How the machine neuters rebels

Musk isn't Tom Payne and Trump isn't George Washington

The manufactured response to the Trump phenomenon is astonishingly polarized.

He’s either considered the second coming of Hitler, or the harbinger of liberty’s return to the oppresséd peoples of the West. And the intensity of this polarization is constantly being fed by all levels of the contemporary media, from the legacy mainstream media to the volunteer propaganda corps on Tiktok and the tube. From the point of view of the broad resistance formation that took shape in the wake of covid (and which was furter consolidated through the Ukraine war), the fact that most of the violently conformist mask-wearing and triple-vaxxed crowd are pulling out their hair in this two-minute hate session that was mandated at the election victory is a pretty good reason to put your weight behind him. This in turn feeds more trichotrillomania.

But let’s just say that if the guy you’re backing was just elected to the highest office in the United States, and is also part of the billionaire class with deep and enduring connections to the censorship apparatus and the military-industrial complex, well, then you’re not a part of any resistance whatsoever.

Maybe that could be true in something like 50 years, when the presidency is nothing but a ceremonial position in a reborn Iroquois confederacy and Kunstler’s long emergency is properly established with the global police state of end-stage techno-capitalism reduced to a bad memory —

But what we’re seeing play out right now is just textbook recuperation.

The enthusiastic endorsement of Trump and his “anti-establishment” administration by almost every single noteworthy name in the broader resistance formation that emerged in the wake of the covid event, and not least in response to the empire’s war in Ukraine, is profoundly tragic.

This is exactly how you neutralize a potentially meaningful political movement towards actual change.

The process was certainly visible before that, but the paradigmatic first milestone in all of this was definitely Musk’s purchase and rebranding of both himself and the Twitter platform that we discussed around two years ago.

The most noteworthy thing about that event is just how blatant it was. How Elon Musk, a venture capitalist mostly known for his dishonest business practices and clever skimming of public finances, was now supposed to be hailed as some free speech champion after simply buying and reframing a platform designed specifically for the refinement and dissemination of propaganda. What could go wrong?

Even actual neo-nazis obediently play along, unironically saluting Musk’s “masculine X-symbol”, while mocking the effeminate blue butterfly of Twitter alternative Bluesky. “Social media as it should be. Find your community and come have some fun again.” Ugh.

But who then became the most significant actual owners of rebranded Twitter? Fidelity (second largest asset manager after Vanguard). Pershing Square (of Bill Ackman who publicly supports the ongoing Palestinian genocide). Larry Ellison of Oracle, third-wealthiest person in the world who openly funds the IDF, also supports the ongoing Palestinian genocide, and has close ties to Netanyahu.

Ackman, for that matter, suspiciously hedged Pershing Square’s portfolio just ahead of the covid event, after which he was one of the earliest proponents of massive lockdowns in the US, “to slow the spread”.

And Oracle, of course, originated as a database designed by Ellison for use by the CIA in the 1970s.

Twitter. Risen from the ashes of censorship, a phoenix transformed into a bold guardian of freedom of thought and speech. Under the auspices of Fidelity and the CIA.

Who’s gonna buy that, right?

But some part of us is really, desperately going to want to believe something like this. That there after all are people within the system that can step up and fix things for us.

And after the covid event and the subsequent tyrannical abuses, the mass censorship, the vilification of dissidents, the outright lies, and the almost incomprehensible horror of just how dangerous the mandatory medical experimentation we underwent really was, you’re bound to want to grab onto any outstretched hand. Any port in the storm.

And this is precisely why the strategy is so effective. It can be likened to the outcome of a “strategy of tension” towards social control, but this situation arguably works on several levels all at once. The original notion of a strategy of tension was to foster a passive dependence on authority among the general population due to significant levels of stress and fear. But the advanced situation we’re now witnessing is rather akin to a subsequent imposition of polarization against a background of significant tension, which for different target groups serves to foster allegiance to either the overt face of authority or towards a controlled opposition.

