THE COLUMN: State of Fear

Contrary to the Washington Post, democracy does not "die in darkness." It dies in chaos, brought on by fear, engendered by uncertainty and birthed of instability —an instability that, in the case of the United States of America, has been deliberately cultivated and fanned by the nation's political leadership and other "elite" big chiefs by a decades-long policy of institutional and moral destabilization. And on this Presidents Day, chaos is exactly where we're heading.

Consider the events just since the fall of 2020. An aged, senescent, longtime party hack and lifelong corruptocrat named Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., (look up how many Democrat presidents since Carter have been either "Junior" or "the II" or even "the III." Answer: all of them.) somehow won the presidency by drooling at his opponent while "election reform" did the rest.

At the behest of a World Health Organization corruptocrat/terrorist-adjacent operative named Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Biden immediately ramped up the induced panic over the Chinese bioweapon called Covid-19—typically Chinese in the ineptitude of its weaponization, but enough to frighten the children—and then unleashed yet another corruptocrat/homunculus named Anthony Fauci to oversee a reign of terror that effectively destroyed the private economies of the West along with the American Constitution. In fact, three years after the greatest hoax in human history first showed its ugly face, the Biden administration still won't lift its "state of emergency" until May 11: the death grip of an 80-year-old man who knows his time on this earth is shortening rapidly.

Continuing on the medical front, doctors and formerly respectable hospitals and universities have gone full Dr. Mengele on several issues, including their fascistic partnership with government and the mainstream media to continue to push an ineffective and dangerous "vaccine" to combat an illness with a survival rate of 99+%, even as evidence mounts of the tremendous damage the ill-conceived experimental gene therapy masquerading as a "cure" does to once-healthy people. Not to mention the recent study that showed that you'd have done just as well not to do anything all about Covid (a claim which would have gotten you banned from social media just a year ago), and let natural immunity takes its course.

In addition to that, of course, they're all in on the sexual mutilation of children as the movement that began with gay marriage has now morphed into "gender identity" and "gender-affirming care," spawned a host of new "pronouns" along with exotic piercings, drag-queen story hours in schools, and lectures about its needs on TikTok, itself demoralizing Chinese spyware from the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. All the social changes being rung by the Left at first went the collective name of "Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity"—fittingly, DIE. —until they figured out that some folks might get the right idea, and so an easy fix turned it into DEI. 

And don't even get me started about another insane consensus: that the U.S. should do "whatever it takes" to preserve the reign of the midget dictator of the Ukraine, corruptocrat/Biden paymaster Vladimir Zelensky, so that he might continue to pressure America and other real countries into war with Russia. The spectacle of Robinette Junior cavorting in Kiev while the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, bear the brunt of a government decision to deliberately poison their air and water should get him impeached in the House tomorrow. Or, as National Propaganda Radio daintily put it: "Crews in Ohio successfully release toxic chemicals from derailed tankers." 

Hey, wait a minute—I thought we were against that sort of air, ground, and water pollution! If we are "contributing to climate change" simply by exhaling, isn't this a little much? Shouldn't we just do as Greta does, and hold our breath until we turn blue? With time running out for the third rock from the sun, the oceans rising, the glaciers melting, and little children crying themselves to sleep at night over the certain prospect of their imminent demise, what else can we do but kill ourselves?

In short, we are in the middle of an engineered State of Fear, to use Michael Crichton's term as well as the title of his 2004 techno-thriller, which was the first major expose of the malignant charlatans behind the "climate change" movement. (It is of course purely coincidental that, almost alone among his thrillers, this book has never been made into a movie. The author died at the young age of 66 of cancer in 2008.)

One timely extract from his speech, which comes during a discussion of the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986:

But most troubling of all, according to the UN report in 2005, is that "the largest public health problem created by the accident" is the "damaging psychological impact [due] to a lack of accurate information…[manifesting] as negative self-assessments of health, belief in a shortened life expectancy, lack of initiative, and dependency on assistance from the state."

In other words, the greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies. We demand strict controls on radiation because it is such a health hazard. But Chernobyl suggests that false information can be a health hazard as damaging as radiation. I am not saying radiation is not a threat. I am not saying Chernobyl was not a genuinely serious event. 

But thousands of Ukrainians who didn’t die were made invalids out of fear. They were told to be afraid. They were told they were going to die when they weren’t. They were told their children would be deformed when they weren’t. They were told they couldn’t have children when they could. They were authoritatively promised a future of cancer, deformities, pain and decay. It’s no wonder they responded as they did. In fact, we need to recognize that this kind of human response is well-documented. Authoritatively telling people they are going to die can in itself be fatal.

