Failed Experiment: A Cold Evaluation of the Facts
Our first job is not to panic, but we cannot ignore reality. The American experiment has already failed, it’s just a matter of what will replace it.
I am not predicting the ultimate end of democracy in America, but I am predicting the end of the version of constitutional democracy that we have held onto for nearly 250 years. To put it bluntly:
The system is either going to break, or it’s going to try to kill half of us.
Our Constitution has survived until now based on a common agreement that loyalty to “America” is the one thing we all share. That’s just no longer true. For nearly half of us, “America” is a neo-fascist cult busily putting in the mechanisms to kill the rest.
As surely as David DePape would have killed Nancy Pelosi, or the crowd of QAnon cultists and neo-nazis on 1/6 would have murdered Mike Pence, everyone who has not fallen into the cult is the enemy of everyone who has.
The reasons for this are complex, but also very simple:
America has been the target of a catastrophic attack from military-grade psychological warfare operations conducted by American traitors and terrorists led by Mike Flynn with the cooperation of Vladimir Putin.
This attack started before the 2016 election and has grown in intensity to the point that in 2022 half the country celebrated and laughed at the attempted murder of an elderly man in the attempted assassination of the Speaker of the House.
The steady radicalization of the American population towards violence is not a natural phenomenon. It’s an attack.
Normalization of political violence is a late stage symptom of a failing nation-state.
The level and intensity of violence is going to escalate no matter what the outcomes of the midterms are. If the Democrats hold on to the House and Senate in 2022, the Big Lie 2.0 and the violent reaction will dwarf 2020. If we lose either house, Congress will help destroy us from the inside out, just as the christofascist Supreme Court already has.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Here’s the corollary:
Fascism does not stop on its own; it cannot be negotiated with or appeased; it must be defeated.
Helping Ukraine repel the Russian invaders is the right thing to do, morally and strategically, but it’s ultimately grandstanding unless we repel them from within our own borders, from our military and from our government.
Unfortunately, that’s impossible at this point. The vast majority of the GOP has been brainwashed into believing that Putin is a strong leader, and that America is full of deep state pedophiles that deserve to be executed for treason.
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
— Voltaire.
Our Failed Experiment
The US government is a miracle in many ways — we’ve built the world’s most powerful kinetic and geopolitical force based on a thin set of words written in the 18th century. But those words have been twisted in ways they were never intended — and we’ve allowed the Supreme Court to be invaded by people who are twisting them to the breaking point.
America has been called an “experiment in democracy” for a long time, but it’s a particular favorite of Mike Flynn himself. The reason for that is that Flynn knows that “experiment” really is the right word — because it can be engineered to fail. And thanks to Flynn and Putin’s psychological warfare machine, in conjunction with decades of “ideological subversion,” it already has.
The Russians and their theocratic fascist allies have been putting the pieces in place to subvert American democracy for decades. Operations like the Council for National Policy and the Manhattan Institute have existed for 50 years, gradually tearing at the foundations of democracy and making us vulnerable to attack, while they compromise and plant people in academia, media, business and government institutions to be used at just the right time.
“Social media” — which constitutes the vast majority of our interpersonal communications at this point — is largely controlled by enemies of democracy using it to execute psychological operations on American citizens. Twitter is controlled by a pro-Putin psychopath who is already shaping the platform in his image. Facebook was weaponized and perverted a long time ago. Fox is a neo-nazi Kremlin mouthpiece. And a pro-Putin, QAnon mirror of the world has been set up on Truth Social, Rumble and Telegram.
In the midterms, thousands of the people who have been brainwashed by this mirror world are running to be elected officials in federal, state and local governments. Many of them will win — and they will use their power to make sure there are no more free and fair elections in the future. A number of States in our Union will no longer be democratically run. This will make the 2024 election impossible to win by any Democrat. Checkmate.
We could fix this, but it’s impossible.
The fundamental problem is that in this existential conflict for the hearts and minds of our citizens, one side continues to play by rules that the other side mocks and disdains. We continue to hope that norms will respected, and that the two-party political system we’ve all gotten used to is still somehow valid.
Hope is a not a strategy or a plan.
New Constitution
We need a new Constitution that is clear, does not rely on 18th century words and ideas, and protects the rights of Americans to be who they are, speak freely, and live in a world in which they are not being psychologically assaulted by our enemies.
I am not naive and I know that’s not going to happen anytime soon, but it is inevitable if we want to hold on to any version of the freedoms we’ve gotten used to. We might as well start thinking about how to enshrine them and put them into action.
“Free speech“ has been twisted to include deadly psychological operations. “The right to bear arms” has been twisted to include giving AR15s to 18-year old white nationalists. “Freedom of religion” has been twisted to mean freedom to impose religion on others.
We need a new Constitution that clearly protects the rights of women, LGBTQ+, Black, Brown and indigenous people, and immigrants.
We need a new Constitution that clearly protects the rights of Americans from psychological operations in the digital world, weapons of war in the physical world, and theocratic fascism in our institutions.
We need a new Constitution that recapitulates the American promise, levels the economic playing field, and declares once and for all that bigotry, misogyny and cruelty are not allowed to thrive in our country.
We don’t need to start over. The Founders really were geniuses. They had mostly the right ideas and they put a structure in place that survived for 250 years.
But their words have been perverted beyond recognition while rampant, unfettered capitalism has created a class of psychopaths at the top who control everyone else, but lack the circuitry to care about the impact of their actions and are happy to ally with our enemies.
We need a better combination of socialism and democracy. The privatization of fundamental human needs like health care and communications have been a humanitarian disaster. And Citizens United allowed corporations to buy elections — which is textbook fascism now built into the system.
Capitalist models can not be relied upon to protect basic human rights.
So what now?
Vote. We need as much time and breathing room as we can get to figure out how to rebuild America. This is ultimately a struggle for power. We need to retain as much of it as possible as we watch our long experiment fail before our eyes.
And we need to stay calm and stick together as events unfold. Find alternate ways to communicate and share the work of people who speak the truth wherever you can.
“Truth” is the ultimate victim of fascism.
I hope I am wrong and that we find a way through that preserves our system and fixes the problems without much disruption. But we need to start grasping the reality that may not happen and that we will have an opportunity to rebuild things better.
In the meantime, we’re in an information war for truth — and for the sociopolitical power to tell it. Get in the fight. Support truth tellers. Protect your loved ones and local community. And VOTE. 🇺🇸🏴☠️💙
#ArrestMikeFlynn
Constitutional Convention coming soon. Brilliant, Jim. America just might be the force that leads this crazy world out of darkness. 🤞
Whew, just got my daily dose of jollies from Jim!