Hearing a lot of buzz about the impending civil war on the TL, because the Deep State will “stop at nothing” to ensure that Trump does not take office.
> Hearing a lot of buzz about the impending civil war on the TL, because the Deep State will “stop at nothing” to ensure that Trump does not take office.
It is my gut check that the deep state has in fact changed it's mind, and specifically wants him to win
He shills for kikes and didn’t leave any lasting impact with his last tenure, it only makes sense for him to win as it perpetuates the slow boil of white dissident Americans, I think we’d actually see some small scale civil conflict and unrest if he lost and not in a gay liberal way like burning stuff or looting.
I would phrase it less inflammatorially, on account of optics matter, but you're not wrong.
Except that I disagree. I don't think you see meaningful unrest if he loses. I think that, for all of their bluster, most MAGA Americans don't have the spine to engage in actual political violence the way that Antifa does. I also think that's probably a good thing. If RED team does political violence at small scale, it just delegitimizes their side in the eyes of normies and gives the government a pretense to crack down on freedoms. If RED team does political violence at large scale, I don't think they win(*)
I'm actually fairly undecided on whether or not I think there will be unrest if he wins. On the one hand, there was last time. On the other hand, I'm pretty convinced that approximately zero of that was organic, and if The Deep State has changed their disposition towards him, they have no reason to instigate riots anew
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(*) My wargaming theory on how a large scale RED team uprising would play out.
There's two main ways I see it playing out: organic asymmetric warfare, or rebel state civil war.
Rebel state civil war looks kind of like Civil War 2.0. Say Texas and Florida finally decide that the federal government has gone too far, and put their foot down. My theorizing on this possible future is speculative and poorly defined, but some random thoughts:
* I don't think any state government has the balls to actually do this
* I think that the federal government would likely attempt to avoid a direct confrontation and instead use things like lawfare and PR to win nonviolently
* I think that the united states' society and economy is so interconnected that such an event would be disastrous in the short term.
* I think that the United States federal government recognizes that political unity on the continent is a necessary precondition to nuclear security, and would therefore be willing to do _whatever it takes_ to quell the uprising. I think they would be both willing and able to bomb every Texas city to rubble, for example, if they thought it was necessary.
* I think that, if this kind of future was going to happen, what would instead happen is my "US Collapse (but nobody thinks it's collapsing)" theory. Essentially: states will start ignoring the parts of the federal government that they don't like, and the federal government will be either unwilling or unable to stop them. Imagine immigration sanctuary cities, but for all kinds of different laws.
I am more confident of my prediction for organic asymmetric warfare (ie. random RED teamers deciding they've had enough, and they're going to start using their guns). I think it ends very, very poorly for the RED team. Why?
* The army might be full of sympathizers but the leadership of the army is solidly with the establishment. It is not reasonable to assume that any meaningful US military would defect to RED team
* BLU team controls most of the legitimizing institutions of society.
So if that were to happen, here's how I think it plays out. Somewhere, some idiot does a violence that causes bad optics. Maybe they kill a kid by accident or something. BLU uses their control of corporate media to spam the entire country 24-7 with stories of RED team committing terrorist atrocities.
Some people will believe this and be radicalized against them. Most people will probably have some sense that it is untrue. But it will spread enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to cause a lot of people who would otherwise sympathize, to sit it out.
You'll have millions of conservative Americans watching Fox News and thinking something along the lines of "sure, DC has got to go, but I can't condone killing children. Besides, do I really want to risk my life, and the life of my family, on this cause? It's probably best to keep my head down, stay out of it, cross my fingers, and hope it blows over". Suddenly 80% of the people who otherwise would assist the RED cause, don't.
So with a tiny force of unorganized guerrillas, what can RED do? They can more or less prevent BLU control of rural areas, but, why does BLU care about rural areas? "Have fun eating when we blockade your roads" yeah but most BLU cities are coastal. They can ship food in from other countries. Reality is, rural communities need those cities more than those cities need the rural communities.
The best case scenario is that BLU basically secures the cities and otherwise ignores RED, and RED eventually loses momentum and collapses. The worst case scenario is that heartland America gets napalmed until everyone stops screaming.
That’s a pretty bleak outlook, are you former or active military ? In my personal experience and time in I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of the more valuable people and assets would end up fighting against the government if the time came to pick between real American people or D.C. Jan 6 and numerous SM violations have shown that the military upper brass is not as compliant and “pro-govt” as you’d be led to believe. I don’t think asym red team would be unsupported btw, Russia, China, Iran and even smaller players like Venezuela would send munitions, supply and fighters as soon as the opportunity would arise. There is also the large and growing NS faction of capable and militarist background, we would see a lot of the vulnerable critical infrastructure get hit by drones and third party fighters. It’ll be a huge mess if the day ever does come, I know that much for certain lol.