And this controlled opposition is increasingly now being marketed to recuperate a right-wing populist movement rather than a radical left-wing resistance (through the “compatible left”). And this turn was entirely predictable. The slow death of globalization after the turn of the millennium was sure to bring about a resistance of a right-wing populist bent.

First of all, the left, a formidable foe to the system as recently as 1999, had already been neutered.

The process towards this outcome was complex, and must be considered in the context of the US “war on terror” and the dynamics of its associated global propaganda campaign which fomented a division between a severe and festering anti-islamic sentiment on the one side, generally associated to an ascendant populist right, and a significant reaction against this sentiment, chiefly on the part of a broader left.

There are brilliant examples of some of the most radical left-wing magazines in Sweden celebrating Obama’s election victory in 2008. Here’s from the old bomb-throwing communist paper Flamman from Nov. 7 that year, in an article entitled “Trust the movement”:

The US has been a nation under fear. Only the day before the election, Michael Moore dared stating on his web site that Barack Obama is the most progressive politician in the entire senate — and a few hours later, probably due to repercussions from the Democrats — he had to change this statement to not imperil the election outcome. But in the end, hope defeated fear. Thanks to an amazing candidate, hundreds of thousands enthusiastic campaign workers and millions of citizens.

Yes. The drone president, as he’d now be known to any politically mainstream former US serviceman, celebrated as a people’s hero by the recuperated left.

What remained of the radical potential of the left was throughout all this effectively turned into an auxiliary support for globalization and neoliberal policies, often entirely without the consent of the recuperated resistance groups. Radical left-wing organizations effectively fought in the streets to in practice defend and minimize the consequences of neoliberal migration policies initiated by Western capital, while they (we) simultaneously swore by a principled resistance to global capitalism. The humanitarian ideals and the concrete defense of the oppressed meant that the least bad option very much seemed to be an indirect support of capitalism’s objectives in the management and free movement of a global precariat as a cheap and flexible labour force. Win the battle and lose the war.

And a calculated compromise or not, there was but a short step from this consolidation of the left as an auxiliary force for neoliberal policies to Vaush’s rainbow-painted LGBTQ-tanks fighting the empire’s war in Russia.

Exactly the same thing is now under way in relation to the transnational resistance movement that began to take shape under covid. The key parts of the resistance are teased out and then corralled into one separate camp, where the members’ identification with this new category and its prominent media figures are entrenched.

This, in turn, reproduces further anger and discontent with the “anti-establishment faction” among the mainstream, which consolidates both camps further.

Then you allow the “anti-establishment faction” to finally win a meaningful yet limited victory (RFK as health czar! Bhattacharya as director of the NIH! Hurrah! Big pharma is finally defeated!) which creates additional animosity among the tories/mainline liberals/conformist adherents of the outward face of the power structure while also tying the former resistance movement closer and closer to the established social hierarchy, and promoting its identification with the system and enticing its chief representatives with various perks and privileges.

Yeah, and the Tories, for that matter — the British conservative party, the reactionary wing of the British two-party system? They were once an anti-establishment faction.

As a political term, Tory was an insult (derived from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe, modern Irish tóraí, meaning "outlaw", "robber", from the Irish word tóir, meaning "pursuit" since outlaws were "pursued men") …

Wikipedia.

All of this is now playing out according to the established logic of brand marketing. The machinery of consent manufacturing is tugging along nicely as it always has, and another potential threat to the stability of the system is about to be transformed into the loyalist faction.

And I can’t see why so many of you fail to grasp this. While I can’t really blame the halfwit social justice neoliberal crowd, shrewd old boomers like Kunstler should reasonably well understand that much of what they’re writing now sounds just like Reaganite chatter about “morning in America”.

But nobody’s coming to fix things for us. Nobody’s going to emerge from the confines of the established mechanisms of power and turn this ship around for us.

It’s time to stop sitting around just waiting for something worth waiting for.

Let’s stop this and start over.

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