In short, they're trying to drive us crazy. Why? Control, of course. In the opinion of the very silly men who control the technocracy, there are too many of us, we have too much freedom, the Western world (whence come most all the technological and high-cultural achievements throughout human history) is too white and too racist, that borders and biological sex are "constructs," that the civilizational-corroding pursuit of "diversity" is, like "tolerance," a virtue not a weakness, and cultural homogeneity is to be shunned as a high-trust community in which you leave your doors unlocked at night is replaced by a low-trust community in which people shit in the streets. 

There's a name for the cause of all of this, and it is Critical Theory. I Invite you to learn all about it in my 2015 bestseller, The Devil's Pleasure Palace, which outlined the origins of the Frankfurt School and examined its most destructive poisoned gift to Western civilization. Once again they want to invent the New Soviet Man: ex nihilo from the toxic minds and souls of Rousseau and Marx, people who think the right thoughts and live approved lives, who tolerate the increasing strictures of the surveillance state with a peep, people who won't put up a fuss about the occasional herd cull, which is what Covid was meant to be. In other words: sheep. 

This means you, bub.

What a stroke of genius it was to persuade everyone on the planet to willingly carry around their own ankle bracelet in the form of an iPhone or other smart phone, broadcasting their whereabouts to all relevant authorities 24 hours a day. To get them to happily provide reams of personal data and pictures to Facebook in exchange for being turned into the product that the Zuckerverse serves up to advertisers and from which he mints his billions. To express your personal opinions on Twitter regarding just about every subject under the sun, sometimes hiding behind the false and cowardly security of an easily busted alias, and then being hauled up on "community" charges of wrongthink whenever the media-operated Zeitgeist changes course with the speed of a flock of birds. Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein's got nothing on you. 

State of Fear? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Against the Great Reset: 'Socialism and the Great Reset'

Continuing today, and for the next 10 weeks, The Pipeline will present excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, to be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now for pre-order at the links. 

 

Part III: THE ECONOMIC

Excerpt from "Socialism and the Great Reset" by Michael Anton

It has become increasingly common to hear those on what we may call the conventional Right claim that the main threat facing the historic American nation and the American way of life is “socialism.” These warnings have grown with the rise of the so-called “Great Reset,” ostensibly a broad effort to reduce inequality, cool the planet (i.e., “address climate change”), and cure various social ills, all by decreasing alleged “overconsumption.” In other words, its mission is to persuade people, at least in the developed West, to accept lower standards of living in order to create a more just and “equitable” world. Since the conservative mind, not unreasonably, associates lower standards of living with “socialism,” many conservatives naturally intuit that the Great Reset must somehow be “socialist.”

I believe this fear is at least partly misplaced and that the warnings it gives rise to, however well-meaning, are counterproductive because they deflect attention from the truer, greater threat: specifically, the cabal of bankers, techies, corporate executives, politicians, senior bureaucrats, academics, and pundits who coalesce around the World Economic Forum and seek to change, reduce, restrict, and homogenize the Western way of life—but only for ordinary people. Their own way of life, along with the wealth and power that define it, they seek to entrench, augment, deepen, and extend.

This is why a strict or literal definition of “socialism”—public or government ownership and control of the means of production in order to equalize incomes and wealth across the population—is inapt to our situation. The Great Reset quietly but unmistakably redefines “socialism” to allow and even promote wealth and power concentration in certain hands. In the decisive sense, then, the West’s present economic system—really, its overarching regime—is the opposite of socialistic.

Yet there are ways in which this regime might still be tentatively described as “socialist,” at least as it operates for those not members in good standing of the Davoisie. If the Great Reset is allowed to proceed as planned, wealth for all but the global overclass will be equalized, or at least reduced for the middle and increased for the bottom. Many of the means used to accomplish this goal will be “socialistic,” broadly understood. But to understand both the similarities and the differences, we must go back to socialism’s source, which is the thought of Karl Marx and his colleague, financial backer, and junior partner, Friedrich Engels.

That thought is most accessible in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the jointly authored Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), and Engels’s pamphlet “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (1880). Marxism’s detailed account of economics is fully developed in the monumental Capital (Das Kapital), published in three volumes between 1867 and 1894. Marx and Engels do not claim to be innovators. They insist rather that they merely discovered and explicate the “scientific” theory of socialism, whose true roots are to be found in the unfolding development of “history.”