The closest thing to military experience I have is a friend who is a veteran. Unless playing https://zero-k.info counts
The point of my analysis is that the command and control structures of the military are firmly in the hands of BLU team. It doesn't matter how many individual units would join RED team, if none of them have a command structure (or worse, a command structure actively sabotaging them)
Counterpoint, our nation doesn’t have the munitions or industrial capacity for a prolonged war, including a civil war. Its an open question if our nukes even work anymore. Our military has seen better days and their loyalty to the fedgov is uh… questionable. Its possible that if a break occurs, then it could lead to a cascading effect similar to the end of the soviet union.
What happens if a bunch of red teamers start going ham on rail and industrial infrastructure. Hard targets, not civilians. Blowing up a few dozen bridges at once would cripple the country. How much security do those electrical substations have again? What about spare parts? All shipped to Ukraine? Uh oh. Sure you can still import food but if the middle of the country starts to starve things will get very spicy very quickly. Not to mention most cities electrical grids and utility infrastructure aren’t all that ship shape.
As for the coastal cities… yeah gonna say our aging port infrastructure isn’t gonna look so hot when shit starts going sideways and they have to bear all the systems load that would normally be distributed via rail and road networks.
We also have to assume foreign powers would love to kick the US while its down too…
If things get spicy enough the dollar gets cooked and then that is game set match. The dollar is the last remaining pillar of the empire, if the empire starts looking sick…
True. Sloppy definitions on my part, but when I say "deep state" I mean one of two things:
1) The collective actions of 2 million unelected bureaucrats, mostly following incentives, with the main incentive being "do the least amount of work, collect paycheque, and get home by 5"
2) The handful of people who exercise real, serious influence on our society. Their powers are not limited but they definitely exist. EG the upper echelons of the CIA. If they can regime-change like 80 other countries, there's no reason they wouldn't have similar power here.
In this case, I am mostly working with definition (2)
The following characterizes my thoughts on the matter. There may be other factors involved, and some of these factors may end up being irrelevant, but four hypotheses I have:
1) Popular support for Trump has grown, and popular support for Harris has shrunk, to the point where they feel they can't plausibly steal the election without a complete loss of all legitimacy.
It's clear to me that Trump's appeal and support has only grown since 2016. Meanwhile, more and more people are finally starting to recognize the media BS and astroturfing for what it is. In 2020 they could steal the election and most people would think "well, we all hate Trump, so it's probably legit, (whisper: and if it's not, it's for the greater good anyway)". But in 2024, seeing things like Biden's debate performance and Harris' interviewing, a lot of people are starting to recognize that nothing is real or trustworthy
2) People have very short memories and, for the most part, lack the ability to understand causality. They simply see correlations. The last four years have involved some very disastrous political decisions, but most political decisions take time to come to fruition. If Trump is in office for the next 4 years, he's going to inherit all of the problems, and be unable to solve them (or, if he can solve them, unable to solve them before his term is up). This allows the deep state to pin all the problems on him and sets the Democrats up for a slam dunk in 2028
3) in 2016, Trump was an outsider. In 2024, I think the deep state (specifically the military-industrial complex side of it) has their hooks in him. Choosing Vance strikes me as indicative of this. At the end of the day, if there is a They, They don't care who's in office as long as the office does what they want.
Perhaps in July, someone pulled Trump aside and said "look, you're going to win this election, and then you're going to give us what we want. And if you don't, we won't miss next time". This is, however, not a necessary element to this bullet point (pun intended), just a possibility.
4) Insofar as anyone can exercise power (really, more like influence) over the slime mold under discussion, I think there are certain groups with certain priorities who are much more influential than others. I think that, for all practical purposes, they always get what they want. I think that they have recognized that Harris is insufficiently supportive of their priorities, and I think they have recognized that some of Harris' constituency poses a threat to their priorities. Meanwhile, I think they have also finally admitted to themselves that Trump is the only president in decades to have taken active steps towards their priorities.
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All of this is speculation on my part. The 'real' explanation could be one of the above. Or parts of all of the above. Or some fifth bullet point I haven't thought of. But I think it's clear that the institutional drive to prevent Trump at all costs is gone now. The media doesn't have any heart in their slander anymore, it feels more like they're just going through the motions, and they're allowing a much more critical disposition towards Harris than they ever did towards Biden.
Even amongst the terminally TDS people I know, their opinions are shifting. I was somewhat shocked at their reaction to the assassination attempt, which was unanimously: "look, I think he's a bad leader, but it's fucked up that his supporters can't be safe at their own rallies. We don't settle scores with violence in this country.". That's a far cry from "by ANY means necessary" of 8 years ago. That's a far cry from "fiery but mostly peaceful" of 4 years ago.
