Back in the quaint old days of the George “W” Bush admin, White House political advisor Karl Rove famously said, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.” He was actually bragging on it, a little bit, I think.
Didn’t that set the tone for the years that have followed? The part that even the perspicacious Mr. Rove missed, though, is that the viziers of empire are perhaps even more apt to create their own unreality, which explains a lot about these fretful present days of American collapse. Is there anything the government tells you now that is not some sort of fabrication? One thing for sure is that the elite colleges churn out thousands of certified bullshit artists every year — with no other skills — and many gravitate to the power centers of our national life, where they rise in the ranks spinning metaphysical simulacrums of their boss’s purviews — the Jen Psaki types, who ricochet between the DC political bunkers and boob tube news central. The less glib and physically unpresentable become mere “fact-checkers,” the network of casual liars who toil in the trenches of official unreality.
It’s all pretty hard on the common folk’s brains, and eventually on their souls, as they sink into this mire of purpose-spun cognitive dissonance. Why, for instance, is the head of the CDC, one Rochelle Walensky, still telling the public to vaxx-up and boost when the number of really grave adverse events associated with said vaxxes is so out-of-this-world, compared with previous vaxxes, that liability lawyers from sea to shining sea could be magnificently employed piercing Big Pharma’s EUA shield with fraud charges until the next ice age?
The VAERS program is front-and-center in Ms. Walensky’s CDC purview. Does she not cop a glance at it now and again? It will be fascinating to hear her testify in the Nuremberg-style proceedings that ought to come for America’s public health officialdom. Are they running scared at CDC, FDA, and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID? The waiting must be the hardest part. So much is ominously unknown. But despite official suppression and obfuscation of patient outcome data from the compromised medical establishment, all-causes death numbers are wafting out of the life insurance industry like the Furies from the cosmic darkness.
Is it true, as is hotly rumored now, that the mRNA shots lead uniformly to autoimmune deficiency syndrome? Ditto the alarming rise in cancer cases among the vaxxed… ditto heart damage, organ damage, grievous neurological damage? We’ll know a lot more about this in May and June, and it’s hard to imagine what the collective emotional reaction will be if all that turns out to be true. Never in history will so many face the prospect of an untimely death, and at the hands of such banal bureaucratic villainy. Will they just compliantly check out of this world, the same way they lined up for their vaxxes and boosters, or finally rage against that machine?
The latest venture in unreality these days spills out of Russia’s operation in Ukraine. The mind-fuckery over it sure seems advantageously amplified here as a cover for the tragic developments in the Covid-19 vaxx melodrama and other domestic torments. All the evidence suggests that our country’s leadership wanted this war to happen in the worst way. We set up the provocations in Donbas and let’er rip. Now we posture on the sidelines, crying crocodile tears, pretending to help while sabotaging peace talks.
What’s followed in our attempts to punish The Evil Putin (the source of all our problems) is the most feckless fiasco of unanticipated consequences since Kaiser Wilhelm gave the go-ahead to Austria to punish Serbia over the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Voila: a World War. Only in this case it’s looking more like a suicidal economic war by Western Civ on itself.
How are those sanctions working out? No fuel for German industry… no fertilizer for Iowa farmers… no nickel and other metals to make machine parts for Europe and America…. And suddenly, having kicked Russia out of the international trade payment clearing system (SWIFT), we’ve provoked them to resort to backing the ruble with gold, meaning that our broke-down Bretton Woods fiat money system becomes the new “barbarous relic” of global finance, leaving the West to pound sand down a rat hole, while the other two-thirds of the world do actual business for commodities that modern life can’t do without.
The result of all that? America and its partners in Western Civ resign from modern life and go medieval. Everything about America is looking more and more medieval — our rough living conditions, our lawlessness, our violent entertainments, our Hobbesian racketeering, our occult sexual preoccupations, our depraved elites, our quack science. Our center has not been holding for so long that hardly anyone even remembers where the center used to be. And now the bottom is falling out.
Hence, that pitiful scene in the White House this week with “Joe Biden” wandering aimlessly through a crowd focused on the charismatic Barack Obama — apparently tired of working-from-home. Even the luminous Dr. Jill has abandoned this hollow figurehead on Democracy’s flagship. You have to wonder if Mr. Putin saw the video, and if even he had to cringe at the sad spectacle of his antagonist’s ruin.
Author
“James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic, The Geography of Nowhere, the World Made By Hand novels, and more than a dozen other books. He lives in
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