The Establishment Doesn’t
Fear Trump, And It Doesn’t Fear Bernie. It
Fears You
By Caitlin Johnstone
January 28, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - During the George W
Bush administration it was popular in conspiracy
circles
to speculate that events might be orchestrated
which would allow the Bush family to complete a coup
against the US Constitution and hold on to power
indefinitely.
Such paranoia and suspicion of government power
in the wake of the extraordinary post-9/11
advancements in Orwellian surveillance programs and
unprecedented military expansionism were perfectly
understandable, but predictions that the younger
Bush would not cede power at the end of his second
term proved incorrect. In today’s hysterical
Trump-centric political environment we now see
mainstream voices in
mainstream outlets openly
advancing the same conspiratorial speculations
about the current administration, and those will
prove incorrect as well.
What these paranoid presidential prognostications
get wrong is not their extreme suspicion of
government, but their assumption that America’s real
power structures require a certain president to be
in place in order to advance depraved totalitarian
agendas. As anyone paying attention knows, intense
suspicion of the US government is the only sane
position that anyone can possibly have; the error is
in assuming that there is no mechanism in place to
ensure that the same agendas carry forward from one
presidential administration to the next.
Schiff dwelling on the fact that Trump departed from the talking points prepared for him by national security officials so he could act "contrary to official US policy," which is to "deter Russian adventurism." Glad to know even the president is not permitted to change US policy
In a sense, the conspiracy theories about a Bush
coup were actually correct: the Bush administration
didn’t truly end. All of its imperialist,
power-serving agendas remained in place and were
expanded under the apparent oversight of the
following administration. The same thing happened
after the Obama administration, and the same
thing–whether in 2021 or 2025–will happen after the
Trump administration. The disturbing fact of the
matter is that if you ignore election dates and just
look at the numbers and raw data of US government
behavior over the years, you can’t really tell who
is president or which political party is in power at
any given point in time.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
The mechanism which ensures the perpetuation of
the same policies from administration to
administration used to be referred to by analysts as
the “deep state”, back before Trump and his
supporters hijacked that term and began using it to
essentially mean something like “Democrats and
anyone who doesn’t like Trump”. Originally the term
deep state referred not to one political
party, nor to some shadowy cabal of Illuminati or
Satanists or reptilians, but to the simple and
undeniable fact that unelected power structures
exist and tend to influence America’s official
elected government. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory,
it was a
concept used in political analysis to describe
how US government agencies and plutocrats form loose
alliances with each other and with official
Washington to influence government policy and
behavior.
It is inevitable that such a permanent second
government would exist in the current iteration of
the United States, if you think about it. It’s
impossible to have a globe-spanning empire of the
sort America now has without long-term plans
spanning years or decades for securing control of
world resources, undermining rivals, securing more
compliant allies, and ensuring military and economic
hegemony. If the US were a normal nation which
simply minded its own affairs, a permanent
government wouldn’t be necessary. But because it
isn’t, one is.
I very seldom use the term deep state anymore,
because its meaning in mainstream discourse has been
completely corrupted. Now when I want to point to
America’s permanent unelected power structures I
usually use the word “oligarchy” or “empire”, or
simply “establishment”.
This is why I haven’t been especially focused on
the US presidential race, despite the Democratic
primaries hitting fever pitch intensity. While I
believe the race can be a useful tool for forcing
establishment propagandists to expose themselves
(virulent “never Trump” neocon Bret Stephens just came
out in support of Trump if the Democratic
nominee is anyone to the left of Pete Buttigeig, for
example), the result of the 2020 election isn’t
going to change a whole hell of a lot.
This might be a bit offensive to both Trump
supporters and Sanders supporters, but it’s true.
Whenever I point out that the current
administration has been advancing
many longstanding agendas of the CIA and
neoconservative war pigs–agendas like military
expansionism, imprisoning Assange, regime change
interventionism in Iran and Venezuela, and
reigniting the Cold War–his supporters always come
in saying “If he’s working for the establishment how
come the establishment is working so hard to get rid
of him, huh?”
Well, for starters, they’re not. Nobody who can
count Senate seats believes Trump will be removed
from office in the current impeachment sideshow, and
everyone who understood Russiagate knew it was going
to dead-end at nothing. If they really wanted Trump
gone they wouldn’t be pussyfooting around with a
bunch of kayfabe combat that they know will never
hurt him. Obviously he wasn’t the preferred 2016
choice of certain factions within the establishment,
but there are mechanisms in place to ensure that the
empire can tick right along with a less-than-ideal
president in the White House.
This will also hold true if Sanders miraculously
makes his way through another rigged primary, and
then through whatever sabotage gets thrown his way
in the general election. Sure he might be able to
sign a few somewhat beneficial executive orders and
we probably wouldn’t see him flirting with an Iran
war, but US imperialism
will march on more or less unimpeded and his
popular progressive domestic policies would require
congress to successfully implement. At best he’d be
a mild reformer who uses the bully pulpit to help
spread awareness while being narrative managed on
all sides by the billionaire media, and any changes
he manages to squeak through which inconvenience the
establishment at all will be reversed by a
subsequent administration.
Huge anti-government protests happening now in Iran? Russia? Hong Kong?
Obviously the establishment would rather have
someone in the White House who doesn’t constantly
put an ugly face on the empire by accidentally
exposing its mechanics all the time as Trump
does, and obviously it would rather have an
incompetent oaf like Trump in office than someone
who actively points out the evils of oligarchy and
imperialism like Sanders. But the establishment
which runs the US-centralized empire is not afraid
of Trump, and it is not afraid of Sanders. It’s
afraid of you.
The unelected power establishment has ways of
ensuring its dominance amid the comings and goings
of America’s official elected government; they are
perfectly capable of dealing with one man being a
less than ideal steward of the empire. What they
absolutely cannot deal with, at all, is the prospect
of ordinary people finally rising up and using the
power of their numbers to force real change. That is
what they are really fighting against when they try
to sabotage populist candidates: not the candidates
themselves, but populism itself.
You wouldn’t know it from reading the billionaire
media, but the Yellow Vests protests in France are
still going on and have remained widespread
for more than a year now. This lack of coverage
is partially due to the fact that establishment
narrative managers
are responsible for conveying the idea that the
only governments whose citizens dislike them are
those which haven’t been absorbed into the imperial
blob like China and Iran. But it’s also because the
propagandists don’t want us getting any ideas.
The reason the propagandists work so hard to
manufacture the consent of the governed is
because they absolutely do require that consent. If
enough people decide that the status quo isn’t
working for them and begin rising up to force it to
change, there’s not really anything the
establishment can do to stop them. Right now the
only thing keeping people from rising up in this way
is the fact that they’ve been successfully
propagandized not to, and the propagandists intend
to keep it that way.
But eyes are beginning to open. If real change is
coming, it will come from there. Not from electing
anyone president, but from a large-scale awakening
to the reality of our situation. The only thing
standing in the way is a thin layer of narrative
fluff.
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