Marxism
A word ought to be said about the difference between “communism” and “socialism.” The distinction is not always clear in Marx’s and Engels’s works. Often, they use both terms interchangeably. Engels, especially, seems to elide the two, particularly in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” But we may perhaps take as authoritative the distinction made in the Manifesto. There, the two authors contrast true communism with various forms of socialism—feudal, petty-bourgeois,
German, conservative, and critical-utopian—all of which they find wanting, at best milestones on the road to communism.

Against the Great Reset

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It is unnecessary for our purposes here to recount Marx’s and Engels’s distinctions between the various forms of socialism. Suffice it to say that, in their account, all of those varieties constitute cynical or at any rate inconsequential concessions to the lower classes, intended to stave off the emergence of full communism and to preserve ruling class status and privileges. The “socialism” with which we are most familiar today—high and progressive taxation, a generous welfare state, nationalization of key services such as health care, an expansive list of state-guaranteed “rights,” combined with the retention of private property and private ownership of most means of production—Marx and Engels deride as “bourgeois socialism,” i.e., not only not the real thing but fundamentally closer to bourgeois capitalism than to true socialism, much less communism.

Marxism and “History”
For Marx and Engels, the ground of both socialism and communism is “history,” understood not as an account of past events, conditions, structures, and trends but as an inexorable movement toward a final, fully rational state, with “state” understood as both “state of being” and the formal machinery of government. The discovery of this notion of “history” is implicit in Rousseau’s account of man’s transition from the state of nature—man’s original and natural, in the sense of “default,” condition—to civil society. For Rousseau, that transition was both a decline and one-way: there is no going back. This change in man’s situation, which putatively changes his nature, is the core of what would come to be called “historicism”: the idea that human nature is not constant but variable according to the historical situation. In this understanding, “history,” and not any purported but nonexistent permanent human nature as posited by all prior philosophy, both determines the organization of society and supplies the standard by which man should live.

For Rousseau, man’s transition from the state of nature to civil society is caused by the discovery or development of his rationality, a latent quality always present in humanity but not active in the state of nature, in which men live more or less as beasts. What distinguishes man from the beasts is his freedom, his awareness of and ability to act on that freedom, and the potential to develop his rationality. The “unlocking” of that rationality is perhaps inevitable but at the same
time accidental or inadvertent. Once unlocked, human rationality inevitably leads to the invention of private property, which is the basis of all politics. “The first person who, having fenced off ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society,” Rousseau writes in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men.

Private property necessarily gives rise to institutions designed to protect and defend it, and these become not only the instruments of civil society but also sources of inequality and misery. Implicit in Rousseau’s thought is the unsettling notion that, once this historical process begins, it has no end or rational direction. History is driven by contradiction and conflict—though, he asserts, human beings can still live more or less happily if isolated from urban wealth and corruption. But such circumstances are rare and the products of chance. History in the main is the endless replacement of one set of standards and modes of life for new ones, one set of masters for another, ad infinitum.

Rousseau’s successors, principally Kant and Hegel, accept the notion that history is driven by conflict but posit that the process nonetheless has a rational direction. History’s inherent and inevitable conflicts point forward and upward toward a final state in which all of history’s contradictions are resolved. It is this alleged insight—popularized in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Francis Fukuyama—upon which Marx and Engels build their political and economic theory.

For Marxism, the fundamental fact of human life—what sets man apart from the other living beings—is conscious production and consumption. Marx partly follows Rousseau in believing that there was a period when man could, essentially, “live off the land,” on what he could find and gather. But whereas for Rousseau, man’s transition from the state of nature to civil society was an avoidable or at any rate accidental and unnecessary tragedy, for Marx it was inevitable and, eventually, will turn out all to the good.

Unlike producing animals (for instance, bees) man’s production is conscious. He knows what he does and why he does it. But this consciousness does not arise from any innate rationality but rather from necessity. Population increase forces man to produce—that is, to manipulate nature rather than simply living off its bounty—in order to survive. (The implication is that nature is barely bountiful enough to support a limited number of primitive men but must be “conquered” in order to support the inevitably larger numbers that will emerge absent some external force that consistently culls the population.) This turn to production represents a fundamental change in man’s being and is the first step in his historical development.

From this point forward, the character of man and of every society he inhabits is set by the mode(s) of production. Such modes not only determine but explain, literally, everything about human life: man’s past, present, and future; his theology, morality, and worldview; and the underlying metaphysics and ontology of reality. Thus can Marx claim that his theory is comprehensive...