Thanks for your thoughts on this matter. It's tiring thinking all the time about this and this is one area where I just haven't put in the work to make sense of it. So I really appreciate your list here.
My initial consideration is that bullet point 2 makes the most sense to me. Not just the financial crisis that is building, but probably a war that we can't avoid getting involved in. This should mean the deep state is able not just do a rearguard action, but set itself up nicely for the next big advance.
Hopefully, Trump will use this opportunity to clean house in a way that doesn't seem possible yet, but I'm not optimistic.
> Thanks for your thoughts on this matter. It's tiring thinking all the time about this and this is one area where I just haven't put in the work to make sense of it. So I really appreciate your list here.
I have a job I dislike and a lot of time I need to waste. I wish I had better things to focus on 😅
Ultimately this is all Kremlinology. Whatever the reality is, we will never know, and all we can do is speculate. The only practical application of such speculation is to inform predictions about the future, and so in this case, my prediction: Trump will formally win the election with a very large margin. And then I am going to go around and mock all of the liberals around me mercilessly, not because they lost, but because they were so deluded that they didn't believe they could lose.
> Hopefully, Trump will use this opportunity to clean house in a way that doesn't seem possible yet, but I'm not optimistic.
My mental model suggests that he is now (either willingly or unwillingly) part of the house, and will not clean it.
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As an alternative mental model, one I assign considerably _less_ confidence to: Trump 2024 represents an actual attempt by 'outside' forces (outside the DC swamp anyway) to meaningfully wrest power away from the government and accomplish meaningful change. If Trump was doing this on his own, I'd say this is ridiculous (which I did in fact say in 2016 and feel that I was proven right). But Trump has the backing of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. I don't think Musk is a meaningful political actor in his own right, but Thiel is both willing and able to enact long term plans for substantial cultural change, and 'drain the swamp' would be broadly consistent with what I would expect from him.
I do not want to pin my hopes on such a long shot, but Trump 2024 might represent the good, old-guard culture of Silicon Valley rising up against east coast managerialism and seizing the reins of power. We'll find out, one way or another, in two weeks.
Ironically, having spent 15 years in this industry, when I consider the thesis "FAANG is taking over the USG", this mostly just causes me to fear FAANG more.
There are three competing perspectives about the nature of globohomo: (1) it's fully controlled from the top, (2) it's not controlled at all, it is a blind fungus or swarm (as in this post), or (3) it's a combination.
I see it as #3. The primary way globohomo exerts control is through propaganda (both in the media and in education and entertainment), but ultimately through control of the money supply. The Federal Reserve is privately owned, has never had an audit, and loans money printed out of thin air at interest to the government. The Bank of England, despite being nationalized, is also not fully publicly owned. The central banks of the world are, imo, owned by the same parties that own these two central banks. This is why we saw total coordination from almost every nation of the world during fraudvirus, including from purported enemy countries such as Russia and Iran, which did the same lockdowns and vaccines as every other country. They backed off of vaccine passports, ultimately, because compliance rates were not high enough; something like 80% of adult retards in the U.S. got the first death jab, but compliance rates on the booster were only 50%.
Spot-on! This is exactly how I have been thinking about "the blob" (and the political left) for at least a few years.
Organizations do not behave like individual human beings. The classic example in business is the concept of "disruption", where lower cost alternatives mature into products that can overtake existing markets. If businesses behaved like rational people, they would pursue those lower cost alternatives before they cannibalize their core business, but instead mature, established businesses go up market, chasing more niche features and higher margins until the scrappy lower cost competitors take their customers.
It's also why I never bought into the "the NWO is trying to kill us all with the vax" thing from the fringes of the right (who, in their defense, have been correct more often than not).
There is a human tendency to anthropomorphize things that don't fit under such a paradigm. We do it to animals, we do it to organizations, more primitive people do it for things like the weather (or people we prefer to think of as primitive anyway), but it's more of a human impulse than an analysis.
This article, however, is an analysis. And a damn good one.
The way I see it we are going to be met, sooner or later, with the DoD Directive 5240.01 ( https://tinyurl.com/esdwhsmil524001p ) which was reissued/revised on 09/27/2024. There is no way this was a random update in some random year. The fact that it has happened so close to such a decisive election is telling at best and foreshadowing of the worst. Beware of big cities where BLM and Antifa will be installed to incite the rioting…
Fascinating analysis. I have been thinking about this for a while trying to dissect the blob and figure out if it is rogue actors on a small scale or larger orchestration. One thing I do know is if you want to propagate an agenda through an organization in a surreptitious manner, you dont disclose the larger agenda, but instead privately try to motivate them for a different agenda that produces a similar outcome, so they take the action you want but they dont really know the bigger picture. The military like to say the lie is different at each level. So there could be an agenda at the top but the individual actions. So it will appear like individual actors acting in their own individual incentives within their narrow bureaucratic fiefs, but it was carefully cloaked that way, or its just as it seems, self interest.
