How the Free World Ends

On the Morning After the Day Before, as is my wont in the course of my morning constitutional, I visited a charity shop near my home that has been selling daily newspapers since the outset of the (airquotes) pandemic (end airquotes).  When all non-essential businesses were ordered to close back in March, the owners installed a fridge and kept it filled with cartons of milk, and started selling free range eggs and lemon drizzle cake along with their standard fare of secondhand clothes, books and bric a brac. In the stolid menace of the Time of Covid, this shop has been an oasis of the Old Normal, a place of refuge from the escalating unpleasantness and hypnotic obedience that increasingly shear our lives of positive meanings. It means a great deal to pause ten minutes in there of a morning, browsing the bookshelves, grabbing a George Saunders, a litre of milk and half a lemon cake, and returning to the battlefield with eyes raised again to the horizon. 

But this morning there was a pall about the place that no one was speaking of. Four years ago, at about the same moment in the political cycle, I entered the shop and immediately became involved in an intense conversation with a former colleague, since deceased, an American by birth, about the elevation to leadership of the Free World of one Donald J. Trump. At first she was saying predictable, approved things: He was a misogynist, a racist. I gently pushed back: Had she seen any of his rallies, the love his people have for him? Within a minute or two, she had dropped what was emerging as her pretence for public consumption. Actually, she had been thinking that Trump was interesting; his election might bring some change, maybe some fun. Our conversation became more animated and louder.  Another customer, eavesdropping, said, ‘You know, I quite like him too!’ The woman behind the counter chimed in: ‘I think he’s great! I think it’s going to be fantastic!’ I have found this happens a lot with topics like DJT: First the silence, then someone blabs something verboten, everyone looks at one another or their shoes; then someone either closes it down or opens it up into something like an Old Normal conversation, one in which people say what’s in their hearts and allow the responses to fall how they may. 

This morning, though, the conversation was inconsequential. No one, staff or customer, was mentioning the elephant. I glanced at the row of newspaper front pages; the Guardian had a headline quote from Joe Biden about not letting ‘them’ steal ‘our democracy’. I gagged. Then I bought a litre of milk and a book by Nicole Perlroth (charitably undeterred by the fact that the author writes for the New York Times) about the arms race in cyber weapons. It was brand new, cost me €2 and bore the title This is How They Tell Me the World Ends.

When paying for my purchases I did not mention the elephant. I left the shop thinking about the Guardian, that headline, Joe Biden, and the nature of the globalised incursion rolling out in plain sight. Passing the paper table, I noticed the Guardians had sold out. 

I got to thinking about the people who might look upon that headline. How many of them would have spent the previous 36 hours watching The War Room with Stephen K. Bannon, digesting the crystal clear number crunches of the amazing Richard D. Baris of Big Data Polling? How many of them would, like me, have had a ringside seat on the moral collapse over the previous decade of the Fourth Estate, and so have been aware that the Guardian was an utterly corrupt newspaper staffed by journaliars? How many of them would have known that Joe Biden is the Patriarch of a treasonous crime family operating to steal the ground from under the feet of America’s working people and sell it off to whoever makes the highest bid, most likely the Chinese? Not many, I feared. 

We have arrived at the culmination of a longtime conspiracy — yes, conspiracy — to steal the birthright of the working people of America and the rest of the Free World.  This coup has been in preparation over a very long time, but has escalated in the Time of Trump, because Trump was on to it. The coup is focussed on looting the world’s resources, commandeering the instruments of political control, and marginalising the working people who have built and maintained that world until now. It is a coup against not merely the Leader of the Free World, but against the Sovereign and hitherto free People of that Free World. 

You have to give the Devil his due: the whole thing has been set up and stitched together to make it look like something close to the opposite is happening, that democracy is being snatched back from the voracious jaws of the Tyrant Trump. The global media, corrupt to the last hack, have spent five years setting up this narrative. And the narrative has taken. People believe it. Most heart-breakingly, many of the people against whom this crime is being perpetrated — not so much in America as in the rest of the Free World — have come to believe it. The culture of the world has been subjected to multiple moral inversions, from truth to lies, from justice to injustice, from good to evil, from innocence to filth.

Some of the blame for this must be laid, paradoxically but squarely, at the door of Donald Trump. Had he, two years ago, sent Ted Cruz in to put order on Big Tech and, in particular, the social media giants, none of the events of recent days would have been possible. They became possible only through the collaboration of a triumvirate of corrupt entities: the Big Tech behemoths, the collapsing cathedral media and the Democratic Party of the United States. 

What we observed at play firstly on the stage that is America has now spread to the rest of the Free World: the communication that politics is no longer the theatre of our civic life, the drama of our free existence, but a game in which what are supposed to be disinterested observers are no such thing. The supposed umpires and referee have donned the strip of one side, and are so utterly shameless about it that most people do not recognise their behaviour as crooked or criminal, but attribute their own confusion to a dissonance in the apprehension of reality. 

The past seven months of the Covid (airquotes) pandemic (end airquotes) have acted on an accelerant on these processes, undermining Trump’s trophy economy, creating unprecedented divisions across the democratic world, stealing all the ‘little infinities’ that makes our everyday lives worthwhile, and — most crucially here — creating the context for massive postal voting in the US election.  I have found it strange and worrying that, in America, this self-evident situation appears to be invisible to even the most alert of political observers, including the aforementioned Steve Bannon, Dr. Steve Turley, Professor Victor Davis Hanson — and, indeed, President Trump himself — all of whom use the word ‘pandemic’ without airquotes or apparent irony.  My conclusion is that they have been misled by the Covid story as it played out in New York and a few other Democratic Party strongholds, in which the events around Covid prefigured those around the presidential election. (I would urge all of the above commentators to dig out Andrew Cuomo’s nursing homes order of March 25th.) I don’t say the election was the sole motivation behind the (airquotes) pandemic (end airquotes) but it was certainly key to the timing of what may finally have been deemed a necessary intervention,  on the grounds that Trump, alone among leaders of Western nations, was wide to the deeper agenda of the elites. 

