let’s not waste time on that point. Consider it acknowledged, for all who approach to say that they did see, already.
The reason for writing this article is to make two different points. It’s important to articulate them now, as they will prepare us for the days immediately ahead.
20 January is not the goal line many think it is
The first point is this. There are still many people dithering uneasily from an old perspective they can’t let go of. They don’t see, or at least can’t grasp, for decision-making purposes, that the establishment Left is already unreachable by way of the “Old Consensus.” It no longer considers itself bound by it. That old agreement, that we’d pretend to uphold constitutional principles while slinging resources at a host of organizations dedicated to violating them, is dead.
The Old Consensus may be best seen through this prism: the construct of not quite changing the law to overset people’s feelings and expectations, but, instead, of setting up agencies and commissions that work quietly to reshape people’s expectations. By that means the Old Consensus came to hold the people at risk through nearly unaccountable, virtually irreversible executive regulation.
This is the territory of “the process being the punishment.” Subject the people enough to punitive processes – weaponized government – and they’ll stop fighting for their rights.
That should be recognizable enough. Much of it was the sort of thing Republicans became adept at agreeing to and joining in administering. It was the price of political “peace”: agreeing to be extorted every decade for new agencies and commissions, adjudicative boards and commissars, based on fresh “grievances.” It was throwing money and infrastructure at open-ended “problems” in order to not have to argue them out in more definite terms, and veto plans to unconstitutionally hold the people at risk.
The point is that the establishment Left has moved past that. The Old Consensus was never something they considered themselves bound to. It was a way of turning the establishment Right into an ATM for the resources to lay traps for the people.
The establishment Left doesn’t consider itself bound by anything. For the last four years, it has been falsely depicting the protocols of the Old Consensus as “constitutionalism” – on the basis of the Old Consensus being what the people have become used to.
That’s emotional button-pushing about what the Constitution is, and what it’s for. The Constitution is not there to accustom us to a situational political dynamic cobbled together in the FDR years (which is what the Old Consensus is). But that’s the idea more and more Americans have carried in their heads for three, four, five decades now, as our older generations have died and we’ve lost touch with what it was like before the Old Consensus.
One more important aspect of this before the emphatic point this is leading up to. When I say this is the establishment Left at work, I mean it. Every syllable. This is not the anarchist, disaffected Left wanting to hold the people at risk and deal with the people without restraint or compunction. The anarchist Left assuredly wants to do that, but it is, in fact, the establishment that is rushing now to breach our every expectation of due process and the rule of law.
We see that through multiple windows, starting with the abuse of government powers in Spygate. But the windows go well beyond that. One was opened by LU contributor Hans Bader on Tuesday.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is simply ignoring his duty to schedule a special election to replace a Republican state senator who passed away a few weeks ago. Hans suspects Northam wants to ensure the narrowly-divided state legislature can more easily pass Democratic bills, and check off an agenda, before allowing Republicans to elect another senator to the seat.
That seems like good analysis. Why it would be a surprise isn’t clear, after state officials in at least four states openly violated state election laws in 2020 in order to admit as many mail-in ballots as possible, with few or no enforceable constraints on their use.
Not only did the state executives do that; the state courts and even federal courts let them get away with it. State election laws were every bit as much the “letter of the law” as the law in Virginia governing vacant state senate seats and special elections. But the executive agencies and courts violated and vitiated those laws anyway. As far as we can see right now, they will get away with it. Why shouldn’t Northam?
This is a good illustration of what the establishment Left is prepared to do. It’s being borne out in, among other things, the enthusiasm of the establishment Left for mass political censorship by the Big Tech information platforms. The Stalinist approach to repressing political opponents is embedded in our key institutions now: government, the media, the academy, even the means of access to financial institutions and earning a living.
And that brings us to the culmination of this point.
The establishment Left is ready to use those powers immediately. And it will do so. There is no such future as inaugurating Joe Biden on 20 January and seeing a period of peace and quiet break out.
The nationwide chaos, uncertainty, and misery average people think they’ve been enduring, even before 2020, because the media keep telling them it’s our reality, won’t end on 20 January. That’s the day it will become real, instead of a media-created mirage. In a painful irony, the media will undoubtedly assure the people that, as mistreatment grows for those on the political Right and freedom is curtailed for everyone, we are finally seeing “peace” and harmony return after years of discord.
