False Flags
And wasted opportunities
10/31/22: The most important election of our lives, and it’s a midterm.
Republicans will dispute every loss, and should they gain office they will continue to dismantle democracy. They have no policy but forced pregnancy. Their squawking about “crime” is a promise to pursue a more punitive and violent approach to disciplining the population—especially in cities. Their solutions to their imagined border crisis are destined to fail because as long as American employers offer jobs to undocumented workers, people will keep coming to find work.
Other than that, we have the empowerment of the Dangerously Stupid, which never bodes well for the rest of us. They already got goaded into staging an insurrection they are being imprisoned for, while others are swapping out a pedophilic pizzeria in their minds with Chinese restaurants and hair salons, where Barack Obama conducts imaginary Muslim rituals over cases of government documents.
And the saddest thing of all is that the reason this election has become so important is the Democrats have proven themselves to be true practitioners of #failureship.
They held the Jan6 hearings about a year too late; we should have been in the courts resolving all the delays last year at this time, so that we may have seen the prosecutions commence in spring 2022. Just like the folks who got suckered, we could have had the planners tried and convicted by now. Rather than sitting in prison in November, 2022, Steve Bannon would have been testifying in February, 2022 (or back in prison, for 6 months this time).
Instead, they waited, thinking that presenting evidence itself would suffice to sway the public. It did not. Had we seen prosecutions we would have seen people flip, and we would have even more evidence for prosecutions that would be ongoing right now. The accused are going to call the trials political persecution, no matter when they are held.
There was an attempt to assassinate Nancy Pelosi. Republicans have yet to recognize it as such. Some have spread rumors that the perpetrator was Pelosi’s husband’s gay lover because, you know, they live in San Francisco. That’s how Republicans work the Dangerously Stupid—they ply their ignorance and bigotry to excuse crimes provoked through their own rhetoric.
It’s remarkable. America was attacked twice in the span of just over 18 years. The first time we saw a united front from Congress in response and immediate action to counter the conditions that made the attack possible. Surviving perpetrators were chased around the globe and are still being pursued and killed by the U.S. for their involvement in that attack. The second time, we saw an immediate united response on the part of Congress, followed by Republicans deciding they want power more than they want democracy and in doing so becoming more of a threat to America than Al-Qaeda has ever been.
There is talk of a possible U.S.-led false flag operation having been discovered in Venezuela; the State Department disputes the claim. It is a credible accusation, though, given the Trump Administration’s belligerence toward Venezuela and how the U.S. has utilized false flags (and legitimate attacks) to bring the nation into military engagements in the past.
The ham-handedness of the Administration and its leader’s life-long reliance on experiential learning will prove to be what cost them their dream.
Readers who remember September 11, 2001, can attest to what happened in the nation as a whole, in the days following the attacks. Nationalism and jingoism flooded the zeitgeist. It was dangerous to be visibly Muslim (or Sikh, because Americans are cocksure in their ignorance), and we saw spontaneous censorship. Literally overnight, radio programmers were asked to removed dozens of popular songs from station playlists.
From wikipedia:
The list was not an explicit demand not to play the songs listed, but rather a suggestion that they “might not want to play these songs.” The list was made public by the independent radio industry newsletter Hits Daily Double, which was not affiliated with iHeartMedia. Snopes.com did research on the subject and concluded that the list did exist as a suggestion for radio stations but noted that it was not an outright ban on the songs in question. The compiled list was the subject of media attention around the time of its release.
The list contains 165 suggestions, including a single suggestion for each song in Rage Against the Machine‘s entire catalogue at the time (49 songs) and covers of certain songs (such as Bob Dylan‘s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door“ and the cover by Guns N’ Roses).
Military enlistments spiked as W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” and delineated the lines Trump is utilizing today: You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists. Trump’s military engagements in the Gulf of Mexico (it’s almost like they sought to rename the body of water because they knew it would be in the news a bit more than before) are under the guise of the Reagan/Bush War on Drugs. The War on Drugs globalized acute military interventions more than a decade before the War on Terror.
I have covered the matter of hegemony, how consent to be ruled is manufactured.
Culture, Power, Institution
If you were white and were living in the South in 1953, you would have comported with Jim Crow. How do I know this? Because that is what white people in the South in 1953 did.
A Monopoly on Legitimate Violence
The nation-state is a violent, collective agency capable of superseding all other legitimacy claims in particular space(s) and time(s). In an information-driven, post-Soviet, global capitalist economy—the world since about 1990—the legitimacy of violence will be, more and more, the contested field.
A visible attack on the nation is one of the surest ways to legitimate military responses. As we saw in the first years of the 21st century, Americans were willing to surrender substantial degrees of freedom, in the name of “security.” The PATRIOT Act was largely composed before September 11 (kind of like Project 2025, if you think about it), and ushered in unprecedented degrees of surveillance. All Americans were told: If you see something, say something!
Edward Snowden was a contractor for the National Security Agency when he discovered the extent of the United States government’s surveillance of everyday life—emails, phone calls, texts—virtually all forms of electronic communication were being monitored without probable cause or warrants. He said something, and has since had to live in exile from his homeland. The fourth amendment violations he identified more than a decade ago are ongoing, and have been augmented many times over.
Key elements of Fascism were put into place and enhanced, first through the War on Drugs and then through the War on Terror. The nation came to accept increased intrusions on corporeal integrity and privacy, formal and informal restrictions on speech and expression, and a collaboration of the state and large corporations to discipline the population. Judgement was legislated away from the Judiciary, with mandatory minimum prison sentences assigned to drug and terror crimes. To use certain drugs or to sympathize with anti-imperialism became an attack on the nation, while the perpetrator had their patriotism and the legitimacy of their citizenship drawn into question.
Trump chose the wrong site for the false flag operation. He should have chosen DC. Not by bringing in the National Guard to intimidate the homeless and clear detritus from federal parks, though. He would have been wiser to conspire with a legitimate foreign terrorist organization to blow up a building or a national monument. Rather than Musk, Vought, and Miller, Trump needed the next Osama bin Laden to take the lead.
Look at what W. Bush was able to advance, in terms of state disciplines over the population—and look at how eager Americans were to have that boot placed on them after watching those towers collapse. Trump, as usual, employed the most brutal method rather than subtle, more effective ones.
This piece just proposed a U.S. President would have accomplished his goal more effectively had he attacked the United States. There may be disagreement as to whether that would have indeed been a more effective strategy. No one, on the other hand, can argue that Trump would never think of attacking the United States.
This is where we are.