Misgivings
The news of the day runs something like this:
The US returned to Russia a Russian who was trying to horn in on the US global arms trade; in return Russia sent back an America hating lesbian basketball player;
It turns out Twitter really was shadow banning people—yes, that passes as news;
Kyrsten Sinema has changed her status to Dem in All But Name.
Meanwhile, for those of us who are troubled by the way politics are shaping up—notably, even before the new Congress starts—there is a flurry of articles that add up to a disturbing picture. Let’s start with a summary of the Zhou admin’s agenda as we know it to be, drawing on this article:
Climate change advocacy trumps energy independence.
Lax immigration policies trump a secure border.
Spending billions on green energy trumps tackling inflation.
Exiting a 20-year war on an arbitrary deadline trumps ensuring Americans and their allies are safely evacuated first.
Clamping down on (so-called) misinformation trumps championing free speech.
Codifying gay marriage and zero-restriction abortion at the federal level trumps religious freedom and protecting innocent life.
Add to that list a deep commitment to the globalist agenda, beginning with the Covid Regime and now leading into a global economic (and proxy military) war against Russia, China, and increasingly almost the entire non-collective West—the EU and NATO. In fact, much of the list above fits within this same globalist agenda—climate change is a ploy; the queer agenda is part of the Open Society; green energy, ditto; comprehensive censorship is also part of the globalist agenda, as is global movement of cheap labor.
Where does the GOP stand on all this? One would be hard put to find the GOP in full throated opposition in any principled way on any of these items. About the most we see is opposition based on political opportunism—the necessity of appealing to conservative Neanderthals in order to get elected. But real opposition? Maybe Rand Paul and a relative handful of Congressmen.
A realization is beginning to dawn for many of us, and it’s summarized succinctly in an Epoch Times article. We all talk about the Uniparty and deplore RINOs, but the dawning realization is—how bad the situation really is and how deep the betrayal runs.
The GOP Establishment Rises With DeSantis
The Epoch Times ^ | November 14, 2022 | Stu CvrkThe midterm elections have elucidated much. … What has been revealed is that the real intention was to save our kleptocracy and that the junior partners of the Uniparty—the GOP establishment—were complicit.
Let us explore the premise.
…
Both the GOP establishment and Democrat Party have been trying to get rid of Trump for years. And the spinning by Republicans, self-described conservative pundits, Democrats, and many voices in the legacy media are eerily consistent in the wake of the midterm elections. The move to push Trump aside in favor of DeSantis in the run-up to 2024 is already well underway.
…
DeSantis has already lined up support from the Bush wing of the Republican Party (including Jeb Bush). And many others, such as former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, are helping the cause, as noted here.
You don’t need to buy into everything that the author argues, nor is favoring DeSantis over Trump for 2024 a per se indication of perfidy. Nevertheless, it is fact that the GOP establishment has been at war with anything remotely resembling populist conservatism, any yearning to return to the days of a constitutional republic and government that represents the people. You can trace this back to the Tea Party days—and I, myself, was disturbed by the Libertarian impulse animating much of that supposedly “conservative” movement—and follow the thread right up to today. It’s clear that the Uniparty wants to literally put Trump in prison. For no other crime, in actual fact, than championing views that are wormwood to the globalist establishment that owns both parties. All corners are being cut in the jihad against allowing We The People any real voice in public affairs and the direction of this country.
Here, again, I believe CTH is on to something in its article about the latest Twitter Files revelations. In what I say here I do not intend in any way to ignore what CTH has to say about the deep ties of the US Deep State to social media and Big Tech generally—not just Twitter. What CTH says in that regard is true—this has been clear for many years—and important. The Deep State is deeply interested in filtering the flow of information (should I say “narratives”) to the American public. That it’s finally being made public in a way that may reach the masses is also important and healthy, although a healthy skepticism is in order—how far will these revelations go, and are they merely advancing an agenda that can later be discarded?
However, for my purposes, I want to cite the introduction. Again, one needn’t be a conspiracy theorist to be troubled by what we’re beginning to see among those who back DeSantis:
The latest release of information behind the controversial “Twitter Files”, comes from Bari Weiss complete with the strategic promotion of a new website [The Free Press] launching via the booster provided by their access to the internal Twitter documents.
Curiously intelligent people will note the Weiss website is structured to support the 2024 presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is, not coincidentally, riding atop a multi-staged booster guided by Elon Musk and fueled by Wall Street billionaires.