If you don’t see this by now, there’s nothing anyone can do for you. But too much of the commentary from the Old Consensus Right continues to work on the premise that there will be a stable future operating by the Old Consensus dynamic after the 20th. That commentary is deluded.
Dear friends, you don’t even know for sure what’s going on today: we are being lied to incessantly, about “what Trump is doing,” about “what Trump’s unnamed senior advisers are doing,” about “what Vice President Pence is doing,” about “what Trump supporters are doing,” about “who Trump supporters are,” about who has engaged in what forms of destruction, mayhem, assaults on public order – or hasn’t – and about who in government or industry is trustworthy, and for what purposes. You think you know a great deal that, objectively, you don’t. People who uneasily sense that are better off, but not comforted.
Inauguration Day is not a safe harbor, from any standpoint. To view it that way is to put one’s hopes in a chimera. It is painful but necessary to acknowledge that, and to recognize that the establishment Left is already prepared to overthrow the seeming order of the Old Consensus. That will dispense with your expectations about due process and the rule of law. It’s the first thing they will do.
They’re showing that in everything they do, from Biden blatantly promising to favor “minority” businesses outright in COVID recovery proposals, to Andrew Cuomo suddenly announcing that New York needs to shed his own largely unconstitutional lockdown restraints just in time for the inauguration, to Ralph Northam smiling and refusing to schedule a special election in Virginia, just because he can.
The pretense of honoring the rule of law is already gone. It was gone under Obama for years, but it has now emerged into the open as a change in the rules of engagement. That’s what we’ve been learning by unearthing the history of Spygate for the last four years: that the ROE already changed years ago.
The unspoken premise of most of the well-meaning Never-Trumpers – that we have a status quo to go back to – is a delusion. It was gone before Trump even came down the escalator in 2015.
The priority-setter-in-chief
That sets the stage for the second point, one that is even more important. It’s this: there is someone higher than us who knows what we need to see. And He is arranging for us to see it.
Voters who want to keep Trump in office have been hoping and praying to see the evidence of who did what in the 2016 election, who did what in the Spygate attack on our institutions and our nation, and who did what in the 2020 election.
While I am certain quite a bit of that information is available (if less certain that it has been gathered), what I’m saying here is clearly and bluntly this: that God Himself has a higher priority for what we must see. That’s what He’s been unfolding for us over the last several months, and indeed, over the last several years.
However much we want to see, what we want is not enough for His purposes. He has something better in mind.
We have to see first the molecular-level corruption and depravity of our existing institutions. We have to see that they may be past saving – and pray for the right things on that basis.
I urge you most earnestly not to think you have an immediate task to execute concerning those institutions. If there were something effective for the people to do about it, that would be evident. But it is not.
Whether the institutions are salvageable or not, precipitate action of a disruptive kind will not be under God’s protection. The reason? He is deciding what we need to see. That has been increasingly clear to me for the last four years. We had to get to where we are by the path we have trodden, because it has revealed to us what reality truly is.
Disruptive action on our part interferes with that. When the time for disruption has come, God will move. For what it’s worth, I believe that’s coming very soon. In the meantime, He promises over and over to shield and protect those who put their trust in Him.
But first, He’s giving us a chance to understand why today’s reality has to be broken. I wrote some time back (here, for an extended treatment) about the similarities between our current situation and the Tower of Babel story as it is told in the book of Genesis: peoples being effectively enslaved by a “common language,” and an imperial leadership determined to rule over the people on that basis in the place of God. As an analogy, it makes a useful thinking aid. In the story, God’s move was to knock down the “tower,” and scatter the peoples to decentralized rule.
That was a good thing, as it is framed in Genesis. It undoubtedly felt catastrophic to the people involved at the time. But it was a provision of God for better conditions for men.
I realize everyone cannot be reached by this Biblical allusion. Offering it isn’t about organizing anyone for anything. This is far too big for us to do anything about. It’s about providing a touchstone for the days ahead, in which we may not understand why we must be witness to appalling revelations.
Those revelations are not our end. God is in charge of cataclysm as He is in charge of creation, life, hope, and the future. Don’t lose heart. We are on God’s time now, and His goodness is infinite in a way that goes beyond degree or measure.