I agree for the most part but I am not as dismissive of the possibility of civil conflict. A fracturing bureaucracy like ours is historically dangerous. It is likely to overestimate its strength, underestimate a reaction, or bumble into doing something really stupid. However, I will point out that I think there is a greater possibility of becoming a failed state (at least for a little while) with governmental power fracturing before it ever gets to that point. I know that is usually associated with the Third World but it can happen.
Few would argue that the progressive machine is intelligent. But they are unprincipled and ruthless.
How intelligent was Hillter or Mao? But look at the damage they did. Most of their adversaries were more intelligent than them, but they lost (initially) to the ruthlessness. After all, principled people operate within the law. Unprincipled people don't. Consider how that plays out.
We have a huge problem, right in front of our faces. Inside of one administration, the USA was turned into a banana republic, and half the population cheered. And those cheers mostly came from college campuses.
The history of the 17th-19th centuries is the fall of kind and ineffectual monarchs to much more ruthless ideologues, Imo. I think we may see something similar as managerialism runs its course, the current people in charge are gormless worms.
Stalin was a violent bankrobber and assassin in his early days, and mao led an actual army in the chinese civil war. These weren’t the feminized faggots that manage us today.
This is a thought-provoking counter analysis to those who think everything is planned and orchestrated by a cabal of disciples of Machiavelli.
I think the author’s bottom-line - “The most likely outcome is Trump wins, and they just stonewall him like last time (and try to leave him holding the bag on the impending fiscal collapse.") - could turn out to be true.
While I agree with most points made by the author, I do disagree with the view the Deep State doesn’t “anticipate” threats ... but just “adapts” to them. IMO the Censorship Industrial Complex was CREATED to anticipate all possible threats to their continued control … and has clearly worked to neutralize these threats.
... I just cross-posted this article because I thought it was a good companion piece - with some persuasive alternative takes - to my recent essay, "The Fix is In."
"People are strange. They are constantly angered by trivial things. But on a major matter, like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice." -Bukowski
Many of you should spend at least half the time you waste speculating, by actually preparing for the inevitable collapse. Not due to political nonsense. But due to massive sudden technological breakthroughs which will render large swaths of civilization economically unviable. It's the corporations that are in charge. And they will downsize for profit at the first chance they get. What are all the unemployed people going to do to survive? Universal basic income. Ridiculous. A rising tide raises all ships. And makes $2000 a month the new DEAD BROKE. Let's not even get too far down the rabbit hole on the existential threat of hundreds of millions of people with no life purpose. We're talking mass depression, mass anxiety, mass mental disorders. Enter a Brave New World. Humanity won't go out with a band. Humanity will die with a whimper, stoned, drunk, high, chain watching Tiger King and living in the dream world of social media. The Matrix was not a science fiction film. It was a documentary. The average person spends 8.5 hours a day on a digital screen. But how much more time do they spend THINKING about what they saw on the digital screen? Most people are already plugged in to virtual reality. Rumors about Brain chips and VR glasses are to keep you from realizing it's already here. Prisons exist to keep you from realizing that society is the real prison. A prison for your mind. The war is not "coming". It's been going on since before you were born. We were all born into an artificial reality. And it's about to crash. Technology will be the end of us as a species.
Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they are not worth employing even for the minimum wage. Technological progress makes whole categories of people useless without making it possible to support them with the wealth produced by the progress.
Jacques Ellul
THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work
will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary.
Either of two cases might occur.
The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave.
We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power.
What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions.
As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones.
Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.
People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite-just as it is today, but with two differences.
Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity.
If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite.
Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes
"treatment" to cure his "problem."
Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby.
These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
> Hearing a lot of buzz about the impending civil war on the TL, because the Deep State will “stop at nothing” to ensure that Trump does not take office.
It is my gut check that the deep state has in fact changed it's mind, and specifically wants him to win
He shills for kikes and didn’t leave any lasting impact with his last tenure, it only makes sense for him to win as it perpetuates the slow boil of white dissident Americans, I think we’d actually see some small scale civil conflict and unrest if he lost and not in a gay liberal way like burning stuff or looting.
I would phrase it less inflammatorially, on account of optics matter, but you're not wrong.