Above, I excised a reference to Hedgefunder Ken Griffin, who is a major backer of DeSantis. But Griffin is far from the only Wall Street billionaire who is backing DeSantis. Further, there is a consistency in Musk’s choice of platforms for the release of the Twitter Files—Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, so far. None of these people are anything like friends to conservatives as I understand that term. Libertarians of a sort, maybe. To an extent.
Not to put too fine a point on it, what we are witnessing is Big Money taking over the political processes to an extent that may be unprecedented in US history. Unprecedent in degree, at any rate. Obviously Big Money has always had a major say in how the country is run and for whose benefit it is run. Still, this may be new, and especially coming at a critical juncture in the life of our country, as the American Empire looks increasingly shaky. If, as many are concluding, the era of the American Empire based on the financial hegemony of King Dollar is coming to an end, or at least a scaling back, then this country could be in for some rough times. We need a national discussion and accounting, but we’re not getting it.
Disturbingly, the political establishment seems intent on continuing much of the globalist agenda. Having spent the last six years trying to put the Trump genie back in the bottle, having taken a dive in three elections in a row, the GOP establishment now appears to be using the lame duck session of Congress to lay down for an agenda that should be antithetical to what any remotely conservative or simply constitutionalist party should allow. Some might argue that this is happening with the support of RINOs, but based on the last six years I suspect that many of those Republicans who have voted against these measures are doing so because of the need to fool their voters for the next election.
Josh Hammer is all over this story:
Why Does the GOP Elite Hate Its Own Base?
For the GOP, the status quo is simply unsustainable.
Now, in the midst of a lame-duck Congress and in the aftermath of a severely disappointing midterm election, we have gleaned even more indicia about the level of scorn Republican elites reserve for their own voters.
Perhaps most notably, 12 Republican senators and a whopping 39 Republican congressmen have rushed to add their imprimaturs of legitimacy to the so-called Respect for Marriage Act, which would not only statutorily enshrine an erroneous definition of marriage in federal law but would also further weaponize the leftist lawfare apparatus to subjugate conscientious objectors to the Western world’s new same-sex marriage dispensation. While it is true that Republicans nationally are now split on the issue of same-sex marriage, it is also true that religious Christians still comprise the very core of the GOP’s base. Nonetheless, a sizable portion of Republicans in Congress voted for a bill that would open the floodgates of litigation for those Christians, Jews, Muslims and others who still adhere to the biblical (and historically uncontroversial) definition of marriage.
On the always-thorny issue of immigration, where Republican elites have historically sold out their own base perhaps more than any other, Republican leaders are using the perfidious backdrop of the lame-duck Congress to get the amnesty band back together again. Specifically, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) is now teaming up with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to push a prototypical “comprehensive immigration reform”-style “compromise”: amnesty for millions of young illegal aliens (tendentiously called “Dreamers” by our propagandist press) in exchange for promised milquetoast “enforcement” measures. …
There may well be other lame-duck Congress betrayals, as well. One week after the election last month, the Biden Administration requested an additional $37 billion in “emergency” aid for Ukraine. One can only imagine how many Senate and House Republicans are all too eager to abide the administration’s desire to bolster Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s quixotic crusade to recover Crimea and the Donbas.
For more on the border angle, see Karl Denninger today.
What we seem to be seeing in all this is a political establishment—including the Republican party—that is determined to push through an agenda that is dictated by financial backers, yet opposed by their voters. This is a bipartisan thing. Not only are Republicans ignoring their base, but Dems are doing so as well—the open border policy is not popular with most of the Dems base, and the decision to stiff the railway workers is a slap in the face to the Dem labor base that forms so much of the electoral foot soldier forces for the Dems.
This is a deeply unserious and self centered political establishment. It somehow believes that the world order—based on rules that the US arbitrarily sets—cannot change. The rest of the world sees things differently:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/09/federal-appeals-court-rules-biden-admin-cant-force-religious-doctors-to-perform-gender-transition-surgeries/
I forgot to mention. Congress will throw nearly a trillion bucks at the military in the newest spending bill. Now, it's great that the mRNA injection mandate will apparently be done away with, but ...
This is a mountain of money for what is now probably the wokest and most powerful organization in the country, with no strings attached to all the crazy woke and leftist stuff the military is engaged in.
That's not serious. That's not conservative.