Next week: an excerpt from "The Economic Consequences of the Great Reset" by David P. Goldman. 

Against the Great Reset: 'Sovereignty and the Nation-State'

Continuing today, and for the next 14 weeks, The Pipeline will present excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, to be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now for pre-order at the links. 

 

PART II: THE POLITICAL

Excerpt from "Sovereignty and the Nation-State," by Roger Kimball

I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In a memorable passage at the beginning of The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant evokes a soaring dove that, “cleaving the air in her free flight,” feels the resistance of the wind and imagines that its flight “would be easier still in empty space.” A fond thought, of course, since absent that aeolian pressure, the dove would simply plummet to the ground.

How regularly the friction of reality works that way: making possible our endeavors even as it circumscribes and limits their extent. And how often, like Kant’s dove, we are tempted to imagine that our freedoms would be grander and more extravagant absent the countervailing forces that make them possible.

Such fantasies are as perennial as they are vain. They insinuate themselves everywhere in the economy of human desire, not least in our political arrangements. Noticing the imperfection of our societies, we may be tempted into thinking that the problem is with the limiting structures we have inherited. If only we could dispense with them, we might imagine, beating our wings, how much better things might be.

What a cunning, devilish word: “might.” For here as elsewhere, possibility is cheap. Scrap our current political accommodations and things might be better. Then again, they might be a whole lot worse. Vide the host of tyrannies inspired by that disciple of airy possibility, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Man was born free,” he declaimed, “but is everywhere in chains”: two startling untruths in a single famous utterance. Rousseau was keen on “forcing men to be free,” but we had to wait until his followers Robespierre and Saint-Just to discover that freedom in this sense is often indistinguishable from what Robespierre chillingly called “virtue and its emanation, terror.” Something similar can be said about Karl Marx, that other acolyte of possibility. How much misery have his theories underwritten, promising paradise but delivering tyranny, oppression, poverty, and death?

It wasn’t so long ago that I had hopes that the Marxist-socialist rot—outside the insulated purlieus of humanities departments at Western universities, anyway—was on the fast track to oblivion. Has any “philosophy” ever been so graphically refuted by events (or the number of corpses it created)?

Maybe not, but refutation, like reason, plays a much more modest role in human affairs than we might imagine. In fact, the socialist-inspired utopian chorus is alive and well, playing to full houses at an antidemocratic redoubt near you. Consider the apparently unkillable dream of “world government.” It is as fatuous now as it was when H. G. Wells infused it with literary drama toward the beginning of the twentieth century.

All human children need to learn to walk by themselves; so, it seems, every generation needs to wean itself from the blandishments of various utopian schemes. In 2005, the political philosopher Jeremy Rabkin published a fine book called Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States. Rabkin ably fleshes out the promise of his subtitle, but it would be folly to think this labor will not have to be repeated. The temptation to exchange hard-won democratic freedom for the swaddling comfort of one or another central planning body is as inextinguishable as it is dangerous. As Ronald Reagan memorably put it,

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

The late English philosopher Roger Scruton made the connection between this insight and the bulwark provided by the nation-state. “Democracies,” he wrote, “owe their existence to national loyalties—the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition.” Confusing national loyalty with nationalism, many utopians argue that the former is a threat to peace. After all, wasn’t it national loyalty that sparked two world wars? No, it was that perverted offspring, nationalism, which at great cost was defeated only by the successful mobilization of national loyalty. Scruton quotes G. K. Chesterton on this point: to condemn patriotism because people go to war for patriotic reasons is like condemning love because some loves lead to murder.

It is one of the great mysteries—or perhaps I should say it is one of the reliable reminders of human imperfection—that higher education often fosters a particular form of political stupidity. Scruton anatomizes that stupidity, noting “the educated derision that has been directed at our national loyalty by those whose freedom to criticize would have been extinguished years ago, had the English not been prepared to die for their country.” This peculiar mental deformation, Scruton observes, involves “the repudiation of inheritance and home.” It is a stage, he writes,

through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers. The Cambridge spies [Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and others] offer a telling illustration of what [this tendency] has meant for our country.

It is also telling that this déformation professionelle of intellectuals encourages them to repudiate patriotism as an atavistic passion and favor transnational institutions over national governments, rule by committee or the courts over democratic rule. Rabkin reminds us of the naïveté—what others have called the “idealism”—that this preference requires. In order to believe that international bodies will protect human rights, for example, you would have to believe

that governments readily cooperate with other governments on common projects, even when such cooperation promises no direct exchange of benefits to each side. In the end, you must believe that human beings cooperate easily and naturally without much constraint—without much actual enforcement, hence without much need for force.