Except that I disagree. I don't think you see meaningful unrest if he loses. I think that, for all of their bluster, most MAGA Americans don't have the spine to engage in actual political violence the way that Antifa does. I also think that's probably a good thing. If RED team does political violence at small scale, it just delegitimizes their side in the eyes of normies and gives the government a pretense to crack down on freedoms. If RED team does political violence at large scale, I don't think they win(*)
I'm actually fairly undecided on whether or not I think there will be unrest if he wins. On the one hand, there was last time. On the other hand, I'm pretty convinced that approximately zero of that was organic, and if The Deep State has changed their disposition towards him, they have no reason to instigate riots anew
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(*) My wargaming theory on how a large scale RED team uprising would play out.
There's two main ways I see it playing out: organic asymmetric warfare, or rebel state civil war.
Rebel state civil war looks kind of like Civil War 2.0. Say Texas and Florida finally decide that the federal government has gone too far, and put their foot down. My theorizing on this possible future is speculative and poorly defined, but some random thoughts:
* I don't think any state government has the balls to actually do this
* I think that the federal government would likely attempt to avoid a direct confrontation and instead use things like lawfare and PR to win nonviolently
* I think that the united states' society and economy is so interconnected that such an event would be disastrous in the short term.
* I think that the United States federal government recognizes that political unity on the continent is a necessary precondition to nuclear security, and would therefore be willing to do _whatever it takes_ to quell the uprising. I think they would be both willing and able to bomb every Texas city to rubble, for example, if they thought it was necessary.
* I think that, if this kind of future was going to happen, what would instead happen is my "US Collapse (but nobody thinks it's collapsing)" theory. Essentially: states will start ignoring the parts of the federal government that they don't like, and the federal government will be either unwilling or unable to stop them. Imagine immigration sanctuary cities, but for all kinds of different laws.
I am more confident of my prediction for organic asymmetric warfare (ie. random RED teamers deciding they've had enough, and they're going to start using their guns). I think it ends very, very poorly for the RED team. Why?
* The army might be full of sympathizers but the leadership of the army is solidly with the establishment. It is not reasonable to assume that any meaningful US military would defect to RED team
* BLU team controls most of the legitimizing institutions of society.
So if that were to happen, here's how I think it plays out. Somewhere, some idiot does a violence that causes bad optics. Maybe they kill a kid by accident or something. BLU uses their control of corporate media to spam the entire country 24-7 with stories of RED team committing terrorist atrocities.
Some people will believe this and be radicalized against them. Most people will probably have some sense that it is untrue. But it will spread enough fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to cause a lot of people who would otherwise sympathize, to sit it out.
You'll have millions of conservative Americans watching Fox News and thinking something along the lines of "sure, DC has got to go, but I can't condone killing children. Besides, do I really want to risk my life, and the life of my family, on this cause? It's probably best to keep my head down, stay out of it, cross my fingers, and hope it blows over". Suddenly 80% of the people who otherwise would assist the RED cause, don't.
So with a tiny force of unorganized guerrillas, what can RED do? They can more or less prevent BLU control of rural areas, but, why does BLU care about rural areas? "Have fun eating when we blockade your roads" yeah but most BLU cities are coastal. They can ship food in from other countries. Reality is, rural communities need those cities more than those cities need the rural communities.
The best case scenario is that BLU basically secures the cities and otherwise ignores RED, and RED eventually loses momentum and collapses. The worst case scenario is that heartland America gets napalmed until everyone stops screaming.
That’s a pretty bleak outlook, are you former or active military ? In my personal experience and time in I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of the more valuable people and assets would end up fighting against the government if the time came to pick between real American people or D.C. Jan 6 and numerous SM violations have shown that the military upper brass is not as compliant and “pro-govt” as you’d be led to believe. I don’t think asym red team would be unsupported btw, Russia, China, Iran and even smaller players like Venezuela would send munitions, supply and fighters as soon as the opportunity would arise. There is also the large and growing NS faction of capable and militarist background, we would see a lot of the vulnerable critical infrastructure get hit by drones and third party fighters. It’ll be a huge mess if the day ever does come, I know that much for certain lol.
The closest thing to military experience I have is a friend who is a veteran. Unless playing https://zero-k.info counts
The point of my analysis is that the command and control structures of the military are firmly in the hands of BLU team. It doesn't matter how many individual units would join RED team, if none of them have a command structure (or worse, a command structure actively sabotaging them)
Counterpoint, our nation doesn’t have the munitions or industrial capacity for a prolonged war, including a civil war. Its an open question if our nukes even work anymore. Our military has seen better days and their loyalty to the fedgov is uh… questionable. Its possible that if a break occurs, then it could lead to a cascading effect similar to the end of the soviet union.
