Now You Know
"Being mean or telling the truth is indistinguishable to far too many people." —Mike Thompson on X
Woke liberalism is exactly what Christopher Lasch predicted in The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995, the year after his early death at 61. Lasch saw how the juvenile idealism of Boomer hippiedom would slide into the narcissistic, sado-masochistic degeneracy of open borders, drag queen story hours, Covid-19 despotism, DEI racism, showbiz Satanism, censorship, forever wars, and now, the legal insurrection of lawfare.
In doing so, Lasch also predicted the “mass formation psychosis” described by Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet, spawned by a crisis of meaning and purpose in the thinking classes of Western Civ. And now you know exactly how come a place like Boston, with its concentration of “elites” in universities, computer tech, and medical research displays a batshit-crazy dedication to ideas bent on destroying our political culture: the American republic.
The word republic derives from the Latin, res publica: the public thing, the idea of a state dedicated to the common good. By “state” you can infer both a group of people in a certain place, but also the set of conditions they dwell in. You can’t have a common good without a common culture, which means a general agreement among citizens on values in that certain place — which is our country, the USA.
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You can’t overstate the importance of shared ideas and values in that enterprise of being a nation, we-the-people in our particular place. The juvenile idealism of Boomer hippiedom wrecked the crucial idea of a common culture, and I will tell you exactly how that happened. Two crusades: first, the civil rights campaign, and second, stopping the War in Vietnam, defined the era.
The first of these climaxed in twin landmark legislative acts designed to abolish Jim Crow racism: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination in public places, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited unfair obstacles to voting. The idealism in that moment of history was extreme. The dominant old-school Liberal ethos displayed a sense of triumph. Its cardinal belief in human progress was validated in the new law-of-the-land. We were supposedly entering a utopia of racial harmony.
It proved to be a huge disappointment, a failure. In some fundamental ways, black and white America could not agree on certain values, especially language and behavior. These matters were so hypersensitive that discussing them became taboo, and when someone dared to — such as the rogue journalist Tom Wolfe in his book Radical Chic, which made fun of the cultural elites trying to socialize with the Black Panthers — he was buried in the most extreme censorious opprobrium by the elite good-thinkers of politics, academia, and the cultural media. They couldn’t believe old Tom dove clear through the Overton Window the way he did, head first.
In fact, a big segment of black America after 1965 became much more overtly separatist and oppositional, while white America became more frantically confounded and depressed by it. The result was the elite’s solution to that quandary: multiculturalism! Which basically meant: we don’t need a common culture in the USA. (We don’t need an agreement about values, language, and behavior.) Each group in America can have its own menu of these things. This accomplished two ends: it allowed criminal behavior to explode; and it allowed the elites to excuse themselves from any serious further attempts to manage the res publica. The people of the ghettos were free to do their thing; while the elites turned their full attention to Boomer careerism and Gordon Gecko style financial moneygrubbing.
As for the crusade to end the War in Vietnam, that was also an epic failure, never properly acknowledged. In fact, no one in the USA, no party or faction, ended the war. We simply lost the War in Vietnam. We just never said so, and still don’t. It ended in ignominy, with the last remnants of US officialdom in Saigon having to be rescued by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy. The so-called “gooks” in their black pajamas beat the giant American “grunt” army with its bottomless supply of attack helicopters and napalm. Chalk up another “L” for old school Liberalism.
You can’t overstate how demoralizing this was. And so. . . the serial reenactments of our forever wars of recent decades, mostly botches and failures despite our vaunted “defense” establishment, our glorious war technology, and our fake commitment to “spreading democracy.” We simply need to prove that we can’t possibly lose wars against more primitive people — though we have lost repeatedly, the fiasco in leaving Kabul in 2021 being even more ignominious than the flight from Saigon. This can only be understood, finally, as a species of national neurosis.
As was absolutely everything about the George Floyd riots of 2020, Wokery-in-action, with the torching of cities, the looting flash-mobs, and the tearing down of statues honoring American heroes. Try understanding that as the latest chapter in civil rights egalitarianism gone awry, starting with the sanctification of the druggie thug George Floyd, who so perfectly personified the failures of multiculturalism. (What were his values? Ever ask yourself that?)