To believe this you must believe that almost all human beings are well-meaning, even to strangers. And you must believe that human beings have no very serious disagreements on fundamental matters.

The persistence of such beliefs is no guide to their cogency or truth. What another Jeremy, Jeremy Bentham, long ago called “nonsense on stilts” presents a spectacle that is perhaps unsteady but nonetheless mesmerizing. And when it comes to the erosion of the nation-state and its gradual replacement by unaccountable, transnational entities such as the E.U., the U.N., or the so-called “World Court,” the results are ominous.

The political tendency of such institutions was brilliantly captured by John Fonte’s coinage “transnational progressivism.” As Fonte explains in his book Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? (2011), “transnational progressivism” describes the antinationalist impulse that seeks to transfer political power and decision-making “from democratic nations to supranational authorities and institutions” such as the European Union, the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and kindred organizations (“judges from the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court; career officials in the U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office, and the German Foreign Ministry; American CEOs of major global corporations; NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Greenpeace”; and so on and so forth).

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A sterling contemporary example is the Great Reset recently proposed by the Davos-based WEF, which seeks “to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.” Exploiting the panic caused by the Covid-19 crisis, the WEF demands that “every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed” in its socialist scheme to bring about a “Great Reset of capitalism.”

The true political ends of such elite enterprises are generally swaddled in emollient rhetoric about freedom and democracy. Thus the PR surrounding the WEF’s Great Reset is festooned with talk of “stakeholder capitalism,” “equality,” “sustainability,” and other items in the lexicon of socialistically oriented political obfuscation.

The real agenda, however, is revealed in its call for “changes,” i.e., increases in taxes on wealth, a turn away from reliance on fossil fuels, and “building ‘green’ urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.” Stepping back, John Fonte uncovered some revelatory gems that speak candidly about what’s really at stake. For example, Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution put it with all possible clarity when he declared in 2008 that the “United States…should not oppose, but welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty” (my emphasis). “Pooled and diminished national sovereignty.” At least we know where we stand.

The question of sovereignty—of who governs—is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives. It has been posed with increasing urgency as the bureaucratic burden of what has been called the “deep state” or administrative state has weighed more and more forcefully upon the political and social life of Western democracies.

The phenomenon is often identified with the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 and his candidacy in 2020. But the political, moral, and social realities for which Trump was a symbol and a conduit both predated his candidacy and achieved independent reality in countries as disparate as the United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, and Brazil.

The question of sovereignty was perhaps most dramatically posed in the United Kingdom. In June 2016, more Brits voted to leave the European Union and return sovereignty to Parliament than had ever voted for any initiative in the long history of Great Britain. Some seventeen million people voted to leave the European Union and regain local responsibility for their own lives. That’s more people than had ever voted for anything in Britain. It took more than three years for that promissory note to be cashed. The U.K. formally began its split from the E.U. at 11 p.m. GMT on 31 January 2020. Like the Battle of Waterloo according to the Duke of Wellington, it was a “near run thing.” Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised that he would, deal or no deal, get Brexit done by the end of October 2019. He was stymied for months, as much by the established elites of his own party as by Labour.

The process of emancipation had not proceeded far before it was interrupted by the advent of a new Chinese import, the novel coronavirus which swept all other news from the front page for months (until, that is, it was half-superseded by the extortionist Kabuki theater of “Black Lives Matter”). As I write in the summer of 2021, Europe and the United States both are poised to return to a state of state-enforced semihibernation or “lockdown,” an insidious flu-like respiratory virus created in a Chinese virology lab having paralyzed their populations with fear and transported their governments with the tantalizing prospect of greater control over every aspect of life.

I am not sure I have ever heard Joe Biden utter the word “sovereignty.” But Donald Trump spoke about it often. In his first speech to the United Nations’ General Assembly in September 2017, he said to a startled roomful of diplomats that “we are renewing this founding principle of sovereignty.”

Our government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens—to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values. As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first.

All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of that speech was the shocked horror that it provoked among the entrenched globalist establishment for whom the whole idea of nation-states and patriotic allegiance to one’s country seems like a barbaric affront to common decency. Imagine, a president of the United States declaring his intention to foster the well-being and prosperity of his own citizens!

Next week: an excerpt from "Resetting the Educational Reset" by Angelo M. Codevilla.