What happened through Tuesday night was a carefully choreographed insurgency, involving not just the DNC but also the world’s legacy media and Big Tech. I watched it from the early hours, Irish time, from the closing of the first polls in Indiana and Kentucky. I tuned into Bannon on YouTube, occasionally dipping into Steve Turley for his always cogent and uplifting intermittent posts. I do not engage with legacy media, for the reasons already mentioned. 

From about 1am Irish time, it was clear that Donald Trump was running away with it.  He had virtually everywhere improved on his 2016 performance, massively increasing his share of the Black (up 50%) and Latino votes and losing only the odd handful of elitist whites and baby boomers.  Once again, his results left the information warfare opinion pollsters bleeding by the wayside. 

The pattern we had been alerted to expect was that Biden would start off strong, because of the preponderance of Democrats among postal voters, but then Trump would surge as the votes-on-game-day were counted.  That’s exactly what happened. For about three solid hours, Trump was soaking everything up. Then, completely against the run of play, Joe Biden emerged at 12.40am in Delaware to claim the election while claiming he wasn’t. ‘It ain’t over until every ballot is counted, but we feel good about where we are,’ he said, his wife by his side clapping maniacally. Historians will in time replay ad nauseam that brief speech, read from autocue, sounding and looking like it had the word ‘(smile)’ inserted into each break between paragraphs. ‘It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,’ Biden said. ‘That’s the decision of the American people.’ But, at that moment, anyone watching the numbers would have expected Biden to be conceding. 

From then, the results seemed to dry up. Several clearly imminent Trump victories were left undeclared, while media reports attributed bizarrely improbable wins to Biden. Even Fox News got in on the act, claiming that Arizona, looking like neck-and-neck, would fall to Sleepy Joe. The reason was obvious: the media did not want Trump to achieve the psychological boost of going into the lead in the Electoral College, though they appeared to take some joy in announcing that the (meaningless) popular vote baton had passed from Trump to Biden. Gradually, the counts adjourned for the night, including some that were within an hour of a final result. Then, in the small hours, 138,000 votes, allegedly lost-but-now-found postal ballots, turned up in Wisconsin, 96% of them made out to Joe Boden. The final assault on Western civilization had begun. 

It is crucial to focus on all this with a view to comprehending the sheer barefaced nature of what is happening. As with the Covid scam, it is happening in full view, so that it barely seems credible that anything untoward is happening at all. This is what happens when there is total  — or all but total — control of the means of communication, creating conditions in which the levels of cognitive dissonance among observers are prone to disable their incredulity on the basis that, if something deviant were happening, it would surely be concealed behind some kind of subterfuge or cover. 

What is happening is not just an American concern. The interconnections between America and other Western countries are now so profound and manifold that what happens in the US is inevitably a harbinger for what will soon happen everywhere else. It has been clear for some time that the self-ordained royalty of Silicon Valley have decided that democracy, although a nice-sounding idea to be maintained upright by lip-service, is a cumbersome and outmoded means of organising the affairs of societies in which they have an monied interest. What? — that people of limited intelligence should be allowed to sit around discussing what should happen, how things will unfold? The growing sense among such people that democracy used to seem a fine idea at a time when it was as yet impossible to achieve a functional oligarchy without bloodying the walls in a most unseemly fashion. But now, the power of the internet has given these players the equivalent of a cultural neutron bomb, capable of immobilising the human quotient of Western society without damaging concrete assets. The Democratic Party — which has a single objective in the world: to achieve and hold power — has suggested itself as the transitional political instrument of this shift. The legacy media, grateful for another year of relevant existence, is only too happy to be part of the assault team. Thus, the world as we have known it shudders to a stop. 

And the world in its foolish slumber thinks the assassin’s target is Trump, the evil racist Great Global Bastard with the bad hair and potty mouth. But the target is not Trump. He is but the self-appointed human shield who has thrown himself between the assassins and his mark. He is the gunslinger who, riding cross-mountain, heard the commotion and came to see if he could help. 

The true target is you and you and you and me, the formerly Sovereign people of the Free World. The target is the kind of people who go around the place saying — if they converse with one another at all in this growing climate of low-grade terror — what a terrible man that Trump fellow is. They are the kind of people who are too busy, too arrogant, too distracted or too dumb to pay attention to the dissonance in their own hearts, who will not forbear to excoriate Orange Man even while those who attackTrump with the blasphemous name of democracy on their lips move in to steal the ground from under the feet of those who mouth with apparent relish their proffered platitudes. 

Our gunslinger saviour is now all but mortally wounded. The townspeople, confused and torn by distraction and lies, do not know who the Good Guys are. The cock crowed its warning once, four years ago; and then a second time last Easter, at the dawn of the Time of Covid. Most of us did not hear, either time. If, in time, we contrive to ignore the third cockcrow, let us not think we can simply excuse ourselves by pleading: ‘Not I’.  There is no gallery we ought to be concerned about, no one listening or watching now whom we should think worth signalling our virtue to. And, since one of the many terrible consequences of what is happening will be the eradication of history, there will in the end be no judge of our responses but ourselves and those who will grow up in a much-reduced world and learn about the Big Bad Orange Monster, from whom the world was once saved. And we shall be unable to remember why we thought that such a good idea at the time.