What happens if a bunch of red teamers start going ham on rail and industrial infrastructure. Hard targets, not civilians. Blowing up a few dozen bridges at once would cripple the country. How much security do those electrical substations have again? What about spare parts? All shipped to Ukraine? Uh oh. Sure you can still import food but if the middle of the country starts to starve things will get very spicy very quickly. Not to mention most cities electrical grids and utility infrastructure aren’t all that ship shape.
As for the coastal cities… yeah gonna say our aging port infrastructure isn’t gonna look so hot when shit starts going sideways and they have to bear all the systems load that would normally be distributed via rail and road networks.
We also have to assume foreign powers would love to kick the US while its down too…
If things get spicy enough the dollar gets cooked and then that is game set match. The dollar is the last remaining pillar of the empire, if the empire starts looking sick…
Calm down, Heinrich. Everything is going to work out ok.
I’m not trying to be a doomer here, I just don’t see Trump making any real change “THIS TIME” is all.
Like the OP said, the deep state isn't monolithic, different parts of it take different attitudes towards him.
True. Sloppy definitions on my part, but when I say "deep state" I mean one of two things:
1) The collective actions of 2 million unelected bureaucrats, mostly following incentives, with the main incentive being "do the least amount of work, collect paycheque, and get home by 5"
2) The handful of people who exercise real, serious influence on our society. Their powers are not limited but they definitely exist. EG the upper echelons of the CIA. If they can regime-change like 80 other countries, there's no reason they wouldn't have similar power here.
In this case, I am mostly working with definition (2)
I think there's lots of evidence that seems to point in that development, but I don't understand why.
The following characterizes my thoughts on the matter. There may be other factors involved, and some of these factors may end up being irrelevant, but four hypotheses I have:
1) Popular support for Trump has grown, and popular support for Harris has shrunk, to the point where they feel they can't plausibly steal the election without a complete loss of all legitimacy.
It's clear to me that Trump's appeal and support has only grown since 2016. Meanwhile, more and more people are finally starting to recognize the media BS and astroturfing for what it is. In 2020 they could steal the election and most people would think "well, we all hate Trump, so it's probably legit, (whisper: and if it's not, it's for the greater good anyway)". But in 2024, seeing things like Biden's debate performance and Harris' interviewing, a lot of people are starting to recognize that nothing is real or trustworthy
2) People have very short memories and, for the most part, lack the ability to understand causality. They simply see correlations. The last four years have involved some very disastrous political decisions, but most political decisions take time to come to fruition. If Trump is in office for the next 4 years, he's going to inherit all of the problems, and be unable to solve them (or, if he can solve them, unable to solve them before his term is up). This allows the deep state to pin all the problems on him and sets the Democrats up for a slam dunk in 2028
3) in 2016, Trump was an outsider. In 2024, I think the deep state (specifically the military-industrial complex side of it) has their hooks in him. Choosing Vance strikes me as indicative of this. At the end of the day, if there is a They, They don't care who's in office as long as the office does what they want.
Perhaps in July, someone pulled Trump aside and said "look, you're going to win this election, and then you're going to give us what we want. And if you don't, we won't miss next time". This is, however, not a necessary element to this bullet point (pun intended), just a possibility.
4) Insofar as anyone can exercise power (really, more like influence) over the slime mold under discussion, I think there are certain groups with certain priorities who are much more influential than others. I think that, for all practical purposes, they always get what they want. I think that they have recognized that Harris is insufficiently supportive of their priorities, and I think they have recognized that some of Harris' constituency poses a threat to their priorities. Meanwhile, I think they have also finally admitted to themselves that Trump is the only president in decades to have taken active steps towards their priorities.
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All of this is speculation on my part. The 'real' explanation could be one of the above. Or parts of all of the above. Or some fifth bullet point I haven't thought of. But I think it's clear that the institutional drive to prevent Trump at all costs is gone now. The media doesn't have any heart in their slander anymore, it feels more like they're just going through the motions, and they're allowing a much more critical disposition towards Harris than they ever did towards Biden.
Even amongst the terminally TDS people I know, their opinions are shifting. I was somewhat shocked at their reaction to the assassination attempt, which was unanimously: "look, I think he's a bad leader, but it's fucked up that his supporters can't be safe at their own rallies. We don't settle scores with violence in this country.". That's a far cry from "by ANY means necessary" of 8 years ago. That's a far cry from "fiery but mostly peaceful" of 4 years ago.
Excellent post. You’ve clearly articulated some rather random thoughts I had knocking around in my brain
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Thanks for your thoughts on this matter. It's tiring thinking all the time about this and this is one area where I just haven't put in the work to make sense of it. So I really appreciate your list here.