Now, try (if you can) to understand what the election of Mr. Trump represents: the drive to restore a viable American common culture, to re-set our agreement on values, to repair the broken res publica. And note how wildly that is resented and opposed by this corrupt and degenerate residue of idealism gone to hell (literally), this ragtag and bobtail of Democratic Party elites, consumed in their mass formation psychosis, addicted to lying and violence, and furious that they are no longer in command.
So, now you know how all this works. An American common culture matters, and if we can’t put it together, we’re sunk. This is our chance to put it together.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Kayak Parade, Battenkill River, Shushan, New York
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
"As was absolutely everything about the George Floyd riots of 2020, Wokery-in-action, with the torching of cities, the looting flash-mobs, and the tearing down of statues honoring American heroes..."
All funded by George Soros, augmented with radicalization propaganda pushed through free Obama phones and his radio stations. The entire monstrous plot was orchestrated to ignite latent forgotten resentments and hatreds in order to ruthlessly rip America apart. In Seattle during this time there was at least one radio station whose sole purpose was to enrage the black community. All it played were news events from history where whites either killed or caused injustice to them. This was before and during CHAZ/CHOP and likely played a big role in its coming to be.
How do I know? I was there. I went to CHAZ, and during driving over a week-long period to and from Seattle, I listened to that malicious hate spewing radio station, and it all became clear: We are being played and mercilessly divided:
The globablists' have successfully weaponized (and dramatically magnified) the Red vs Blue, East vs West, Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed, Boy vs Girl, Gay vs Straight, Brown vs White, and Pro-Life vs Choice dichotomies to exploit our innate tribal nature, and in doing so are dividing and conquering us. This us-vs-them separation makes us easy to control and direct with simple angry thoughts about the enemy who isn’t really our enemy - while blinding us to the actual enemy behind the curtain pulling the puppet strings. If we could collectively recognize this for what it is the NWO wouldn’t stand a chance.
The globalists now have the technology to do away with the left versus right control grid, and so they’re angling in for full control at an individual level: from the inside out. In order to build a new system, you must first destroy the old one, and oh boy, are they destroying. Actually, they are filling our minds with hatred for one another so that we will destroy it ourselves.
These forces we are up against cannot be overcome if we keep allowing them to divide and conquer us. We must let go of our pride and our resentments for one another - which were instilled in us through their psychological operations - and unite together or we stand no chance.
Our adversaries know this, which is why they've been fighting tooth and nail to poison the wells we all share of comradery, fellowship, and family—they've been doing everything they can to decimate the ties that bind by disintegrating every trace of common ground and brotherhood between us.
Values we all once shared that were intended to do the most good for the most people are being maliciously torched in the name of discord and disunity by utilizing a reality denying, mentally ill, family destroying, child warping, depraved ideology.
They do not stand a chance against the united, undivided resolve of even a small percentage of us—and they know it. This is the reason they are frantically fighting and sparing no expense to keep us depressed, oppressed, divided, demoralized, and traumatized. And so we will respond by uniting and taking back what is ours.
Saw a fascinating documentary on PBS (yes! PBS) about the blowing apart of the black family and community by LBJ's "War on Poverty". For 100 years following Emancipation and the Civil War, black families migrated from southern farms into northern and midwestern cities for cash paying work and built what were called "alley-communities" in which they had nearly complete societies with their own businesses, schools, banks, libraries, etc. It was certainly an apartheid culture and the black alley communities were at the bottom with poor to no sanitation, shared privies and water faucets, however, most everything they needed was within short walking distance and crime was almost non-existent since everyone knew each other. The War on Poverty (WOP) came along and destroyed these communities (in order to build skyscrapers) and moved the families into randomly assigned apartments in low-income housing projects built on the fringes of the cities, putting strangers from different alley communities next door to each other. Not only were the surroundings unfamiliar, but the jobs and stores that put food on the table were located miles away from the projects, forcing commuters and shoppers onto buses & subways. The family separations, the stress of having to leave the home/neighborhood every day, the hostile neighborhoods all contributed to skyrocketing crime and the destruction of the black family. The Think-Gooders of elitist institutions had failed in the grandest fashion, yet.