The Age of Conspiracy
Recalibrating My Heuristics
(A quick and hasty personal reflection, without links or sources. Please indulge me.)
I voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I was ambivalent in 2016 and did not vote (like everyone else, I loathed Hillary Clinton but I saw her as a somewhat capable and not-evil public servant) but I was cheered by Trump’s early moves in office. Unfortunately, while (as
says) Trump was the most ‘lied about’ president in history, he also created a great deal of dysfunction, even within his own cabinet. Didn’t he have FIVE Defense Secretaries?! I never saw Trump as a capable political operator. Some people think that’s a positive, but in Washington you’re either capable of getting things done or you’re not. Not being able to do anything doesn’t make you pure or allow you to start over from some tabula rasa… it just means you’re not able to accomplish anything. To be sure, Trump had some successes but I was leery of what seemed to be an increasingly chaotic and impulsive executive branch and I was deeply worried about Trump’s refusal to agree to hand over power if his opponent won. Everyone should remember that! Trump refused to say he would leave office if he lost. Even IF you’re monitoring a vast Democrat conspiracy you don’t make statements like that in interviews and debates! God knows how many votes that kind of behavior cost him but it probably cost him mine. I haven’t dived in to the election fixing allegations and although I have seen some things which make me uncertain I think that even if there were instances of massive ballot fraud (as in Pennsylvania, for example) I doubt they were enough to change the total outcome of the election. Even IF Trump was robbed, he played his role horribly. He didn’t effectively use federal resources (he was the PRESIDENT after all) to protect the election and then he failed to cobble together an effective legal strategy and THEN he put the country through weeks of suspense and uncertainty, culminating in January 6th. Even if I knew that Biden had won only through fraud I would think that the operation of our system is more important than the identity or priorities of any particular man. If you want to stage press conferences and pressure legislators and submit court filings, go ahead. If those things fail you should recognize that they have and exit gracefully. Our political structure requires that. In any case, I’m not convinced that Trump was concerned about election integrity or the rights of voters. I think he just wanted to win and that massive self-regard is at the root of so many of his blunders. Trump is not a good leader. Just ask the people who work with him.Having said all of that, I regret voting for Joe Biden. I literally couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Biden’s performance would make this the case (since half of my objection to Trump was an issue of principle and my rock-solid support of our democratic superstructure) but it has. Immigration, inflation, social justice concepts creeping further into our culture (with federal bureaucracies doing more than their parts) like a spreading inkblot… you already know what we’ve suffered in this country. You’ve experienced it too.
My disgust with Biden is two-fold: first (tinged with pity) is the sense that he’s in no shape to manage a Dairy Queen, much less perform the duties of the President of the United States; second (perhaps related to the first) is his absolute inability to confront the radicals within his party. This is something I’ve noticed for years and written about extensively, but party politics is ultimately not a battle of good versus evil. It might seem that way at times and it might be incredibly useful for operators to portray it that way to the public but it’s more like a boring office meeting where you’re selecting and discussing some agenda items… perhaps selecting new office furniture. It requires compromise and maneuvering and argument (maybe even secrecy and dishonesty) to be sure, but if people in your group are proclaiming that the office should HAVE no furniture, or that the furniture should be burned, you must turn to them and address that before moving forward with the agenda. Some ideas are so bad that they jump to the top of the list in matters of government. Questioning the election spending practices of an opponent after a devastating earthquake would be strange and inept behavior… yet that is what I see from Democrats in many cases. They want Republicans to be the problem so badly that they have blinded themselves to crime and immigration and the state-by-state catastrophe which is public education. It’s unforgivable. If people in your party are literally eroding the rule of law in cities or actively promoting the sterilization of mentally ill adolescents you simply CANNOT redirect attention to the flaws and missteps of your opponents! You can’t! It may be politically feasible and less costly than it once might have been to deflect in this way (aided by a broken and pliant legacy media and a voting population which is pathetically ignorant) but if you do I will no longer support you. If you do this sort of thing long enough other smart and intellectually flexible people will also stop supporting you. That is the situation Biden finds himself in now and it’s a profound understatement to say that he only has himself to blame. God Damn him. I imagine he sees himself as a uniter and a leader, but I perceive him as an addled dupe, reflexively deferring to concerns of party unity which have made him complicit in terrible crimes against our people and the world. He’s never been a leader and now he’s a blinking and bewildered puppet whose strings are being pulled by the most psychologically deviant and intellectually bankrupt cadre of political operators that have ever gotten close to power in our country.
I will get to the point: my disgust with Biden reflects my disgust and profound disappointment with the operation of our system over the past decade. Power has always been uncouth and predatory and merciless but it now seems to be incompetent as well, wielded by people who do not understand human nature or the world because they’ve existed in the most exquisitely crafted bubble in history. I was watching a YouTube video about an international cult with ties to the CIA who credibly caged and abused and trafficked small children without consequence (below)
and I realized that this sort of thing now seems to be a defining feature of our system rather than a dark exception. Our government appears to have recovered alien craft and buried them in secrecy. Jeffrey Epstein was probably an intelligence asset, which means that some intelligence service(s) was using the rape of minors as a tool of tradecraft. COVID might have been created with the help of our government-we’ll probably never know because the people closest to the projects successfully manipulated all media and tech companies and politicians to protect them through lies and that protection continues to this day, even though the lies have been revealed. Great Britain wants to drastically slow illegal immigration to the country but the government has basically refused to follow the will of the people. One party (the Conservative Party) is losing power largely because of this and the next one has barely promised to change policies. Our country is having a similar experience. Despite 84% of California voters wanting parents to be notified of mental health issues (including gender confusion) the State Assembly has passed a bill which would pull state funding from any school which doesn’t adopt a policy of almost-total secrecy as a default. Under ‘normal’ circumstances the governor would certainly veto a bill this controversial around an issue this emotionally salient. Let’s see what Governor Newsom does. If he does veto this bill it will not be any reflection of the will of the people of California or (far less important) the lives and wellbeing of teenage schoolkids and their desperate parents but rather a strategic move made with a presidential run in mind (I believe).
I have realized that I am the frog in the boiling water. I tended to support Obama and Biden and the NIH and the New York Times because I understood that, while being narcissistic and corrupt and short-sighted, they were part of a larger machine which was restrained by certain standards and mechanisms of control and that machine had built many good and useful things. The machine is not totally broken. It still functions in many cases and seems to pick the low-hanging fruit reliably… but it’s becoming more distant and weird and ideological and… totalitarian. I no longer have faith in the machine to do the things it’s supposed to, and my faith is particularly thin when it comes to issues which involve personal well-being (health, education) or knowledge or truth. I suspect that the machine is not just actively harming us in those areas but (worse) actively trying to harm us.
I am recalibrating my heuristics through which I view the world. I understand that I am in the age of powerful impunity and obfuscation and parasitic bleeding. I’m in the age of conspiracy.