My initial consideration is that bullet point 2 makes the most sense to me. Not just the financial crisis that is building, but probably a war that we can't avoid getting involved in. This should mean the deep state is able not just do a rearguard action, but set itself up nicely for the next big advance.
Hopefully, Trump will use this opportunity to clean house in a way that doesn't seem possible yet, but I'm not optimistic.
> Thanks for your thoughts on this matter. It's tiring thinking all the time about this and this is one area where I just haven't put in the work to make sense of it. So I really appreciate your list here.
I have a job I dislike and a lot of time I need to waste. I wish I had better things to focus on 😅
Ultimately this is all Kremlinology. Whatever the reality is, we will never know, and all we can do is speculate. The only practical application of such speculation is to inform predictions about the future, and so in this case, my prediction: Trump will formally win the election with a very large margin. And then I am going to go around and mock all of the liberals around me mercilessly, not because they lost, but because they were so deluded that they didn't believe they could lose.
> Hopefully, Trump will use this opportunity to clean house in a way that doesn't seem possible yet, but I'm not optimistic.
My mental model suggests that he is now (either willingly or unwillingly) part of the house, and will not clean it.
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As an alternative mental model, one I assign considerably _less_ confidence to: Trump 2024 represents an actual attempt by 'outside' forces (outside the DC swamp anyway) to meaningfully wrest power away from the government and accomplish meaningful change. If Trump was doing this on his own, I'd say this is ridiculous (which I did in fact say in 2016 and feel that I was proven right). But Trump has the backing of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. I don't think Musk is a meaningful political actor in his own right, but Thiel is both willing and able to enact long term plans for substantial cultural change, and 'drain the swamp' would be broadly consistent with what I would expect from him.
I do not want to pin my hopes on such a long shot, but Trump 2024 might represent the good, old-guard culture of Silicon Valley rising up against east coast managerialism and seizing the reins of power. We'll find out, one way or another, in two weeks.
Ironically, having spent 15 years in this industry, when I consider the thesis "FAANG is taking over the USG", this mostly just causes me to fear FAANG more.
There are three competing perspectives about the nature of globohomo: (1) it's fully controlled from the top, (2) it's not controlled at all, it is a blind fungus or swarm (as in this post), or (3) it's a combination.
I see it as #3. The primary way globohomo exerts control is through propaganda (both in the media and in education and entertainment), but ultimately through control of the money supply. The Federal Reserve is privately owned, has never had an audit, and loans money printed out of thin air at interest to the government. The Bank of England, despite being nationalized, is also not fully publicly owned. The central banks of the world are, imo, owned by the same parties that own these two central banks. This is why we saw total coordination from almost every nation of the world during fraudvirus, including from purported enemy countries such as Russia and Iran, which did the same lockdowns and vaccines as every other country. They backed off of vaccine passports, ultimately, because compliance rates were not high enough; something like 80% of adult retards in the U.S. got the first death jab, but compliance rates on the booster were only 50%.
Seeing the world as centralized above the level of the nation state has much greater predictive accuracy, imo, than just seeing globohomo as a headless entropic swarm: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-global-world-order-is-centralized
My goodness that was good. I fancy myself a good judge. In my judgement this author is correct, accurate and has displayed impeccable judgment.
In a sea of shit and nonsense what a pleasure that was, congratulations.
Read "The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World?" It explains quite a lot of the gaps you're looking to explore.
@eugyppius wrote something similar about conspiracies back in late 2021. You should check it out. https://www.eugyppius.com/p/there-isnt-one-plan-there-are-fifty
Spot-on! This is exactly how I have been thinking about "the blob" (and the political left) for at least a few years.
Organizations do not behave like individual human beings. The classic example in business is the concept of "disruption", where lower cost alternatives mature into products that can overtake existing markets. If businesses behaved like rational people, they would pursue those lower cost alternatives before they cannibalize their core business, but instead mature, established businesses go up market, chasing more niche features and higher margins until the scrappy lower cost competitors take their customers.
It's also why I never bought into the "the NWO is trying to kill us all with the vax" thing from the fringes of the right (who, in their defense, have been correct more often than not).
There is a human tendency to anthropomorphize things that don't fit under such a paradigm. We do it to animals, we do it to organizations, more primitive people do it for things like the weather (or people we prefer to think of as primitive anyway), but it's more of a human impulse than an analysis.
This article, however, is an analysis. And a damn good one.
Zombies have always just been PC stand-ins for commies.
Fantastic article!
The way I see it we are going to be met, sooner or later, with the DoD Directive 5240.01 ( https://tinyurl.com/esdwhsmil524001p ) which was reissued/revised on 09/27/2024. There is no way this was a random update in some random year. The fact that it has happened so close to such a decisive election is telling at best and foreshadowing of the worst. Beware of big cities where BLM and Antifa will be installed to incite the rioting…
Nice analysis, reminds me of the excellent book "The Unaccountability Machine" by Dan Davies
Isn't this just Yarvin's Cathedral?
Fascinating analysis. I have been thinking about this for a while trying to dissect the blob and figure out if it is rogue actors on a small scale or larger orchestration. One thing I do know is if you want to propagate an agenda through an organization in a surreptitious manner, you dont disclose the larger agenda, but instead privately try to motivate them for a different agenda that produces a similar outcome, so they take the action you want but they dont really know the bigger picture. The military like to say the lie is different at each level. So there could be an agenda at the top but the individual actions. So it will appear like individual actors acting in their own individual incentives within their narrow bureaucratic fiefs, but it was carefully cloaked that way, or its just as it seems, self interest.
I agree for the most part but I am not as dismissive of the possibility of civil conflict. A fracturing bureaucracy like ours is historically dangerous. It is likely to overestimate its strength, underestimate a reaction, or bumble into doing something really stupid. However, I will point out that I think there is a greater possibility of becoming a failed state (at least for a little while) with governmental power fracturing before it ever gets to that point. I know that is usually associated with the Third World but it can happen.
Few would argue that the progressive machine is intelligent. But they are unprincipled and ruthless.
How intelligent was Hillter or Mao? But look at the damage they did. Most of their adversaries were more intelligent than them, but they lost (initially) to the ruthlessness. After all, principled people operate within the law. Unprincipled people don't. Consider how that plays out.
We have a huge problem, right in front of our faces. Inside of one administration, the USA was turned into a banana republic, and half the population cheered. And those cheers mostly came from college campuses.
The history of the 17th-19th centuries is the fall of kind and ineffectual monarchs to much more ruthless ideologues, Imo. I think we may see something similar as managerialism runs its course, the current people in charge are gormless worms.
Stalin was a violent bankrobber and assassin in his early days, and mao led an actual army in the chinese civil war. These weren’t the feminized faggots that manage us today.
The ancien regime reaks of weakness.
This is a thought-provoking counter analysis to those who think everything is planned and orchestrated by a cabal of disciples of Machiavelli.
I think the author’s bottom-line - “The most likely outcome is Trump wins, and they just stonewall him like last time (and try to leave him holding the bag on the impending fiscal collapse.") - could turn out to be true.
While I agree with most points made by the author, I do disagree with the view the Deep State doesn’t “anticipate” threats ... but just “adapts” to them. IMO the Censorship Industrial Complex was CREATED to anticipate all possible threats to their continued control … and has clearly worked to neutralize these threats.
... I just cross-posted this article because I thought it was a good companion piece - with some persuasive alternative takes - to my recent essay, "The Fix is In."
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/logic-tells-me-the-fix-is-in
"People are strange. They are constantly angered by trivial things. But on a major matter, like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice." -Bukowski
Many of you should spend at least half the time you waste speculating, by actually preparing for the inevitable collapse. Not due to political nonsense. But due to massive sudden technological breakthroughs which will render large swaths of civilization economically unviable. It's the corporations that are in charge. And they will downsize for profit at the first chance they get. What are all the unemployed people going to do to survive? Universal basic income. Ridiculous. A rising tide raises all ships. And makes $2000 a month the new DEAD BROKE. Let's not even get too far down the rabbit hole on the existential threat of hundreds of millions of people with no life purpose. We're talking mass depression, mass anxiety, mass mental disorders. Enter a Brave New World. Humanity won't go out with a band. Humanity will die with a whimper, stoned, drunk, high, chain watching Tiger King and living in the dream world of social media. The Matrix was not a science fiction film. It was a documentary. The average person spends 8.5 hours a day on a digital screen. But how much more time do they spend THINKING about what they saw on the digital screen? Most people are already plugged in to virtual reality. Rumors about Brain chips and VR glasses are to keep you from realizing it's already here. Prisons exist to keep you from realizing that society is the real prison. A prison for your mind. The war is not "coming". It's been going on since before you were born. We were all born into an artificial reality. And it's about to crash. Technology will be the end of us as a species.
Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they are not worth employing even for the minimum wage. Technological progress makes whole categories of people useless without making it possible to support them with the wealth produced by the progress.
Jacques Ellul
THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work
will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary.
Either of two cases might occur.
The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave.
We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power.
What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions.
As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones.
Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.
People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite-just as it is today, but with two differences.
Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity.
If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite.
Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes
"treatment" to cure his "problem."
Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby.
These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.